Notional amounts of derivative securities have nothing to do with money.
For example, I recently traded some stock options. The actual value was around $600 at the time of the sale. The notional amount, which happens to be the stock's price trigger at which the options activate times the number of options, was $13,000. You do the math.
I think the shills will be right this time. I think we'll find that they changed the definition of what is a "healthy life" around 2003. It explains, for example, why the phenomenon honors national borders (and why Sweden was affected, but not Denmark). This smells of change in methodology.
So sure, we can blame climate change, water fluoridation, or imbalanced chakra, but as I see it, there probably isn't any change in EU human health to worry about here.
In reality, we have history to look at. Here, the US became an economic power well before its federal government grew to substantial size. The economy came before the government did.
What if I'm indirectly forced into it because I have no other options.
It's still the best choice you have.
To be fair is to be just and and unfair compensation is unjust.
Unless you've messed up the semantics of "fair" and "unfair" to the point where they have no meaning. For example, a lot of people have this idea that something benefits them at the expense of someone else is "fair". I rarely take arguments of economic "fairness" seriously because they are usually ridiculously skewed towards the interests of the speaker.
What if I was a billionaire and started buying up all of the farms, then I refused to let people buy food from me?
Well, you'd have to have a lot more money than a billion dollars.
But until they finish unloading reactor 4 - which won't be until end of 2014, any serious earthquake (a high probability in that area) could cause the precarious elevated rod bundles to crash down and even the best case scenarios, if that happens, are ugly.
Uh huh. You do realize that these fuel rods have already experienced a magnitude 9 earthquake and the "crash down" didn't happen? The "precarious elevation" is not that precarious.
If two contracting parties are going to rely on the government to handle disputes, the government now has a perfectly legitimate opportunity to set the rules which will govern the agreement. It need not slavishly enforce whatever happens to have been put on a signed piece of paper.
Nonsense. Obviously, government need not "slavishly enforce" conditions which are against the law. But government should be obligated to uphold the contract when possible. Else you end up with obvious problems like a politically connected business routinely getting out of honoring contracts via corrupt government decisions.
The NAZI holocaust during WW2 is within living memory and was definitively inspired in Christianity in the sense that served as ideological basis to purge the Jews.
Nazism simply wasn't Christian in nature. They didn't adhere to Christian beliefs or use Christian symbols. For example, the swastika, the symbol of the Nazi party, comes from Indian religious symbols. The "Aryan race" was originally a culture of ancient India (who conquered large parts of India and instituted Hinduism), but that phrase was appropriated by Hitler to describe what he thought was the best of men. He also borrowed heavily from Germanic mythology and symbols. But most telling is that there simply wasn't a state religion (unless you consider Nazism itself to be the state religion). The state and party was nominally atheist.
I see also that Wikipedia claims that Hitler was planning to eventually shutdown the various Christian sects in Germany after the war, but in the meantime went through the motions.
For example, Hitler and other higher leaders were members of the Catholic Church for "tactical reasons" according to a diary entry of Goebbels. And from a memoir by Albert Speer:
"Once I have settled my other problem," [Hitler] occasionally declared, "I'll have my reckoning with the church. I'll have it reeling on the ropes" But Bormann did not want this reckoning postponed [...] he would take out a document from his pocket and begin reading passages from a defiant sermon or pastoral letter. Frequently Hitler would become so worked up... and vowed to punish the offending clergyman eventually... That he could not immediately retaliate raised him to a white heat...
There is nothing intrinsically better in Christianity compared to others, is the same bloodthirsty ideals of the bronze age and a lot of pick an choosing what to believe in a book full of contradictions.
No religion has survived intact from the bronze age. And Christianity comes from a later time as do most other major religions.
Also, "free market" only work if all competitors know all the information of the free market.
Well, what is the information of the free market? It's the listed prices of anything traded on the market. That is public knowledge. Knowing things outside of the market, such as there's another free market over the hill offering gasoline for three quarters of the price, is not information of the free market. Knowing the past trading history of a stock or the condition of its finances is not information of the free market, except as it is reflected in the current spread of the stock. So for example, information asymmetries don't prevent free markets.
I find a large part of the criticism of "free markets" is simply ignorance of what they actually are and do.
Actually we're coasting on top of what the govt did in the 60's and 70's.
And that would be? My view is that what the government did in that time, as well as since, is largely responsible for the mess now. For example, most of the problems with the big three living expenses which rise much faster than official inflation: higher education, health care, and housing, stem from government policies during this period.
