Or pay for your phone yourself and get an uncrippled one. Or move away from the US and even get an uncrippled subsidized one. Your horizon seems quite narrow.
Yes, dipshit, I think most people's horizons are too narrow to actually MOVE TO A DIFFERENT COUNTRY to get a better cell phone. If you actually did that, you're probably insane.
I had that discussion with one of my managers about people giving notice, and I asked him how much notice I would get from him if I were to be fired or laid off. He went into a long explanation of how telling an employee he's getting canned causes all sorts of security problems and low productivity etc etc, to which I pointed out I would give him as much notice as I thought he would give me.
I don't think he liked that, but he understood where I was coming from. Companies expect generosity and loyalty from their employees, but have absolutely no intention of being generous or loyal to their employees. Generous and loyal employees increase company proffit. Generous and loyal companies lower company proffit. That can only lead to this sort of behavior.
A decent company will solve that dilemma by giving you a decent severance package. This is especially true if you're simply laid off as opposed to being fired for Xeroxing your ass.
There is a big difference though between this type of marketing, and me putting a single line with a link and a factual statement in my sigline.
That's not spam because you haven't sent it to anyone. People notice it only because they're reading what you have to say, which presumably must be worth reading. So yes, that's much different, to the point where I'd barely qualify it as advertising at all. To be honest I don't think you need to be so defensive, a handful of words in YOUR sig isn't the same as 20 emails with image attachments in MY inbox.
Now, if you start sending out mass emails, you go down with the likes of Prince Mubutu who needs to get $20 Million out of his country.
If there was actually a working scheme that allows you to prove your age online without placing trust in a dubious third party and which wasn't trivially breakable, I'd buy that. But there is no Internet-based proof-of-age scheme that works. Generally, anyone with access to a credit card can acquire one. Anyone who doesn't trust the apparently-dodgy businesses operating in the area with their credit card details can't.
Not saying I agree with them, but the lawmakers' response is likely something along the lines of "that's your problem." Not to mention which, faking IDs isn't even challenging either, so the parallel is a reasonable one.
Unfortunately, an unenforceable law still costs the rest of us time, convenience and money, because anyone who doesn't want the hassle of being prosecuted and having to take the case through multiple levels of appeal to have the law declared unconstitutional will comply with it anyway. Don't think for a moment that if this law is passed, every blogger account there is will be suspended until its owner can prove their age, whether or not the owner is even in the US. How many great blogs will we lose?
At least they get struck down fast and I'd imagine there would be a temporary injunction against blocking them pending outcome of the case. I can hear it now, "Someone think of the bloggers!"
There is no real way to do that. Who is liable if the minor works around the security and makes a page? What if said minor created a page and NOTHING happened aside from a parent finding out the page exists? What is an acceptable form of verifying parental consent?
This proposal is a prime example of people who don't know jack about how the technology works trying to legislate it.
Well, you make the company liable just as bars are liable if a kid uses a fake ID. That's the approach they'll likely take, assuming this is found Constitutional the fist time it's tested, which it won't.
Maby this will be a wakeup call to the cell phone companies that they are completly clueless about the market they control.
Or maybe it will be a wakeup call to Apple fans to remind them that the company that made the iPod also made the flop that was the Newton. They're not infallible, and given the terms Apple was demanding, it would definitely need to be to make it worth it.
When I compared eBay to gambling I meant precisely that. And also of course that all fraud applicable (and actually used) to gambling would be also applicable to gambling.
Now look how strict gambling regulated - and compare to how lax regulated eBay is. (Honestly I doubt that it is regulated at all). eBay now does whatever it wants and whenever it wants.
Which is the problem people have with Ebay now. Vegas cleaned up its act quite some time ago, so that when you gamble in Vegas you know you're getting a clean game. Vegas has worked its ass off to get rid of the cheaters, and they do a damned good job. The whole point of Ebay, and a large justification of their cut, is that you're supposed to be able to trust that you're getting a clean game, and you're not. I think people have a right to expect Ebay to do more to clean up the game.
Shill bidding should not be particularly tough to snuff out.
To me, eBay was always a gambling site. There is NO other point in auctioning.
And shill bidding is like a casino where the house uses loaded dice. Which is fraud, and bad and stuff. Being OK with gambling doesn't mean being OK with cheating.
When anyone starts a point with "studies show..." you can be sure the author is full of shit. What studies? Who's studies? And show my a study by respected economists, not some crap on a nutball website.
Obviously nobody *likes* taxes, for Chrissakes, but there seems to be little alternative for government fundraising unless you think people will make donations, which I believe rather unlikely.
If you have a security clearance you get to "know" a lot more about what the government is doing with trillions of dollars in taxpayer money.
