It can harm other parties. For example, one could probe a business for vulnerabilities and then when those are discovered, hand the actual highly criminal task of stealing assets or knowledge from the company to another party willing to take that additional legal risk.
If one actually looks at who actually kills people, one would not find anything meaningful, as sociopathy/psychopathy is not measured by kill count, and I doubt there's any actual research done on the subject on "how many people CEOs kill"
Look so you think that this isn't actually important? Well, tell it to this person not me.
I think in addition to a certain huge degree of sociopathy, one also needs opportunity and power. But once you have that necessary opportunity and power, body count does correspond to the degree of sociopathy.
Now, given that you chose to write more than a sentence or two indicates to me that maybe you don't believe what you originally wrote.
Second, it's worth noting that government can only kill when they have the help of the private sector, to supply them with funding, technology, weapons, etc. Governments rise and fall based on the decisions the private sector makes - if the private sector decides to side with the people, the government will not last.
Well, that wasn't true of the communist countries. It wasn't true of Nazi Germany. Or Turkey. Or even of the Congo Free State, where most of the decisions were made at the government level. Sure, some business owners like Cecil Rhodes (creator of the De Beers diamond monopoly among other things) helped facilitate the Congo Free State's recognition by their governments. But other business owners would have been found, if those had been lacking.
Now who is in the best position to influence government to kill for them? Big Business, and thus CEOs.
Government officials, of course. I fail to see why people don't get this.
An efficient sociopath use other people to do the killing, and cover their tracks.
So an efficient sociopath won't be in government. Too visible. Too much research showing how government kills people. An efficient sociopath stays outside of government, but then use the government to do killing.
Nonsense. Such visibility was nonexistent in most of the governments I mentioned above. Even now many of them continue to deny or obfuscate their more nefarious past activities.
For example. Turkey still denies the various genocides that the "Young Turks" carried out in the early part of the 20th Century (probably because Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey as well as other ranking officials of that government, were probably deeply involved in such massacres. So what sort of "visibility" is that which is steadfastly denied almost a century after it happened?
If one actually looks at who actually kills people, you'll see that CEOs are way far down that list. The high body count sociopaths tend to be hardcore ideologues heading governments. The next biggest group are barbarians, powerful, amoral outsiders who have little to no stake in viable civilization.
The foremost CEO by body count (by far!) is Leopold II the head of the loathsome Congo Free State. And he had such power only because he was already the head of state for Belgium. Sure, it demonstrates that corporations can be just as vile as any other form of human organization, but it's worth noting that there's really only one business-related example of democide among the worst of humanity. Most mass murdering sociopaths used other, more effective tools.
In order to be viable in the market, a labor-saving device must, by logical necessity eliminate more work than it creates. This is the only way to get the total cost of ownership down below the cost of hiring people to do the work. When successfully applied widely enough, this processes has serious economic implications.
It's not even logic, but by definition. One shouldn't expect a "labor saving device" to create more labor than it eliminates! Else, it'd be an instrument of torture cleverly misnamed as a "labor saving device".
Second, there are plenty of devices that do other things than "save" labor. For example, enable new capabilities or activities, preserve a resource that is unusually valuable (electroplating gold), or do things in an entertaining way or in a way that increases status (flashy sports car).
There is a finite (and, ultimately, small) demand for brain-work
That hasn't been true in practice. To the contrary, there's a vast need for people capable of such.
As tech puts us all out of work, we either start adopting more socialist policies, we put most of our population in jail (where we pay for their needs anyway), or we experience a violent mess.
Or more than one of the above. I consider none of the above an adequate solution to the problem.
A person can make things as accurately as a machine, they just take longer.
As cusco replied, there's a bunch of cases where that doesn't hold. In those cases, the human would make things as accurately as the machine by making the machine.
Why is everyone pretending that the legal system has no idea how to establish guilty mind?
Because that's a very difficult thing to show unless the defendant has been careless or there are obvious signs of criminal intent. It's also why we have the common principle of "ignorance of the law is no excuse" (due to the difficulty of distinguishing between someone truly ignorant of a law and someone pretending to be so).
As I see it, if the only difference between a criminal and non-criminal act is guilty mind, then most such cases are not going to be prosecuted as criminal acts just due to the difficulty of establishing guilty mind.
