So, 2000 years before christ metal pieces where already 'stamped' with a 'value'?
Yea, pretty much. There were bronze age metal pieces that were stamped to provide a value, often called "bronze cowrie". You've heard of a "shekel", right? It was a standard weighing of gold or, more typically, silver. The Anatolian traders were known to "stamp" their units of metal to avoid weighing during trade - this was around 3000 B.C.
I'm looking forward for your Ph.D. thesis. That will be a real eye opener.
Typical American idiot - figures only academics with doctorates should know anything about history. Everything important you'll hear about on MSNBC and Fox News, right? No need for regular people to learn something so useless as "history", right?
At first, and then it explains why that's not an accurate statement. In fact, it literally says those exact words later on. Perhaps don't stop reading after the first sentence?
Nope. That's a completely disingenuous description of the article, so misleading as to justifiably called a lie. The article does go on to say that "The Fed is a little defensive about the question of ownership." - true, and a bit of an understatement. What you claim is the article explaining why the it's "not an accurate statement" is simply a quote in the article from the Fed itself, being, yes, "defensive" about its ownership, and going so far as to re-define the term "ownership" to suit its own view.
I don't call that either accurate or credible. So I guess, really, all of your arguments come down to the Fed defending their own destructive and harmful structure and practices.
Your sig is surprisingly accurate.
I love it when people point that out in an argument. It completely outs them as a person that takes the statements at face value, and have never learned to think critically on their own.
Your ignorance is obstinate. Nice selective reading / quoting there, BTW. Try actually addressing the points I made, rather than obfuscating and creating diversions.
No, because none of that is true. No one really "owns" the Fed. [factcheck.org].
Your link says exactly the opposite, to quote:
Q: Who owns the Federal Reserve Bank?
A: There are actually 12 different Federal Reserve Banks around the country, and they are owned by big private banks.
The private banks are more like members than owners, government appointees have all the decision making power.
Kind of. Monetary policy decisions are made by the Federal Open Market Committee, which has members from both the Board and the Reserve Banks. Government appointees and the heads of the private Federal Reserve Banks work together to set monetary policy objectives that directly impact the strength of the dollar. Not all of the members of the FOMC are confirmed by the Senate, though they should be. So those government appointees only have some decision-making powers. That point may be moot, anyway, though, because the decisions the Fed makes are always about ensuring the profits and stability of Wall Street through a system of taxing the poor and middle-class by devaluing their money over time, and ensuring that the big bank owners of the Fed get the best deal on newly created "money".
Also, all the Fed banks are subject to audits [federalreserve.gov] by the GAO and independent entities.
Pft. Quoting the Federal Reserve on whether they are subject to audits is not very credible, to say the least. There are serious restrictions on the GAO's audits of the Fed and its credit facilities, securities purchases, and quantitative easing activities - these actions have no congressional oversight whatsoever. Dennis Kucinich pointed out the issues better than I can, during the debate on passage of the "Audit the Fed" bill (which eventually failed in the Senate): "The Fed creates trillions of dollars out of nothing and gives it to banks. Congress is in the dark. The Fed sets the stage for the subprime meltdown. Congress is in the dark. The Fed takes a dive on LIBOR. Congress is in the dark. The Fed doesn’t tell regulators what is going on. Congress is in the dark,"
You have a pretty wiered idea what "money" is. All the stuff you menation is barter, and not money.
No - you're wrong. "Barter" is, by definition the action or system of exchanging goods or services without using money. Money is a medium of exchange that allows you to exchange ANY good or service for a certain value, represented by the exchange medium - money. Precious metal commodities are, traditionally, a form of REAL money - what you are used to are Federal Reserve Notes, which are, in fact, promissory notes, an "innovation" typically referred to as fiat money. That is, it's only money because the current geographical authority that enforces their control through force and arms say it is money by fiat.
Money got invented by Kroesus... he was the first one who came to the idea to make coins from gold and silver (and electrum).
That's one debatable version of the history of coinage, but it only worked because people had already been using gold, silver, and other commodity precious metals as money for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
Imagine before coins existed ppl payed with 'random chunks' of metal. Which made handing back 'overpay' difficult.
Not really. The "chunks" of metal you're referring to were almost universally stamped with some specifics as to the purity and weight. It's speculated that priests and other trusted merchants were the first to do this. The only thing that Kroesus changed about the stamping was to put his likeness on the coins instead of useful information about the value of the coin. This is not "inventing" money - it's a sovereign's attempt to control money.
