Those that can afford a $1000.- handbag will get the Real Thing and wouldn't want to be caught dead with a fake. These guys don't loose a cent due to all the counterfeit crap being sold to an entirely different demographic.
This is not at all true. The problem with counterfeit fashion stuff is that the people who buy $1000 handbags buy them specifically to show off their wealth; they are status symbols. If every soccer mom is walking around with a Louis Vuitton lookalike, the wealthy are much less likely to buy the real thing because they would no longer stand out. Piracy devalues the brand. Not that this bothers me; I think spending $1000 for something that cost $40 to make (factoring in design time) is absurd, but the losses are just as real.
They may be even more real than losses from game piracy, as the non-paying or reduced-price demographic exists for both the fashion and game industries, but a pirated game still provides the original game experience and so cannot devalue the brand to paying customers: the enjoyment of a game, unless you are elitist, is independent of how many other people possess a copy of it. Of course, the more easily available pirated games are, the more the non-paying demographic increases and greater losses most certainly occur.
I like it for server stuff, as it's real easy to get it to detect when the code on disk has changed, load 'n compile it into memory, and splice it into what's already running... without losing any data structures or anything, and if there's any errors in the code, throw an error, and go back to the previous working version of that module. Without need for any close/restarts.
That's kind of bad-ass. Years ago I took a very brief look at perl and it just didn't look friendly, know what I mean? I may have to give it a second chance one of these days.
No. If I take the pills, giant insects peer at me through my windows at night. The pills must change my body chemistry and attract them. At least, that's what I thought at first. Now I'm pretty sure that they're mutated chip-implanted insect overlords from Homeland Security.
On behalf of English-speaking readers everywhere, I ask you to PLEASE refrain from abbreviating "duplicate" by using the word "dup." You may pronounce it "doop" but the rest of us can't help but hear the little reading voice in our heads say "dhupp!" The sheer glee with which it utters the errant syllable is enough to drive one mad. I feel dumber for having allowed it to traverse my neural pathways. The "e" is silent, but that doesn't make it unimportant.
Apparently you're incapable of discerning the difference between fact and hyperbole, though I must give you kudos for sheer doggedness.
Wikipedia includes this in its entry on Gore's film:
[An Inconvenient Truth] includes segments intended to refute critics who say that global warming is unproven or that warming will be insignificant. For example, Gore discusses the possibility of the collapse of a major ice sheet in Greenland or in West Antarctica, either of which could raise global sea levels by approximately 20 feet (6 m), flooding coastal areas and producing 100 million refugees.
That certainly qualifies as "global warming doom prophecy;" whether it is true or not is immaterial.
Your point about the environment is a good one. I am having trouble seeing how public environmental controls would prevent the accident in your first scenario, unless you mean something like safety standards, but I'm assuming in the second (CFC dumping) that factories which produce harmful chemicals would have audits and reporting requirements. That makes sense. Again, the environment is something that would be low on my radar to "libertarianize," because I am unaware of many problems with current and proposed systems, and don't know what set of advantages and disadvantages a libertarian policy would bring.
We are in full agreement that private police forces and the like are a bad idea.
Re:banking. I can accept that I was wrong about the calls for regulation, but I must not have been clear regarding leveraging and the crash. I know that some people thought 40:1 leveraging was bad, insanely so, and did not mean to imply that nobody saw the impending collapse. Indeed, Peter Schiff and Ron Paul (both free-market economists) had been predicting the housing bubble's crash for years before it happened. It's important to keep in mind that the banking crisis is rooted not in CDSs and MBS but in the inability of people to pay their mortgages--the problems with those financial instruments began there. (And the reasons for the housing boom which led to the bust run straight to the Federal Reserve.)
I want to briefly address your assertion that "libertarian and free-market ideals serve to privatize wealth and nationalize debt" because it rests on a huge assumption that you've made explicit several times; the notion that there are institutions who are too big to fail. This is not a notion that AFAIK any libertarian accepts, and for good reason! Such institutions do not fail in a vacuum--there will be someone else who thinks they can better manage the assets of the failed institution, and they will buy up those assets and life will go on (indeed, we saw a perversion of this when Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch with taxpayer money). It's not fun for those involved, but they chose to be involved with (for example) that bank, and they chose to trust that said bank was acting in their best interest without bothering to examine the bank's practices. It is far more fair that those involved pay the high price of failure than for everyone in the nation to suffer some smaller amount.