Honestly - we should have figured this shit out about 100 years ago - but the Haber-Bosch process (essentially, converting natural-gas into nitrogen-based fertilizer, increasing crop yields, and allowing our population to continue to grow) - made Malthusian economics seem wrong. In fact: the Haber-Bosch process just gave us a way to hold-off on Malthus' prediction for a while. Now look at where we are.
Sitting pretty well, as it turns out. I guess you have to ignore reality in order to buy into some of these doomsday scenarios.
the effect of depleting natural resources, polluting the world, and encouraging a burgeoning population to continue geometrically reproducing.
It's worth noting here that developed world society has solved all of the problems you mention. For example, environmental regulation, recycling programs and new resource discoveries, and of course, the end of a geometrically expanding human population. And green manure does an excellent job of weaning us off of methane-derived fertilizers.
The problem is even less dire than what I presented since one really doesn't need full implementation of any of these at this time in order to gain most of their benefits. Recycling in particular is notorious for being wasteful. I have yet to hear of a plastics or paper recycling program that is remotely economic.
Depends how many embryos they need to make in order for one to "take". From what I've heard, similar medical techniques currently in use, such as in vitro fertilization has a significant failure rate.
Also, there's the possibility that any such being may start out handicapped, by our definitions, in either communication or mental facilities. Our societies have coevolved with our quirks and issues. The more divergent an intelligence is from that norm, the more likely it is to not fit in. Hopefully, the Neanderthal version of man is close enough that this isn't a serious problem, but that's another big risk they're facing.
And as I pointed out, the term "free" is being misused here. It is especially relevant since you were complaining that free libraries and such were less "free" than they used to be.
Plus, you claimed that someone shrunk government services. That didn't happen in total, though obviously the libraries didn't fare so well. Instead, the funding has become distributed in a different way. Consider that in 1997, New York State and its local governments spent roughly $150 billion on state gross product (SDP) of $660 billion. That's roughly a quarter. By 2009, they had spent $280 billion on SDP of somewhere around $1,100 billion. Still roughly a quarter. More of it is probably spent on interest payments (in other words, government service from past years) and pension liabilities, but it's still being spent.
Perhaps, these budgets have dropped substantial since 2009, but at least for twelve years, they held pretty steady.
One of the tangental problems is that this country has shrunk government services and we no longer have free libraries the way we used to. Or free education.
There's never been "free" libraries or education. Someone pays for it. That money goes to other things now.
You're Quantum Apostrophe, right? I'm pretty sure your arguments have been refuted before. One wonders why you haven't paid attention. In any case, let's go through them again.
How many spaceships are these these days?
More than zero. We have experience with spaceships, both their manufacture and use. We're not going from square one. Hence, it makes sense to push the envelope and use them in places where we haven't been yet.
How much technology and resources are required to go to space?
We already know the answer to that. Not very much. It's about 100 tons of material per person to get to Mars. And as noted before, we already have most of the technology we need to do so.
Columbus actually went exploring since from his point of view, he didn't know where he was going. We KNOW that Mars and the Moon are dead.
And we know we can make them not dead by living there. This is really one of the dumber arguments you can make. As far as we can tell, Earth used to be dead too. But it didn't stay that way.
Traveling on the sea, as noted, supplies you with the essential basics of survival, including gravity. In space, you have none of these and zero-G and free fall are detrimental to human health. Argument four.
You still get copious sunlight, which is all you really need for most life support. And artificial gravity is both easy to generate and sufficient.
Columbus arrived on the same planet, in the same environment, and had natives he could kill and steal from. This is fucking obvious as he was still on Earth. You idiots want to go to dead rocks.
So it's a bit harder, but you'll have no messy genocide.
Free fuel (wind).
Free fuel (sun).
SPACE IS FUCKING HUGE.
But not huge enough that we can't get to other destinations.
IT'S ALSO FUCKING EMPTY.
This is the dumbest argument you make. Since the Moon, Mars, asteroids, etc are in space (not to mention Earth itself is in space!), then space is not empty.
Just because the courts choose not to find them unconstitutional, doesn't mean that they are constitutional. Stack the Supreme Court with the right people and they'll find that shipping the entire population of Springfield, Illinois to the glue factory is constitutional.
And the simple rebuttal is that they can always get a new job (assuming their job actually becomes obsolete in the first place). I don't see the reason to care that someone might have to find something new to do.