Do you have one? They don't hand you the keys to the car with a clearance. You get access to know a little bit about a small piece of an enormous pie.
I'm guessing the databases are chock full of information gleened from digital transmissions, many financial transactions, cell phones (satellites are in international airspace, therefore, every cell phone call is an international communication), IMs (sent through international servers or international lines), IRC, heck, even web postings...
No way in hell. Have you ever known our government to have their shit anywhere near together enough to do that? Not only do they not have that data, they wouldn't know how to make sense of it if they had it. Not to mention which, there is no collective "they", it's spread across many agencies, and the FBI is using the digital equivalent of an old card catalog system. SAIC just royally fucked a $200M contract to modernize their computer system to vintage 1990 state of the art, and they couldn't implement it. Had to scrap it. So no way.
Well, not quite. As I understand it, the remedy sought by plaintiffs was cessation of the program, which, as toe gov argues, has ceased anyway. With the wifebeater, the remedy is jail. So somewhat different. Don't know if that helps get them off the hook or not, but what would plaintiffs argue now?
A textbook is a poor replacement for research especially when it comes to history. I've seen more blatantly incorrect information in college level history books then in Wikipedia (and I'm not implying Wikipedia is anywhere near perfect). Unfortunately most professors select textbooks that support their own prejudices (many times even their own book) for the courses they teach and aren't open to any viewpoints that may be counter to those prejudices no mater how well supported.
Sir, how dare you imply that our beknighted pursuers of the truth are driven by ego and insecurity! I can assure you those sorts of bias aren't confined to history, I saw them constantly in the sciences.
For what it's worth, a textbook isn't for research in any field; they're supposed to give a rough background of the collected best-guess background knowledge in a given field. Where the textbook ends, research begins.
What I don't get is that she's very dismissive of the Yucatan crater, saying it's too small. Well, it was big enough go spread iridium across the entire planet in pretty big concentrations, so I'm not sure what she's basing that off of. Her entire thesis seems to be that the crater is timed 300K years wrong, and that her volcano is closer to the time. But to me it seems that the best case she could make is that the crater in the Yucatan is the wrong one, since the die-off correlates very well with the iridium layer. She seems to want to make her volcano the interim winner, but I don't buy it. Not to mention, those eruptions were continuous over an extended period, while KT seems more abrupt.
Still, always good to try new ideas, I'm just not putting the crown on this one.
I begrudgingly signed a one year contract (lease) for an apartment when I didn't own a house, and that bothered me. But I would never sign an agreement to pay someone hundreds of dollars to stop using their shitty service. That makes no sense to me.
Well it's not like it sounded like a great idea to the rest of us either, it's kind of the lack of alternatives. It's either get a service plan with a major carrier or one of those "pay as you go" plans that outrageously gouge you per minute. You find a better option in the US, you let me know.
Of course, annual rates swung up and down over the period; that is related to business cycles, weather (drought years tend to make food more expensive, etc.), inventions, improvements in manufacturing, transport, and trade, etc. But my point that there was relative price stability over a sustained period is in fact correct, despite your protestations to the contrary. In fact, because of the slight general deflation, anyone living off 5,000 pounds in 1850 was actually richer in 1900, assuming he lived off the interest.
Even if this were true, it's a unique, rare, and bad situation - a deflationary economy is actually quite bad because it leaves people realizing that they'll do better hoarding their money, not spending it, and this is poor for the economy long term because it leads to reduced investment and spending.
Also, the car example: you seem to be OK with 5% inflation. At that rate, your money in 14 years buys half of what it does today.
Which is fantastic motivation to invest that money, benefiting the economy, than leaving it idle. You have people sitting on all their money, you have a recession. Yes, you're right. I don't want my money to lose value. That's why I don't leave my money in a matress for 14 years. Or invest it in, say, gold, which has shown a return of about 1% annually for the last couple of centuries.
May be fine by you, but I did the taxes of a lot of pensioners who suffered through rates even higher than that in the late 1960's-1970's. People who had a comfortable fixed income in 1960 ($5,000 Cdn) were dead broke by 1974.
Which proves only that pensions suck; something that is being realized now as they die a long overdue death in favor of diversified investment plans like 401(k)'s here in the states.
Finally, you say "In NA and Europe, inflation barely exists". Please go visit some people living on fixed incomes and ask them if they have as much spending power as they did last year.
Ah, when all else fails, and you have no evidence, rely on sappy strawman arguments. You should be a politician. I'm not ready to dereail a good economy (overall) to deal with their not accounting for even modest inflation in their retirement calculations. If they didn't realize that inflation would occur over the next 30 years like it had over the past 30, they're idiots. Hell, these people lived through the Depression AND the 70's/early 80's, they KNOW what inflation is. If they failed to plan it's their own damned fault.