He also was 'the first' who realized, the actual amount of metal in the coin does not need to match the 'imprinted value' on it.
That is, he was the first "government" that came up with the concept of what we today call "debasing the currency". A technique that the Federal Reserve, and all other central banks, are now rather expert at doing, to the detriment of the working class.
This is utter crap. With very, very few exceptions, money has always been issued by government.
Either your view of "always" is limited to a few hundred years, or you are simply wrong. "Money" has a long history, much longer than formal government issuance of gold and silver coins. The first money was actually livestock (yep), and probably the oldest more portable form was the cowrie (which is still used in some places, BTW). There was no government issuing Wampum, either, but it was money for hundreds of years.
The US set a standard for money, but it was still considered private. The "Dollar" was really just a standard for a specific amount of silver that was based on a coin Spain used. Gold and silver were used as money for thousands of years before any government started "issuing" them. And even when they did, it was the intrinsic value of the metal that made them money - governments attempting to create a monopoly for units of exchange in their own money is a very recent development. Throughout most of history money from anywhere (even long-abandoned civilizations) was considered perfectly valid.
DAMMIT! I've been waiting all this time for the "Internet Connected Refrigerator" I was promised 10 years ago so it can order groceries for me - and all they've come up with is a fucking bathroom mirror with stock quotes!?!? Get the fuck out.
So hang on, you called his figures crap, then cite some other figures which you show are crap as a reason why his figures are crap? Damn, I've seen some bad arguments, but this...
Lots of people not paying attention these days. I know/. users are notorious for NOT reading, but sheesh. The Wiki has both HHS figures, as well as others. I guess I should have started with "Those figures FROM HHS THAT WERE IN YOUR LINK are crap."
Those figures are a load of bullshit...(y)ou just try feeding a teenage boy on less than $1,000 a year.
The linked wikipedia entry that you are calling bullshit allocates ~$2500 per year for food for a middle class teenager. You may want to pay a bit more attention.
That's the averages for what people actually spend. I was referring to the figures from HHS - which I explicitly said. So maybe it's you that should pay a bit more attention.
Yes - but what message? While the explicit message may be "don't text and drive", the implicit message in this, and many other activities of NY and many other efforts around the country is very clear: Big Brother is watching you.
If texting while driving is as dangerous as people indicate, wouldn't a reckless driving charge be more appropriate? Individuals under 21 should be charged with reckless driving if an officer catches them with a communications device in their hand while driving.
Only if they are, in fact, driving recklessly. Let's face it, there are many ways to get distracted while driving and cause an accident. I really don't like the focus on this one specific activity. It should be about sanctioning people that actually cause a problem. This focus on texting as the distracting activity (justified as a prevention effort) is more like pre-crime.
I didn't read the NYT article, but I did read the abstract. It explains what the test was about:
Students who participated in the School Visit Program demonstrated significantly stronger critical thinking skills when analyzing a new painting.
In other words, the kids that visited the museum of art managed to learn something about art, somehow slightly more than kids that didn't... learn about art at the museum. That's no surprise - the "study" was designed to succeed.
Children, on the other hand, are way more expensive than a lot of would-be parents give them credit for. To age 18, it's about $400K.
You sound insightful, but your numbers are crap. You would have to spoil your kids rotten, or be very rich to spend so much on a kid. Have some data.
Those figures are a load of bullshit. I see they come from the US government's HHS department, so they are probably politically influenced to maintain support for higher middle class taxation and lower costs for welfare and social services. You just try feeding a teenage boy on less than $1,000 a year. That's a lot of mac and cheese. And of course, using the HHS figures, your kids are wearing used clothes, have no extracurricular activities, get a trip to the local library for Christmas, etc., etc. That's not "raising" a child - it's just keeping them alive.
But when I send out a perfectly good resume and use the more obvious resources there are still precious few bites for someone requiring to work remotely
How come nobody has commented on this part? No matter what age you are, requiring that you work remotely is going to make things difficult, no matter your age.
Good point. If a company is looking for someone to work remotely, they have the whole world to pick from, including places where the cost of living is extremely low. Very hard to compete with that, even if you can show that you're very productive in comparison.
Do not make medical decisions about which drug to take by yourself, it's a bad idea.
That's a horrible stance. Get as much information as you can from whatever "experts" you can consult. But the decision about what to put in your body should be entirely and solely your own.
