Having said that, Obama is young, charismatic, and is promoting the change that only 21.4% of Americans said they wanted.
The difference is important because, as you say, we can't know how the 60% who didn't vote feel about the changes that Obama has said he will make. Your fix of GP's fix still implies that the silent majority is fine with those changes, which I am not convinced is the case. Admittedly, they don't care enough to make their opinion known, but how much of that is laziness and how much of that is because they didn't feel represented by either candidate?
<failure of the two-party system rant that we've heard a hundred times/>
> whether there is a God and we've seen some of that being transferred into bets. I thought that God didn't play dice with the universe. Now you're telling me that God is in the dice?
Linky linky. For those who don't feel like clicking: Obama is moderately statist, just left (liberal) of center. McCain is a pinch more statist than Obama and just right (conservative) of center. On an image ~9cm wide they are separated by no more than 1cm.
There is no information posted on how whoever created the image filled out the survey for placement on the chart, so I suppose it's possible that it's entirely fabricated. However, it was presumably done by a Libertarian (since they're the only ones who tend to use the Nolan chart in the first place) who has no vested interest in either candidate.
It provides a decent metric of just how mountainous the molehill separating the Democratic and Republican nominees is.
Anyway, your argument falls apart when you realize state governments are already populated by idiots because there is no scrutiny. Voters barely care what their national representatives and senators are doing.
Americans on the whole don't care about politics. The presidential election is like another Superbowl or a horse race, only the winner is the one who makes the most exciting promises to the majority of the people.
I agree with the GP that state governments are very important and should be considered more important than the federal government. The individual states should (and often do) have a lot of control over what goes on inside them. There are even variances at the county level. This is a good thing! What works for Philadelphia may not work for Pittsburgh, and is even less likely to work for Dallas or LA -- and those are all urban centers, arguably more similar to each other than to the rural areas next door to them.
The real problem is that we have been trained to ignore local politics in favor of the national horse race. This is the reason for state governments being "populated by idiots." Voters barely care what their national representatives and senators are doing because they don't have the celebrity draw of presidents, and because we are given only the highlights that the media wants us to hear -- if it doesn't make for a sensational 30-second synopsis, it doesn't get reported.
Now, with the Internet generation this can change and I believe it is changing. The fact that Slashdot added a politics section shows that people are more interested. They're talking about another record turnout for the election tomorrow. The remaining cultural hurdle is the idea that the federal government is the only one that matters.
This idea exists because in the current environment it's mostly true. A lot of social laws (abortion, drugs, etc.) are either directly set by the federal government or are ostensibly left up to the states but with the caveat that passing a law that the federal government doesn't like leads to the federal money teat drying up (in any other circumstance we call this "blackmail").
The idea also exists because local politics aren't really discussed or reported often. The structure for doing so used to be "chatting with the neighbors," but many people don't know their neighbors anymore. In the next 5-10 years, once all these new voters realize that Obama has nothing new to offer, we will see a growth of third party political sites and discussion groups. Due to their lack of big media christening, these organizations are necessarily grassroots in nature. When you have a grassroots movement that is more than a "get out the vote" campaign, a focus on local politics is almost always present. Once people are paying attention, the quality of their local elected officials will improve by leaps and bounds.
Because the amendment process was concocted by those same white male landowners, it will never amount to a chance for real participation by those excluded from the country's founding political processes.
WTF does "white male landowners" have to do with anything when talking about the amendment process? The process was designed to enable the country to repair flaws in the original document and to modify it as needed to fit the current situation. God forbid we concede that a white man from back in the day could have had more to his person than being a racist, sexist oppressor.
You also need to define what you mean by "real participation," because I am certain that I'm not alone in believing that amendments 13, 15, 19, and 24 all enabled real participation by those originally excluded from the political process.
So our choice this election is someone who wants to give government ultimate power and believes the constitution is flawed, or the lesser evil. I for one am voting for McCain, but I'm in Texas so it makes not much of a difference.
