Well, here's another moment for you. You aren't forced to play (well, aside from occasionally having to send some money in as taxes). You could make most of your trades as barter or in the commodity of your choice. It would just be rather hard and complicated especially with almost no one else wanting to do that.
I don't see money itself as a game but rather as a lubricant for trade. It expedites things. Most people don't even want to hold on to it. They buy stuff, put it in the bank, etc as soon as they get it.
Contracts are only as good as the parties you signed with. Who signed the other side of your pension? Who made that promise? It wasn't me. I don't write checks I can't cash.
I agree wholeheartedly with the other replier, energy and work comes in many different forms which are not equally valuable. Let's consider the special case of human labor, the work I do by punching a few keys can be far more valuable than the work someone does by lifting a shovel load of dirt.
Second, money buys work just fine. So no need to trade in work directly. The system is not broken.
Work also doesn't have a lot of the characteristics that a unit of money needs to have. It's not a store of value. It's not fungible or easy to trade.
Finally, you still run into the problem of beliefs or expectations as they're also called. Everything has a prior expectation because someone expects either to do something valuable with it or trade to someone else for something valuable. That wouldn't change a bit, if we were trading energy instead of something else.
You don't need to do anything that generates a positive return either, but you wouldn't call it an "investment" in that case. "Never invest in something you don't understand" is a great rule to follow.
There's no "hyperinflation policy" when there's no hyperinflation. At the least, to have hyperinflation, you need a massive drop in the value of the currency over a relatively short time plus a strong incentive for everyone to treat the currency like passing around a hot potato or live hand grenade. That hasn't happened in the US.
If I were a huge holder of Bitcoins, I would have sold off a significant portion by now. First, it'd cool off the rapid rise in Bitcoins prices. If that market goes up too fast, then the bubble might pop before I get out. I think here that big holders got a bit too greedy, but they may still get away with it in the end despite the current market gyrations and manipulations.
Second, it'd add volume to the market so I can dump more Bitcoins than I could otherwise. A market with double the daily volume can soak up my Bitcoins at twice the rate.
Third, by passing some of my potential profits to other traders, I encourage the bubble mentality. You bought 10 Bitcoins at $30 and now they're $300. Due to that $2,700 profit, you're more likely to buy part of the 1,000 Bitcoins I sell off in small orders.
I think a goal of all out within a year would be achievable at reasonable profit. Unless I had some sort of business that depending on having Bitcoins.
And who knows, maybe as a result of prepping this market, a whale will come in and buy a zillion at a huge price. In which case, I'm instantly all out of the Bitcoin market. Hasta la vista. Send Uncle Sam a check and move on to something else.
The 'commander in chief' thing only applies to the military.
It only applies to the entire executive branch of government. Obama can fire anyone working under him.
So he may have some responsibility, but only by proxy and by inaction.
When did I say otherwise? That is enough to damn him. A lot of people died here, and he's fucking around by proxy and by inaction.
By the same logic you use, you could say he is responsible whenever the post office loses a letter.
The post office has a policy it follows when it loses a letter. It's also not actually part of the executive branch, but let's ignore that (especially, since the executive branch does have some power over the USPS). If they were consistently not following policy and losing letters frequently, you can bet good money that Obama would be feeling the heat just as he is for Fast and Furious.
And the chain of responsibility means that yes, he ultimate is responsible. It might not be enough pressure to get him to do anything about the US Postal Service, but that's a different story.
but the truth is that it is not easy for an American to go set up a life in Bangalore where he can afford to make a living micro-gigging.
That's irrelevant. The characteristics of a free market aren't about what you need from the market. Everyone needs different things. And you may well need so much that a free market can't help you.
Every year we strip away further at what used to be worker's rights.
That's what happens when the value of labor goes down, but not the value of capital. We can work to make US labor competitive again (which involves taking away workers' "rights" which just hurt workers) or we can, as in your case, whine like a kicked puppy.
They're still worth 28 times what they were a few months ago.
For now. Crashes of this size are an indication that a bubble is in process. It might continue to go up, but OTOH, it might crash hard, as in more than a factor of 28 hard.
Or we, being libertarian, could consider private side approaches. While space-based private exploration and science is in its infancy, it's worth noting that it is done.
For example, the Planetary Society has several projects cooking. I don't agree with the ideological baggage that comes attached (they're uncritical boosters of NASA's unmanned science program), but at least they practice what they preach. One could do worse than send them some money.