Being aware of false information can have a negative impact, in the same way that bogus leads can hinder a police investigation.
That said, I think the FDA should be allowed to put their stamp of approval on things, but they shouldn't be allowed to prevent people from deciding what medical tests and procedures they do to themselves.
There has to be a line beyond which you can not practice medicine. Without that line we would have thousands of quack 'doctors' performing cosmetic surgery in hotel rooms. There would be people giving cancer "tests" using actual litmus strips. Maybe what we have now is too strict. I would argue that the FDA should be clamping down harder on the "supplements" market. You can argue about where the line should be. However, a libertarian system where anybody can practice medicine, anybody can sell any kind of pill claiming anything they want, but the real doctors are "certified" is not a system I want to be part of.
The FDA is not involved in the qualification process for doctors. In fact, the Federal government is entirely uninvolved qualifying or licensing physicians.
Primarily, the FDA is a group that ensures profits for specific pharmaceutical corporations. This can be used to explain pretty much explains every decision they make.
Regulating this seems reasonable to me, as does the logic in the FDA letter...
Because the peasants are so stupid that they need to be protected from themselves, or because you enjoy having tyrannical bureaucrats dictating every aspect of people's lives?
Whatever your opinion of Obama, he is certainly not from "the ruling class".
Really? Let's see... A descendant of rulers and politically-connected international travelers, Religious and Prep school upbringing in upper-class neighborhoods, Educated at Occidental and Columbia and law degree from Harvard... what's missing?
Obama is only "black" because his father was a member of the ruling class from a black country. His mother, who also had a PhD, is descended from an American slave-holder family.
How did you come to this delusion that Obama is not a member of the ruling class?
Slashdot Mirror
Cattle is no money and never was, it is a barter item.
Well I would have said so, too, but I found that PBS' NOVA described cattle as the first form of money. I thought it was an interesting assertion, so I repeated the claim. It's certainly debatable.
So, 2000 years before christ metal pieces where already 'stamped' with a 'value'?
Yea, pretty much. There were bronze age metal pieces that were stamped to provide a value, often called "bronze cowrie". You've heard of a "shekel", right? It was a standard weighing of gold or, more typically, silver. The Anatolian traders were known to "stamp" their units of metal to avoid weighing during trade - this was around 3000 B.C.
I'm looking forward for your Ph.D. thesis. That will be a real eye opener.
Typical American idiot - figures only academics with doctorates should know anything about history. Everything important you'll hear about on MSNBC and Fox News, right? No need for regular people to learn something so useless as "history", right?
At first, and then it explains why that's not an accurate statement. In fact, it literally says those exact words later on. Perhaps don't stop reading after the first sentence?
Nope. That's a completely disingenuous description of the article, so misleading as to justifiably called a lie. The article does go on to say that "The Fed is a little defensive about the question of ownership." - true, and a bit of an understatement. What you claim is the article explaining why the it's "not an accurate statement" is simply a quote in the article from the Fed itself, being, yes, "defensive" about its ownership, and going so far as to re-define the term "ownership" to suit its own view.
I don't call that either accurate or credible. So I guess, really, all of your arguments come down to the Fed defending their own destructive and harmful structure and practices.
Your sig is surprisingly accurate.
I love it when people point that out in an argument. It completely outs them as a person that takes the statements at face value, and have never learned to think critically on their own.
Your ignorance is obstinate. Nice selective reading / quoting there, BTW. Try actually addressing the points I made, rather than obfuscating and creating diversions.
No, because none of that is true. No one really "owns" the Fed. [factcheck.org].
Your link says exactly the opposite, to quote:
The private banks are more like members than owners, government appointees have all the decision making power.
Kind of. Monetary policy decisions are made by the Federal Open Market Committee, which has members from both the Board and the Reserve Banks. Government appointees and the heads of the private Federal Reserve Banks work together to set monetary policy objectives that directly impact the strength of the dollar. Not all of the members of the FOMC are confirmed by the Senate, though they should be. So those government appointees only have some decision-making powers. That point may be moot, anyway, though, because the decisions the Fed makes are always about ensuring the profits and stability of Wall Street through a system of taxing the poor and middle-class by devaluing their money over time, and ensuring that the big bank owners of the Fed get the best deal on newly created "money".
Also, all the Fed banks are subject to audits [federalreserve.gov] by the GAO and independent entities.
