The problem with the gold standard is you have absolutely no control of when the inflation or deflation happens. And by Murphy's law it will happen whenever you don't want it to.
That is precisely the advantage of gold. Because what "you" want is not likely what is best for "you". And because "you" means "government" means "whoever is in power", and their purpose in manipulating the money supply is to stay in power.
What we need is one step better than even a gold standard, it is gold currency.
Romney earned his way to wealth, and is part of a religious organization whose members are more honest than most. Kerry fucked his way to way to wealth, and his military history was a shabbily constructed lie.
Centrists don't spend deliberately spend the nation into bankruptcy, encourage racial violence, and (though intermediaries) encourage the creation of diseased mobs in major cities, all of which Obama has done.
It isn't a question of lawyers not being paid, but rather being paid reasonably relative to the work they've done. One common practice is "minimum billable time": talk to a client for three minutes, bill him for an hour. A majority of lawyers, conscious of their ability to get paid highly for doing as little as possible, do just that.
There are whole classes of lawyers that are more nearly honest: those making out wills or handling real estate transactions, particularly if they work for a fixed fee agreed to in advance. But lawyers in the lines of business that attract fraudsters and other people looking to get something for nothing, tend to be people like their clients, and those lawyers in turn actively seek suckers who are easily persuaded to join class action suits. depend on them to overcharge.
I'd guess that very few people with recurrent credit card billing have more than a half dozen organizations involved with that. Most of those can be updated via the internet. Less than an hour and the job's done. It's something that has to be done every few years anyway, as the expiration date changes.
The 8088 in the IBM PC had the advantage of multiply, divide, and string compare instructions, the Z80 had the advantage of more registers. Which was faster for a given clock rate depended upon the particular software. The factors that led to the relative dominance of the IBM PC were (unearned) reputation, a standardized way to access memory beyond 64k, and a standardized architecture.
The Z80 used an internal 2:1 clock divider, so that a 2X MHz Z80 was roughly equivalent to a 1X MHz 6502.
The 6502 was fully as fast as the 8080; the Z80 was a little faster due to an expanded instruction set and more registers. The 6800 had little, if any, advantage over the 6502. In the early years, the Z80 was much more expensive than the 6502. It wasn't until 1982 that the extra cost of a Z80 could be justified for home use.
There are at least 2 arguments for not letting Iran & North Korea get nukes.
The US has a tolerable record of not threatening, taunting, and insulting other countries. Iran and North Korea do misbehave in that manner, and their current leaders are obvious psychopaths.
It is an advantage for any country to have nuclear weapons, a disadvantage to be without. The US should want to maintain an advantage over all other countries, particularly over the vile and dangerous ones. The US should not be in the business of caring what Iran and North Korea want.
.
As a further note, consider that the behavior of Iran and particularly North Korea can hardly be considered logical, as evidenced by widespread poverty.
Although nicotinoid != nicotine, it's worthwhile to look at the toxicity of nicotine.
The LD50 of nicotine for humans is about 50 mg. A single cigarette contains about 9 mg of nicotine, not all of which is inhaled by a smoker. If dissolved in alcohol and drunk, there's enough nicotine in a pack of cigarettes to dependably kill a person. Nicotine affects the nervous system, and probably can cause birth defects and cancer.
The detection of trace amounts of chemicals has improved greatly over the last few decades. For many chemicals, a few parts per billion are detectable, and laws with "zero tolerance" will reject amounts that are harmless. The advances of science have turned poorly written laws into nuisances.
Consumer level recycling (sorting) is an astonishing waste of effort. It should be done at the trash collection center, if at all. If you want to improve quality of life, stop the people who throw beer containers to the roadside, or secretly dump toxic waste.
Letting banks fail is one thing. Repudiating international debt is an invitation to war and a guarantee that other nations wouldn't trust trade with the US for a generation.
There is a long trail of causes that led to the banking disaster, most of which were foreseen and some of which were not corrected to to the malice of Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, among others.
That Greece has less debt per capita than the US is completely irrelevant. What does matter is that Greece's debt is 116% of its GNP, which is worse than the US's 102%. It's even worse when you consider the margin of GNP above subsistence. We're both well and truly screwed.
The only way the "public option" will lower cost is if you enslave doctors. Do you want your life to depend upon someone you've (metaphorically) whipped?
Each new generation of semiconductor technology reduces the power required to do a given amount of computation. LCD displays are much more efficient that CRTs. CFLs are more efficient and longer lasting than incandescent lights, and LEDs now beat CFLs. Lubricants are a bit better, cars a bit more efficient. New houses are better insulated and less leaky. Oil and gas furnaces are more efficient, sometimes over 90%. Refrigerators are more efficient. For me personally, that's a reduction in ongoing expenses of at least 20%.
The assumption that perpetual growth is necessary to stability is self-contradictory. Unending growth is, of course, impossible. In 1968, Asimov stated that at the then-current rate of growth, the entire mass of the universe would be human flesh in about 6000 years, which is a pretty hard limit.