I understand that you believe that these institutions are too big to fail without catastrophic effects, and working with that premise then yes, libertarian principles in every other area save for letting large institutions fail would serve to privatize wealth and nationalize debt. However, I don't think it's fair to characterize the libertarian system of thought as such while you refuse to allow the system to handle failure in a manner consistent with itself.
In a larger sense, the problem with the libertarian, states rights agenda (aside from the racist dog whistles) is that it rests on the assumption that people will physically move to the state that best provides for them. That's just not true - there's a tremendous amount of inertia involved in moving humans, and companies can and will exploit that. We, as citizens, are best served by the broadest possible minimum workers rights and environmental regulations in order to prevent a race to the bottom. In today's world, that means they should be national.
They can certainly be national, it's just that the barrier for entry is higher, requiring a constitutional amendment. It pisses me off that so much is done in this country that goes flatly against our founding charter. And yes, it's hard for people to pack up and move to a different state, but with strong states' rights the option is there. If you take the long view, then giving states the freedom to experiment is a better way to find out what works and what doesn't, and the nation as a whole will be better off for gai
It should also be noted that debt must be paid back through future taxes, and inflation causes the value of a currency to go down, amounting to...a tax.
So the three ways to finance a deficit are taxes, taxes, and taxes, it's just a matter of how honest they decide to be about it.
(Also, for once, the "think of the children" meme may be apropos, as saddling future generations with debt that they have no say in creating strikes me as a bit wrong.)
That's okay. "The modern global economy" will cease to exist within the next few decades as rising energy prices, the probable death of the world's reserve currency and other factors will cause a vast change in the way we live, and libertarian ideals will become viable, even preferable again.
Not that I'd expect you to consider any of this; I'm not one of the top 1% and so must be hopelessly naive. If by some off chance you're up for looking at some information that might challenge your global economy viewpoint, check out the link in my sig.
I didn't quite follow your second sentence. Are you implying that libertarian ideas are what got us the companies who are "too big to fail," or are you just saying that that's the way it is and that epic failure must always be nationalized?
Now that I've opened my big mouth, I might as well give a response to some of the things you mentioned in earlier posts. This will likely get unwieldy, so I apologize in advance for the length. I should also say that I lean libertarian but am not married to all of its concepts, and anything I write reflects only my own point of view.
Nothing is sacred in (some) libertarian circles, from justice to environmental controls, everything can be done better privately than publicly.
I have always understood libertarians to believe that justice is one of the few roles that should and must be undertaken by government, so if you believe you've heard otherwise I'd like to hear your evidence. Regarding environmental controls, a number of libertarians (including Ron Paul, who colors many of my views) believe that they can be handled adequately through private property law. In other words, if a factory nearby is contaminating your water supply, you sue the factory for damages and cleanup. This is an area where I have little expertise, and it's low on my radar so you won't find me out advocating it. I like it in principle because government only gets involved when a suit is filed (fulfilling its role as purveyor of justice).
I don't support the US government's use of private security forces (i.e. mercenaries) and I think you'll be hard-pressed to find any constitutional libertarians who do.
And which libertarian/Austrian concepts led to our current predicament?
the ones that called government "interferences" like regulating CDSs and MBSs abhorrent obstructions to delicate market signals.
You're missing the point here. Nobody was calling for regulation of these "financial instruments" until the damage was already done. Regulation is always, always, always reactionary. What's the point of adding regulation when the cat's already out of the bag? Once people are made aware of the risks with these instruments, they'll either stay away or realize they are taking a gamble. This is known as due diligence, and should be practiced by any investor. Regulation creates a false sense of security that results both in cases where a) illegal activity goes on despite ostensible regulation (such as in the Bernie Madoff with all my cash scandal), and b) new schemes are devised that look fine under current regulations and are allowed to continue until they blow up (such as in the CDS/MBS/CDO fiasco).
The whole idea is that if we think that e.g. the banking sector is so indispensable [...] we damn well ought to be making sure they don't do objectively stupid things like leverage themselves 40:1 - and paying themselves billions for driving the company into the ground.
You're illustrating my point. 40:1 leverage is as far as I can tell something that was so ridiculous that nobody thought to make a law about it, and now that it's grown up and crashed you won't find anyone reputable doing it anymore. Such an insane environment can only be formed under the guise of regulation: if it's not illeg
You shouldn't have posted anonymously; it could have given your links some more weight. The climb up to page space from zero is a lot harder than from one or two.
