right wing suffers from a collective mental disorder characterized by faulty logic and an inability to understand history.
The left wing does the same thing... at an extreme look at Venezuela. Whatever your feelings about Chavez in particular, it's probably not a great idea to create a dictator position no matter how much you like the guy currently in power.
In the US, the left's default position is to let the government fix a problem, just as the right's default position is to remove the government to fix a problem. In reality, problems are each different and you can't just blindly apply an ideology to fix them all in the same way. Sometimes tight government regulation is worth the drawbacks, and sometimes you don't want to live with all extra corruption, graft, and inefficiency that so often invades government involvement.
Anyway, you are right - banks should be banks... nominally, big safe places to pile cash. Humans have a very low tolerance for loss, so risky investments trigger panics, which is not what you want in your core banking system.
A short term swing in the value of gold is one of the things that make crashes and bubbles short and self-limiting.
Please read up on the history of financial panics and recessions and the Great Depression and then re-read your reply. I'm not asking for a lot of your time - perhaps an hour. We had many really terrible financial situations in the US while on the gold standard. As usual, someone was nice enough to compile a list over at Wikipedia.
1) Fiat currencies have been destroyed by hyperinflation a thousand times over. Their values regularly go to zero. Gold doesn't.
So don't try to hold large amounts of fiat currency. Use it as a barter replacement and move on. If gold is so great, buy gold.
2) The notion that it is easy to avoid the punishing effects of inflation are so short sighted and ignorant it's hard to fully comprehend.
Which is why I didn't suggest that. Short-term inflation and deflation is horrible and destructive. I was referring to long-term deflation.
Telling people on a limited or fixed income that the solution to inflationary pressures is to just throw money into the stock market - the only thing with a chance of beating our current 6 to 7% inflation rate - is really no different.
Since you picked the 6-7% inflation number, you are obviously including energy and food. Care to explain how a gold standard will make oil less scarce or finite?
Europe is printing at warp speed via the ECB. They do not have a gold standard.
Europe is not printing - at least not like we did - that is the crux of the argument going on over there. Germany is terrified of inflation and will not print their way out of the crisis. Just this week, the elections changed the equation of power over there and I believe they have agreed to basically emulate the "quantitative easing" that the US did. Anyway, Greece can't print their own currency, which is forcing them to live within their means, which is killing their economy. This is what happens during a cash crunch under a gold standard as well, which is why I pointed to Greece as an example. True, QE will eventually cause inflation, but I maintain that long-term, predictable pain is better than the short-term shock the Greeks are going through.
The stated policy of the Federal Reserve is that the TBTF banks will be given infinite money if needed. Little people and even little banks? Screwed.
So what is your proposal? I have a feeling it isn't "learn lessons from the last fiscal crises and tweak the central bank", but rather, return to some era you have decided is the golden age. Am I right? People 200 years ago were not happy with the banking system, which is why they changed it in the first place.
Nixon officially ended the US gold standard in 1972
That's only sort-of true. He actually just killed the Bretton Woods reincarnation of it, which wasn't really gold-backed currency but an agreement to hold the price of gold to $35 per ounce. Since much of the world was pegged to the dollar, this acted a lot like a gold standard.
In the decades since, with the federal reserve corporation fully in control of monetary supply, the common American has seen their income stagnate for the past three decades while the top 10%
Wait a minute... are you blaming wage stagnation on a single factor?
Income disparity has never been greater in America than now. Is that a mark of success?
Read up the chain! spazdor's comment is flamey and probably more inciteful than insightful... but Jeng basically insults everyone who doesn't agree with Ron Paul, saying they won't vote for "reality". spazdor just turned the comment around on Jeng.
I obviously didn't mod his post up, and I probably wouldn't have since I don't think flame wars deserve mods - but I can understand why it got up-voted. He shut up someone who was preaching to all of us poor ignorant rabble, some of whom happen to have mod points.
Yeah, a lot of the candidates lately have been pretty similar.