To look forward far enough into the future, we'll have a basic understanding of almost everything, and perhaps almost everyone will have almost everything they want. No significant net economic growth will be possible, but fads and fashions and the simple requirements of maintaining your body will assure a continued existence of productive activity. At that time, I'll bet there will still be people trying to make others feel poor and angry.
Most civilization collapses have been due primarily to social failures: malice and degeneracy and superstition (religion) leading to war, weakness and disease in no particular order. Not inherently unavoidable resource depletion.
From another angle, to oversimplify, consider that static civilizations collapse because they can't adapt, and dynamic civilizations can't be said to have failed because they're changed into something else. The Roman civilization of the Tarquins didn't collapse, Tarquinius Superbus was exiled and Rome became a republic. The Roman civilization of the Republic didn't collapse, but the government was overthrown by Caesar (et al) and became an empire, which did collapse, for a variety of social reasons including Christianity.
There is at the moment no viable substitute for oil.
I'll assume when you say "oil" you mean mined petroleum and tar. And then I have to challenge with "for what purpose?" Hydraulic fluid was once always petroleum based, but better ones are now silicones. For heating, there are many oil substitutes including wood, coal gas, geothermal, hydroelectric, nuclear-electric. For vehicle fuel, there is not yet a large scale substitute for petroleum, but we're nibbling at the edges with vegetable matter. As economic forces shift, the balance of fuel and lubricant usage will shift away from mined petroleum. Whether we're better or worse off for the change 100 or 200 years from now is not dependably predictable.
I don't know if the argument is valid, but I've read that China's economic improvements are due in part to their population limiting policies. It takes a lot of human effort, and a lot of stress on physical resources, to raise a lot of children. Freeing effort and resources for other goals has allowed them to lift themselves out of an economic whirlpool. It's been government force that's slowed population growth.
Wealth alone is just one of the forces that promote smaller families. Others include easy birth control, culture, and economic conditions that do not make large families economically advantageous (i.e. the decline of large family farms.) China may not yet be over the threshold where wealth discourages large families.
Although China is far from free by Western standards, they're a lot better off than they were 50 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
That is precisely the advantage of gold. Because what "you" want is not likely what is best for "you". And because "you" means "government" means "whoever is in power", and their purpose in manipulating the money supply is to stay in power.
What we need is one step better than even a gold standard, it is gold currency.
Romney earned his way to wealth, and is part of a religious organization whose members are more honest than most. Kerry fucked his way to way to wealth, and his military history was a shabbily constructed lie.
Over the last 6 decades the US dollar has averaged a loss of 50% per decade. Only 20% would be a vast improvement, but that's not where we're heading.
Centrists don't spend deliberately spend the nation into bankruptcy, encourage racial violence, and (though intermediaries) encourage the creation of diseased mobs in major cities, all of which Obama has done.
Never leave home without 2 car keys in your pocket, for when you lock one in your car.
It isn't a question of lawyers not being paid, but rather being paid reasonably relative to the work they've done. One common practice is "minimum billable time": talk to a client for three minutes, bill him for an hour. A majority of lawyers, conscious of their ability to get paid highly for doing as little as possible, do just that.
There are whole classes of lawyers that are more nearly honest: those making out wills or handling real estate transactions, particularly if they work for a fixed fee agreed to in advance. But lawyers in the lines of business that attract fraudsters and other people looking to get something for nothing, tend to be people like their clients, and those lawyers in turn actively seek suckers who are easily persuaded to join class action suits. depend on them to overcharge.
I'd guess that very few people with recurrent credit card billing have more than a half dozen organizations involved with that. Most of those can be updated via the internet. Less than an hour and the job's done. It's something that has to be done every few years anyway, as the expiration date changes.
The 8088 in the IBM PC had the advantage of multiply, divide, and string compare instructions, the Z80 had the advantage of more registers. Which was faster for a given clock rate depended upon the particular software. The factors that led to the relative dominance of the IBM PC were (unearned) reputation, a standardized way to access memory beyond 64k, and a standardized architecture.
The Z80 used an internal 2:1 clock divider, so that a 2X MHz Z80 was roughly equivalent to a 1X MHz 6502.
The 6502 was fully as fast as the 8080; the Z80 was a little faster due to an expanded instruction set and more registers. The 6800 had little, if any, advantage over the 6502. In the early years, the Z80 was much more expensive than the 6502. It wasn't until 1982 that the extra cost of a Z80 could be justified for home use.
There are at least 2 arguments for not letting Iran & North Korea get nukes.
The US has a tolerable record of not threatening, taunting, and insulting other countries. Iran and North Korea do misbehave in that manner, and their current leaders are obvious psychopaths.
It is an advantage for any country to have nuclear weapons, a disadvantage to be without. The US should want to maintain an advantage over all other countries, particularly over the vile and dangerous ones. The US should not be in the business of caring what Iran and North Korea want.
.
As a further note, consider that the behavior of Iran and particularly North Korea can hardly be considered logical, as evidenced by widespread poverty.