In fact, the whole reason cold fusion is dismissed out-of-hand is because of a related issue: reputation. Mainstream scientists seem to say, "If cold fusion were possible, we would have evidence of it," and then dismiss any evidence provided on the basis that anyone doing research into cold fusion is a crackpot.
The same can be said for paranormal research and a select few other "fringe sciences." There are certainly fakes out there, yet they also exist in the mainstream as evidenced by the South Korean cloning fiasco, and the existence of a few nuts should not invalidate an entire field of research. Unfortunately, once the public (or the scientific community) gets into the habit of associating "cold fusion" with "overblown quackery" it takes a lot more hard work to get them to pay attention--much like starting with a 0 or -1 score on Slashdot.
Don't tell the people here on Slashdot, tell the people who are pestering you. If they're friends or family of yours, they should be willing to let the matter be in order to keep the relationship. That doesn't mean that they'll never mention God in your presence, since God (whether God exists or not) is an important part of their lives, but pestering and pressuring you to convert or believe or what have you should stop (or at the very least become very intermittent). The key, though, is to actually confront them with the issue instead of sitting there looking uncomfortable or peeved. Tell them that you are not interested in God or their religion, you do not believe, you will never believe, and if they cannot respect that and stop trying to get you to believe then you will spend your time with other people who will.
Of course I have no idea what your individual situation is like, but this is a good practice in general. I've found that if your relationship with the person is based on a genuine friendship, they'll tone down the fervor.
Now boil your brain on the fact that the very same thing exists in medical research, and feel the creeping horror at what that implies.
"Your leg's going to be fine, Michael. And I wouldn't worry about getting hit by any more cars. I've shortened your calf muscles to theoretically increase your jumping ability. But if it works, I could be the best in the world!" - Dr. Frank Stein, Arrested Development
The NPR show This American Life recently did an episode on Keynes and his theory. The reason for doing this now, according to them, is because with the stimulus package, Obama Gives Keynes His First Real-World Test (transcript).
It's a very interesting read, and it was an even better listen. They do a good job of explaining Keynesian economics, the various schools that cropped up after Keynes' death and the ascendancy of interest rate manipulation by the central bank to control the economy.
This view held sway until a month ago â" Dec. 16, 2008, to be precise. That's the day the Federal Reserve tried to stabilize the economy by lowering the interest rate all the way down to zero percent. The Fed can't go lower, but the economy has kept worsening. The one effective tool seemed to have stopped working. [...] Economists and policymakers started looking around for some other way to fix things. They dusted off some old books and found that there's one guy in particular who'd given a lot of thought to get out of a situation like this.
That guy being Keynes, of course. Even if you're a fan of his theories you have to admit that this is a huge gamble.
I believe that Austrian economics are the closest to the mark, and my sole disappointment with the show is that the Austrian model, which runs counter to Keynes, the Chicago school and supply-side economics, is never mentioned. Though it doesn't have a huge following it is not a fringe school, and it is the Austrian economists who predicted the current crash. Still, what the show covers it covers very well, and it is well worth your time.
I'm a bit taken aback that tax cuts are considered "Republican pork." I always sorta thought that tax cuts let me decide what to spend my money on instead of being forced to spend it how the government would like me to. Sure, I could blow it on exotic dancers, and then I'd have nothing to show for it, but isn't that my call? Personally, I'd use it to pay for a new furnace, because the one in my house is gonna blow within a year or two, but I guess the roads in Arkansas or this bullshit open source study are more important things that I have to pay for because somehow, someday they might affect me, assuming I survive when my furnace starts blowing carbon monoxide.
(I would have said "the roads in PA," as that's where I'm from, but I'd be kidding myself if I thought PennDOT was anything more than a black hole for money.)
I hear it all the time: "Sending messages to Congress won't work." My first reaction is, "compared to what?"
In truth, "public pressure" has a fine track record . . .
* How did segregation end? It ended because of public pressure.
* Why did the Soviet Union collapse? In the end, it was because of public pressure.
* Why did China move toward a free market economy? It was because of public pressure.
More to the point, Congress has voted the way we wanted 17 times since DownsizeDC.org was founded.
Sending messages online is good. Mail is better. Phone calls are best because they are timely and, if there are enough people calling, they can swamp the system, making it seem to those in the office that EVERYONE is against whatever measure they're calling in to rant about.