There's also a large number of non profits developing launch prototypes all over the world. I think that's a bit oversaturated, but I do volunteer on occasion for JP Aerospace, who does high altitude balloons and the occasional balloon-launched rocket.
And of course, there are actual start ups to invest in. I have an non-business interest in Altius Space Machines because I'm acquainted with the founder, Jon Goff who is one of the more insightful bloggers out there on space development topics.
I say we ditch FOIA and submit every report to an ethics oversight department,
Why? What do we get for this aside from more lack of oversight. The ethics oversight department would just become another ineffective layer of internal oversight.
You need people who are completely independent of government. They're not paid by government. They're not appointed by government or elected by the public. There's no way to subvert the process by choosing who gets to have oversight and who doesn't. FOIA gives you that, but only if government is forced to honor FOIA requests.
Internal oversight is only a joke if you let it be.
Hence, the reason for FOIA. So you can know enough to not let that happen. I might add that in the Fast and Furious case, external oversight was blocked. This is precisely the situation where internal oversight breaks down.
What percentage of illegal straw purchases do you suppose they _normally_ prevent?
You want us to believe ALL OF THEM, right up until they practically wheel-burrowed guns into Mexico themselves...
Please stop before you embarrass yourself further. Sting operations are ancient tradition in US law enforcement. And this "gunwalking" is just a variation of the classic sting operation.
But you don't continue the sting operation, if peoples' lives are at stake. You don't kill people so that you can make a case.
For a few months, every right-wing blog and news site carried articles blaming Obama personally for the whole fiasco.
Given he is the Commander in Chief, what is the problem? Did he resolve this scandal? No. Therefore, he is personally responsible. That's how responsibility works.
It's worth noting that many of those costs go down when you reuse a proven vehicle. If you've demonstrated via the last three launches that your vehicle plays well with others, you don't need to dump a bunch of money to prove it again.
That's not the only fixed cost you mention. Many of these very expensive costs can be spread out over more vehicles.
Launch costs are another area where costs can be reduced. Launch frequency is an economy of scale for any working launch vehicle ever made (just due to the considerable fixed costs of R&D and launch infrastructure). The approach I just mentioned generates as a side benefit a demand for higher launch frequency and thus, would reduce the of cost per launch since it launches more probes in the same time. NASA would probably get a piece of that back in lower launch prices.
Finally, a last thing I forgot to mention is the considerable time value and reliability of reusing existing designs. For example, the two Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) were launched in 2003 and landed six months later at the beginning of 2004. The follow on mission the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) landed on Mars in 2012, eight years later. That delay was due mostly to the development of the MSL and its more advanced landing systems.
However, if they had stuck with the MERs and merely launched of them, they could have had another batch on Mars in 2006. My estimate is that they could have had at least six MERs for the price of the MSL and they could have had them all deployed on Mars by 2006 or perhaps 2008. And be four years ahead of where we are now with MSL.
There is a little bit of trouble here. They would have had to shave some weight to get them on Delta IIs (the trajectories in 2006 and 2008 aren't as good in terms of delta v as the 2003 trajectory was). And they probably would want better landing accuracy comparable to what the MSL had.
But that's development costs spread over six probes rather than over one really expensive probe. And since the design was tested twice by the previous MERs, it would be more reliable than the MSL was.
As many people have noted, his ocean research non profit is selling some boats that look an awful lot like the sort of workhorse boats that such a non profit would be expected to have. That's not Eric Schmidt's yacht. This is Eric Schmidt's yacht. It's got a night club.
This is a typical first world whine. You made yourself too expensive with poorly thought out regulation and cushy entitlements. Now, you're trying to close yourself off economically from the real world so that you can somehow return to the nostalgic days of plenty that never happened.
Where's the industry that's going to make that work out? It's not going to happen with the regulations in place. Similarly, where's the wealth coming from? You just dropped trade with everyone but maybe a billion at most.
My view is that you aren't helping anybody. When we buy from factories that treat workers "like slaves" but not, of course, actually like slaves, we're elevating those workers from poverty. When we buy "conflict" minerals we are elevating those people from the poverty driving those conflicts. Many billions of people will be repressed no matter what we do. But by buying their goods and services, we give them some wealth and a chance for a better life.
We don't have a "free" market, because capitalism (and prices) do not accurately reflect the true cost of production - so we have to legislate environmental controls, safety laws and workers rights.
