Uh, no, we just don't answer the damn phone. That isn't next to impossible. It isn't walking on water. It isn't even going on a diet or quitting smoking. It's easy.
Really, I understand that 99.99% of driving is boring as hell. The other.01% includes moments when you see something in front of you that you didn't see a second ago. In a lifetime of driving, eventually one of those moments may coincide with one of the seconds when you were paying attention to your phone.
As long as you're piloting that your 2 tons of car on the public road, the rest of us would appreciate it if you would please keep your attention on what you're doing.
Following some links. A fan of this Peter Schiff guy? You realize he a) appears to have a background in accounting, not economics, b) seems to have his own self interest (selling gold??), c) seems to cling to a lot of ideas that most economists consider long ago discredited. Anyone else you follow for analysis of the economy?
Some sources I'd recommend: The Economist, blogs by Krugman (or pick your favorite actual economist). Agree or disagree, some understanding of a wider variety of viewpoints is helpful.
you'll get is less and less investment, because savings get wiped out
If there is deflation, then I can get a few percent a year just by stuffing my cash under a mattress. Why would that increase the incentive to invest my money?
I switched to laser because the cost was far less then what an Inkjet ran us in ink.
And I always thought that was the absolute rule too, so when I researched my most recent printer purchase I was surprised how much price-per-page varied within the two categories--some inkjet printers are reported as quite cheap to run, and some lasers quite expensive--and the printer I ended up with was an inkjet for which consumer reports claimed around $.02/page for black-and-white text (if I remember correctly--I tried to check that just now on their website and found they'd switched to using a monthly cost based on average home use).
Ok, but if they unloaded all their securities at once, it would cause a massive price depression
Would it? We talk as if China held most of the US's debt, but of course they don't (about 10% if http://www.businessinsider.com/who-does-the-us-owe-its-debt-to-2011-4 is right), so the market for the securities is huge, and why wouldn't more buyers suddenly take interest if the price dropped a little?
Well, of course it's a bit of a ridiculous scenario to start off with anyway.
No, I'm not thinking about that, I think about what I wrote: the USA are unable to pay for their bills: right now. It is all over the news, just not in the USA.
No, that's petty political brinkmanship, it's nothing to do with economic fundamentals. The federal government is perfectly capable of paying its obligations, but parties in congress love to play these games with the debt limit to put pressure on the other side.
You are considered broke when your payments for debts exceed your income. By that definition the "state of the united states of america" is broke. You will see that in US news the next days;D
No, debt service is under 10% of the federal budget, if I remember right (less than 2% of gdp?).
You're almost certainly thinking of the *debt* to gdp ratio, which is very close to 100%--but that's not a critical milestone (according to https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ja.html, Japan's debt-to-gdp ratio was 225% in 2010, and people are still willing to lend to the Japanese government.).
These numbers were from usdebtclock.org, which gets its figures form the treasury and the federal reserve. Hover over each figure to list the sources.
Thanks. That's a fun site to try to use with flashblock....
GDP is a far smaller number than national assets ($65 trillion less)
What's the point of comparing them? They're barely even in the same units (dollars/year vs dollars).
, but the problem with that discussion is that our government doesn't use the same generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) that is expected of any large organization.
Why on earth should they? A national government is very different in a number of ways--having its own currency not the least....
They use cash, rather than accrual, accounting, which is highly inaccurate. In accrual accounting, all revenues and expenditures are counted right away, allowing for a complete picture of an organizations finances. If our government held itself to the same accounting principles that it expects of major corporations, then our debt is more like $127 trillion.
Huh. How do you calculate the total debt using "accrual" accounting? I mean, if you assume social security and medicare will continue as they are without any tax changes to increase revenue in the coming decades, and you book that all now--yes, of course, you'll get big scary numbers. So what? Is that likely?
But in any case the practical questions are how our debt load is likely to impact our everyday lives. Why is an accrual-based national debt, or total national assets, or whatever, a better measure of that than any of the measures (debt/GDP ratios, bond yields, whatever) that economists usually use to decide whether countries (not companies, but countries!) are in trouble?
The USA is near defaulting on its debt. That's fairly broke. Welcome to reality. It's OK, you'll figure it out when hyperinflation kicks in.
Those statements all require support.
I'm no expert--all I know is that for several years now I've seen people claiming on Slashdot that inflation was a mathematical certainty the moment the fed engaged in quantatative easing. And during that time inflation has remained at record lows. So absent actual evidence, I'm inclined to listen to the actual economists who can back up their arguments with actual data....