From IRV on Wikipedia, section "Fails the monotonicity criterion":
It can be best understood by trying to exploit a tactical voting strategy called push-over, used in a runoff process with 3 or more strong candidates. If your candidate is in the lead, with two nearly equally supported competitors and you believe one of your competitors will be weaker in the final round, you might try insincerely supporting this weaker competitor to help eliminate the stronger competitor.[citation needed] In runoffs with sequential voting, this is a relatively safe strategy because you can move your vote back to your favorite in the final round.[citation needed] It is much more difficult in an instant runoff with a single ballot where insincere votes will stay with the competitor if the strategy succeeds.[citation needed]
Lots of [citation needed]s, but I have heard this argument elsewhere and seen it backed up with numbers, though as the article states it is much more difficult in instant runoff as opposed to sequential.
All of this falls under strategic voting and would never be announced by the candidate, though I can certainly envision the tactics being discussed by his supporters. Please also note that I'm not trying to knock IRV or indeed any decent alternative to plurality voting; I'd rather have any of a number of alternate systems. However, since changing the voting system is done only once in a great while, it pays to check out all the alternatives and to be aware of their strengths and weaknesses.
It's a chicken-and-egg problem the way I see it. State governments nowadays get little attention because the federal government is so massive, and it is the lack of attention that breeds corruption. The "swift and decisive action" was taken by the federal government through the New Deal, which was nothing more than a triumph of propaganda, and while the feds are responsible for making the US the world's most powerful nation it only got that way through brute force and deception by the use of the dollar as the world's reserve currency. We were certainly the most prosperous nation before all that, yet we remain so not because of our own hard work but because we have the world's finances by the short-and-curlies. The current recession is hitting us so hard for precisely this reason--we are now mainly a service economy that produces very little material goods, and all the wealth that we thought we had is evaporating in a puff of logic.
People's desire for a strong federal government exists mainly because every man wishes that everyone else would live by the rules that he himself lives by. This is incredibly egocentric and counterproductive and a failure to recognize each individual's sovereignty. It is this environment that has bred the fractured partisan society we inhabit today.
Were more rights asserted by the states as laid out in the Constitution, swift and decisive action would take place at the state rather than the federal level. It should be even swifter, since national crises are rare and rarely affect two states the same way when they do crop up, and are most often caused by federal policies.
I'm with the GP on this one--it is the laziness of the citizens that allows the federal government's continued march to total authority. There are signs that this is changing, and I welcome them.
This also completely misses the point that at least in theory each U.S. state is an independently sovereign entity in control of its own territory and subject to independent bodies of law. Many (unfortunately most) Americans and even members of the U.S. Congress... and the current U.S. President... seem to have forgotten this simply concept.
You may not have heard much about it, but there's a quiet movement afoot to reassert state sovereignty and stop the uncontrolled expansion of federal government power. Almost half of the state legislatures are considering or have representatives preparing to introduce resolutions which reassert the principles of the 9th and 10th Amendments to the Constitution and the idea that federal power is strictly limited to specific areas detailed in the Constitution and that all other governmental authority rests with the states.
With 20 states at the very least considering such legislation and a few in which the bill has been presented to the state congress, we might begin to see the states return to their former, more powerful positions. IMO, this is a good thing and very welcome even if overdue.
I love the idea of a system other than "plurality wins," and IRV is a good candidate, but it has its own problems. The big flaw IIRC is that in some cases it is better to put your favorite candidate in the number 2 spot to increase his chances of winning. There is also the issue of getting people to fill in numbers when it's hard enough to get them to fill in bubbles or touch a screen or punch a hole or...
I really like approval voting because of its simplicity, and it is certainly better than simple plurality, but if you follow the link you'll see that it too has issues with strategic voting.
Really I'd be happy with ANY voting system that improves upon what we're using now, but it's important to recognize that they each have their own set of advantages and flaws.
Change and Transparency (and jobs, jobs, jobs!) are the new Terror and Security. Out with the stick and in with the carrot, and the Kraken continues its growth unchecked.
Reminds me of the Duke of Qwglhm, Graf Heinrich Karl Welhelm Otto Friedrich von Ubersetzenseehafenstadt, in Cryptonomicon. This guy has him beat for length but not, IMO, absurdity. Plus, "Ubersetzenseehafenstadt" is just fun to say.
Slashdot Mirror
Those that can afford a $1000.- handbag will get the Real Thing and wouldn't want to be caught dead with a fake.
These guys don't loose a cent due to all the counterfeit crap being sold to an entirely different demographic.