Bush I and Clinton were nearly indistinguishable from an economic perspective. Dole would not have rocked the Clinton boat too much. Bush II was pretty different from Gore, but even he kind of surprised everyone out of the gate by greatly expanding Medicare. Again, Kerry seems like he would have been different - but then again, Obama seemed different as well, and where has that gotten him? He followed the Bush timeline to leave Iraq, increased troop levels in Afghanistan, continues to push record levels of illegal immigrants out of the country, kept Guantanamo open, kept the Bush financial bailout rolling, renewed the Patriot Act, and of course greatly expanded Medicare. I'll grant you that McCain would have never dusted off and passed the old Republican Heartland Institute health care plan. And on social issues, it is unlikely that he would have ended don't ask, don't tell.
But wow, get away from the largely symbolic "wedge issues" and the parties don't really have much differentiation.
I guess that preferring a metal that has had value for thousands of years and will have value as far as we can tell for thousands more, over a piece of paper that politicians can print pretty much at will, makes hima loon.
Gold's value swung wildly throughout history, causing massive short-term inflation and deflation. That is far more damaging than long-term inflation, which is easily avoided by not sitting on a pile of cash, which should be treated like a barter stand-in and not a gold equivalent.
Further, the same limited quantities that give gold the value you desire also make it too scarce for a growing economy.
And then there is the inability to "print" money. Ron Paul would probably put this in the "plus" column, but I think that governments will spend recklessly whether they can print money or not. Most of modern Europe is evidence that governments will borrow heavily even if they have no ability to print money. World history is chock-full of "Greeces", well before the federal reserve system was invented. In the US, we had plenty of bank failures, financial panics, and major recessions while on the gold standard. The federal reserve system gives the government more tools than it had prior to it's invention.
So in short, the main thrust of the pro-gold argument is that people who stuff their mattresses full of cash would be better off in the long run. No argument there. Of course they could be buying gold and stuffing that in their mattresses right now, so I'm frankly at a loss as to why we should give up all the advantages of the federal reserve system for such people.
Which gets me to the reason we tend to dismiss Ron Paul as a crazy person. What I wrote isn't remotely controversial. Banking has been a mess since it was invented - one of the core issues of our young country involved banking. We tried several national models, all of which had at least one spectacular failure. I'm under no delusion that the current Federal Reserve is the ultimate solution, but it seems to work better than it's predesessors. Ron Paul seems like a really intelligent guy, and he's also pretty well educated. So it really seems... odd... that he comes to the conclusions that he does on this matter. My conclusion is that his mind works in a way that is very different from my own. I could be the crazy one, but from my perspective he is the one drawing irrational conclusions.
If all you are trying to do is make a statement, may I suggest stopping by American's Elect? It's our best shot at getting a common 3rd party candidate on all ballots this year. Libertarians are also on most of them.
Remote X11 sucks ass on any medium. VNC is only a tiny bit better, but you can disconnect from a running session. Give XRDP a spin sometime. X11 needs to die, it's served its purpose.
Agreed but I don't have admin over these servers and some of the tools are painful to use without X11.
Back to the topic at hand, if a wifi connection is not sufficient for your remote admin tools, and you need 1Gb, think about the overhead you are creating on your _server's_ connection.
These are development servers and all of the bandwidth is being used for X11 sessions... not much else they have to do except serve some internal low-traffic web pages. A momentary spike in traffic won't hurt anyone.
I assume your problem is with wifi throughput, because the latency should be reasonable.
You are correct, but I'm not trying to stream video over X11 or anything - just open windows full of toolbars and stuff. Most of the bandwidth comes in a burst when you first create a new window. Over WiFi you can watch it draw, and on gigabit it is almost instantaneous. Sure, I'm sucking up a bunch of bandwidth for a fraction of a second every once in a while, but most of the time it's only sending text updates as I type or get feedback on the terminal.
One trick I sometimes use is to plug my laptop in to the gigabit, fire up the windows I know I'll need, and then unplug and work from WiFi.:)
Which model Mac and which model PC? I don't think you've actually done the comparison because when I've compared with similar Dell and HP notebooks in the past, the numbers are always plus or minus (yes, minus) 10%.
All this is to address the prior AC's suggestion that because Apple didn't invent Objective-C, they can't sue over it. They can, because they bought NeXT, who bought the rights from Stepstone. The situation is exactly parallel to Oracle, Sun, and Java.