We are quite broke, so long as you don't engage in Enron style accounting. We have over $113 trillion in unfunded liabilities, over $14 trillion in immediate debt and this country's TOTAL national assets only amount to just under $79 trillion.
Citations? And why is "total national assets" the correct measure? Hey, I'm no economist, but most discussion I've seen focus on income (gdp, tax revenue), not assets--which makes sense to me, since income is what we use to pay our debts, not, I dunno, selling off Yellowstone or something.
BBC news appears to be around 8 figures, for a complete news organization with international coverage.
Eh, correcting myself: I suspect I'm just misunderstanding how they split up the spending categories, billions sounds like a more likely budget. Maybe somebody else can figure that out....
Quite apart from all the other good reasons why this is a BAD idea, it is another way to wase money a broke country dosn't have.
First, the US is very far from broke. We have a huge national income, and (relative to our peers) choose to spend relatively little of it on taxes. We could in theory go "broke" if we fail to raise revenues to cover growing health care costs and/or cut benefits to our aging population. Nobody (least of all the people putting their money where there mouths are and buying US debt) seems to think it's likely that we'll do neither, and thus default.
Second, the proposal in question would require a trivial amount of money; factcheck.org and polifact.com, for example, already do this kind of work. I wonder what their budgets are--probably 6 or 7 figures? A government with a 13-figure budget could do contribute significantly to that kind of work with money that would amount to a rounding error. BBC news appears to be around 8 figures, for a complete news organization with international coverage.
Third, this hardly strikes me as a "waste". If we could better educate our voters with such a tiny fraction of our budget, that sounds like spending that could pay for itself.
They have secure logins, just not secure sessions after you've logged in.
And that's an important distinction. It means someone can sniff your credentials for the *session*, and impersonate you as long as you're logged in; but if you detect the mischief, then you can regain control, because your real long-lived credential (your password) is sent under ssl.
It's a tradeoff, but for something non-critical it seem to me like a reasonable one.
Five workers have died since the quake and 22 more have been injured for various reasons, while two are missing. One worker was hospitalized after suddenly grasping his chest and finding himself unable to stand, and another needed treatment after receiving a blast of radiation near a damaged reactor. Eleven workers were injured in a hydrogen explosion at reactor No. 3.
That's a little vague, though it does suggest at least one incident ("needed treatment after receiving a blast of radiation"). (I suppose it could have been purely precautionary.)
I don't really see the downside for the "hard-core" folks either.
Why spend my time on tedious tasks that a computer should be able to automate for me?
Stuff like configuring X, tracking down package dependencies, installing applications from source--OK, the first time I do that stuff by hand, maybe I learn a little bit, but it gets old fast.
These days, thankfully, my Linux distro takes care of most of that that for me, so I can go focus on the stuff I care about. The fact that the stuff I care about is in fact kernel hacking doesn't make running./configure scripts much more interesting to me than it is to anybody else, really.
Yeah, I do the same thing as you, with prepaid service a few bucks a month is enough to let me do everything I need the cell phone for.
But less expensive pay-as-you-go/pre-paid plans do seem to be showing up. And as the cost of smartphone drops, the pull of subsidies will also drop, so hopefully there will be more progress in that direction.
You might want to look at the various prepaid and pay-as-you-go plans.
As a very light cellphone user I've been paying under $10/mo for t-mobile's prepaid service (with an initial cost of around $50 for the cellphone and "activation fee", if I remember right) for several years now. Even much higher upfront costs can pay off pretty quickly compared to the cost of the two-year contracts.
I'll happily buy a smart phone the moment I can figure out how to get an unlocked (preferably rootable and developer-friendly) smart phone that works with multiple carriers.
I considered the Nexus S, and it looks like you can get minimal month-to-month contracts for around $40/mo if you pass on the subsidy. But as long as it only works well on t-mobile then I'm still effectively locked in....
$20 says she's just milking her celebrity for every dollar she can. She loves complaining about her critics. Why quell any speech that's about *her*?
Somebody who gives up a governership for TV shows and speaking tours has little interest in actually governing. She wants to be a conservative media figure.
Not that she'll say any of that--the possibility of a future run keeps her in the public eye.
Regan was great for this country. We had great economic growth which drove the Democrats crazy. We had low unemployment and nice growth of entrepreneurs. Everything after that was down hill.
It's not the degree that shows competency. It's the drive required to get the degree that tells you what you need to know about a potential employee.