This is not at all true. The problem with counterfeit fashion stuff is that the people who buy $1000 handbags buy them specifically to show off their wealth; they are status symbols. If every soccer mom is walking around with a Louis Vuitton lookalike, the wealthy are much less likely to buy the real thing because they would no longer stand out. Piracy devalues the brand. Not that this bothers me; I think spending $1000 for something that cost $40 to make (factoring in design time) is absurd, but the losses are just as real.
They may be even more real than losses from game piracy, as the non-paying or reduced-price demographic exists for both the fashion and game industries, but a pirated game still provides the original game experience and so cannot devalue the brand to paying customers: the enjoyment of a game, unless you are elitist, is independent of how many other people possess a copy of it. Of course, the more easily available pirated games are, the more the non-paying demographic increases and greater losses most certainly occur.
They should really document features like that. I was going to skip the download, but now I'm eagerly awaiting its completion!
I like it for server stuff, as it's real easy to get it to detect when the code on disk has changed, load 'n compile it into memory, and splice it into what's already running... without losing any data structures or anything, and if there's any errors in the code, throw an error, and go back to the previous working version of that module. Without need for any close/restarts.
That's kind of bad-ass. Years ago I took a very brief look at perl and it just didn't look friendly, know what I mean? I may have to give it a second chance one of these days.
Oh, well that's all right then.
Carry on.
No. If I take the pills, giant insects peer at me through my windows at night. The pills must change my body chemistry and attract them. At least, that's what I thought at first. Now I'm pretty sure that they're mutated chip-implanted insect overlords from Homeland Security.
On behalf of English-speaking readers everywhere, I ask you to PLEASE refrain from abbreviating "duplicate" by using the word "dup." You may pronounce it "doop" but the rest of us can't help but hear the little reading voice in our heads say "dhupp!" The sheer glee with which it utters the errant syllable is enough to drive one mad. I feel dumber for having allowed it to traverse my neural pathways. The "e" is silent, but that doesn't make it unimportant.
Thank you.
Apparently you're incapable of discerning the difference between fact and hyperbole, though I must give you kudos for sheer doggedness.
Wikipedia includes this in its entry on Gore's film:
[An Inconvenient Truth] includes segments intended to refute critics who say that global warming is unproven or that warming will be insignificant. For example, Gore discusses the possibility of the collapse of a major ice sheet in Greenland or in West Antarctica, either of which could raise global sea levels by approximately 20 feet (6 m), flooding coastal areas and producing 100 million refugees.
That certainly qualifies as "global warming doom prophecy;" whether it is true or not is immaterial.
Here I thought it was a Snow Crash reference...
Thanks for the great response.
Your point about the environment is a good one. I am having trouble seeing how public environmental controls would prevent the accident in your first scenario, unless you mean something like safety standards, but I'm assuming in the second (CFC dumping) that factories which produce harmful chemicals would have audits and reporting requirements. That makes sense. Again, the environment is something that would be low on my radar to "libertarianize," because I am unaware of many problems with current and proposed systems, and don't know what set of advantages and disadvantages a libertarian policy would bring.
We are in full agreement that private police forces and the like are a bad idea.
Re:banking. I can accept that I was wrong about the calls for regulation, but I must not have been clear regarding leveraging and the crash. I know that some people thought 40:1 leveraging was bad, insanely so, and did not mean to imply that nobody saw the impending collapse. Indeed, Peter Schiff and Ron Paul (both free-market economists) had been predicting the housing bubble's crash for years before it happened. It's important to keep in mind that the banking crisis is rooted not in CDSs and MBS but in the inability of people to pay their mortgages--the problems with those financial instruments began there. (And the reasons for the housing boom which led to the bust run straight to the Federal Reserve.)
I want to briefly address your assertion that "libertarian and free-market ideals serve to privatize wealth and nationalize debt" because it rests on a huge assumption that you've made explicit several times; the notion that there are institutions who are too big to fail. This is not a notion that AFAIK any libertarian accepts, and for good reason! Such institutions do not fail in a vacuum--there will be someone else who thinks they can better manage the assets of the failed institution, and they will buy up those assets and life will go on (indeed, we saw a perversion of this when Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch with taxpayer money). It's not fun for those involved, but they chose to be involved with (for example) that bank, and they chose to trust that said bank was acting in their best interest without bothering to examine the bank's practices. It is far more fair that those involved pay the high price of failure than for everyone in the nation to suffer some smaller amount.
