You're right: "Japan, whose foreign exchange reserves topped US$1 trillion last month, is the largest foreign holder of US paper, sitting atop US$586.9 billion worth in January. China was close behind with US$492.6 billion, way ahead of No. 3 Britain which held US$160 billion worth."
So it's not just China, rather Japan and China.
Nobody is proposing to abolish money and go back to bartering. I'm not even sure this stimulus is such a terrible idea, maybe it will work (though we'll never really known either way). What worries me is we've been doing this since the 80's (Reagan), long enough to know that even in good times, we never quite get around to repaying the debt we rationalize in the bad times. Where will it end?
Banks create money on a grand scale, and contrary to what people would expect, it doesn't cause rampant inflation.
Credit can appear and disappear relatively quickly without causing rampant inflation. That doesn't mean the total money supply can simply increase forever without doing so. Be very careful overgeneralising from the last decade. I think there's a specific reason we've gotten away with it for so long, which is China. They willingly hoarded ever more of our dollars and tied their currency to ours. Part of the reason is because they hold so many US dollars, if they tried to circulate them they'd become almost worthless. If they ever call in our debts by spending those dollars, we are in big trouble.
"Bad" as in "round up the villagers with pitchforks and torches," or "bad" as in "you know, maybe a big international corporation with no particular allegiance to the US doesn't need US taxpayer subsidies" bad? They're quite different. I can respect what they do without wanting to donate, can't I?
Crap like this is what will drive companies _away_ from open source. Look at all the flak that Sun gets regarding it's handling of Open Office. Or countless other examples. The community should be grateful that these companies support FOSS at all
No, this is not OpenOffice, because drivers are only useful to customers who pay for hardware. When I shop for a laptop, I buy something with good driver support by my chosen OS, which is Linux. So if Intel wants me to consider buying something with their chips, they'd better fix the driver problem. The idea of being "grateful" to somebody making something I might want to buy is neither here nor there.
Actually they're not free, and they're not your tax dollars.
They're not free because even with the coupon, you still have to pay $15 or so to get a box, so I suspect many "unneeded" coupons will never be redeemed.
And they're not your tax dollars because the proceeds for the program came from the sale of the reclaimed RF spectrum.
"What do we need the TV for?" And that is the big question.
Ironic that you would write that the day before the Superbowl. Tomorrow 100 million Americans will be watching a high-def videostream live as it happens. Broadcast is superbly well-suited for this.
And by the way, if you have satellite or cable, you might want to try the broadcast stream anyways, since I hear it's higher bitrate.
Whether it's "surprising" is subjective. But since "new versions" normally cost $$$ while service packs do not, this move would make me angry if I were a Vista user. They sell me Vista, then finally get it working 2 years later but change the name so I have to pay again!?
It won't make much difference. People won't go out en masse to upgrade existing computers to Windows 7, but more will accept Windows 7 instead of XP on new computers. But what difference does that make? Microsoft gets paid either way. So, yes, Microsoft is "undestructible." The old days of rapid growth are mostly over, but they can sit back and collect the PC tax for at least another 10 or 15 yaars.
Reagan's great innovation was figuring out that if you fill people's pockets, they love you for it, even if the money is just a loan taken out in their name.
Last night npr had a story about Obama's huge stimulus plan being the first real test of Keynesianism, and how conservatives (they quoted somebody from the Cato Institute) hated it.
I thought, Huh? It was Reagan who ushered in the modern era of huge government spending to juice the economy. Both Bushes did it too, with Jr taking it to new heights.
The main difference I see with Obama is that less of the money will go to the military-industrial complex and tax cuts for the rich, and more into infrastructure and services that benefit greater number of people. I think that's potentially good, but doesn't change the fact that the federal budget deficit is downright terrifying and unsustainable.
As for Reagan breaking up the Soviet Union, give me a break. Communism never works, with or without Reagan. It was Clinton who was smart enough to reap the peace dividend by closing bases and bring a govt. surplus, which Reagan never would have done.
Until all of humanity lives like the Amish, we are all evil and destroying the Earth.
You question that we are destroying the earth?