You're throwing your vote away. The best thing you can do this election cycle is to vote third party. If you're concerned that doing so might let Obama win, which doesn't appear to be the case for you but certainly is for others, check out votepact.org or just follow their advice: find someone you know who thinks that Obama is the "lesser evil" and make a deal to both vote for a 3rd party candidate that you actually like.
Yes, it's true that you won't be picking a winner, but what you will do is erode the established practice of voting for someone you dislike so that someone you dislike even more won't get in, and with a vote pact you will do it without negatively affecting the chances of your preferred evil candidate.
Most of [gold's] value comes from collective delusion, just like fiat currency. There's nothing wrong with that, but it needs to be recognized when advocating its use for backing currency.
I fully agree with you on this. If people had a better idea of what "worth" and "value" actually means, I think we would be less obsessed with it on the whole. Now I am going to geek out about gold stability, so if you don't care then skip the rest of this comment.
All of the graphs on the page you linked start in 1971 when the US severed its last ties to the gold standard. The vast majority of the variance you see in those charts is due to the fluctuation of the value of the dollar (and other currencies) in relation to gold. That is, an amount of gold that got you a service or good in 1971 will still get you a nearly equivalent service or good today (or could get you more due to advances in tech). I couldn't find any charts that go back far enough, but plugging some years into this calculator (an unfortunate PHP script that won't let me link results directly, and seems to be spotty) will show that before 1971 gold was extremely stable. It traded for $20.67/oz for a hundred years (!), jumped to $35/oz in 1933 after we went off the gold standard, and really started to take off after Nixon nixed the Bretton Woods agreement.
I suppose it's a tautology that gold remained stable while we set its dollar price (which is what a gold standard is, in addition to every dollar being redeemable for the equivalent amount), so in order to judge the truth of the matter you have to look at inflation.
In 1913, a Ford Model T cost $550, which according to the calculator in my original post is equivalent to $11,516 in 2007 dollars--almost enough to buy a new subcompact, and a reasonable amount for a car with the Model T's features today. $550 of gold in 1913 was worth $18,694 in 2007, enough for a midrange vehicle. The divergence between the two values is about 1/3, which isn't too shabby considering a timespan of almost a century. I would consider that to be pretty stable.
My point is merely that gold is no different from the rest of these. It's all just "how much people pay for them".
You are right about this, but you are neglecting stability. The perceived value of gold has stayed relatively stable through time, which makes it a good commodity to back up a money system. The difference between gold and $20 bills is that it's a hell of a lot harder to reduce the scarcity of gold because you have to go out and find it and dig it up. It's not nearly as much of an endeavor to make $20s: cotton and ink, as you pointed out, are cheap, and the government already has the presses.
Anyway, if gold is as useless as you say it is, then lets just trade. I got 300 new 1 dollar bills. Just get me two gold bars for them and we'll leave it at that.
Let's do the reverse. If paper money is so worthless, why don't you give me enough $100 bills to fill a suitcase and I will give you an ounce of gold in return. I'm sure that the gold will be more than enough to pay for the cotton and ink.
You're both being a little ridiculous here because you are both saying, "X has little value, so I'll trade you a ton of it for some Y!" Both gold and dollars have value because people perceive them to have value. Dollars are just a hell of a lot more volatile, and more likely to be devalued because there are more and more of them popping into existence at (what should be) an alarming rate. (For a case study, see the Zimbabwe dollar, which was so inflated that, until redenomination in August, $100,000,000,000 bought you...three eggs. For another, the calculator on the MN Fed site says that $100 in 1913 was equivalent to $2093.94 in 2007.) People value gold because...well, because people have always valued gold. We're irrational but predictable. People value dollars because the government tells us that they are worth something. What happens when we (predictably) print too many and/or the world (predictably) loses faith in the US government's word?