I understand that you believe that these institutions are too big to fail without catastrophic effects, and working with that premise then yes, libertarian principles in every other area save for letting large institutions fail would serve to privatize wealth and nationalize debt. However, I don't think it's fair to characterize the libertarian system of thought as such while you refuse to allow the system to handle failure in a manner consistent with itself.
In a larger sense, the problem with the libertarian, states rights agenda (aside from the racist dog whistles) is that it rests on the assumption that people will physically move to the state that best provides for them. That's just not true - there's a tremendous amount of inertia involved in moving humans, and companies can and will exploit that. We, as citizens, are best served by the broadest possible minimum workers rights and environmental regulations in order to prevent a race to the bottom. In today's world, that means they should be national.
They can certainly be national, it's just that the barrier for entry is higher, requiring a constitutional amendment. It pisses me off that so much is done in this country that goes flatly against our founding charter. And yes, it's hard for people to pack up and move to a different state, but with strong states' rights the option is there. If you take the long view, then giving states the freedom to experiment is a better way to find out what works and what doesn't, and the nation as a whole will be better off for gai
It should also be noted that debt must be paid back through future taxes, and inflation causes the value of a currency to go down, amounting to...a tax.
So the three ways to finance a deficit are taxes, taxes, and taxes, it's just a matter of how honest they decide to be about it.
(Also, for once, the "think of the children" meme may be apropos, as saddling future generations with debt that they have no say in creating strikes me as a bit wrong.)
That's okay. "The modern global economy" will cease to exist within the next few decades as rising energy prices, the probable death of the world's reserve currency and other factors will cause a vast change in the way we live, and libertarian ideals will become viable, even preferable again.
Not that I'd expect you to consider any of this; I'm not one of the top 1% and so must be hopelessly naive. If by some off chance you're up for looking at some information that might challenge your global economy viewpoint, check out the link in my sig.
I didn't quite follow your second sentence. Are you implying that libertarian ideas are what got us the companies who are "too big to fail," or are you just saying that that's the way it is and that epic failure must always be nationalized?
Now that I've opened my big mouth, I might as well give a response to some of the things you mentioned in earlier posts. This will likely get unwieldy, so I apologize in advance for the length. I should also say that I lean libertarian but am not married to all of its concepts, and anything I write reflects only my own point of view.
Nothing is sacred in (some) libertarian circles, from justice to environmental controls, everything can be done better privately than publicly.
I have always understood libertarians to believe that justice is one of the few roles that should and must be undertaken by government, so if you believe you've heard otherwise I'd like to hear your evidence. Regarding environmental controls, a number of libertarians (including Ron Paul, who colors many of my views) believe that they can be handled adequately through private property law. In other words, if a factory nearby is contaminating your water supply, you sue the factory for damages and cleanup. This is an area where I have little expertise, and it's low on my radar so you won't find me out advocating it. I like it in principle because government only gets involved when a suit is filed (fulfilling its role as purveyor of justice).
[continued] Hell, private soldiering is blasé now.
I don't support the US government's use of private security forces (i.e. mercenaries) and I think you'll be hard-pressed to find any constitutional libertarians who do.
And which libertarian/Austrian concepts led to our current predicament?
the ones that called government "interferences" like regulating CDSs and MBSs abhorrent obstructions to delicate market signals.
You're missing the point here. Nobody was calling for regulation of these "financial instruments" until the damage was already done. Regulation is always, always, always reactionary. What's the point of adding regulation when the cat's already out of the bag? Once people are made aware of the risks with these instruments, they'll either stay away or realize they are taking a gamble. This is known as due diligence, and should be practiced by any investor. Regulation creates a false sense of security that results both in cases where a) illegal activity goes on despite ostensible regulation (such as in the Bernie Madoff with all my cash scandal), and b) new schemes are devised that look fine under current regulations and are allowed to continue until they blow up (such as in the CDS/MBS/CDO fiasco).
The whole idea is that if we think that e.g. the banking sector is so indispensable [...] we damn well ought to be making sure they don't do objectively stupid things like leverage themselves 40:1 - and paying themselves billions for driving the company into the ground.
You're illustrating my point. 40:1 leverage is as far as I can tell something that was so ridiculous that nobody thought to make a law about it, and now that it's grown up and crashed you won't find anyone reputable doing it anymore. Such an insane environment can only be formed under the guise of regulation: if it's not illeg
You're right; that's a whole different ball game and a bigger problem. I wasn't thinking along those lines at all.
You shouldn't have posted anonymously; it could have given your links some more weight. The climb up to page space from zero is a lot harder than from one or two.