People who had a comfortable fixed income in 1960 ($5,000 Cdn) were dead broke by 1974. My father supported a family with three kids on $7,000 Cdn a year in 1962, when we bought our first house, and we were comfortably middle class. So I have lived through inflation; you apparently haven't.
I have, actually, 70s/80s. And thus I realize that it's a good idea to plan it into your retirement calculations rather than determining how much it costs to live today and assuming that will remain fixed for decades, because that's just retarded.
If my Internet service goes from $35 to $50 a month, but the line speed doubles, government stats will say my cost actually fell on kbps basis, even though it's costing me an extra $180/year. And yes, it is faster; pages that used to load in 1.5 seconds now load in 1 second. Big effing deal; the extra expense compared to the miniscule time savings should show up as in increase in CPI, not a decrease. But, please, by all means continue to drink the Kool-Aid; meanwhile, my gold funds have more than doubled in the past two years.
Great example, internet service has bottomed out here to the point where broadband is available for $20/month. The overall price point won't move much below $20 because it's simply not worth anyone's time to sell any always-on service for much less than that per month.
All in all, your examples seem to basically stem from a lack of planning to account for even modest, 3%/year inflation. Sure, if people retired immediately before the gas shortage and a decade of double digit inflation ensued, I feel sorry for *them*.
Your grasp of macroeconomics is remarkably weak. We live in a world where more goods are being made every day, as China and India rev up their production. Go to your local car dealer, and look at the inventory piled up on his lot. Yet we have inflation, which is actually far higher than the government's posted CPI. (Government and business love to keep the CPI low, as it lets them avoid cost-of-living-adjustments.) Why? Because there is too much money being created, thanks to the US deficits and the fractional banking system.
Your statements contradict each other and fail to account for the fact that they take place at different timescales. We live in a world in which more goods are being made every *decade*. However, on a year to year basis, the GDP is quite capable of going down, which is a definition of recession/depression. If you're not aware of this,then you're not in a position to question anyone's understanding of macroeconomics. Second, while India and China do ramp up their production, that hardly helps our GDP, does it? Third, what the hell this has to do with money being created no one knows. If we were creating extra money, we wouldn't have the deficit but we would have more inflation. Instead, we have incredibly low inflation (check the numbers, it's below 4%), and a high deficit. So, through your line of reasoning using actual evidence that does exist, we should be printing more money. Fractional banking doesn't have that much to do with inflation, but if done wrong, results in banking disasters like teh S&L crisis in the 80s. This hasn't happened lately, so your evidence is woefully out of date.
Look at Great Britain from the end of the Napoleonic wars to WWI - a span of roughly 100 years, during which Britain was on a bimetalic standard of gold and silver. It cost 2p to mail a letter when Victoria ascended to the throne; it cost 2p when she died 75 years later. That's price stability. I paid C$3,500 for a Honda Civic in 1975; 30 years later, when presumably it should have moved way down the cost curve, it costs $15,000 for a base model. That's monetary inflation
Your examples are extremely weak, and the aggregate inflation in Britain over that period was not 0% regardless of what they chose to charge for a stamp. Your Civic example works out to under 5% inflation annually which is quite in the healthy range and fails to account for the fact that the 2005 model is a far better car than the 1975; the real rate of inflation on cars (assuming the same product in 1975 and 2005) is far less than 5% and quite likely would be negative if it were legal to sell a vintage 1975 car today. So again, your point is moot. There's no inflation there.
As for why gold should be used, it has many unique qualities. First, it makes pretty, shiny things that ladies have liked for thousands of years. So ladies want it. Men have learned that if they give ladies pretty, shiny things, they can get sex. So men want it. Gold is not too abundant, so scarcity makes it desirable. Gold is perfectly fungible - one gram of gold in China is exactly the same as a gram of gold in Burkina Faso. (Diamonds, for example, are also pretty shiny things that ladies like, but they don't function well as a currency because clarity, colour, flaws, etc. mean your 1 carat gem might not be worth as much as my 1 carat stone.) Gold is easily divisible into smaller amounts to facilitate smaller transactions, while retaining its value. (Gemstones lose much of their worth as they become smaller; check out the difference between the cost of a 1 carat solitaire at your local jeweler, versus a ring with "1 carat total weight" of teeny tiny diamond chips.) Gold, unlike copper or silver, doesn't tarnish easily.