That's deceptive nonsense. No one ever priced externalities. They just regulated stuff without a thought to the cost of regulation and set arbitrary thresholds.
Those things push the price up. You want lower prices? Get rid of those things.
You agree on a major source of the trouble, costly, onerous regulation, but are so intent on slitting your own throat, you can't be bothered to ask how we could make that better. For example, easing up on pollution thresholds and dropping minimum wage would help a lot. Outright removal of public pensions and health care entitlements (neither help developed world workers be better workers - they just add cost) would probably balance government budgets anywhere in the world. And dare I mention corporate welfare? I bet removing that would help as well.
He even made some large superpower play chess with its missile defense, at their own expense.
Which also happened to be a convenient pretext to plant anti-missile systems in Japan, South Korea, and Guam. China's nuclear reach just got a bit weaker.
A private company receives somewhere less than $90 million in funding (half which was received last month) and manages to create a new type of cheap sea-based platform and currently has over a hundred of them active.
In contrast, the typical space probe is a hideously expensive, one-off design made by people who have no interest in reducing the cost of the platform. In the past, I've advocated developing space probes in batches or iterative generations instead. This is an example of why.
There are some obvious differences. Space is much more expensive to access at $5-10k per kg just to reach low Earth orbit. While these guys can just drive up to a beach. Space also is a harsher environment. It doesn't have full time exposure to sea water, but it does have hard radiation, temperature extremes, and heat dissipation issues.
Even so, this is how you do things economically. Making multiple copies of a probe design means that you spread out R&D costs over more probes - R&D is a large cost currently of space probes. You also get "learning curve" effects where the marginal cost of manufacturing, operation, and management of probes goes down as you make and deploy more of them. You "learn" (or rather exploit various economies of scale for these processes) how to do this better.
End result is more probes and more work done for the same amount of money spent.
It took more than a basic QM course before I had a real inkling of what was or might be going on. Even now, I have to handle this stuff gingerly with some rather complicated math tools, my intuition sucks.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, here's another moment for you. You aren't forced to play (well, aside from occasionally having to send some money in as taxes). You could make most of your trades as barter or in the commodity of your choice. It would just be rather hard and complicated especially with almost no one else wanting to do that.
I don't see money itself as a game but rather as a lubricant for trade. It expedites things. Most people don't even want to hold on to it. They buy stuff, put it in the bank, etc as soon as they get it.
Contracts are only as good as the parties you signed with. Who signed the other side of your pension? Who made that promise? It wasn't me. I don't write checks I can't cash.
I agree wholeheartedly with the other replier, energy and work comes in many different forms which are not equally valuable. Let's consider the special case of human labor, the work I do by punching a few keys can be far more valuable than the work someone does by lifting a shovel load of dirt.
Second, money buys work just fine. So no need to trade in work directly. The system is not broken.
Work also doesn't have a lot of the characteristics that a unit of money needs to have. It's not a store of value. It's not fungible or easy to trade.
Finally, you still run into the problem of beliefs or expectations as they're also called. Everything has a prior expectation because someone expects either to do something valuable with it or trade to someone else for something valuable. That wouldn't change a bit, if we were trading energy instead of something else.
Do you always actively put yourself in the company of pure investors, marketers and thrillseekers?
There are worse groups to be members of. At least, it'll be exciting.
You don't need to understand the maths...
You don't need to do anything that generates a positive return either, but you wouldn't call it an "investment" in that case. "Never invest in something you don't understand" is a great rule to follow.
There's no "hyperinflation policy" when there's no hyperinflation. At the least, to have hyperinflation, you need a massive drop in the value of the currency over a relatively short time plus a strong incentive for everyone to treat the currency like passing around a hot potato or live hand grenade. That hasn't happened in the US.
If I were a huge holder of Bitcoins, I would have sold off a significant portion by now. First, it'd cool off the rapid rise in Bitcoins prices. If that market goes up too fast, then the bubble might pop before I get out. I think here that big holders got a bit too greedy, but they may still get away with it in the end despite the current market gyrations and manipulations.
Second, it'd add volume to the market so I can dump more Bitcoins than I could otherwise. A market with double the daily volume can soak up my Bitcoins at twice the rate.
Third, by passing some of my potential profits to other traders, I encourage the bubble mentality. You bought 10 Bitcoins at $30 and now they're $300. Due to that $2,700 profit, you're more likely to buy part of the 1,000 Bitcoins I sell off in small orders.