In fact, the whole reason cold fusion is dismissed out-of-hand is because of a related issue: reputation. Mainstream scientists seem to say, "If cold fusion were possible, we would have evidence of it," and then dismiss any evidence provided on the basis that anyone doing research into cold fusion is a crackpot.
The same can be said for paranormal research and a select few other "fringe sciences." There are certainly fakes out there, yet they also exist in the mainstream as evidenced by the South Korean cloning fiasco, and the existence of a few nuts should not invalidate an entire field of research. Unfortunately, once the public (or the scientific community) gets into the habit of associating "cold fusion" with "overblown quackery" it takes a lot more hard work to get them to pay attention--much like starting with a 0 or -1 score on Slashdot.
Don't tell the people here on Slashdot, tell the people who are pestering you. If they're friends or family of yours, they should be willing to let the matter be in order to keep the relationship. That doesn't mean that they'll never mention God in your presence, since God (whether God exists or not) is an important part of their lives, but pestering and pressuring you to convert or believe or what have you should stop (or at the very least become very intermittent). The key, though, is to actually confront them with the issue instead of sitting there looking uncomfortable or peeved. Tell them that you are not interested in God or their religion, you do not believe, you will never believe, and if they cannot respect that and stop trying to get you to believe then you will spend your time with other people who will.
Of course I have no idea what your individual situation is like, but this is a good practice in general. I've found that if your relationship with the person is based on a genuine friendship, they'll tone down the fervor.
Now boil your brain on the fact that the very same thing exists in medical research, and feel the creeping horror at what that implies.
"Your leg's going to be fine, Michael. And I wouldn't worry about getting hit by any more cars. I've shortened your calf muscles to theoretically increase your jumping ability. But if it works, I could be the best in the world!"
- Dr. Frank Stein, Arrested Development
The NPR show This American Life recently did an episode on Keynes and his theory. The reason for doing this now, according to them, is because with the stimulus package, Obama Gives Keynes His First Real-World Test (transcript).
It's a very interesting read, and it was an even better listen. They do a good job of explaining Keynesian economics, the various schools that cropped up after Keynes' death and the ascendancy of interest rate manipulation by the central bank to control the economy.
This view held sway until a month ago â" Dec. 16, 2008, to be precise. That's the day the Federal Reserve tried to stabilize the economy by lowering the interest rate all the way down to zero percent. The Fed can't go lower, but the economy has kept worsening. The one effective tool seemed to have stopped working.
[...]
Economists and policymakers started looking around for some other way to fix things. They dusted off some old books and found that there's one guy in particular who'd given a lot of thought to get out of a situation like this.
That guy being Keynes, of course. Even if you're a fan of his theories you have to admit that this is a huge gamble.
I believe that Austrian economics are the closest to the mark, and my sole disappointment with the show is that the Austrian model, which runs counter to Keynes, the Chicago school and supply-side economics, is never mentioned. Though it doesn't have a huge following it is not a fringe school, and it is the Austrian economists who predicted the current crash. Still, what the show covers it covers very well, and it is well worth your time.
I'm a bit taken aback that tax cuts are considered "Republican pork." I always sorta thought that tax cuts let me decide what to spend my money on instead of being forced to spend it how the government would like me to. Sure, I could blow it on exotic dancers, and then I'd have nothing to show for it, but isn't that my call? Personally, I'd use it to pay for a new furnace, because the one in my house is gonna blow within a year or two, but I guess the roads in Arkansas or this bullshit open source study are more important things that I have to pay for because somehow, someday they might affect me, assuming I survive when my furnace starts blowing carbon monoxide.
(I would have said "the roads in PA," as that's where I'm from, but I'd be kidding myself if I thought PennDOT was anything more than a black hole for money.)
It seems to me what we are missing nowadays is government for the people.
Mod parent up. A relevant quote from DownsizeDC:
I hear it all the time: "Sending messages to Congress won't work." My first reaction is, "compared to what?"
In truth, "public pressure" has a fine track record . . .
* How did segregation end? It ended because of public pressure.
* Why did the Soviet Union collapse? In the end, it was because of public pressure.
* Why did China move toward a free market economy? It was because of public pressure.
More to the point, Congress has voted the way we wanted 17 times since DownsizeDC.org was founded.
Sending messages online is good. Mail is better. Phone calls are best because they are timely and, if there are enough people calling, they can swamp the system, making it seem to those in the office that EVERYONE is against whatever measure they're calling in to rant about.
Participation is necessary for representation.