Unlike a number of (small-l) libertarians, I don't think that the gold standard is the holy grail of currency backing, but it has a lot of benefits. In addition to its stability it has a convenient mass/value ratio, it's easy to check for purity, and it's nearly universally recognized, all of which combined make it a great reserve currency. I personally think that its lack of utility is also a plus because there is little competition from the manufacturing sector for its use. Still, it doesn't matter what we back paper money with, as long as it's backed with something greater than the word of a government that it is good.
I hate your fucking guts and can't stand any of your opinions, but you are absolutely correct about moderation reflecting content, so I modded your post insightful before writing this reply.
Good question. The answer is "I have no idea." The controller I am referring to is nothing more than an M-AUDIO o2 2-octave keyboard. I'm using this with Reason 4 on a MacBookPro. Every now and then (quite rare, actually) I get a dialog that says something to the effect of "Your computer is not fast enough to process the incoming MIDI input." This usually happens when I'm banging away at the keys while tweaking some knobs, but that's obviously all on a single channel. I guess I assumed that the CPU was getting bogged down with handling all the USB interrupts...which I now realize is different from overloading the connection. I think.
Exactly. FireWire is great for pumping high-bandwidth data like multiple audio streams (think mixing board) into the computer for processing. Firewire's biggest advantage is that it's designed to do all of this while bypassing the CPU as much as possible, freeing the CPU's cycles for audio effects processing. USB's theoretical speed is higher, but the architecture relies on the CPU to a much greater extent than FireWire.
Maybe we will get to the point soon where USB's CPU-intensive nature won't matter, but as someone who still occasionally overloads the USB input using only a MIDI controller, I can authoritatively say that we're not there yet.
Too bad that idea ends up taking the economy completely out.
I don't believe you.
I'm a subscriber to the DownsizeDC.org mailing list. Here's a link to the dispatch that they sent me today. A large chunk of the text follows. I am not an economist, but the data looks pretty straightforward to me. It's not going to be a good year no matter how you slice it, but none of the actions taken will do anything except further distort the markets and exacerbate the problem. The US government is broke, and if they continue to print money for stuff like this, they will eventually break the dollar and then we may indeed be eating dog food (or just dogs) in the streets.
There's a lot of evidence that we've been scammed. Treasury Secretary Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke told us they needed to spend $700 billion of your money to buy supposedly toxic assets that were crippling major firms and for which there was no immediate market. This was a lie even when they said it, because . . .
If Merrill could do it, other firms could do it too. They might not have liked the price they got, but it could have been done. The Big Bailout was purposely designed to give favored firms a better deal than they could have gotten in the market.
We've also been told, constantly, that credit markets are frozen. We're still being told that today, constantly, around the clock, on the cable business channels. It wasn't true before, and it isn't true now. We could point you to many places for the evidence, but here's one great graph from the blog Carpe Diem to give you the evidence in one pretty picture.
"Looking at the data for the first four business days of the past week, I find that firms sold from $179 billion to $205 billion of commercial paper per day; the number of separate issuances per day ranged from 6,761 to 7,298. Both the total amount borrowed and the number of issuances per day increased steadily throughout the week (data for Friday have not yet been reported)."
Higgs goes on to compare the current numbers with past periods and finds NO CREDIT FREEZE!
But what about the stock market? Doesn't its fall tell us there's a crisis? Perhaps, until you consider what's causing stocks to fall.
The really big drops began when Paulson and Bernanke began peddling their fear to Congress. And since then, nearly every time some government official has opened his or her mouth, with some new claim or some new plan, the stock market has taken another nose dive. A good chunk of the decline appears to be driven by fear mongering.
Propellerhead got the name for Reason from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. It was the name of the nuke-powered still-in-beta chain gun used by the Mafia on some pirates (and later used by Hiro himself, if I remember correctly).
Not a bad guess, though. I had forgotten about that little jewel.
When the wealth in a country is created not through the trade of goods but through manipulation of the money supply, this fact must be kept from being understood by the majority of its people. Confidence in the money supply and markets is everything. If the people doubt the value of their currency, you get panic, bank runs (as people try to exchange their paper scrip for something of real value), and a crash of not only the markets but of the monetary system.