I think a goal of all out within a year would be achievable at reasonable profit. Unless I had some sort of business that depending on having Bitcoins.
And who knows, maybe as a result of prepping this market, a whale will come in and buy a zillion at a huge price. In which case, I'm instantly all out of the Bitcoin market. Hasta la vista. Send Uncle Sam a check and move on to something else.
The 'commander in chief' thing only applies to the military.
It only applies to the entire executive branch of government. Obama can fire anyone working under him.
So he may have some responsibility, but only by proxy and by inaction.
When did I say otherwise? That is enough to damn him. A lot of people died here, and he's fucking around by proxy and by inaction.
By the same logic you use, you could say he is responsible whenever the post office loses a letter.
The post office has a policy it follows when it loses a letter. It's also not actually part of the executive branch, but let's ignore that (especially, since the executive branch does have some power over the USPS). If they were consistently not following policy and losing letters frequently, you can bet good money that Obama would be feeling the heat just as he is for Fast and Furious.
And the chain of responsibility means that yes, he ultimate is responsible. It might not be enough pressure to get him to do anything about the US Postal Service, but that's a different story.
with banking infrastructure, power grids etc. being online and reachable via public internet channels, how is the statement overstates?
So? That doesn't demonstrate vulnerability.
but the truth is that it is not easy for an American to go set up a life in Bangalore where he can afford to make a living micro-gigging.
That's irrelevant. The characteristics of a free market aren't about what you need from the market. Everyone needs different things. And you may well need so much that a free market can't help you.
Every year we strip away further at what used to be worker's rights.
That's what happens when the value of labor goes down, but not the value of capital. We can work to make US labor competitive again (which involves taking away workers' "rights" which just hurt workers) or we can, as in your case, whine like a kicked puppy.
They're still worth 28 times what they were a few months ago.
For now. Crashes of this size are an indication that a bubble is in process. It might continue to go up, but OTOH, it might crash hard, as in more than a factor of 28 hard.
Or we, being libertarian, could consider private side approaches. While space-based private exploration and science is in its infancy, it's worth noting that it is done.
For example, the Planetary Society has several projects cooking. I don't agree with the ideological baggage that comes attached (they're uncritical boosters of NASA's unmanned science program), but at least they practice what they preach. One could do worse than send them some money.
There's also a large number of non profits developing launch prototypes all over the world. I think that's a bit oversaturated, but I do volunteer on occasion for JP Aerospace, who does high altitude balloons and the occasional balloon-launched rocket.
And of course, there are actual start ups to invest in. I have an non-business interest in Altius Space Machines because I'm acquainted with the founder, Jon Goff who is one of the more insightful bloggers out there on space development topics.
I say we ditch FOIA and submit every report to an ethics oversight department,
Why? What do we get for this aside from more lack of oversight. The ethics oversight department would just become another ineffective layer of internal oversight.
You need people who are completely independent of government. They're not paid by government. They're not appointed by government or elected by the public. There's no way to subvert the process by choosing who gets to have oversight and who doesn't. FOIA gives you that, but only if government is forced to honor FOIA requests.
Internal oversight is only a joke if you let it be.
Hence, the reason for FOIA. So you can know enough to not let that happen. I might add that in the Fast and Furious case, external oversight was blocked. This is precisely the situation where internal oversight breaks down.
What percentage of illegal straw purchases do you suppose they _normally_ prevent? You want us to believe ALL OF THEM, right up until they practically wheel-burrowed guns into Mexico themselves...
Please stop before you embarrass yourself further. Sting operations are ancient tradition in US law enforcement. And this "gunwalking" is just a variation of the classic sting operation.
But you don't continue the sting operation, if peoples' lives are at stake. You don't kill people so that you can make a case.
Nonsense. That's no reason not to investigate felonies that resulted in the death of a federal law enforcement officer.
For a few months, every right-wing blog and news site carried articles blaming Obama personally for the whole fiasco.
Given he is the Commander in Chief, what is the problem? Did he resolve this scandal? No. Therefore, he is personally responsible. That's how responsibility works.
As an aside, my approach would have generated 6 additional launches by 2008 for the Delta II that already had 34 launches between 2004 and 2008.