Though there *are* also some skills you can expect from someone with a decent college education: writing readable email; making a convincing argument about something complicated; using whatever sources they can find to study up on what they need to know to finish a project; dealing with numerical data (not necessarily advanced mathematics, just knowing how to think about orders of magnitude, margins of error, averages, whatever--basic numeracy); deciding when a given source of information is trustworthy; etc. A lot of that in theory you learn in high school, but by the time someone gets a BA they've usually got that stuff pretty well pounded into them.
And then there's more specialized skills: again, not even the junior/senior-level classes you might think of as defining a major, but the basic bits you have to pick up to get there: CS majors will know what a debugger is, how basic logic and bit operations work, what a "for" loop is, how to read documentation, etc--a thousand tiny things any one of which anyone could pick up, but it's nice to know they've got that basic culture already. (Yeah, we've probably all heard the story of an interview where graduate of $prestigiousU flunked on the basics, but that's the exception.)
Har. Yes, let's have the fun of spending a different currency each time we cross a state border. Or of having to go through immigration when I want to take a job in another state.
Or you want to keep the same currency without a strong central government? I don't get the impression that's working out so great for Europe at the moment....
A google search for "john kenneth galbraith new york city budget" suggests that your quote is from "The American Left and Some British Comparisons, 1971. Looks like the quote said "doubling", not "tripling".
An August 27, 1972 New York Times article ("City's 71-72 Expense Budget Balanced") gives the 71-72 budget as $8.5 billion, $44.53 billion in today's money (according to the first inflation calculator I found on the web). The NYC OBM gives $63.1 billion as the budget for the current fiscal year. That looks like an inflation-adjusted increase of 42%.
I could have gotten the numbers, and the quote, wrong. What was your source?
(And ditto for "problems have become both larger and more numerous". Sources?)
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, no, we just don't answer the damn phone. That isn't next to impossible. It isn't walking on water. It isn't even going on a diet or quitting smoking. It's easy.
Really, I understand that 99.99% of driving is boring as hell. The other .01% includes moments when you see something in front of you that you didn't see a second ago. In a lifetime of driving, eventually one of those moments may coincide with one of the seconds when you were paying attention to your phone.
As long as you're piloting that your 2 tons of car on the public road, the rest of us would appreciate it if you would please keep your attention on what you're doing.
Well, that ignores the question.
Following some links. A fan of this Peter Schiff guy? You realize he a) appears to have a background in accounting, not economics, b) seems to have his own self interest (selling gold??), c) seems to cling to a lot of ideas that most economists consider long ago discredited. Anyone else you follow for analysis of the economy?
Some sources I'd recommend: The Economist, blogs by Krugman (or pick your favorite actual economist). Agree or disagree, some understanding of a wider variety of viewpoints is helpful.
Right, but the opportunity cost in this case is:
(income from investing) - (income from stuffing cash under your mattress)
The second number is deflation.
And you're claiming that increasing deflation *increases* the opportunity cost.
At the very least, that's a claim that needs some convincing evidence!
you'll get is less and less investment, because savings get wiped out
If there is deflation, then I can get a few percent a year just by stuffing my cash under a mattress. Why would that increase the incentive to invest my money?
I switched to laser because the cost was far less then what an Inkjet ran us in ink.
And I always thought that was the absolute rule too, so when I researched my most recent printer purchase I was surprised how much price-per-page varied within the two categories--some inkjet printers are reported as quite cheap to run, and some lasers quite expensive--and the printer I ended up with was an inkjet for which consumer reports claimed around $.02/page for black-and-white text (if I remember correctly--I tried to check that just now on their website and found they'd switched to using a monthly cost based on average home use).
Look over to the right of the download page. Note where it says "To install Fedora using a USB stick, follow these instructions."
(Also note the command line version of the instructions amount to just dd'ing your choice of iso images onto a usb stick.)
Ok, but if they unloaded all their securities at once, it would cause a massive price depression
Would it? We talk as if China held most of the US's debt, but of course they don't (about 10% if http://www.businessinsider.com/who-does-the-us-owe-its-debt-to-2011-4 is right), so the market for the securities is huge, and why wouldn't more buyers suddenly take interest if the price dropped a little?
Well, of course it's a bit of a ridiculous scenario to start off with anyway.
No, I'm not thinking about that, I think about what I wrote: the USA are unable to pay for their bills: right now. It is all over the news, just not in the USA.