My argument wasn't "population density". It was that the two markets are not even comparable. Only one of the reasons was population density.
The government also owns whatever they say they own (including the phone companies) and can put towers in without any limitations at all. In the US, the individual mobile operators must bid for frequency, construct their network not to interfere with any other channels, acquire tower space somehow, link the towers into their network somehow, etc. It's much more ad hoc. Sometimes a big omnipotent entity with unlimited powers is more efficient, and it certainly doesn't hurt when there are a billion more customers served in the same area.
I don't know why Norway has great cell service, but maybe if I have time I'll look into it.
Just wait until they find out that a farmer in rural China can get better cell phone service and a cheaper plan than they can in one of the large US cities...
Take a land area about the size of the US. Now cram in a billion or so additional subscribers. Now grant a monopoly on spectrum to two state-owned telecommunications companies, and let them put towers anywhere they please.
But otherwise the countries are ridiculously similar markets.
I believe you are making the mistake of conflating companies with people. The "inventor" of Java was James Gosling. He supports Oracle's action against Google. Whether the company is currently under Oracle or Sun brand name is not particularly important - many of the same engineers, managers, and ownership either way. All of the former owners of Sun at the time of the merger became owners of Oracle, as did the vast majority of employees. You could argue that Sun "bought" Java as well, since it was obviously the product of a person and team of people and not a non-human corporate entity.
They are, but they are pricey. You get what you pay for. I consistently get 6 years out of the Macs - my current G5 Tower "kids computer" was purchased in (late) 2004 for around $2000. At the time, grotesquely expensive but I'm still editing video on it occasionally (because I like the older PPC version of iMovie for quick stuff) and at this point it has worked out to roughly $300/year. It's now obsolete because it won't run the newest software - Apple gave up the PPC ghost - but speed-wise it still is more than adequate and my kids use it for PBS kids and stuff now.
Similarly, I have an overpriced HP workstation from the same era doing FreeBSD duty in my basement, chugging along like a champ. Again, nice but expensive hardware (and EEC RAM... big plus for ZFS).
I have a similar lifetime out of my much cheaper PC, but I built that myself and chose nice components. Include all the time I spent researching and assembling that thing (and dealing with the Windows install... ugh) and the cost is even higher than the HP or Mac:)
Oracle (or more properly their subsidiary Sun) certainly did invent Java. Search for James A. Gosling.
Incidentally, Gosling supports Oracle's action against Google, despite having left Sun as it was acquired by Oracle and having no particular love for Oracle.
Who needs to hack it when there is already a secure.ru domain? It's already shady as hell - won't even let you in unless you let it set a javascript cookie.
I'm still a little confused about the "naked annuities" because usually an annuity is distinct from a bond. Are these a type of indexed annuity that are tied to the price of some underlying bonds? In any case, annuities are great in that they are tax deferred, but someone with the ability to stick $30,000 into a 401(k) still has a huge (immediate) tax advantage over someone who can only stick $5000 into an IRA.
True a house is not an "investment", but since you have to live somewhere and the government will subsidize you if you live in a house, it is at least worth the consideration. Houses are not illiquid at all - take reverse mortgages, for instance. They are only "illiquid" in the sense of selling them, which is obviously not the only way to get at the money. If you have an immediate need you can get at 80% of the equity by taking out a traditional mortgage, and you can still have the house on the market.
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right wing suffers from a collective mental disorder characterized by faulty logic and an inability to understand history.
The left wing does the same thing... at an extreme look at Venezuela. Whatever your feelings about Chavez in particular, it's probably not a great idea to create a dictator position no matter how much you like the guy currently in power.
In the US, the left's default position is to let the government fix a problem, just as the right's default position is to remove the government to fix a problem. In reality, problems are each different and you can't just blindly apply an ideology to fix them all in the same way. Sometimes tight government regulation is worth the drawbacks, and sometimes you don't want to live with all extra corruption, graft, and inefficiency that so often invades government involvement.
Anyway, you are right - banks should be banks... nominally, big safe places to pile cash. Humans have a very low tolerance for loss, so risky investments trigger panics, which is not what you want in your core banking system.