Lame. The love of ladies for baubles is not enough to sustain a real economy in a time of crisis, which is the only time that any sort of paper economy would fail. If the revolution comes, metaphorically speaking, no one will care how much gold you have. Scarcity doesn't make a
An encyclopedia, regardless of type, is a poor replacement for a textbook. If you buy a book you rarely open, then you should be 1) studying harder, or 2) not buying your books until the 3rd week of class when you're sure you need them.;)
plenty of good American beers are more than 3-4 percent (unless you live in Utah or something). most of the beers I drink are around 5, but some are 7-9% or more
Amen. Especially on the west coast, all the craft brews are hoppy and strong as shit. Stone Brewery is one of my favorites, and I recently polished off a 22 Ozer (about a pint and a third for you Brits), over 10% alcohol. Fantastic barley wine. Yup.
Horseshit. Inflation has exactly one root cause - the use of fiat ("non-specie") currency.
Horseshit. Gold has no more innate worth than any other currency. Not to mention that you can be proven wrong by example, namely that inflation was quite well known in economies in the past that HAD NO PAPER MONEY.
Long-term, productivity increases force prices down, not up.
That's quite correct, which is why you see inflation in recessions quite often.
Why is it worth less? Because the man behind the curtain has printed a few trillion copies of the dollars in your pocket, and handed them out to his best friends, making yours worth less/worthless. Wasn't that nice of him?
This is an incredibly simplistic view of things, and still doesn't go back far enough to the root problems of macroeconomics. The problem isn't some clown with a printing press (unless he's as dumb as Germany was between the wars; that's how they paid off their war debt and screwed their economy). The problem is that more money is coming out of banks and being spent than is being saved during an economic downturn, at the same time that fewer goods are being produced. This increases prices. Note that this effect would be the same regardless of whether the currency is digital, paper, gold, or cowrie shells. It doesn't matter a bit. This is something I'll never successfully pound through the heads of the gold nuts who have absolutely no grasp of economics.
The dangers of fiat currency are legion and well-known of old; we were warned, well in advance, that the establishment of a fiat currency provides limitless, subtle, and inevitably abused powers to its wielders. We're still being warned, today. Few listen, even as the signs of such abuse are evident.
This naive approach forgets that any currency, by definition, is NOT something of innate value. EVERY currency is a fiat currency. Go study the gold/silver fights in England of a few hundred years ago; that was the man foisting a gold standard on the populace to keep money at a denomination they couldn't afford, thereby disempowering the poor. Any currency can be wielded as a weapon by those in power. Also, if gold wasn't accepted as a type of currency, what the hell would you do with it? Make rings, for God's sake? That gold you're hoarding is only worth a damned thing if someone comes around and buys it from you. So it's still a fiat currency as much as anything else. Who says it's worth anything? Only those with a false sense of security who feel that a bit of metal will serve as their security blanket. And what happens if people decide they don't want it? It's not useful at all on its own outside of the semiconductor and jewelry industry. What do you do then?
If the shit really hits the fan, the only worthwhile currency will be food, so I suggest you cash in your hoard of gold and invest in baked beans and twinkies, those things last forever.
As for your interest rate argument, welcome to 1978! Twenty percent? What? My mortgage is under six percent, and I believe that current rates are only slightly higher, although I haven't checked in a while.
Not to jump in the middle of a flame war, but the reason for skyrocketing housing the last 5 years is due in large part to historically low interest rates. The housing bubble began to burst very soon after rates began to increase again, when people with "exotic" mortgages started getting burnt by the increasing rates.
And besides, 'inflation' isn't some phenomenon that makes prices get higher. Inflation is just what we call it when they do so....
Well, sure, but the interesting part is certainly the bigger concept of *why* they do. In many cases, it's not supply and demand of goods so much, as also a supply and demand of *money*. Saved money is an IOU that can be cashed for stuff at any time. If the GDP of a country goes down - through, say, economic downturn - it may be the case that productivity output drops faster than available cash, meaning that there are more people trying to buy goods than there are goods existing, driving up the price. When salaries and goods both increase, it's a mechanism that serves to deweight money earned in economies past, and weighting money earned today more strongly - which also happens in bad economies with high unemployment, because it may be that much harder to earn that dollar than in the past. In effect, the IOUs you were granted in yesteryear are no good because it was so much easier to earn them.
One could devote an entire series of books to these concepts (Macroeconomics). In a free market (if such a thing truly exists), prices are always set by supply and demand of goods and cash. That's an effect, though. The goal is to understand the underlying cause.
For what it's worth, as a person who has more debt than liquid assets (ie, I have a mortgage and I'm under 30), I'm strongly in favor of some high inflation.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Or pay for your phone yourself and get an uncrippled one. Or move away from the US and even get an uncrippled subsidized one. Your horizon seems quite narrow.
Yes, dipshit, I think most people's horizons are too narrow to actually MOVE TO A DIFFERENT COUNTRY to get a better cell phone. If you actually did that, you're probably insane.