This is what they are afraid of, and this is what will happen anyway sometime down the road. Be prepared for it in the US as well: the reason for the current credit freeze is because banks want cash in the vaults to alleviate the bank runs that they fear are coming.
This is an excellent point. I would like to hear if any arm-twisting is going on to get these countries to sign on, or if it is their own greed or lack of foresight that leads them into such a trap.
I have no doubt that it is a trap, however. There are ugly things roaming the world today.
Humans are a computer. You take in input from your senses, do something to it in your brain, then output the answer (either to memory, talking, etc).
Wrong. Humans and computers operate in a completely different manner.
A comparison to your analogy:
Every "input" that you receive contains not only your sensory impressions, but the whole of your experience up until this moment.
The "input" is a continuous stream (unless you count Planck-length units, which could have an effect on consciousness; hmm...) and not a discrete series of occurences.
Memory is not at all like a hard disk. Memory is continually colored, reinterpreted, in many instances fabricated, and on the whole highly subjective.
Your concept of "output" is flawed as well. The output, no matter how it is expressed, immediately becomes part of the input stream. Output is in fact also continuous.
As another poster pointed out, your abstraction of "do something to [the input] in your brain" covers up much of the difference between human and computer. It's like saying "the Earth is a basketball! They are both round!" It is, quite frankly, irresponsible, and it's a shame that this viewpoint is so widespread.
I have a number of other objections, but I'm trying to avoid a rant.
This is not to say that consciousness is impossible on silicon. We don't know enough about how consciousness works to make a claim for or against at this point. I personally lean against, but I'm glad that research is still being done and I hope it continues. After all, the best way to find out how a system works is to observe it when it breaks.
Slashdot Mirror
Still not accurate enough.
Having said that, Obama is young, charismatic, and is promoting the change that only 21.4% of Americans said they wanted.
The difference is important because, as you say, we can't know how the 60% who didn't vote feel about the changes that Obama has said he will make. Your fix of GP's fix still implies that the silent majority is fine with those changes, which I am not convinced is the case. Admittedly, they don't care enough to make their opinion known, but how much of that is laziness and how much of that is because they didn't feel represented by either candidate?
<failure of the two-party system rant that we've heard a hundred times />
But that was twenty years ago. We're much smarter now~
> whether there is a God and we've seen some of that being transferred into bets.
I thought that God didn't play dice with the universe. Now you're telling me that God is in the dice?
Linky linky.
For those who don't feel like clicking: Obama is moderately statist, just left (liberal) of center. McCain is a pinch more statist than Obama and just right (conservative) of center. On an image ~9cm wide they are separated by no more than 1cm.
There is no information posted on how whoever created the image filled out the survey for placement on the chart, so I suppose it's possible that it's entirely fabricated. However, it was presumably done by a Libertarian (since they're the only ones who tend to use the Nolan chart in the first place) who has no vested interest in either candidate.
It provides a decent metric of just how mountainous the molehill separating the Democratic and Republican nominees is.
Anyway, your argument falls apart when you realize state governments are already populated by idiots because there is no scrutiny. Voters barely care what their national representatives and senators are doing.
Americans on the whole don't care about politics. The presidential election is like another Superbowl or a horse race, only the winner is the one who makes the most exciting promises to the majority of the people.
I agree with the GP that state governments are very important and should be considered more important than the federal government. The individual states should (and often do) have a lot of control over what goes on inside them. There are even variances at the county level. This is a good thing! What works for Philadelphia may not work for Pittsburgh, and is even less likely to work for Dallas or LA -- and those are all urban centers, arguably more similar to each other than to the rural areas next door to them.
The real problem is that we have been trained to ignore local politics in favor of the national horse race. This is the reason for state governments being "populated by idiots." Voters barely care what their national representatives and senators are doing because they don't have the celebrity draw of presidents, and because we are given only the highlights that the media wants us to hear -- if it doesn't make for a sensational 30-second synopsis, it doesn't get reported.