Although nicotinoid != nicotine, it's worthwhile to look at the toxicity of nicotine.
The LD50 of nicotine for humans is about 50 mg. A single cigarette contains about 9 mg of nicotine, not all of which is inhaled by a smoker. If dissolved in alcohol and drunk, there's enough nicotine in a pack of cigarettes to dependably kill a person. Nicotine affects the nervous system, and probably can cause birth defects and cancer.
The detection of trace amounts of chemicals has improved greatly over the last few decades. For many chemicals, a few parts per billion are detectable, and laws with "zero tolerance" will reject amounts that are harmless. The advances of science have turned poorly written laws into nuisances.
Michael Savage is claiming the root cause is military budget cutbacks and bad judgement within the pentagon leading to maintenance inadequacy.
Consumer level recycling (sorting) is an astonishing waste of effort. It should be done at the trash collection center, if at all. If you want to improve quality of life, stop the people who throw beer containers to the roadside, or secretly dump toxic waste.
Remember the Mars Probe that crashed instead of orbiting? With a 10% error, it never would have gotten within 10 million miles of Mars.
RTD temperature sensors routinely measure to 0.03 degrees C accuracy with 0.001 degrees C resolution over a 1100 degree range: 0.0027 % error.
0.0001 % error in time measurement is routine and cheap. Current state of the art is 0.0000000000001 %.
10% ? 30 % ?! That the sort of range that is expected from social "science">
Letting banks fail is one thing. Repudiating international debt is an invitation to war and a guarantee that other nations wouldn't trust trade with the US for a generation.
There is a long trail of causes that led to the banking disaster, most of which were foreseen and some of which were not corrected to to the malice of Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, among others.
That Greece has less debt per capita than the US is completely irrelevant. What does matter is that Greece's debt is 116% of its GNP, which is worse than the US's 102%. It's even worse when you consider the margin of GNP above subsistence. We're both well and truly screwed.
The only way the "public option" will lower cost is if you enslave doctors. Do you want your life to depend upon someone you've (metaphorically) whipped?
Let me know when you develop perpetual motion plants that provide more calories than they consume.
So the poor people will have to listen to good music.
Each new generation of semiconductor technology reduces the power required to do a given amount of computation. LCD displays are much more efficient that CRTs. CFLs are more efficient and longer lasting than incandescent lights, and LEDs now beat CFLs. Lubricants are a bit better, cars a bit more efficient. New houses are better insulated and less leaky. Oil and gas furnaces are more efficient, sometimes over 90%. Refrigerators are more efficient. For me personally, that's a reduction in ongoing expenses of at least 20%.
The assumption that perpetual growth is necessary to stability is self-contradictory. Unending growth is, of course, impossible. In 1968, Asimov stated that at the then-current rate of growth, the entire mass of the universe would be human flesh in about 6000 years, which is a pretty hard limit.
To look forward far enough into the future, we'll have a basic understanding of almost everything, and perhaps almost everyone will have almost everything they want. No significant net economic growth will be possible, but fads and fashions and the simple requirements of maintaining your body will assure a continued existence of productive activity. At that time, I'll bet there will still be people trying to make others feel poor and angry.
Most civilization collapses have been due primarily to social failures: malice and degeneracy and superstition (religion) leading to war, weakness and disease in no particular order. Not inherently unavoidable resource depletion.
From another angle, to oversimplify, consider that static civilizations collapse because they can't adapt, and dynamic civilizations can't be said to have failed because they're changed into something else. The Roman civilization of the Tarquins didn't collapse, Tarquinius Superbus was exiled and Rome became a republic. The Roman civilization of the Republic didn't collapse, but the government was overthrown by Caesar (et al) and became an empire, which did collapse, for a variety of social reasons including Christianity.
Show me the numbers that demonstrate the death of 4 billion people from lack of food production within 40 years, including your assumptions.
I'll assume when you say "oil" you mean mined petroleum and tar. And then I have to challenge with "for what purpose?" Hydraulic fluid was once always petroleum based, but better ones are now silicones. For heating, there are many oil substitutes including wood, coal gas, geothermal, hydroelectric, nuclear-electric. For vehicle fuel, there is not yet a large scale substitute for petroleum, but we're nibbling at the edges with vegetable matter. As economic forces shift, the balance of fuel and lubricant usage will shift away from mined petroleum. Whether we're better or worse off for the change 100 or 200 years from now is not dependably predictable.
I don't know if the argument is valid, but I've read that China's economic improvements are due in part to their population limiting policies. It takes a lot of human effort, and a lot of stress on physical resources, to raise a lot of children. Freeing effort and resources for other goals has allowed them to lift themselves out of an economic whirlpool. It's been government force that's slowed population growth.
Wealth alone is just one of the forces that promote smaller families. Others include easy birth control, culture, and economic conditions that do not make large families economically advantageous (i.e. the decline of large family farms.) China may not yet be over the threshold where wealth discourages large families.
Although China is far from free by Western standards, they're a lot better off than they were 50 years ago.