I had that discussion with one of my managers about people giving notice, and I asked him how much notice I would get from him if I were to be fired or laid off. He went into a long explanation of how telling an employee he's getting canned causes all sorts of security problems and low productivity etc etc, to which I pointed out I would give him as much notice as I thought he would give me. I don't think he liked that, but he understood where I was coming from. Companies expect generosity and loyalty from their employees, but have absolutely no intention of being generous or loyal to their employees. Generous and loyal employees increase company proffit. Generous and loyal companies lower company proffit. That can only lead to this sort of behavior.
A decent company will solve that dilemma by giving you a decent severance package. This is especially true if you're simply laid off as opposed to being fired for Xeroxing your ass.
though one could argue the Germans might have a reason to, since they have socialized health care
So does the US, with Medicare. I've seens studies that smokers require less health care money overall since they tend to die earlier, however.
There is a big difference though between this type of marketing, and me putting a single line with a link and a factual statement in my sigline.
That's not spam because you haven't sent it to anyone. People notice it only because they're reading what you have to say, which presumably must be worth reading. So yes, that's much different, to the point where I'd barely qualify it as advertising at all. To be honest I don't think you need to be so defensive, a handful of words in YOUR sig isn't the same as 20 emails with image attachments in MY inbox.
Now, if you start sending out mass emails, you go down with the likes of Prince Mubutu who needs to get $20 Million out of his country.
...are belong to us.
How long till a EE undergrad sends them a breadboard project and tells them "U write me da driver, u promise!"
If there was actually a working scheme that allows you to prove your age online without placing trust in a dubious third party and which wasn't trivially breakable, I'd buy that. But there is no Internet-based proof-of-age scheme that works. Generally, anyone with access to a credit card can acquire one. Anyone who doesn't trust the apparently-dodgy businesses operating in the area with their credit card details can't.
Not saying I agree with them, but the lawmakers' response is likely something along the lines of "that's your problem." Not to mention which, faking IDs isn't even challenging either, so the parallel is a reasonable one.
Unfortunately, an unenforceable law still costs the rest of us time, convenience and money, because anyone who doesn't want the hassle of being prosecuted and having to take the case through multiple levels of appeal to have the law declared unconstitutional will comply with it anyway. Don't think for a moment that if this law is passed, every blogger account there is will be suspended until its owner can prove their age, whether or not the owner is even in the US. How many great blogs will we lose?
At least they get struck down fast and I'd imagine there would be a temporary injunction against blocking them pending outcome of the case. I can hear it now, "Someone think of the bloggers!"
There is no real way to do that. Who is liable if the minor works around the security and makes a page? What if said minor created a page and NOTHING happened aside from a parent finding out the page exists? What is an acceptable form of verifying parental consent? This proposal is a prime example of people who don't know jack about how the technology works trying to legislate it.
Well, you make the company liable just as bars are liable if a kid uses a fake ID. That's the approach they'll likely take, assuming this is found Constitutional the fist time it's tested, which it won't.
Maby this will be a wakeup call to the cell phone companies that they are completly clueless about the market they control.
Or maybe it will be a wakeup call to Apple fans to remind them that the company that made the iPod also made the flop that was the Newton. They're not infallible, and given the terms Apple was demanding, it would definitely need to be to make it worth it.
When I compared eBay to gambling I meant precisely that. And also of course that all fraud applicable (and actually used) to gambling would be also applicable to gambling. Now look how strict gambling regulated - and compare to how lax regulated eBay is. (Honestly I doubt that it is regulated at all). eBay now does whatever it wants and whenever it wants.
Which is the problem people have with Ebay now. Vegas cleaned up its act quite some time ago, so that when you gamble in Vegas you know you're getting a clean game. Vegas has worked its ass off to get rid of the cheaters, and they do a damned good job. The whole point of Ebay, and a large justification of their cut, is that you're supposed to be able to trust that you're getting a clean game, and you're not. I think people have a right to expect Ebay to do more to clean up the game.
Shill bidding should not be particularly tough to snuff out.
To me, eBay was always a gambling site. There is NO other point in auctioning.
And shill bidding is like a casino where the house uses loaded dice. Which is fraud, and bad and stuff. Being OK with gambling doesn't mean being OK with cheating.
When anyone starts a point with "studies show..." you can be sure the author is full of shit. What studies? Who's studies? And show my a study by respected economists, not some crap on a nutball website.
Obviously nobody *likes* taxes, for Chrissakes, but there seems to be little alternative for government fundraising unless you think people will make donations, which I believe rather unlikely.
If you have a security clearance you get to "know" a lot more about what the government is doing with trillions of dollars in taxpayer money.
Do you have one? They don't hand you the keys to the car with a clearance. You get access to know a little bit about a small piece of an enormous pie.