Now, with the Internet generation this can change and I believe it is changing. The fact that Slashdot added a politics section shows that people are more interested. They're talking about another record turnout for the election tomorrow. The remaining cultural hurdle is the idea that the federal government is the only one that matters.
This idea exists because in the current environment it's mostly true. A lot of social laws (abortion, drugs, etc.) are either directly set by the federal government or are ostensibly left up to the states but with the caveat that passing a law that the federal government doesn't like leads to the federal money teat drying up (in any other circumstance we call this "blackmail").
The idea also exists because local politics aren't really discussed or reported often. The structure for doing so used to be "chatting with the neighbors," but many people don't know their neighbors anymore. In the next 5-10 years, once all these new voters realize that Obama has nothing new to offer, we will see a growth of third party political sites and discussion groups. Due to their lack of big media christening, these organizations are necessarily grassroots in nature. When you have a grassroots movement that is more than a "get out the vote" campaign, a focus on local politics is almost always present. Once people are paying attention, the quality of their local elected officials will improve by leaps and bounds.
The times, they are a-changin'.
Because the amendment process was concocted by those same white male landowners, it will never amount to a chance for real participation by those excluded from the country's founding political processes.
WTF does "white male landowners" have to do with anything when talking about the amendment process? The process was designed to enable the country to repair flaws in the original document and to modify it as needed to fit the current situation. God forbid we concede that a white man from back in the day could have had more to his person than being a racist, sexist oppressor.
You also need to define what you mean by "real participation," because I am certain that I'm not alone in believing that amendments 13, 15, 19, and 24 all enabled real participation by those originally excluded from the political process.
I'm a Sony fanboy!
Fixed that for you.
So our choice this election is someone who wants to give government ultimate power and believes the constitution is flawed, or the lesser evil. I for one am voting for McCain, but I'm in Texas so it makes not much of a difference.
You're throwing your vote away. The best thing you can do this election cycle is to vote third party. If you're concerned that doing so might let Obama win, which doesn't appear to be the case for you but certainly is for others, check out votepact.org or just follow their advice: find someone you know who thinks that Obama is the "lesser evil" and make a deal to both vote for a 3rd party candidate that you actually like.
Yes, it's true that you won't be picking a winner, but what you will do is erode the established practice of voting for someone you dislike so that someone you dislike even more won't get in, and with a vote pact you will do it without negatively affecting the chances of your preferred evil candidate.
Most of [gold's] value comes from collective delusion, just like fiat currency. There's nothing wrong with that, but it needs to be recognized when advocating its use for backing currency.
I fully agree with you on this. If people had a better idea of what "worth" and "value" actually means, I think we would be less obsessed with it on the whole. Now I am going to geek out about gold stability, so if you don't care then skip the rest of this comment.
All of the graphs on the page you linked start in 1971 when the US severed its last ties to the gold standard. The vast majority of the variance you see in those charts is due to the fluctuation of the value of the dollar (and other currencies) in relation to gold. That is, an amount of gold that got you a service or good in 1971 will still get you a nearly equivalent service or good today (or could get you more due to advances in tech). I couldn't find any charts that go back far enough, but plugging some years into this calculator (an unfortunate PHP script that won't let me link results directly, and seems to be spotty) will show that before 1971 gold was extremely stable. It traded for $20.67/oz for a hundred years (!), jumped to $35/oz in 1933 after we went off the gold standard, and really started to take off after Nixon nixed the Bretton Woods agreement.
I suppose it's a tautology that gold remained stable while we set its dollar price (which is what a gold standard is, in addition to every dollar being redeemable for the equivalent amount), so in order to judge the truth of the matter you have to look at inflation.
In 1913, a Ford Model T cost $550, which according to the calculator in my original post is equivalent to $11,516 in 2007 dollars--almost enough to buy a new subcompact, and a reasonable amount for a car with the Model T's features today. $550 of gold in 1913 was worth $18,694 in 2007, enough for a midrange vehicle. The divergence between the two values is about 1/3, which isn't too shabby considering a timespan of almost a century. I would consider that to be pretty stable.