Colonize space? Why? 3/4 of our planet is ocean, how about colonize that first? Deserts?
Both are colonized. In the case of deserts, there are very large cities such as Phoenix in the US or Dubai in the UAE, In the case of the sea, colonization is done via ship.
Even if there are good replacements for oil as an energy source, not investing in them soon enough before peak oil will likely cause serious problems for energy prices
Well, they are being invested in (perhaps too much, I might add), so I don't grant your point here.
See "The Energy Trap" for an explanation
Energy is not oil. Just because oil will eventually be scarcer and harder to obtain than it is now, doesn't mean that energy will be.
Why send robots when you just not send anything at all? At some point, you are assuming that there's something valuable to do in space. Else just not doing anything is the correct choice.
As it turns out both robots and humans have their place in space activities. Robots are the obvious winners for virtually all extreme exploration, such as sending something out for the first time (the unmanned probes that were part of the Apollo program and used to scout possible sites and try out landing technology), to an environment that simply is not survivable (for example, a one way trip into the atmospheres of Jupiter or Venus), or lasts a ridiculous length of time (the Voyager missions).
Robots are also good for easily automated tasks such as imaging and communications. And as the software improves, one can expect more such tasks to be automated.
Humans are better for missions that have a lot of complexity and on site decision making. The Apollo program contains a good example of human activity that couldn't be readily duplicated by an affordable amount of robotics on Mars. Overall human time on the Moon was something like three or four weeks of human time (including the fact that there were two people on each of the half dozen missions that made it to the Moon).
For example, consider the scientific missions to Mars over the past forty years. Each of the last three lunar missions duplicated the basic feats of any of the rovers on Mars, but in a couple of days rather than a number of years. And a powerful component of the Apollo program was the sample return, which still generates considerable academic activity today.
People tend to forget that a manned mission could generate as much scientific knowledge in a few weeks as the unmanned landers and rovers have over the past last forty years. And that's a good use of humanity's real strength, the Earthside infrastructure that has had to make do with a remarkably thin gruel for four decades.
There's also the goal of eventual colonization of space. One has to use humans at some point in order to further that goal beyond a rudimentary level.
And is there any measure of safety that backs up your claims? Last I heard, modern commercial jets, including Boeing's, were excessively safe as measured by deaths per passenger mile with about an order of magnitude lower than the next two competitors, buses and trains.
I don't know the relative safety of Boeing compared to other developed world jet makers, but it can't be much worse than the norm (just due to how many Boeing jets are flying out there) and not throw the statistics.
Now having said that, it appears that the Dreamliner had a series of notable problems including substantial schedule slipping, manufacture and maintenance problems with the composite parts, and now these safety issues. So the Dreamliner might not be close to matching the safety record of the rest of Boeing's fleet. It certainly doesn't surprise me to hear that they've had another problem with that plane.
As to the use of lithium-ion batteries, I don't see the claimed inherent safety risk here. The approach they're using is to put the batteries in a box that can contain the fireworks, when a battery shorts out. And someone has to try that sort of thing on a working plane, or we'll never get the benefits of new technologies.
No, inflation is a straightforward case of things costing more than they did, which can be due to scarcity and/or increased demand.
No, that's an increase in price. As I noted, inflation is a devaluing of the currency, not a good which became more valuable due to scarcity.
The "Inflation is defined by the monetary base not the cost of goods" thing is a meme in certain circles. It's wrong. There may be a tiny number of pseudo-economists who use the term that way, but the vast majority of people, economists and lay-people alike, use it to mean rises in prices. If psuedo-economists were ever able to redefine the term that way, we'd need a new word to describe rises in prices, because that's what we're interested in, not whether the Fed has punched another zero into its computer.
Of course not. In real economics, one also has to include velocity of money in discussions of inflation. If monetary base increases a bunch, but inflation does not, then look at where the money is being trapped. For example, a bunch of that created money is probably being put into reducing leverage at banks and investment funds.
Slashdot Mirror
And how is that bad?
It can harm other parties. For example, one could probe a business for vulnerabilities and then when those are discovered, hand the actual highly criminal task of stealing assets or knowledge from the company to another party willing to take that additional legal risk.