I'm guessing the databases are chock full of information gleened from digital transmissions, many financial transactions, cell phones (satellites are in international airspace, therefore, every cell phone call is an international communication), IMs (sent through international servers or international lines), IRC, heck, even web postings...
No way in hell. Have you ever known our government to have their shit anywhere near together enough to do that? Not only do they not have that data, they wouldn't know how to make sense of it if they had it. Not to mention which, there is no collective "they", it's spread across many agencies, and the FBI is using the digital equivalent of an old card catalog system. SAIC just royally fucked a $200M contract to modernize their computer system to vintage 1990 state of the art, and they couldn't implement it. Had to scrap it. So no way.
Gates lucked into an OS deal where he wheedled and dealed and even tried to shut out a partner.
Didn't Jobs screw Woz out of a bunch of cash off of an Atari deal or something like that? Don't think Gates is alone there.
Well, not quite. As I understand it, the remedy sought by plaintiffs was cessation of the program, which, as toe gov argues, has ceased anyway. With the wifebeater, the remedy is jail. So somewhat different. Don't know if that helps get them off the hook or not, but what would plaintiffs argue now?
A textbook is a poor replacement for research especially when it comes to history. I've seen more blatantly incorrect information in college level history books then in Wikipedia (and I'm not implying Wikipedia is anywhere near perfect). Unfortunately most professors select textbooks that support their own prejudices (many times even their own book) for the courses they teach and aren't open to any viewpoints that may be counter to those prejudices no mater how well supported.
Sir, how dare you imply that our beknighted pursuers of the truth are driven by ego and insecurity! I can assure you those sorts of bias aren't confined to history, I saw them constantly in the sciences.
For what it's worth, a textbook isn't for research in any field; they're supposed to give a rough background of the collected best-guess background knowledge in a given field. Where the textbook ends, research begins.
What I don't get is that she's very dismissive of the Yucatan crater, saying it's too small. Well, it was big enough go spread iridium across the entire planet in pretty big concentrations, so I'm not sure what she's basing that off of. Her entire thesis seems to be that the crater is timed 300K years wrong, and that her volcano is closer to the time. But to me it seems that the best case she could make is that the crater in the Yucatan is the wrong one, since the die-off correlates very well with the iridium layer. She seems to want to make her volcano the interim winner, but I don't buy it. Not to mention, those eruptions were continuous over an extended period, while KT seems more abrupt.
Still, always good to try new ideas, I'm just not putting the crown on this one.
A very good comparison at http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/education/events/cowe n1b.html
I begrudgingly signed a one year contract (lease) for an apartment when I didn't own a house, and that bothered me. But I would never sign an agreement to pay someone hundreds of dollars to stop using their shitty service. That makes no sense to me.
Well it's not like it sounded like a great idea to the rest of us either, it's kind of the lack of alternatives. It's either get a service plan with a major carrier or one of those "pay as you go" plans that outrageously gouge you per minute. You find a better option in the US, you let me know.
Of course, annual rates swung up and down over the period; that is related to business cycles, weather (drought years tend to make food more expensive, etc.), inventions, improvements in manufacturing, transport, and trade, etc. But my point that there was relative price stability over a sustained period is in fact correct, despite your protestations to the contrary. In fact, because of the slight general deflation, anyone living off 5,000 pounds in 1850 was actually richer in 1900, assuming he lived off the interest.
Even if this were true, it's a unique, rare, and bad situation - a deflationary economy is actually quite bad because it leaves people realizing that they'll do better hoarding their money, not spending it, and this is poor for the economy long term because it leads to reduced investment and spending.
Also, the car example: you seem to be OK with 5% inflation. At that rate, your money in 14 years buys half of what it does today.
Which is fantastic motivation to invest that money, benefiting the economy, than leaving it idle. You have people sitting on all their money, you have a recession. Yes, you're right. I don't want my money to lose value. That's why I don't leave my money in a matress for 14 years. Or invest it in, say, gold, which has shown a return of about 1% annually for the last couple of centuries.
May be fine by you, but I did the taxes of a lot of pensioners who suffered through rates even higher than that in the late 1960's-1970's. People who had a comfortable fixed income in 1960 ($5,000 Cdn) were dead broke by 1974.
Which proves only that pensions suck; something that is being realized now as they die a long overdue death in favor of diversified investment plans like 401(k)'s here in the states.
Finally, you say "In NA and Europe, inflation barely exists". Please go visit some people living on fixed incomes and ask them if they have as much spending power as they did last year.
Ah, when all else fails, and you have no evidence, rely on sappy strawman arguments. You should be a politician. I'm not ready to dereail a good economy (overall) to deal with their not accounting for even modest inflation in their retirement calculations. If they didn't realize that inflation would occur over the next 30 years like it had over the past 30, they're idiots. Hell, these people lived through the Depression AND the 70's/early 80's, they KNOW what inflation is. If they failed to plan it's their own damned fault.