We are burning fossil fuels thousands or millions of times faster than they regenerate.
Cities keep expanding and consuming additional land which never returns to its natural state.
Animal species are going extinct at unprecedented rates.
These trends cannot continue forever. That should be obvious and is not a matter of opinion or morality.
So, we can either stop soon while the earth is still a relatively good place to live, or wait until we hit carrying capacity. At that point the population is controlled by poverty/starvation and there are no nice places left.
I'm not saying we've already hit the wall, or that I know when we would hit it. But at least admit that there are limits out there somewhere, and if present trends continue, we will reach them.
"Buy when there's blood in the streets." Contrarianism is so appealing to people who are certain they're smarter or better emotionally regulated than others. But it's still just a simple strategy to time the market. I'm deeply suspicious of timing the market when there are plenty of smart people who do nothing but spend all of every day studying various companies and industries in the markets, and I'm not one of those people.
But here's an idea I haven't been able to debunk (yet): we can wait for recovery longer than boomers can, so shares are worth more to us than they are to them. They need their investments to retire on. And at some point, it's "use it or lose it," no point croaking with unsold shares, and it's not in the boomers' character to do so. Thus the risk of stocks is greater for boomers than for Xers and younger. This would mean that a "fair" price for the average stockholder (i.e. the current stock price) is undervalued for us. And unlike the Clinton era rise of the stock market, we X-ers are also far enough into our careers to invest substantially.
Please debunk this idea before I do something dumb like increasing my 401k deduction instead of making accelerated payments on my mortgage (a guaranteed return of 5.375%).
Also it really does not matter much. If they dont have 1TB pipe running to the headends for the 60Mbps services it's gonna be saturated within minutes.
Only if too many people use it at once. And why would they? How many hours per day of high-def video will each household be streaming? That's approximately the total amount of bandwidth that people can use. Once people have at least that much upstream and downstream, the need is met and anything more is likely to go unused.
You might think my argument fails because of bittorrent, but the up- and downstream used by bittorrent are almost exactly equal.
Well, most linux distros now have "Server" and "Workstation" varieties even though there's usually no financial incentive to do so. Somebody must think it's a good idea.
On the other hand, you can install SAMBA shares or host multiple VNC sessions even on a "Workstation" linux if you bother to install the required (free) software, and it won't do stupid crap like limiting your SAMBA share to 5 connections.
Agreed - the Hudson River ditching killed some of my belief in UAVs.
The crux wasn't landing in the river, it was deciding to land in the river. Even if remote pilots were on standby to "jump in" and take over in emergencies, there was no time to gain situational awareness.
Granted, in the long run, computers might have more general intelligence than people and be more trustworthy in making these multi-faceted decisions, but I think that will be a long time coming.
The point is, RAID lets you survive a drive failure. This is, typically, the most common reason one would have a backup (in the sense of the word you're using)
I disagree, I think accidental deletion / alteration is the most common need for a backup. Neither of us has any solid statistics, but it doesn't matter which is "most common" if we agree both are "pretty common."
That much storage in a single unit seems kind of dangerous.
I never understood this argument. Say you have N drives each with capacity C/N (e.g. C=2TB, N=1 for this new drive, or C=500GB, N=4 as you prefer) and probability P of each drive failing in a given time interval. Your expected data loss is N*P*C/N, which is independent of N. So what's the gain from more drives?
Heck, assume you don't want the hassle of multiple partitions so you use logical volume management to concatenate the drives (simulating the larger disk). Since any failure kills the whole thing, it's even worse - N*P*C.
I guess maybe your are thinking of RAID5? But is this an enterprise-class hard drive? I'm not buying (or buying electricity for) 3x 1TB drives instead of 1x 2TB drive just to protect my PVR recordings. And since RAID (regardless of level) is not a backup, if the data is any more important than PVR recordings, you still need backups with or without RAID. So all RAID5 gives you is decreased time to recover from a broken drive, by making you buy a spare up front. Obviously decreased downtime is critical for an important server, but not for the vast majority of home PCs.
Spindle-drives are inherently slow anyways, so I think the combination of a big, power-efficient drive (never mind the speed) for movies and an SSD drive for everything else is ideal.