If one actually looks at who actually kills people, one would not find anything meaningful, as sociopathy/psychopathy is not measured by kill count, and I doubt there's any actual research done on the subject on "how many people CEOs kill"
Look so you think that this isn't actually important? Well, tell it to this person not me.
I think in addition to a certain huge degree of sociopathy, one also needs opportunity and power. But once you have that necessary opportunity and power, body count does correspond to the degree of sociopathy.
Now, given that you chose to write more than a sentence or two indicates to me that maybe you don't believe what you originally wrote.
Second, it's worth noting that government can only kill when they have the help of the private sector, to supply them with funding, technology, weapons, etc. Governments rise and fall based on the decisions the private sector makes - if the private sector decides to side with the people, the government will not last.
Well, that wasn't true of the communist countries. It wasn't true of Nazi Germany. Or Turkey. Or even of the Congo Free State, where most of the decisions were made at the government level. Sure, some business owners like Cecil Rhodes (creator of the De Beers diamond monopoly among other things) helped facilitate the Congo Free State's recognition by their governments. But other business owners would have been found, if those had been lacking.
Now who is in the best position to influence government to kill for them? Big Business, and thus CEOs.
Government officials, of course. I fail to see why people don't get this.
An efficient sociopath use other people to do the killing, and cover their tracks.
So an efficient sociopath won't be in government. Too visible. Too much research showing how government kills people. An efficient sociopath stays outside of government, but then use the government to do killing.
Nonsense. Such visibility was nonexistent in most of the governments I mentioned above. Even now many of them continue to deny or obfuscate their more nefarious past activities.
For example. Turkey still denies the various genocides that the "Young Turks" carried out in the early part of the 20th Century (probably because Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey as well as other ranking officials of that government, were probably deeply involved in such massacres. So what sort of "visibility" is that which is steadfastly denied almost a century after it happened?
Indeed. It's quite clear how slightly less plush retirements will lead directly to disaster on the ISS.
That's not three words either. "Strategic maple reserve"?
Once the CEOs (sociopaths)
If one actually looks at who actually kills people, you'll see that CEOs are way far down that list. The high body count sociopaths tend to be hardcore ideologues heading governments. The next biggest group are barbarians, powerful, amoral outsiders who have little to no stake in viable civilization.
The foremost CEO by body count (by far!) is Leopold II the head of the loathsome Congo Free State. And he had such power only because he was already the head of state for Belgium. Sure, it demonstrates that corporations can be just as vile as any other form of human organization, but it's worth noting that there's really only one business-related example of democide among the worst of humanity. Most mass murdering sociopaths used other, more effective tools.
In order to be viable in the market, a labor-saving device must, by logical necessity eliminate more work than it creates. This is the only way to get the total cost of ownership down below the cost of hiring people to do the work. When successfully applied widely enough, this processes has serious economic implications.
It's not even logic, but by definition. One shouldn't expect a "labor saving device" to create more labor than it eliminates! Else, it'd be an instrument of torture cleverly misnamed as a "labor saving device".
Second, there are plenty of devices that do other things than "save" labor. For example, enable new capabilities or activities, preserve a resource that is unusually valuable (electroplating gold), or do things in an entertaining way or in a way that increases status (flashy sports car).
There is a finite (and, ultimately, small) demand for brain-work
That hasn't been true in practice. To the contrary, there's a vast need for people capable of such.
As tech puts us all out of work, we either start adopting more socialist policies, we put most of our population in jail (where we pay for their needs anyway), or we experience a violent mess.
Or more than one of the above. I consider none of the above an adequate solution to the problem.
A person can make things as accurately as a machine, they just take longer.
As cusco replied, there's a bunch of cases where that doesn't hold. In those cases, the human would make things as accurately as the machine by making the machine.
Why is everyone pretending that the legal system has no idea how to establish guilty mind?
Because that's a very difficult thing to show unless the defendant has been careless or there are obvious signs of criminal intent. It's also why we have the common principle of "ignorance of the law is no excuse" (due to the difficulty of distinguishing between someone truly ignorant of a law and someone pretending to be so).
As I see it, if the only difference between a criminal and non-criminal act is guilty mind, then most such cases are not going to be prosecuted as criminal acts just due to the difficulty of establishing guilty mind.