My point is merely that gold is no different from the rest of these. It's all just "how much people pay for them".
You are right about this, but you are neglecting stability. The perceived value of gold has stayed relatively stable through time, which makes it a good commodity to back up a money system. The difference between gold and $20 bills is that it's a hell of a lot harder to reduce the scarcity of gold because you have to go out and find it and dig it up. It's not nearly as much of an endeavor to make $20s: cotton and ink, as you pointed out, are cheap, and the government already has the presses.
Anyway, if gold is as useless as you say it is, then lets just trade. I got 300 new 1 dollar bills. Just get me two gold bars for them and we'll leave it at that.
Let's do the reverse. If paper money is so worthless, why don't you give me enough $100 bills to fill a suitcase and I will give you an ounce of gold in return. I'm sure that the gold will be more than enough to pay for the cotton and ink.
You're both being a little ridiculous here because you are both saying, "X has little value, so I'll trade you a ton of it for some Y!" Both gold and dollars have value because people perceive them to have value. Dollars are just a hell of a lot more volatile, and more likely to be devalued because there are more and more of them popping into existence at (what should be) an alarming rate. (For a case study, see the Zimbabwe dollar, which was so inflated that, until redenomination in August, $100,000,000,000 bought you...three eggs. For another, the calculator on the MN Fed site says that $100 in 1913 was equivalent to $2093.94 in 2007.) People value gold because...well, because people have always valued gold. We're irrational but predictable. People value dollars because the government tells us that they are worth something. What happens when we (predictably) print too many and/or the world (predictably) loses faith in the US government's word?
Unlike a number of (small-l) libertarians, I don't think that the gold standard is the holy grail of currency backing, but it has a lot of benefits. In addition to its stability it has a convenient mass/value ratio, it's easy to check for purity, and it's nearly universally recognized, all of which combined make it a great reserve currency. I personally think that its lack of utility is also a plus because there is little competition from the manufacturing sector for its use. Still, it doesn't matter what we back paper money with, as long as it's backed with something greater than the word of a government that it is good.
Despite their common names, crane flies do not prey on mosquitoes
You linked it.
But wait...if the cows are spherical then how do we know they are always facing north?
I hate your fucking guts and can't stand any of your opinions, but you are absolutely correct about moderation reflecting content, so I modded your post insightful before writing this reply.
=)
Good question. The answer is "I have no idea." The controller I am referring to is nothing more than an M-AUDIO o2 2-octave keyboard. I'm using this with Reason 4 on a MacBookPro. Every now and then (quite rare, actually) I get a dialog that says something to the effect of "Your computer is not fast enough to process the incoming MIDI input." This usually happens when I'm banging away at the keys while tweaking some knobs, but that's obviously all on a single channel. I guess I assumed that the CPU was getting bogged down with handling all the USB interrupts...which I now realize is different from overloading the connection. I think.
It's starting to sound like the Pit and the Pendulum in here...
Exactly. FireWire is great for pumping high-bandwidth data like multiple audio streams (think mixing board) into the computer for processing. Firewire's biggest advantage is that it's designed to do all of this while bypassing the CPU as much as possible, freeing the CPU's cycles for audio effects processing. USB's theoretical speed is higher, but the architecture relies on the CPU to a much greater extent than FireWire.
Maybe we will get to the point soon where USB's CPU-intensive nature won't matter, but as someone who still occasionally overloads the USB input using only a MIDI controller, I can authoritatively say that we're not there yet.
Too bad that idea ends up taking the economy completely out.
I don't believe you.
I'm a subscriber to the DownsizeDC.org mailing list. Here's a link to the dispatch that they sent me today. A large chunk of the text follows. I am not an economist, but the data looks pretty straightforward to me. It's not going to be a good year no matter how you slice it, but none of the actions taken will do anything except further distort the markets and exacerbate the problem. The US government is broke, and if they continue to print money for stuff like this, they will eventually break the dollar and then we may indeed be eating dog food (or just dogs) in the streets.