People who had a comfortable fixed income in 1960 ($5,000 Cdn) were dead broke by 1974. My father supported a family with three kids on $7,000 Cdn a year in 1962, when we bought our first house, and we were comfortably middle class. So I have lived through inflation; you apparently haven't.
I have, actually, 70s/80s. And thus I realize that it's a good idea to plan it into your retirement calculations rather than determining how much it costs to live today and assuming that will remain fixed for decades, because that's just retarded.
If my Internet service goes from $35 to $50 a month, but the line speed doubles, government stats will say my cost actually fell on kbps basis, even though it's costing me an extra $180/year. And yes, it is faster; pages that used to load in 1.5 seconds now load in 1 second. Big effing deal; the extra expense compared to the miniscule time savings should show up as in increase in CPI, not a decrease. But, please, by all means continue to drink the Kool-Aid; meanwhile, my gold funds have more than doubled in the past two years.
Great example, internet service has bottomed out here to the point where broadband is available for $20/month. The overall price point won't move much below $20 because it's simply not worth anyone's time to sell any always-on service for much less than that per month.
All in all, your examples seem to basically stem from a lack of planning to account for even modest, 3%/year inflation. Sure, if people retired immediately before the gas shortage and a decade of double digit inflation ensued, I feel sorry for *them*.
Your grasp of macroeconomics is remarkably weak. We live in a world where more goods are being made every day, as China and India rev up their production. Go to your local car dealer, and look at the inventory piled up on his lot. Yet we have inflation, which is actually far higher than the government's posted CPI. (Government and business love to keep the CPI low, as it lets them avoid cost-of-living-adjustments.) Why? Because there is too much money being created, thanks to the US deficits and the fractional banking system.
Your statements contradict each other and fail to account for the fact that they take place at different timescales. We live in a world in which more goods are being made every *decade*. However, on a year to year basis, the GDP is quite capable of going down, which is a definition of recession/depression. If you're not aware of this,then you're not in a position to question anyone's understanding of macroeconomics. Second, while India and China do ramp up their production, that hardly helps our GDP, does it? Third, what the hell this has to do with money being created no one knows. If we were creating extra money, we wouldn't have the deficit but we would have more inflation. Instead, we have incredibly low inflation (check the numbers, it's below 4%), and a high deficit. So, through your line of reasoning using actual evidence that does exist, we should be printing more money. Fractional banking doesn't have that much to do with inflation, but if done wrong, results in banking disasters like teh S&L crisis in the 80s. This hasn't happened lately, so your evidence is woefully out of date.
Look at Great Britain from the end of the Napoleonic wars to WWI - a span of roughly 100 years, during which Britain was on a bimetalic standard of gold and silver. It cost 2p to mail a letter when Victoria ascended to the throne; it cost 2p when she died 75 years later. That's price stability. I paid C$3,500 for a Honda Civic in 1975; 30 years later, when presumably it should have moved way down the cost curve, it costs $15,000 for a base model. That's monetary inflation
Your examples are extremely weak, and the aggregate inflation in Britain over that period was not 0% regardless of what they chose to charge for a stamp. Your Civic example works out to under 5% inflation annually which is quite in the healthy range and fails to account for the fact that the 2005 model is a far better car than the 1975; the real rate of inflation on cars (assuming the same product in 1975 and 2005) is far less than 5% and quite likely would be negative if it were legal to sell a vintage 1975 car today. So again, your point is moot. There's no inflation there.
As for why gold should be used, it has many unique qualities. First, it makes pretty, shiny things that ladies have liked for thousands of years. So ladies want it. Men have learned that if they give ladies pretty, shiny things, they can get sex. So men want it. Gold is not too abundant, so scarcity makes it desirable. Gold is perfectly fungible - one gram of gold in China is exactly the same as a gram of gold in Burkina Faso. (Diamonds, for example, are also pretty shiny things that ladies like, but they don't function well as a currency because clarity, colour, flaws, etc. mean your 1 carat gem might not be worth as much as my 1 carat stone.) Gold is easily divisible into smaller amounts to facilitate smaller transactions, while retaining its value. (Gemstones lose much of their worth as they become smaller; check out the difference between the cost of a 1 carat solitaire at your local jeweler, versus a ring with "1 carat total weight" of teeny tiny diamond chips.) Gold, unlike copper or silver, doesn't tarnish easily.