It's also when the US started to get exposed to cheaper labor from the rest of the world. For example, the US got out of TV manufacture about then. As I see it, a lot of the complaints about the decline of the US come solely from this exposure to global labor competition. It's a basic principle of economics, increase the supply of something and the price for it goes down.
The US government - which in its current form has led the world's leading/only superpower for over a century - is "incompetent"?
Of course. It's like you haven't been paying attention. The reason the US government is currently the world's leading/only superpower is because it scraps 15-20% of the GDP of the largest national economy in the world. You can buy a lot of graft with that kind of captive revenue stream and still have some left over for the services you're actually supposed to provide.
However, if they'd declare it downright illegal, this would expose their intend to kill it, which is bad pr.
It wouldn't be bad PR for the government since almost no one cares about Bitcoins in the first place. It might even be good PR because it could play to the people who support things like the illegalization of recreational drugs and "being tough on crime". That second group is probably a few orders of magnitude more numerous in the US than Bitcoin users.
I suspect that this decision will be challenged in court and reversed based on the 1st amendment
Why would it be? The holder of Bitcoins can always convert them to dollars and then donate the dollars. The restriction is not a serious restriction of any freedoms.
and the fact that the rest of the fed seems to be accepting it as a legit currency
I don't see that. They're basically treating Bitcoins like they would anything you can buy and sell. And if you make a profit, you pay taxes on the profit in US dollars not Bitcoins.
OTOH Christianity have plenty of examples throughout history where killing as many "infidels" as possible was the only concern
No such examples exist in living memory. There have been a few groups that were nominally Christian which did a bunch of killing (for example, the breakup of Yugoslavia had such). But such murders were based on nationalist rationalizations rather than religion ones.
In comparison with other major religions, it fares pretty well, being IMHO a bit more violent than Buddhism and less than Hinduism. And most religions are less violent than Marxism and Fascism, both which are nominally atheist.
It's no longer 1100 AD. Christianity is no longer the collection of violent sects it once was.
Let's step it up a little more. In addition to nuclear-armed and autonomous drones as previous repliers noted, we can have self-reproduction. Throw in a bunch of rad and EMP hardened, self-reproducing, tunneling, autonomous drones into an area and you might not be able to get them out even with repeated application of large nuclear weapons.
I'm sure at some point, evolution will kick in so that the drones are more interested in reproduction than in messing with the humans, but that could take a long time. In the meantime, you're looking at a scenario where a large bunch of burrowing critters just don't like you and are almost impossible to get rid of. I've seen a few monster flicks like that. It's area denial that could be on the order of millions of years.
Speaking of reading graphs, we have this one. It projects "percent job losses relative to peak employment month" for all of the US recessions since the end of the Second World War.
Without exception, all of the job recoveries before 1981 lasted less than two years till they met or exceeded the earlier peak employment and all the job recoveries after 1981 took longer than two years. Further, each subsequent recession from 1981 on, took longer to recover from than the previous one with the current one being the longest of all. The US still hasn't recovered to old employment levels from the beginning of the recession in late 2008 (glancing at job growth data, I think the threshold will be achieved shortly after March 2014).
That's why I continue to claim that the US hasn't recovered from the last recession and why it could have recovered, if it weren't for the current policies in place.
Now sure, we can continue to claim that this recession was "worse than expected" or we recognize that employers were punished by regulation for hiring more workers (and not just in the US!). br.
Obamacare for example forces employers of more than 50 full-time (here only 30 hours a week) workers to pay at least $2k per person over 30 full-time employees. For a 40 hour a week person, that's $1 per hour surcharge on top of everything else. That's pretty darn big for someone near the minimum wage level.
What we are taking about is enough angel funding to *create* an industry.
That would have been an appropriate concern for 1970. Solar has been around for a long time now.
That's just not happening with solar, and as a result every 4 minutes a *chinese* made panel is installed in the US, and the US gets a little poorer as China gets its fingers on more USD.
That's comparative advantage not lack of angel investors. China is just a really good place to make stuff like solar panels. The US isn't.
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Notional amounts of derivative securities have nothing to do with money.
For example, I recently traded some stock options. The actual value was around $600 at the time of the sale. The notional amount, which happens to be the stock's price trigger at which the options activate times the number of options, was $13,000. You do the math.
I think the shills will be right this time. I think we'll find that they changed the definition of what is a "healthy life" around 2003. It explains, for example, why the phenomenon honors national borders (and why Sweden was affected, but not Denmark). This smells of change in methodology.