Read the summary. This wasn't done for clueless procrastinators, it was done for the 2.5 million people who know about the switchover, applied for their coupons, and are counting on the govt. to live up to its obligation to send them so they can make the switch.
Congress should have specified that the coupons are only for people without cable or dish service.
Why? It's more fair if everybody benefits. RF spectrum is a shared natural resource, so everybody should share in the gains from using it more efficiently. (Besides, most of the people getting coupons even though they don't converters probably won't bother to redeem them when they find out it's still $15 or so with the coupon).
but then the number of coupons exceeds the estimate of TVs receiving through broadcast signals.
I can't speak for others, but before the switch I had zero devices on broadcast, but now switched my TV and PVR from Comcast to broadcast since the digital picture is so much better. Analog broadcast TV looked lousy, now it's better than cable.
Anyways, I'm curious how the system is being scammed? Are retailers filing for hundreds of cards using others' addresses (identity theft) and then redeeming them for boxes they didn't actually sell? If it's just people who don't need converters cashing their 2 coupons and selling the converters on ebay, that doesn't really bother me. The spectrum is a public resource, so everybody should share in the benefit of using it more efficiently.
It really doesn't matter when they do it -- February, June, two years ago, two years from now. Either way, they'll still have 2 million clueless idiots cussing out at their TVs wondering what happened to their TV signal.
Well, according to the summary there are 2.5 million people on the coupon waiting list. So that group of people, at least, are not clueless - they want to convert, and for them waiting does matter - it will save them $40 or $80 each.
Forcing people to buy things they don't need or want with no benefit to them won't stimulate the economy- it will force dollars away from useful purchases to useless ones. It harms the economy, not boosts it.
Actually this conversion is the antitheses of the broken windows fallacy; instead digital uses an existing limited resource more efficiently, which will pay dividends indefinitely. By converting the wasteful analog transmissions to more efficient digital, they reclaimed a resource which then sold for $20 billion dollars. Of that, about $1.3 billion was spent defraying the cost of digital converter boxes, which undercuts your argument of forcing people to buy them.
The spectrum we used to use for TV will now be used for TV plus broadband plus who knows what. That is a net win.
froogle used to have a format where you could provide all that information to them.
That's interesting, but I don't think the technical spec is that much of an issue, rather it's the willingness of retailers to provide product information and pricing in machine-readable format. Since BestBuy is a huge retailer, that makes this a step forward.
I would love if some format, any format, were widely adopted and used, but unfortunately I doubt it will be. From CORBA to XML, solutions to this issue (and more broadly the Semantic Web) have been around forever, but they never catch on.
I sure hope that's not all it is. If one API for product info predominated across most companies, it would be great, basically froogle.google.com without all the heuristics of trying to find and parse the price out of a web page (since that would be explicit). You would hardly need ebay anymore, since the search engine would be the marketplace.
Slashdot Mirror
So it's not just China, rather Japan and China.
Nobody is proposing to abolish money and go back to bartering. I'm not even sure this stimulus is such a terrible idea, maybe it will work (though we'll never really known either way). What worries me is we've been doing this since the 80's (Reagan), long enough to know that even in good times, we never quite get around to repaying the debt we rationalize in the bad times. Where will it end?
Credit can appear and disappear relatively quickly without causing rampant inflation. That doesn't mean the total money supply can simply increase forever without doing so. Be very careful overgeneralising from the last decade. I think there's a specific reason we've gotten away with it for so long, which is China. They willingly hoarded ever more of our dollars and tied their currency to ours. Part of the reason is because they hold so many US dollars, if they tried to circulate them they'd become almost worthless. If they ever call in our debts by spending those dollars, we are in big trouble.
"Bad" as in "round up the villagers with pitchforks and torches," or "bad" as in "you know, maybe a big international corporation with no particular allegiance to the US doesn't need US taxpayer subsidies" bad? They're quite different. I can respect what they do without wanting to donate, can't I?
I wouldn't recommend composting on a laptop. If you must compost, I'd place the heap in the furthest corner of the back yard.