There's a lot of evidence that we've been scammed. Treasury Secretary Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke told us they needed to spend $700 billion of your money to buy supposedly toxic assets that were crippling major firms and for which there was no immediate market. This was a lie even when they said it, because . . .
Merrill Lynch was able to sell it's most troubled assets back in July.
If Merrill could do it, other firms could do it too. They might not have liked the price they got, but it could have been done. The Big Bailout was purposely designed to give favored firms a better deal than they could have gotten in the market.
We've also been told, constantly, that credit markets are frozen. We're still being told that today, constantly, around the clock, on the cable business channels. It wasn't true before, and it isn't true now. We could point you to many places for the evidence, but here's one great graph from the blog Carpe Diem to give you the evidence in one pretty picture.
The hysteria mongers would tell you that even if consumer credit is okay (and you would have to hammer them with the evidence to get them to admit it), commercial credit is still in big trouble. But that isn't true either. Here's a good summary from the great scholar Robert Higgs, at the Independent Institute . . .
"Looking at the data for the first four business days of the past week, I find that firms sold from $179 billion to $205 billion of commercial paper per day; the number of separate issuances per day ranged from 6,761 to 7,298. Both the total amount borrowed and the number of issuances per day increased steadily throughout the week (data for Friday have not yet been reported)."
Higgs goes on to compare the current numbers with past periods and finds NO CREDIT FREEZE!
But what about the stock market? Doesn't its fall tell us there's a crisis? Perhaps, until you consider what's causing stocks to fall.
The really big drops began when Paulson and Bernanke began peddling their fear to Congress. And since then, nearly every time some government official has opened his or her mouth, with some new claim or some new plan, the stock market has taken another nose dive. A good chunk of the decline appears to be driven by fear mongering.
What?
Propellerhead got the name for Reason from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. It was the name of the nuke-powered still-in-beta chain gun used by the Mafia on some pirates (and later used by Hiro himself, if I remember correctly).
Not a bad guess, though. I had forgotten about that little jewel.
When the wealth in a country is created not through the trade of goods but through manipulation of the money supply, this fact must be kept from being understood by the majority of its people. Confidence in the money supply and markets is everything. If the people doubt the value of their currency, you get panic, bank runs (as people try to exchange their paper scrip for something of real value), and a crash of not only the markets but of the monetary system.
This is what they are afraid of, and this is what will happen anyway sometime down the road. Be prepared for it in the US as well: the reason for the current credit freeze is because banks want cash in the vaults to alleviate the bank runs that they fear are coming.
The people who are delusional are the ones who think you can fix the problem of inflation with more inflation.
Well said!
(Nothing intelligent to add here, move along.)
This is an excellent point. I would like to hear if any arm-twisting is going on to get these countries to sign on, or if it is their own greed or lack of foresight that leads them into such a trap.
I have no doubt that it is a trap, however. There are ugly things roaming the world today.
Humans are a computer. You take in input from your senses, do something to it in your brain, then output the answer (either to memory, talking, etc).
Wrong. Humans and computers operate in a completely different manner.
A comparison to your analogy:
As another poster pointed out, your abstraction of "do something to [the input] in your brain" covers up much of the difference between human and computer. It's like saying "the Earth is a basketball! They are both round!" It is, quite frankly, irresponsible, and it's a shame that this viewpoint is so widespread.
I have a number of other objections, but I'm trying to avoid a rant.
This is not to say that consciousness is impossible on silicon. We don't know enough about how consciousness works to make a claim for or against at this point. I personally lean against, but I'm glad that research is still being done and I hope it continues. After all, the best way to find out how a system works is to observe it when it breaks.
I thought only old people used email. Or is that just in Korea?
Fortunately we live in a society where the rule of law prevails.
BwaHAH-hahahaha! Heeheehee, oh, man, hahaha!
Heh heh....
whoo, that was a good one =)