So sure, we can blame climate change, water fluoridation, or imbalanced chakra, but as I see it, there probably isn't any change in EU human health to worry about here.
In other words, "humanity" will probably live but there's a decent chance that you personally will not.
Seriously, what's going to off the previous poster that is remotely climate related?
The Gilded Age came after the Civil War, the event which triggered government expansion
But before the far larger expansions following the two world wars.
In reality, we have history to look at. Here, the US became an economic power well before its federal government grew to substantial size. The economy came before the government did.
I provided examples as you requested. I consider this discussion finished.
What if I'm indirectly forced into it because I have no other options.
It's still the best choice you have.
To be fair is to be just and and unfair compensation is unjust.
Unless you've messed up the semantics of "fair" and "unfair" to the point where they have no meaning. For example, a lot of people have this idea that something benefits them at the expense of someone else is "fair". I rarely take arguments of economic "fairness" seriously because they are usually ridiculously skewed towards the interests of the speaker.
What if I was a billionaire and started buying up all of the farms, then I refused to let people buy food from me?
Well, you'd have to have a lot more money than a billion dollars.
But until they finish unloading reactor 4 - which won't be until end of 2014, any serious earthquake (a high probability in that area) could cause the precarious elevated rod bundles to crash down and even the best case scenarios, if that happens, are ugly.
Uh huh. You do realize that these fuel rods have already experienced a magnitude 9 earthquake and the "crash down" didn't happen? The "precarious elevation" is not that precarious.
If two contracting parties are going to rely on the government to handle disputes, the government now has a perfectly legitimate opportunity to set the rules which will govern the agreement. It need not slavishly enforce whatever happens to have been put on a signed piece of paper.
Nonsense. Obviously, government need not "slavishly enforce" conditions which are against the law. But government should be obligated to uphold the contract when possible. Else you end up with obvious problems like a politically connected business routinely getting out of honoring contracts via corrupt government decisions.
The work to prevent Fukushima from being a "hemispheric disaster" already happened.
FidoNet and CSNET are counterexamples.
FidoNet and CSNET for example.
The NAZI holocaust during WW2 is within living memory and was definitively inspired in Christianity in the sense that served as ideological basis to purge the Jews.
Nazism simply wasn't Christian in nature. They didn't adhere to Christian beliefs or use Christian symbols. For example, the swastika, the symbol of the Nazi party, comes from Indian religious symbols. The "Aryan race" was originally a culture of ancient India (who conquered large parts of India and instituted Hinduism), but that phrase was appropriated by Hitler to describe what he thought was the best of men. He also borrowed heavily from Germanic mythology and symbols. But most telling is that there simply wasn't a state religion (unless you consider Nazism itself to be the state religion). The state and party was nominally atheist.
I see also that Wikipedia claims that Hitler was planning to eventually shutdown the various Christian sects in Germany after the war, but in the meantime went through the motions.
For example, Hitler and other higher leaders were members of the Catholic Church for "tactical reasons" according to a diary entry of Goebbels. And from a memoir by Albert Speer:
"Once I have settled my other problem," [Hitler] occasionally declared, "I'll have my reckoning with the church. I'll have it reeling on the ropes" But Bormann did not want this reckoning postponed [...] he would take out a document from his pocket and begin reading passages from a defiant sermon or pastoral letter. Frequently Hitler would become so worked up... and vowed to punish the offending clergyman eventually... That he could not immediately retaliate raised him to a white heat...
There is nothing intrinsically better in Christianity compared to others, is the same bloodthirsty ideals of the bronze age and a lot of pick an choosing what to believe in a book full of contradictions.
No religion has survived intact from the bronze age. And Christianity comes from a later time as do most other major religions.
Also, "free market" only work if all competitors know all the information of the free market.
Well, what is the information of the free market? It's the listed prices of anything traded on the market. That is public knowledge. Knowing things outside of the market, such as there's another free market over the hill offering gasoline for three quarters of the price, is not information of the free market. Knowing the past trading history of a stock or the condition of its finances is not information of the free market, except as it is reflected in the current spread of the stock. So for example, information asymmetries don't prevent free markets.
I find a large part of the criticism of "free markets" is simply ignorance of what they actually are and do.
Actually we're coasting on top of what the govt did in the 60's and 70's.