Honestly - we should have figured this shit out about 100 years ago - but the Haber-Bosch process (essentially, converting natural-gas into nitrogen-based fertilizer, increasing crop yields, and allowing our population to continue to grow) - made Malthusian economics seem wrong. In fact: the Haber-Bosch process just gave us a way to hold-off on Malthus' prediction for a while. Now look at where we are.
Sitting pretty well, as it turns out. I guess you have to ignore reality in order to buy into some of these doomsday scenarios.
the effect of depleting natural resources, polluting the world, and encouraging a burgeoning population to continue geometrically reproducing.
It's worth noting here that developed world society has solved all of the problems you mention. For example, environmental regulation, recycling programs and new resource discoveries, and of course, the end of a geometrically expanding human population. And green manure does an excellent job of weaning us off of methane-derived fertilizers.
The problem is even less dire than what I presented since one really doesn't need full implementation of any of these at this time in order to gain most of their benefits. Recycling in particular is notorious for being wasteful. I have yet to hear of a plastics or paper recycling program that is remotely economic.
They aren't even killing anything
Depends how many embryos they need to make in order for one to "take". From what I've heard, similar medical techniques currently in use, such as in vitro fertilization has a significant failure rate.
Also, there's the possibility that any such being may start out handicapped, by our definitions, in either communication or mental facilities. Our societies have coevolved with our quirks and issues. The more divergent an intelligence is from that norm, the more likely it is to not fit in. Hopefully, the Neanderthal version of man is close enough that this isn't a serious problem, but that's another big risk they're facing.
Is this an actual sentence? I'm trying to decipher it and yet I find I cannot.
He was grown on labs. You can tell.
Indeed. Who is this upstart, Mona? Has anyone even heard of her before?
And as I pointed out, the term "free" is being misused here. It is especially relevant since you were complaining that free libraries and such were less "free" than they used to be.
Plus, you claimed that someone shrunk government services. That didn't happen in total, though obviously the libraries didn't fare so well. Instead, the funding has become distributed in a different way. Consider that in 1997, New York State and its local governments spent roughly $150 billion on state gross product (SDP) of $660 billion. That's roughly a quarter. By 2009, they had spent $280 billion on SDP of somewhere around $1,100 billion. Still roughly a quarter. More of it is probably spent on interest payments (in other words, government service from past years) and pension liabilities, but it's still being spent.
Perhaps, these budgets have dropped substantial since 2009, but at least for twelve years, they held pretty steady.
One of the tangental problems is that this country has shrunk government services and we no longer have free libraries the way we used to. Or free education.
There's never been "free" libraries or education. Someone pays for it. That money goes to other things now.
No, just because you (and even millions of other you's) disagree with the courts, doesn't mean that the courts are wrong.
No? Nothing you've said contradicts anything I've said.
What about it hasn't work? As was noted earlier, this is stuff that humans have routinely done for centuries, if not their entire existence.
How many spaceships are these these days?
More than zero. We have experience with spaceships, both their manufacture and use. We're not going from square one. Hence, it makes sense to push the envelope and use them in places where we haven't been yet.
How much technology and resources are required to go to space?
We already know the answer to that. Not very much. It's about 100 tons of material per person to get to Mars. And as noted before, we already have most of the technology we need to do so.
Columbus actually went exploring since from his point of view, he didn't know where he was going. We KNOW that Mars and the Moon are dead.
And we know we can make them not dead by living there. This is really one of the dumber arguments you can make. As far as we can tell, Earth used to be dead too. But it didn't stay that way.
Traveling on the sea, as noted, supplies you with the essential basics of survival, including gravity. In space, you have none of these and zero-G and free fall are detrimental to human health. Argument four. You still get copious sunlight, which is all you really need for most life support. And artificial gravity is both easy to generate and sufficient.
Columbus arrived on the same planet, in the same environment, and had natives he could kill and steal from. This is fucking obvious as he was still on Earth. You idiots want to go to dead rocks.
So it's a bit harder, but you'll have no messy genocide.
Free fuel (wind).
Free fuel (sun).
SPACE IS FUCKING HUGE.
But not huge enough that we can't get to other destinations.
IT'S ALSO FUCKING EMPTY.
This is the dumbest argument you make. Since the Moon, Mars, asteroids, etc are in space (not to mention Earth itself is in space!), then space is not empty.