Lame. The love of ladies for baubles is not enough to sustain a real economy in a time of crisis, which is the only time that any sort of paper economy would fail. If the revolution comes, metaphorically speaking, no one will care how much gold you have. Scarcity doesn't make a
An encyclopedia, regardless of type, is a poor replacement for a textbook. If you buy a book you rarely open, then you should be 1) studying harder, or 2) not buying your books until the 3rd week of class when you're sure you need them. ;)
plenty of good American beers are more than 3-4 percent (unless you live in Utah or something). most of the beers I drink are around 5, but some are 7-9% or more
Amen. Especially on the west coast, all the craft brews are hoppy and strong as shit. Stone Brewery is one of my favorites, and I recently polished off a 22 Ozer (about a pint and a third for you Brits), over 10% alcohol. Fantastic barley wine. Yup.
Horseshit. Inflation has exactly one root cause - the use of fiat ("non-specie") currency.
Horseshit. Gold has no more innate worth than any other currency. Not to mention that you can be proven wrong by example, namely that inflation was quite well known in economies in the past that HAD NO PAPER MONEY.
Long-term, productivity increases force prices down, not up.
That's quite correct, which is why you see inflation in recessions quite often.
Why is it worth less? Because the man behind the curtain has printed a few trillion copies of the dollars in your pocket, and handed them out to his best friends, making yours worth less/worthless. Wasn't that nice of him?
This is an incredibly simplistic view of things, and still doesn't go back far enough to the root problems of macroeconomics. The problem isn't some clown with a printing press (unless he's as dumb as Germany was between the wars; that's how they paid off their war debt and screwed their economy). The problem is that more money is coming out of banks and being spent than is being saved during an economic downturn, at the same time that fewer goods are being produced. This increases prices. Note that this effect would be the same regardless of whether the currency is digital, paper, gold, or cowrie shells. It doesn't matter a bit. This is something I'll never successfully pound through the heads of the gold nuts who have absolutely no grasp of economics.
The dangers of fiat currency are legion and well-known of old; we were warned, well in advance, that the establishment of a fiat currency provides limitless, subtle, and inevitably abused powers to its wielders. We're still being warned, today. Few listen, even as the signs of such abuse are evident.
This naive approach forgets that any currency, by definition, is NOT something of innate value. EVERY currency is a fiat currency. Go study the gold/silver fights in England of a few hundred years ago; that was the man foisting a gold standard on the populace to keep money at a denomination they couldn't afford, thereby disempowering the poor. Any currency can be wielded as a weapon by those in power. Also, if gold wasn't accepted as a type of currency, what the hell would you do with it? Make rings, for God's sake? That gold you're hoarding is only worth a damned thing if someone comes around and buys it from you. So it's still a fiat currency as much as anything else. Who says it's worth anything? Only those with a false sense of security who feel that a bit of metal will serve as their security blanket. And what happens if people decide they don't want it? It's not useful at all on its own outside of the semiconductor and jewelry industry. What do you do then?
If the shit really hits the fan, the only worthwhile currency will be food, so I suggest you cash in your hoard of gold and invest in baked beans and twinkies, those things last forever.
Not to mention the fact that I should have hiw Preview instead of Submit. Grammar (and reading!) nazi's flame away!
OK. "nazi's" should be capitalized, and you've used an apostrophe for your plural which makes it a possessive.
As for your interest rate argument, welcome to 1978! Twenty percent? What? My mortgage is under six percent, and I believe that current rates are only slightly higher, although I haven't checked in a while.
Not to jump in the middle of a flame war, but the reason for skyrocketing housing the last 5 years is due in large part to historically low interest rates. The housing bubble began to burst very soon after rates began to increase again, when people with "exotic" mortgages started getting burnt by the increasing rates.
And besides, 'inflation' isn't some phenomenon that makes prices get higher. Inflation is just what we call it when they do so....
Well, sure, but the interesting part is certainly the bigger concept of *why* they do. In many cases, it's not supply and demand of goods so much, as also a supply and demand of *money*. Saved money is an IOU that can be cashed for stuff at any time. If the GDP of a country goes down - through, say, economic downturn - it may be the case that productivity output drops faster than available cash, meaning that there are more people trying to buy goods than there are goods existing, driving up the price. When salaries and goods both increase, it's a mechanism that serves to deweight money earned in economies past, and weighting money earned today more strongly - which also happens in bad economies with high unemployment, because it may be that much harder to earn that dollar than in the past. In effect, the IOUs you were granted in yesteryear are no good because it was so much easier to earn them.
One could devote an entire series of books to these concepts (Macroeconomics). In a free market (if such a thing truly exists), prices are always set by supply and demand of goods and cash. That's an effect, though. The goal is to understand the underlying cause.
For what it's worth, as a person who has more debt than liquid assets (ie, I have a mortgage and I'm under 30), I'm strongly in favor of some high inflation. ;)