Oh, good grief, you're talking about this: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/17/us/politics/17budget.html?hpw
No, that's petty political brinkmanship, it's nothing to do with economic fundamentals. The federal government is perfectly capable of paying its obligations, but parties in congress love to play these games with the debt limit to put pressure on the other side.
You are considered broke when your payments for debts exceed your income. ;D
By that definition the "state of the united states of america" is broke.
You will see that in US news the next days
No, debt service is under 10% of the federal budget, if I remember right (less than 2% of gdp?).
You're almost certainly thinking of the *debt* to gdp ratio, which is very close to 100%--but that's not a critical milestone (according to https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ja.html, Japan's debt-to-gdp ratio was 225% in 2010, and people are still willing to lend to the Japanese government.).
These numbers were from usdebtclock.org, which gets its figures form the treasury and the federal reserve. Hover over each figure to list the sources.
Thanks. That's a fun site to try to use with flashblock....
GDP is a far smaller number than national assets ($65 trillion less)
What's the point of comparing them? They're barely even in the same units (dollars/year vs dollars).
, but the problem with that discussion is that our government doesn't use the same generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) that is expected of any large organization.
Why on earth should they? A national government is very different in a number of ways--having its own currency not the least....
They use cash, rather than accrual, accounting, which is highly inaccurate. In accrual accounting, all revenues and expenditures are counted right away, allowing for a complete picture of an organizations finances. If our government held itself to the same accounting principles that it expects of major corporations, then our debt is more like $127 trillion.
Huh. How do you calculate the total debt using "accrual" accounting? I mean, if you assume social security and medicare will continue as they are without any tax changes to increase revenue in the coming decades, and you book that all now--yes, of course, you'll get big scary numbers. So what? Is that likely?
But in any case the practical questions are how our debt load is likely to impact our everyday lives. Why is an accrual-based national debt, or total national assets, or whatever, a better measure of that than any of the measures (debt/GDP ratios, bond yields, whatever) that economists usually use to decide whether countries (not companies, but countries!) are in trouble?
You obviously don't understand how money works.
Feel free to explain.
The USA is near defaulting on its debt. That's fairly broke. Welcome to reality. It's OK, you'll figure it out when hyperinflation kicks in.
Those statements all require support.
I'm no expert--all I know is that for several years now I've seen people claiming on Slashdot that inflation was a mathematical certainty the moment the fed engaged in quantatative easing. And during that time inflation has remained at record lows. So absent actual evidence, I'm inclined to listen to the actual economists who can back up their arguments with actual data....
We are quite broke, so long as you don't engage in Enron style accounting. We have over $113 trillion in unfunded liabilities, over $14 trillion in immediate debt and this country's TOTAL national assets only amount to just under $79 trillion.
Citations? And why is "total national assets" the correct measure? Hey, I'm no economist, but most discussion I've seen focus on income (gdp, tax revenue), not assets--which makes sense to me, since income is what we use to pay our debts, not, I dunno, selling off Yellowstone or something.
BBC news appears to be around 8 figures, for a complete news organization with international coverage.
Eh, correcting myself: I suspect I'm just misunderstanding how they split up the spending categories, billions sounds like a more likely budget. Maybe somebody else can figure that out....
Quite apart from all the other good reasons why this is a BAD idea, it is another way to wase money a broke country dosn't have.
First, the US is very far from broke. We have a huge national income, and (relative to our peers) choose to spend relatively little of it on taxes. We could in theory go "broke" if we fail to raise revenues to cover growing health care costs and/or cut benefits to our aging population. Nobody (least of all the people putting their money where there mouths are and buying US debt) seems to think it's likely that we'll do neither, and thus default.
Second, the proposal in question would require a trivial amount of money; factcheck.org and polifact.com, for example, already do this kind of work. I wonder what their budgets are--probably 6 or 7 figures? A government with a 13-figure budget could do contribute significantly to that kind of work with money that would amount to a rounding error. BBC news appears to be around 8 figures, for a complete news organization with international coverage.
Third, this hardly strikes me as a "waste". If we could better educate our voters with such a tiny fraction of our budget, that sounds like spending that could pay for itself.
They have secure logins, just not secure sessions after you've logged in.
And that's an important distinction. It means someone can sniff your credentials for the *session*, and impersonate you as long as you're logged in; but if you detect the mischief, then you can regain control, because your real long-lived credential (your password) is sent under ssl.
It's a tradeoff, but for something non-critical it seem to me like a reasonable one.
So far there have been no reports of workers getting sick from radioactive exposure.