Pft. Quoting the Federal Reserve on whether they are subject to audits is not very credible, to say the least. There are serious restrictions on the GAO's audits of the Fed and its credit facilities, securities purchases, and quantitative easing activities - these actions have no congressional oversight whatsoever. Dennis Kucinich pointed out the issues better than I can, during the debate on passage of the "Audit the Fed" bill (which eventually failed in the Senate): "The Fed creates trillions of dollars out of nothing and gives it to banks. Congress is in the dark. The Fed sets the stage for the subprime meltdown. Congress is in the dark. The Fed takes a dive on LIBOR. Congress is in the dark. The Fed doesn’t tell regulators what is going on. Congress is in the dark,"
You have a pretty wiered idea what "money" is. All the stuff you menation is barter, and not money.
No - you're wrong. "Barter" is, by definition the action or system of exchanging goods or services without using money. Money is a medium of exchange that allows you to exchange ANY good or service for a certain value, represented by the exchange medium - money. Precious metal commodities are, traditionally, a form of REAL money - what you are used to are Federal Reserve Notes, which are, in fact, promissory notes, an "innovation" typically referred to as fiat money. That is, it's only money because the current geographical authority that enforces their control through force and arms say it is money by fiat.
Money got invented by Kroesus ... he was the first one who came to the idea to make coins from gold and silver (and electrum).
That's one debatable version of the history of coinage, but it only worked because people had already been using gold, silver, and other commodity precious metals as money for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
Imagine before coins existed ppl payed with 'random chunks' of metal. Which made handing back 'overpay' difficult.
Not really. The "chunks" of metal you're referring to were almost universally stamped with some specifics as to the purity and weight. It's speculated that priests and other trusted merchants were the first to do this. The only thing that Kroesus changed about the stamping was to put his likeness on the coins instead of useful information about the value of the coin. This is not "inventing" money - it's a sovereign's attempt to control money.
He also was 'the first' who realized, the actual amount of metal in the coin does not need to match the 'imprinted value' on it.
That is, he was the first "government" that came up with the concept of what we today call "debasing the currency". A technique that the Federal Reserve, and all other central banks, are now rather expert at doing, to the detriment of the working class.
Not quite sure how you see the FRS as 'private' - it's a national reserve bank established by legislation.
Because it is wholly owned by a consortium of private banks, and not subject to government audits?
This is utter crap. With very, very few exceptions, money has always been issued by government.
Either your view of "always" is limited to a few hundred years, or you are simply wrong. "Money" has a long history, much longer than formal government issuance of gold and silver coins. The first money was actually livestock (yep), and probably the oldest more portable form was the cowrie (which is still used in some places, BTW). There was no government issuing Wampum, either, but it was money for hundreds of years.
The US set a standard for money, but it was still considered private. The "Dollar" was really just a standard for a specific amount of silver that was based on a coin Spain used. Gold and silver were used as money for thousands of years before any government started "issuing" them. And even when they did, it was the intrinsic value of the metal that made them money - governments attempting to create a monopoly for units of exchange in their own money is a very recent development. Throughout most of history money from anywhere (even long-abandoned civilizations) was considered perfectly valid.
DAMMIT! I've been waiting all this time for the "Internet Connected Refrigerator" I was promised 10 years ago so it can order groceries for me - and all they've come up with is a fucking bathroom mirror with stock quotes!?!? Get the fuck out.
1995 called. They want their web site design back.
What is it with people like you who assume that posting as AC means someone is "afraid" ?
Did you miss the part where the AC acronym is for Anonymous Coward??
So hang on, you called his figures crap, then cite some other figures which you show are crap as a reason why his figures are crap? Damn, I've seen some bad arguments, but this...
Lots of people not paying attention these days. I know /. users are notorious for NOT reading, but sheesh. The Wiki has both HHS figures, as well as others. I guess I should have started with "Those figures FROM HHS THAT WERE IN YOUR LINK are crap."
Those figures are a load of bullshit...(y)ou just try feeding a teenage boy on less than $1,000 a year.
The linked wikipedia entry that you are calling bullshit allocates ~$2500 per year for food for a middle class teenager. You may want to pay a bit more attention.
That's the averages for what people actually spend. I was referring to the figures from HHS - which I explicitly said. So maybe it's you that should pay a bit more attention.
Its [sic] about sending a message.
Yes - but what message? While the explicit message may be "don't text and drive", the implicit message in this, and many other activities of NY and many other efforts around the country is very clear: Big Brother is watching you.