A short term swing in the value of gold is one of the things that make crashes and bubbles short and self-limiting.
Please read up on the history of financial panics and recessions and the Great Depression and then re-read your reply. I'm not asking for a lot of your time - perhaps an hour. We had many really terrible financial situations in the US while on the gold standard. As usual, someone was nice enough to compile a list over at Wikipedia.
1) Fiat currencies have been destroyed by hyperinflation a thousand times over. Their values regularly go to zero. Gold doesn't.
So don't try to hold large amounts of fiat currency. Use it as a barter replacement and move on. If gold is so great, buy gold.
2) The notion that it is easy to avoid the punishing effects of inflation are so short sighted and ignorant it's hard to fully comprehend.
Which is why I didn't suggest that. Short-term inflation and deflation is horrible and destructive. I was referring to long-term deflation.
Telling people on a limited or fixed income that the solution to inflationary pressures is to just throw money into the stock market - the only thing with a chance of beating our current 6 to 7% inflation rate - is really no different.
Since you picked the 6-7% inflation number, you are obviously including energy and food. Care to explain how a gold standard will make oil less scarce or finite?
Europe is printing at warp speed via the ECB. They do not have a gold standard.
Europe is not printing - at least not like we did - that is the crux of the argument going on over there. Germany is terrified of inflation and will not print their way out of the crisis. Just this week, the elections changed the equation of power over there and I believe they have agreed to basically emulate the "quantitative easing" that the US did. Anyway, Greece can't print their own currency, which is forcing them to live within their means, which is killing their economy. This is what happens during a cash crunch under a gold standard as well, which is why I pointed to Greece as an example. True, QE will eventually cause inflation, but I maintain that long-term, predictable pain is better than the short-term shock the Greeks are going through.
The stated policy of the Federal Reserve is that the TBTF banks will be given infinite money if needed. Little people and even little banks? Screwed.
So what is your proposal? I have a feeling it isn't "learn lessons from the last fiscal crises and tweak the central bank", but rather, return to some era you have decided is the golden age. Am I right? People 200 years ago were not happy with the banking system, which is why they changed it in the first place.
How is a bank that is 100% controlled by the federal government, with all profits returned to the US Treasury, a "private" bank?
Some people get really hung up on semantics.
Nixon officially ended the US gold standard in 1972
That's only sort-of true. He actually just killed the Bretton Woods reincarnation of it, which wasn't really gold-backed currency but an agreement to hold the price of gold to $35 per ounce. Since much of the world was pegged to the dollar, this acted a lot like a gold standard.
In the decades since, with the federal reserve corporation fully in control of monetary supply, the common American has seen their income stagnate for the past three decades while the top 10%
Wait a minute... are you blaming wage stagnation on a single factor?
Income disparity has never been greater in America than now. Is that a mark of success?
First of all, that is not true - we are back to the income disparity levels seen in the first half of the 20th century. Second, no I don't consider it a mark of success. Care to explain how the gold standard will erase that disparity? Clearly we've seen that kind of disparity prior to the ending of the gold standard.
I for one side with great Americans such as Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson that central banking is vile and contrary to Republican principle.
I'm an Alexander Hamilton fan myself... well, maybe not his politicians-for-life opinions :)
You're both acting just as bad as Jeng.
True - but the thread was worthless at the very tippy top. Nothing good is coming from a thread that starts by calling Ron Paul followers cultists.
So pick a side and flame away!
Read up the chain! spazdor's comment is flamey and probably more inciteful than insightful... but Jeng basically insults everyone who doesn't agree with Ron Paul, saying they won't vote for "reality". spazdor just turned the comment around on Jeng.
I obviously didn't mod his post up, and I probably wouldn't have since I don't think flame wars deserve mods - but I can understand why it got up-voted. He shut up someone who was preaching to all of us poor ignorant rabble, some of whom happen to have mod points.
Yeah, a lot of the candidates lately have been pretty similar.