It's worth noting that many of those costs go down when you reuse a proven vehicle. If you've demonstrated via the last three launches that your vehicle plays well with others, you don't need to dump a bunch of money to prove it again.
That's not the only fixed cost you mention. Many of these very expensive costs can be spread out over more vehicles.
Launch costs are another area where costs can be reduced. Launch frequency is an economy of scale for any working launch vehicle ever made (just due to the considerable fixed costs of R&D and launch infrastructure). The approach I just mentioned generates as a side benefit a demand for higher launch frequency and thus, would reduce the of cost per launch since it launches more probes in the same time. NASA would probably get a piece of that back in lower launch prices.
Finally, a last thing I forgot to mention is the considerable time value and reliability of reusing existing designs. For example, the two Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) were launched in 2003 and landed six months later at the beginning of 2004. The follow on mission the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) landed on Mars in 2012, eight years later. That delay was due mostly to the development of the MSL and its more advanced landing systems.
However, if they had stuck with the MERs and merely launched of them, they could have had another batch on Mars in 2006. My estimate is that they could have had at least six MERs for the price of the MSL and they could have had them all deployed on Mars by 2006 or perhaps 2008. And be four years ahead of where we are now with MSL.
There is a little bit of trouble here. They would have had to shave some weight to get them on Delta IIs (the trajectories in 2006 and 2008 aren't as good in terms of delta v as the 2003 trajectory was). And they probably would want better landing accuracy comparable to what the MSL had.
But that's development costs spread over six probes rather than over one really expensive probe. And since the design was tested twice by the previous MERs, it would be more reliable than the MSL was.
As many people have noted, his ocean research non profit is selling some boats that look an awful lot like the sort of workhorse boats that such a non profit would be expected to have. That's not Eric Schmidt's yacht. This is Eric Schmidt's yacht. It's got a night club.
Where's the industry that's going to make that work out? It's not going to happen with the regulations in place. Similarly, where's the wealth coming from? You just dropped trade with everyone but maybe a billion at most.
My view is that you aren't helping anybody. When we buy from factories that treat workers "like slaves" but not, of course, actually like slaves, we're elevating those workers from poverty. When we buy "conflict" minerals we are elevating those people from the poverty driving those conflicts. Many billions of people will be repressed no matter what we do. But by buying their goods and services, we give them some wealth and a chance for a better life.
We don't have a "free" market, because capitalism (and prices) do not accurately reflect the true cost of production - so we have to legislate environmental controls, safety laws and workers rights.
That's deceptive nonsense. No one ever priced externalities. They just regulated stuff without a thought to the cost of regulation and set arbitrary thresholds.
Those things push the price up. You want lower prices? Get rid of those things.
You agree on a major source of the trouble, costly, onerous regulation, but are so intent on slitting your own throat, you can't be bothered to ask how we could make that better. For example, easing up on pollution thresholds and dropping minimum wage would help a lot. Outright removal of public pensions and health care entitlements (neither help developed world workers be better workers - they just add cost) would probably balance government budgets anywhere in the world. And dare I mention corporate welfare? I bet removing that would help as well.
He even made some large superpower play chess with its missile defense, at their own expense.
Which also happened to be a convenient pretext to plant anti-missile systems in Japan, South Korea, and Guam. China's nuclear reach just got a bit weaker.
A private company receives somewhere less than $90 million in funding (half which was received last month) and manages to create a new type of cheap sea-based platform and currently has over a hundred of them active.
In contrast, the typical space probe is a hideously expensive, one-off design made by people who have no interest in reducing the cost of the platform. In the past, I've advocated developing space probes in batches or iterative generations instead. This is an example of why.
There are some obvious differences. Space is much more expensive to access at $5-10k per kg just to reach low Earth orbit. While these guys can just drive up to a beach. Space also is a harsher environment. It doesn't have full time exposure to sea water, but it does have hard radiation, temperature extremes, and heat dissipation issues.
Even so, this is how you do things economically. Making multiple copies of a probe design means that you spread out R&D costs over more probes - R&D is a large cost currently of space probes. You also get "learning curve" effects where the marginal cost of manufacturing, operation, and management of probes goes down as you make and deploy more of them. You "learn" (or rather exploit various economies of scale for these processes) how to do this better.
End result is more probes and more work done for the same amount of money spent.
It took more than a basic QM course before I had a real inkling of what was or might be going on. Even now, I have to handle this stuff gingerly with some rather complicated math tools, my intuition sucks.