No, this is not OpenOffice, because drivers are only useful to customers who pay for hardware. When I shop for a laptop, I buy something with good driver support by my chosen OS, which is Linux. So if Intel wants me to consider buying something with their chips, they'd better fix the driver problem. The idea of being "grateful" to somebody making something I might want to buy is neither here nor there.
They're not free because even with the coupon, you still have to pay $15 or so to get a box, so I suspect many "unneeded" coupons will never be redeemed.
And they're not your tax dollars because the proceeds for the program came from the sale of the reclaimed RF spectrum.
Ironic that you would write that the day before the Superbowl. Tomorrow 100 million Americans will be watching a high-def videostream live as it happens. Broadcast is superbly well-suited for this.
And by the way, if you have satellite or cable, you might want to try the broadcast stream anyways, since I hear it's higher bitrate.
Whether it's "surprising" is subjective. But since "new versions" normally cost $$$ while service packs do not, this move would make me angry if I were a Vista user. They sell me Vista, then finally get it working 2 years later but change the name so I have to pay again!?
It won't make much difference. People won't go out en masse to upgrade existing computers to Windows 7, but more will accept Windows 7 instead of XP on new computers. But what difference does that make? Microsoft gets paid either way. So, yes, Microsoft is "undestructible." The old days of rapid growth are mostly over, but they can sit back and collect the PC tax for at least another 10 or 15 yaars.
Last night npr had a story about Obama's huge stimulus plan being the first real test of Keynesianism, and how conservatives (they quoted somebody from the Cato Institute) hated it.
I thought, Huh? It was Reagan who ushered in the modern era of huge government spending to juice the economy. Both Bushes did it too, with Jr taking it to new heights.
The main difference I see with Obama is that less of the money will go to the military-industrial complex and tax cuts for the rich, and more into infrastructure and services that benefit greater number of people. I think that's potentially good, but doesn't change the fact that the federal budget deficit is downright terrifying and unsustainable.
As for Reagan breaking up the Soviet Union, give me a break. Communism never works, with or without Reagan. It was Clinton who was smart enough to reap the peace dividend by closing bases and bring a govt. surplus, which Reagan never would have done.
You question that we are destroying the earth?
We are burning fossil fuels thousands or millions of times faster than they regenerate.
Cities keep expanding and consuming additional land which never returns to its natural state.
Animal species are going extinct at unprecedented rates.
These trends cannot continue forever. That should be obvious and is not a matter of opinion or morality.
So, we can either stop soon while the earth is still a relatively good place to live, or wait until we hit carrying capacity. At that point the population is controlled by poverty/starvation and there are no nice places left.
I'm not saying we've already hit the wall, or that I know when we would hit it. But at least admit that there are limits out there somewhere, and if present trends continue, we will reach them.
What do you know that the market does not?
"Buy when there's blood in the streets." Contrarianism is so appealing to people who are certain they're smarter or better emotionally regulated than others. But it's still just a simple strategy to time the market. I'm deeply suspicious of timing the market when there are plenty of smart people who do nothing but spend all of every day studying various companies and industries in the markets, and I'm not one of those people.
But here's an idea I haven't been able to debunk (yet): we can wait for recovery longer than boomers can, so shares are worth more to us than they are to them. They need their investments to retire on. And at some point, it's "use it or lose it," no point croaking with unsold shares, and it's not in the boomers' character to do so. Thus the risk of stocks is greater for boomers than for Xers and younger. This would mean that a "fair" price for the average stockholder (i.e. the current stock price) is undervalued for us. And unlike the Clinton era rise of the stock market, we X-ers are also far enough into our careers to invest substantially.
Please debunk this idea before I do something dumb like increasing my 401k deduction instead of making accelerated payments on my mortgage (a guaranteed return of 5.375%).
Only if too many people use it at once. And why would they? How many hours per day of high-def video will each household be streaming? That's approximately the total amount of bandwidth that people can use. Once people have at least that much upstream and downstream, the need is met and anything more is likely to go unused.
You might think my argument fails because of bittorrent, but the up- and downstream used by bittorrent are almost exactly equal.