From http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16workers.html?_r=1
Five workers have died since the quake and 22 more have been injured for various reasons, while two are missing. One worker was hospitalized after suddenly grasping his chest and finding himself unable to stand, and another needed treatment after receiving a blast of radiation near a damaged reactor. Eleven workers were injured in a hydrogen explosion at reactor No. 3.
That's a little vague, though it does suggest at least one incident ("needed treatment after receiving a blast of radiation"). (I suppose it could have been purely precautionary.)
I don't really see the downside for the "hard-core" folks either.
Why spend my time on tedious tasks that a computer should be able to automate for me?
Stuff like configuring X, tracking down package dependencies, installing applications from source--OK, the first time I do that stuff by hand, maybe I learn a little bit, but it gets old fast.
These days, thankfully, my Linux distro takes care of most of that that for me, so I can go focus on the stuff I care about. The fact that the stuff I care about is in fact kernel hacking doesn't make running ./configure scripts much more interesting to me than it is to anybody else, really.
Yeah, I do the same thing as you, with prepaid service a few bucks a month is enough to let me do everything I need the cell phone for.
But less expensive pay-as-you-go/pre-paid plans do seem to be showing up. And as the cost of smartphone drops, the pull of subsidies will also drop, so hopefully there will be more progress in that direction.
You might want to look at the various prepaid and pay-as-you-go plans.
As a very light cellphone user I've been paying under $10/mo for t-mobile's prepaid service (with an initial cost of around $50 for the cellphone and "activation fee", if I remember right) for several years now. Even much higher upfront costs can pay off pretty quickly compared to the cost of the two-year contracts.
I'll happily buy a smart phone the moment I can figure out how to get an unlocked (preferably rootable and developer-friendly) smart phone that works with multiple carriers.
I considered the Nexus S, and it looks like you can get minimal month-to-month contracts for around $40/mo if you pass on the subsidy. But as long as it only works well on t-mobile then I'm still effectively locked in....
$20 says she's just milking her celebrity for every dollar she can. She loves complaining about her critics. Why quell any speech that's about *her*?
Somebody who gives up a governership for TV shows and speaking tours has little interest in actually governing. She wants to be a conservative media figure.
Not that she'll say any of that--the possibility of a future run keeps her in the public eye.
Regan was great for this country. We had great economic growth which drove the Democrats crazy. We had low unemployment and nice growth of entrepreneurs. Everything after that was down hill.
Err: GDP and unemployment, graphed for your entertainment.
You're looking at the "brain drain" graph on the Economist article? The y-axis on those graphs is 2009 dollars (raw data here: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/household/index.html, table H-13).
It's not the degree that shows competency. It's the drive required to get the degree that tells you what you need to know about a potential employee.
Though there *are* also some skills you can expect from someone with a decent college education: writing readable email; making a convincing argument about something complicated; using whatever sources they can find to study up on what they need to know to finish a project; dealing with numerical data (not necessarily advanced mathematics, just knowing how to think about orders of magnitude, margins of error, averages, whatever--basic numeracy); deciding when a given source of information is trustworthy; etc. A lot of that in theory you learn in high school, but by the time someone gets a BA they've usually got that stuff pretty well pounded into them.
And then there's more specialized skills: again, not even the junior/senior-level classes you might think of as defining a major, but the basic bits you have to pick up to get there: CS majors will know what a debugger is, how basic logic and bit operations work, what a "for" loop is, how to read documentation, etc--a thousand tiny things any one of which anyone could pick up, but it's nice to know they've got that basic culture already. (Yeah, we've probably all heard the story of an interview where graduate of $prestigiousU flunked on the basics, but that's the exception.)
Har. Yes, let's have the fun of spending a different currency each time we cross a state border. Or of having to go through immigration when I want to take a job in another state.
Or you want to keep the same currency without a strong central government? I don't get the impression that's working out so great for Europe at the moment....
A google search for "john kenneth galbraith new york city budget" suggests that your quote is from "The American Left and Some British Comparisons, 1971. Looks like the quote said "doubling", not "tripling".
An August 27, 1972 New York Times article ("City's 71-72 Expense Budget Balanced") gives the 71-72 budget as $8.5 billion, $44.53 billion in today's money (according to the first inflation calculator I found on the web). The NYC OBM gives $63.1 billion as the budget for the current fiscal year. That looks like an inflation-adjusted increase of 42%.
I could have gotten the numbers, and the quote, wrong. What was your source?
(And ditto for "problems have become both larger and more numerous". Sources?)