If texting while driving is as dangerous as people indicate, wouldn't a reckless driving charge be more appropriate? Individuals under 21 should be charged with reckless driving if an officer catches them with a communications device in their hand while driving.
Only if they are, in fact, driving recklessly. Let's face it, there are many ways to get distracted while driving and cause an accident. I really don't like the focus on this one specific activity. It should be about sanctioning people that actually cause a problem. This focus on texting as the distracting activity (justified as a prevention effort) is more like pre-crime.
Okay, it's a bad idea, causes accidents, and the state is combating it. I never text and drive, and I get the justification for trying to stop it.
But ... what about Ingress? Can I still play Ingress and drive? I'm not texting anything, dammit!
I didn't read the NYT article, but I did read the abstract. It explains what the test was about:
Students who participated in the School Visit Program demonstrated significantly stronger critical thinking skills when analyzing a new painting .
In other words, the kids that visited the museum of art managed to learn something about art, somehow slightly more than kids that didn't ... learn about art at the museum. That's no surprise - the "study" was designed to succeed.
Children, on the other hand, are way more expensive than a lot of would-be parents give them credit for. To age 18, it's about $400K.
You sound insightful, but your numbers are crap. You would have to spoil your kids rotten, or be very rich to spend so much on a kid. Have some data.
Those figures are a load of bullshit. I see they come from the US government's HHS department, so they are probably politically influenced to maintain support for higher middle class taxation and lower costs for welfare and social services. You just try feeding a teenage boy on less than $1,000 a year. That's a lot of mac and cheese. And of course, using the HHS figures, your kids are wearing used clothes, have no extracurricular activities, get a trip to the local library for Christmas, etc., etc. That's not "raising" a child - it's just keeping them alive.
But when I send out a perfectly good resume and use the more obvious resources there are still precious few bites for someone requiring to work remotely
How come nobody has commented on this part? No matter what age you are, requiring that you work remotely is going to make things difficult, no matter your age.
Good point. If a company is looking for someone to work remotely, they have the whole world to pick from, including places where the cost of living is extremely low. Very hard to compete with that, even if you can show that you're very productive in comparison.
...and, unfortunately, you are likely to die by it too.
A good general rule before issuing a tirade is to ask who benefits or in other words FOLLOW THE MONEY.
I followed your advice and came to a different conclusion. Apparently FDA approval means your product will cost at least 10 times as much.
Are we to assume that the FDA has no interest in protecting the corporations that provide their funding?
Do not make medical decisions about which drug to take by yourself, it's a bad idea.
That's a horrible stance. Get as much information as you can from whatever "experts" you can consult. But the decision about what to put in your body should be entirely and solely your own.
Being aware of false information can have a negative impact, in the same way that bogus leads can hinder a police investigation.
That said, I think the FDA should be allowed to put their stamp of approval on things, but they shouldn't be allowed to prevent people from deciding what medical tests and procedures they do to themselves.
There has to be a line beyond which you can not practice medicine. Without that line we would have thousands of quack 'doctors' performing cosmetic surgery in hotel rooms. There would be people giving cancer "tests" using actual litmus strips. Maybe what we have now is too strict. I would argue that the FDA should be clamping down harder on the "supplements" market. You can argue about where the line should be. However, a libertarian system where anybody can practice medicine, anybody can sell any kind of pill claiming anything they want, but the real doctors are "certified" is not a system I want to be part of.
The FDA is not involved in the qualification process for doctors. In fact, the Federal government is entirely uninvolved qualifying or licensing physicians.
Primarily, the FDA is a group that ensures profits for specific pharmaceutical corporations. This can be used to explain pretty much explains every decision they make.
Regulating this seems reasonable to me, as does the logic in the FDA letter...
Because the peasants are so stupid that they need to be protected from themselves, or because you enjoy having tyrannical bureaucrats dictating every aspect of people's lives?
Whatever your opinion of Obama, he is certainly not from "the ruling class".
Really? Let's see... A descendant of rulers and politically-connected international travelers, Religious and Prep school upbringing in upper-class neighborhoods, Educated at Occidental and Columbia and law degree from Harvard ... what's missing?
Obama is only "black" because his father was a member of the ruling class from a black country. His mother, who also had a PhD, is descended from an American slave-holder family.
How did you come to this delusion that Obama is not a member of the ruling class?
Welcome to the Internet!