On the other hand, you can install SAMBA shares or host multiple VNC sessions even on a "Workstation" linux if you bother to install the required (free) software, and it won't do stupid crap like limiting your SAMBA share to 5 connections.
The crux wasn't landing in the river, it was deciding to land in the river. Even if remote pilots were on standby to "jump in" and take over in emergencies, there was no time to gain situational awareness.
Granted, in the long run, computers might have more general intelligence than people and be more trustworthy in making these multi-faceted decisions, but I think that will be a long time coming.
I disagree, I think accidental deletion / alteration is the most common need for a backup. Neither of us has any solid statistics, but it doesn't matter which is "most common" if we agree both are "pretty common."
I never understood this argument. Say you have N drives each with capacity C/N (e.g. C=2TB, N=1 for this new drive, or C=500GB, N=4 as you prefer) and probability P of each drive failing in a given time interval. Your expected data loss is N*P*C/N, which is independent of N. So what's the gain from more drives?
Heck, assume you don't want the hassle of multiple partitions so you use logical volume management to concatenate the drives (simulating the larger disk). Since any failure kills the whole thing, it's even worse - N*P*C.
I guess maybe your are thinking of RAID5? But is this an enterprise-class hard drive? I'm not buying (or buying electricity for) 3x 1TB drives instead of 1x 2TB drive just to protect my PVR recordings. And since RAID (regardless of level) is not a backup, if the data is any more important than PVR recordings, you still need backups with or without RAID. So all RAID5 gives you is decreased time to recover from a broken drive, by making you buy a spare up front. Obviously decreased downtime is critical for an important server, but not for the vast majority of home PCs.
Spindle-drives are inherently slow anyways, so I think the combination of a big, power-efficient drive (never mind the speed) for movies and an SSD drive for everything else is ideal.
Read the summary. This wasn't done for clueless procrastinators, it was done for the 2.5 million people who know about the switchover, applied for their coupons, and are counting on the govt. to live up to its obligation to send them so they can make the switch.
Why? It's more fair if everybody benefits. RF spectrum is a shared natural resource, so everybody should share in the gains from using it more efficiently. (Besides, most of the people getting coupons even though they don't converters probably won't bother to redeem them when they find out it's still $15 or so with the coupon).
I can't speak for others, but before the switch I had zero devices on broadcast, but now switched my TV and PVR from Comcast to broadcast since the digital picture is so much better. Analog broadcast TV looked lousy, now it's better than cable.
Anyways, I'm curious how the system is being scammed? Are retailers filing for hundreds of cards using others' addresses (identity theft) and then redeeming them for boxes they didn't actually sell? If it's just people who don't need converters cashing their 2 coupons and selling the converters on ebay, that doesn't really bother me. The spectrum is a public resource, so everybody should share in the benefit of using it more efficiently.
Well, according to the summary there are 2.5 million people on the coupon waiting list. So that group of people, at least, are not clueless - they want to convert, and for them waiting does matter - it will save them $40 or $80 each.
Actually this conversion is the antitheses of the broken windows fallacy; instead digital uses an existing limited resource more efficiently, which will pay dividends indefinitely. By converting the wasteful analog transmissions to more efficient digital, they reclaimed a resource which then sold for $20 billion dollars. Of that, about $1.3 billion was spent defraying the cost of digital converter boxes, which undercuts your argument of forcing people to buy them.
The spectrum we used to use for TV will now be used for TV plus broadband plus who knows what. That is a net win.
That's interesting, but I don't think the technical spec is that much of an issue, rather it's the willingness of retailers to provide product information and pricing in machine-readable format. Since BestBuy is a huge retailer, that makes this a step forward.
I would love if some format, any format, were widely adopted and used, but unfortunately I doubt it will be. From CORBA to XML, solutions to this issue (and more broadly the Semantic Web) have been around forever, but they never catch on.
I sure hope that's not all it is. If one API for product info predominated across most companies, it would be great, basically froogle.google.com without all the heuristics of trying to find and parse the price out of a web page (since that would be explicit). You would hardly need ebay anymore, since the search engine would be the marketplace.