And that would be? My view is that what the government did in that time, as well as since, is largely responsible for the mess now. For example, most of the problems with the big three living expenses which rise much faster than official inflation: higher education, health care, and housing, stem from government policies during this period.
It's also when the US started to get exposed to cheaper labor from the rest of the world. For example, the US got out of TV manufacture about then. As I see it, a lot of the complaints about the decline of the US come solely from this exposure to global labor competition. It's a basic principle of economics, increase the supply of something and the price for it goes down.
The US government - which in its current form has led the world's leading/only superpower for over a century - is "incompetent"?
Of course. It's like you haven't been paying attention. The reason the US government is currently the world's leading/only superpower is because it scraps 15-20% of the GDP of the largest national economy in the world. You can buy a lot of graft with that kind of captive revenue stream and still have some left over for the services you're actually supposed to provide.
However, if they'd declare it downright illegal, this would expose their intend to kill it, which is bad pr.
It wouldn't be bad PR for the government since almost no one cares about Bitcoins in the first place. It might even be good PR because it could play to the people who support things like the illegalization of recreational drugs and "being tough on crime". That second group is probably a few orders of magnitude more numerous in the US than Bitcoin users.
I suspect that this decision will be challenged in court and reversed based on the 1st amendment
Why would it be? The holder of Bitcoins can always convert them to dollars and then donate the dollars. The restriction is not a serious restriction of any freedoms.
and the fact that the rest of the fed seems to be accepting it as a legit currency
I don't see that. They're basically treating Bitcoins like they would anything you can buy and sell. And if you make a profit, you pay taxes on the profit in US dollars not Bitcoins.
OTOH Christianity have plenty of examples throughout history where killing as many "infidels" as possible was the only concern
No such examples exist in living memory. There have been a few groups that were nominally Christian which did a bunch of killing (for example, the breakup of Yugoslavia had such). But such murders were based on nationalist rationalizations rather than religion ones.
In comparison with other major religions, it fares pretty well, being IMHO a bit more violent than Buddhism and less than Hinduism. And most religions are less violent than Marxism and Fascism, both which are nominally atheist.
It's no longer 1100 AD. Christianity is no longer the collection of violent sects it once was.
"Built on a volcano" is an automatic turn off for me. I advocate using nuclear power, but you have to exercise some sense in where you put them.
Let's step it up a little more. In addition to nuclear-armed and autonomous drones as previous repliers noted, we can have self-reproduction. Throw in a bunch of rad and EMP hardened, self-reproducing, tunneling, autonomous drones into an area and you might not be able to get them out even with repeated application of large nuclear weapons.
I'm sure at some point, evolution will kick in so that the drones are more interested in reproduction than in messing with the humans, but that could take a long time. In the meantime, you're looking at a scenario where a large bunch of burrowing critters just don't like you and are almost impossible to get rid of. I've seen a few monster flicks like that. It's area denial that could be on the order of millions of years.
Speaking of reading graphs, we have this one. It projects "percent job losses relative to peak employment month" for all of the US recessions since the end of the Second World War.
Without exception, all of the job recoveries before 1981 lasted less than two years till they met or exceeded the earlier peak employment and all the job recoveries after 1981 took longer than two years. Further, each subsequent recession from 1981 on, took longer to recover from than the previous one with the current one being the longest of all. The US still hasn't recovered to old employment levels from the beginning of the recession in late 2008 (glancing at job growth data, I think the threshold will be achieved shortly after March 2014).
That's why I continue to claim that the US hasn't recovered from the last recession and why it could have recovered, if it weren't for the current policies in place.
Now sure, we can continue to claim that this recession was "worse than expected" or we recognize that employers were punished by regulation for hiring more workers (and not just in the US!).
br. Obamacare for example forces employers of more than 50 full-time (here only 30 hours a week) workers to pay at least $2k per person over 30 full-time employees. For a 40 hour a week person, that's $1 per hour surcharge on top of everything else. That's pretty darn big for someone near the minimum wage level.
As other repliers have noted, other networks were created which weren't government subsidized and which didn't have your claimed problems.
While the Philippines don't have a nuclear power plant, they do have off shore oil platforms.
What we are taking about is enough angel funding to *create* an industry.
That would have been an appropriate concern for 1970. Solar has been around for a long time now.
That's just not happening with solar, and as a result every 4 minutes a *chinese* made panel is installed in the US, and the US gets a little poorer as China gets its fingers on more USD.
That's comparative advantage not lack of angel investors. China is just a really good place to make stuff like solar panels. The US isn't.