Bush I and Clinton were nearly indistinguishable from an economic perspective. Dole would not have rocked the Clinton boat too much. Bush II was pretty different from Gore, but even he kind of surprised everyone out of the gate by greatly expanding Medicare. Again, Kerry seems like he would have been different - but then again, Obama seemed different as well, and where has that gotten him? He followed the Bush timeline to leave Iraq, increased troop levels in Afghanistan, continues to push record levels of illegal immigrants out of the country, kept Guantanamo open, kept the Bush financial bailout rolling, renewed the Patriot Act, and of course greatly expanded Medicare. I'll grant you that McCain would have never dusted off and passed the old Republican Heartland Institute health care plan. And on social issues, it is unlikely that he would have ended don't ask, don't tell.
But wow, get away from the largely symbolic "wedge issues" and the parties don't really have much differentiation.
I guess that preferring a metal that has had value for thousands of years and will have value as far as we can tell for thousands more, over a piece of paper that politicians can print pretty much at will, makes hima loon.
Gold's value swung wildly throughout history, causing massive short-term inflation and deflation. That is far more damaging than long-term inflation, which is easily avoided by not sitting on a pile of cash, which should be treated like a barter stand-in and not a gold equivalent.
Further, the same limited quantities that give gold the value you desire also make it too scarce for a growing economy.
And then there is the inability to "print" money. Ron Paul would probably put this in the "plus" column, but I think that governments will spend recklessly whether they can print money or not. Most of modern Europe is evidence that governments will borrow heavily even if they have no ability to print money. World history is chock-full of "Greeces", well before the federal reserve system was invented. In the US, we had plenty of bank failures, financial panics, and major recessions while on the gold standard. The federal reserve system gives the government more tools than it had prior to it's invention.
So in short, the main thrust of the pro-gold argument is that people who stuff their mattresses full of cash would be better off in the long run. No argument there. Of course they could be buying gold and stuffing that in their mattresses right now, so I'm frankly at a loss as to why we should give up all the advantages of the federal reserve system for such people.
Which gets me to the reason we tend to dismiss Ron Paul as a crazy person. What I wrote isn't remotely controversial. Banking has been a mess since it was invented - one of the core issues of our young country involved banking. We tried several national models, all of which had at least one spectacular failure. I'm under no delusion that the current Federal Reserve is the ultimate solution, but it seems to work better than it's predesessors. Ron Paul seems like a really intelligent guy, and he's also pretty well educated. So it really seems... odd... that he comes to the conclusions that he does on this matter. My conclusion is that his mind works in a way that is very different from my own. I could be the crazy one, but from my perspective he is the one drawing irrational conclusions.
If all you are trying to do is make a statement, may I suggest stopping by American's Elect? It's our best shot at getting a common 3rd party candidate on all ballots this year. Libertarians are also on most of them.
You like Ron Paul because he "talks truth", we like spazdor for the same reason.
Remote X11 sucks ass on any medium. VNC is only a tiny bit better, but you can disconnect from a running session. Give XRDP a spin sometime. X11 needs to die, it's served its purpose.
Agreed but I don't have admin over these servers and some of the tools are painful to use without X11.
Back to the topic at hand, if a wifi connection is not sufficient for your remote admin tools, and you need 1Gb, think about the overhead you are creating on your _server's_ connection.
These are development servers and all of the bandwidth is being used for X11 sessions... not much else they have to do except serve some internal low-traffic web pages. A momentary spike in traffic won't hurt anyone.
I assume your problem is with wifi throughput, because the latency should be reasonable.
You are correct, but I'm not trying to stream video over X11 or anything - just open windows full of toolbars and stuff. Most of the bandwidth comes in a burst when you first create a new window. Over WiFi you can watch it draw, and on gigabit it is almost instantaneous. Sure, I'm sucking up a bunch of bandwidth for a fraction of a second every once in a while, but most of the time it's only sending text updates as I type or get feedback on the terminal.
One trick I sometimes use is to plug my laptop in to the gigabit, fire up the windows I know I'll need, and then unplug and work from WiFi. :)
Which model Mac and which model PC? I don't think you've actually done the comparison because when I've compared with similar Dell and HP notebooks in the past, the numbers are always plus or minus (yes, minus) 10%.
So I'd like an example.