Just because the courts choose not to find them unconstitutional, doesn't mean that they are constitutional. Stack the Supreme Court with the right people and they'll find that shipping the entire population of Springfield, Illinois to the glue factory is constitutional.
And the simple rebuttal is that they can always get a new job (assuming their job actually becomes obsolete in the first place). I don't see the reason to care that someone might have to find something new to do.
Colonize space? Why? 3/4 of our planet is ocean, how about colonize that first? Deserts?
Both are colonized. In the case of deserts, there are very large cities such as Phoenix in the US or Dubai in the UAE, In the case of the sea, colonization is done via ship.
Two definitions enter! One definition leaves!
Even if there are good replacements for oil as an energy source, not investing in them soon enough before peak oil will likely cause serious problems for energy prices
Well, they are being invested in (perhaps too much, I might add), so I don't grant your point here.
See "The Energy Trap" for an explanation
Energy is not oil. Just because oil will eventually be scarcer and harder to obtain than it is now, doesn't mean that energy will be.
Why send humans when you can just send robots.
Why send robots when you just not send anything at all? At some point, you are assuming that there's something valuable to do in space. Else just not doing anything is the correct choice.
As it turns out both robots and humans have their place in space activities. Robots are the obvious winners for virtually all extreme exploration, such as sending something out for the first time (the unmanned probes that were part of the Apollo program and used to scout possible sites and try out landing technology), to an environment that simply is not survivable (for example, a one way trip into the atmospheres of Jupiter or Venus), or lasts a ridiculous length of time (the Voyager missions).
Robots are also good for easily automated tasks such as imaging and communications. And as the software improves, one can expect more such tasks to be automated.
Humans are better for missions that have a lot of complexity and on site decision making. The Apollo program contains a good example of human activity that couldn't be readily duplicated by an affordable amount of robotics on Mars. Overall human time on the Moon was something like three or four weeks of human time (including the fact that there were two people on each of the half dozen missions that made it to the Moon).
For example, consider the scientific missions to Mars over the past forty years. Each of the last three lunar missions duplicated the basic feats of any of the rovers on Mars, but in a couple of days rather than a number of years. And a powerful component of the Apollo program was the sample return, which still generates considerable academic activity today.
People tend to forget that a manned mission could generate as much scientific knowledge in a few weeks as the unmanned landers and rovers have over the past last forty years. And that's a good use of humanity's real strength, the Earthside infrastructure that has had to make do with a remarkably thin gruel for four decades.
There's also the goal of eventual colonization of space. One has to use humans at some point in order to further that goal beyond a rudimentary level.
And is there any measure of safety that backs up your claims? Last I heard, modern commercial jets, including Boeing's, were excessively safe as measured by deaths per passenger mile with about an order of magnitude lower than the next two competitors, buses and trains.
I don't know the relative safety of Boeing compared to other developed world jet makers, but it can't be much worse than the norm (just due to how many Boeing jets are flying out there) and not throw the statistics.
Now having said that, it appears that the Dreamliner had a series of notable problems including substantial schedule slipping, manufacture and maintenance problems with the composite parts, and now these safety issues. So the Dreamliner might not be close to matching the safety record of the rest of Boeing's fleet. It certainly doesn't surprise me to hear that they've had another problem with that plane.
As to the use of lithium-ion batteries, I don't see the claimed inherent safety risk here. The approach they're using is to put the batteries in a box that can contain the fireworks, when a battery shorts out. And someone has to try that sort of thing on a working plane, or we'll never get the benefits of new technologies.
No, inflation is a straightforward case of things costing more than they did, which can be due to scarcity and/or increased demand.
No, that's an increase in price. As I noted, inflation is a devaluing of the currency, not a good which became more valuable due to scarcity.
The "Inflation is defined by the monetary base not the cost of goods" thing is a meme in certain circles. It's wrong. There may be a tiny number of pseudo-economists who use the term that way, but the vast majority of people, economists and lay-people alike, use it to mean rises in prices. If psuedo-economists were ever able to redefine the term that way, we'd need a new word to describe rises in prices, because that's what we're interested in, not whether the Fed has punched another zero into its computer.
Of course not. In real economics, one also has to include velocity of money in discussions of inflation. If monetary base increases a bunch, but inflation does not, then look at where the money is being trapped. For example, a bunch of that created money is probably being put into reducing leverage at banks and investment funds.