From IRV on Wikipedia, section "Fails the monotonicity criterion":
It can be best understood by trying to exploit a tactical voting strategy called push-over, used in a runoff process with 3 or more strong candidates. If your candidate is in the lead, with two nearly equally supported competitors and you believe one of your competitors will be weaker in the final round, you might try insincerely supporting this weaker competitor to help eliminate the stronger competitor.[citation needed] In runoffs with sequential voting, this is a relatively safe strategy because you can move your vote back to your favorite in the final round.[citation needed] It is much more difficult in an instant runoff with a single ballot where insincere votes will stay with the competitor if the strategy succeeds.[citation needed]
Lots of [citation needed]s, but I have heard this argument elsewhere and seen it backed up with numbers, though as the article states it is much more difficult in instant runoff as opposed to sequential.
All of this falls under strategic voting and would never be announced by the candidate, though I can certainly envision the tactics being discussed by his supporters. Please also note that I'm not trying to knock IRV or indeed any decent alternative to plurality voting; I'd rather have any of a number of alternate systems. However, since changing the voting system is done only once in a great while, it pays to check out all the alternatives and to be aware of their strengths and weaknesses.
It's a chicken-and-egg problem the way I see it. State governments nowadays get little attention because the federal government is so massive, and it is the lack of attention that breeds corruption. The "swift and decisive action" was taken by the federal government through the New Deal, which was nothing more than a triumph of propaganda, and while the feds are responsible for making the US the world's most powerful nation it only got that way through brute force and deception by the use of the dollar as the world's reserve currency. We were certainly the most prosperous nation before all that, yet we remain so not because of our own hard work but because we have the world's finances by the short-and-curlies. The current recession is hitting us so hard for precisely this reason--we are now mainly a service economy that produces very little material goods, and all the wealth that we thought we had is evaporating in a puff of logic.
People's desire for a strong federal government exists mainly because every man wishes that everyone else would live by the rules that he himself lives by. This is incredibly egocentric and counterproductive and a failure to recognize each individual's sovereignty. It is this environment that has bred the fractured partisan society we inhabit today.
Were more rights asserted by the states as laid out in the Constitution, swift and decisive action would take place at the state rather than the federal level. It should be even swifter, since national crises are rare and rarely affect two states the same way when they do crop up, and are most often caused by federal policies.
I'm with the GP on this one--it is the laziness of the citizens that allows the federal government's continued march to total authority. There are signs that this is changing, and I welcome them.
This also completely misses the point that at least in theory each U.S. state is an independently sovereign entity in control of its own territory and subject to independent bodies of law. Many (unfortunately most) Americans and even members of the U.S. Congress... and the current U.S. President... seem to have forgotten this simply concept.
I came across an article today that leads me to believe this knowledge hasn't been lost for good: http://www.fontcraft.com/rod/?p=849
You may not have heard much about it, but there's a quiet movement afoot to reassert state sovereignty and stop the uncontrolled expansion of federal government power. Almost half of the state legislatures are considering or have representatives preparing to introduce resolutions which reassert the principles of the 9th and 10th Amendments to the Constitution and the idea that federal power is strictly limited to specific areas detailed in the Constitution and that all other governmental authority rests with the states.
With 20 states at the very least considering such legislation and a few in which the bill has been presented to the state congress, we might begin to see the states return to their former, more powerful positions. IMO, this is a good thing and very welcome even if overdue.
I love the idea of a system other than "plurality wins," and IRV is a good candidate, but it has its own problems. The big flaw IIRC is that in some cases it is better to put your favorite candidate in the number 2 spot to increase his chances of winning. There is also the issue of getting people to fill in numbers when it's hard enough to get them to fill in bubbles or touch a screen or punch a hole or...
I really like approval voting because of its simplicity, and it is certainly better than simple plurality, but if you follow the link you'll see that it too has issues with strategic voting.
Really I'd be happy with ANY voting system that improves upon what we're using now, but it's important to recognize that they each have their own set of advantages and flaws.
I've said it before and I'll say it again:
Change and Transparency (and jobs, jobs, jobs!) are the new Terror and Security. Out with the stick and in with the carrot, and the Kraken continues its growth unchecked.
Reminds me of the Duke of Qwglhm, Graf Heinrich Karl Welhelm Otto Friedrich von Ubersetzenseehafenstadt, in Cryptonomicon. This guy has him beat for length but not, IMO, absurdity. Plus, "Ubersetzenseehafenstadt" is just fun to say.