Example?
Remote X11 to servers you don't control is still waaaay faster on a wire.
So are backups. And if you use the folder/drive sharing feature of RDC, this is way more usable using a wire.
Plus, wireless degrades less gracefully with multiple users and I find the wire to be more reliable in general.
All this is to address the prior AC's suggestion that because Apple didn't invent Objective-C, they can't sue over it. They can, because they bought NeXT, who bought the rights from Stepstone. The situation is exactly parallel to Oracle, Sun, and Java.
Yup, I agree with you 100%.
My argument wasn't "population density". It was that the two markets are not even comparable. Only one of the reasons was population density.
The government also owns whatever they say they own (including the phone companies) and can put towers in without any limitations at all. In the US, the individual mobile operators must bid for frequency, construct their network not to interfere with any other channels, acquire tower space somehow, link the towers into their network somehow, etc. It's much more ad hoc. Sometimes a big omnipotent entity with unlimited powers is more efficient, and it certainly doesn't hurt when there are a billion more customers served in the same area.
I don't know why Norway has great cell service, but maybe if I have time I'll look into it.
Just wait until they find out that a farmer in rural China can get better cell phone service and a cheaper plan than they can in one of the large US cities...
Take a land area about the size of the US. Now cram in a billion or so additional subscribers. Now grant a monopoly on spectrum to two state-owned telecommunications companies, and let them put towers anywhere they please.
But otherwise the countries are ridiculously similar markets.
I believe you are making the mistake of conflating companies with people. The "inventor" of Java was James Gosling. He supports Oracle's action against Google. Whether the company is currently under Oracle or Sun brand name is not particularly important - many of the same engineers, managers, and ownership either way. All of the former owners of Sun at the time of the merger became owners of Oracle, as did the vast majority of employees. You could argue that Sun "bought" Java as well, since it was obviously the product of a person and team of people and not a non-human corporate entity.
but Windows XP? Yeauchk! I hope you burned the towelettes afterwards.
Hey, some of that are holding on to that until either MS finally pulls the plug or the Mayans turn out to be right :)
They are, but they are pricey. You get what you pay for. I consistently get 6 years out of the Macs - my current G5 Tower "kids computer" was purchased in (late) 2004 for around $2000. At the time, grotesquely expensive but I'm still editing video on it occasionally (because I like the older PPC version of iMovie for quick stuff) and at this point it has worked out to roughly $300/year. It's now obsolete because it won't run the newest software - Apple gave up the PPC ghost - but speed-wise it still is more than adequate and my kids use it for PBS kids and stuff now.
Similarly, I have an overpriced HP workstation from the same era doing FreeBSD duty in my basement, chugging along like a champ. Again, nice but expensive hardware (and EEC RAM... big plus for ZFS).
I have a similar lifetime out of my much cheaper PC, but I built that myself and chose nice components. Include all the time I spent researching and assembling that thing (and dealing with the Windows install... ugh) and the cost is even higher than the HP or Mac :)
Oracle (or more properly their subsidiary Sun) certainly did invent Java. Search for James A. Gosling.
Incidentally, Gosling supports Oracle's action against Google, despite having left Sun as it was acquired by Oracle and having no particular love for Oracle.
Who needs to hack it when there is already a secure.ru domain? It's already shady as hell - won't even let you in unless you let it set a javascript cookie.
I'm still a little confused about the "naked annuities" because usually an annuity is distinct from a bond. Are these a type of indexed annuity that are tied to the price of some underlying bonds? In any case, annuities are great in that they are tax deferred, but someone with the ability to stick $30,000 into a 401(k) still has a huge (immediate) tax advantage over someone who can only stick $5000 into an IRA.
True a house is not an "investment", but since you have to live somewhere and the government will subsidize you if you live in a house, it is at least worth the consideration. Houses are not illiquid at all - take reverse mortgages, for instance. They are only "illiquid" in the sense of selling them, which is obviously not the only way to get at the money. If you have an immediate need you can get at 80% of the equity by taking out a traditional mortgage, and you can still have the house on the market.
In software years, one does not come of age until his 30s, and only then because he finally accepts prostitution.