If you can't take your water or Coca-Cola through security, you have to pay twice as much for water or Coca-Cola on the inside. It's a financial boon to airport-based businesses.
So technically Scrabble could simply make a call, though Facebook, to get the religion of its users whenever they wanted it.
Only 1 out of a half-dozen phone companies told the NSA to go fuck themselves when they came asking for call records. How many application developers are there? How many people does the CIA have to ask until they find out what my favorite movies are?
In the olden days of 2 GB hard drives, often the data had to be read from the CD while the game was running. I still have an old Mac version of Civ II that had varying levels of installation. If you did the full installation, the installer quipped that if you had that much room available on your hard drive, you should call them and buy more games.
If it is so valuable, will you take 1000 Hugonz from me in exchange for 1000 Federal Reserve Notes?
Of course not--it's already established that your understanding of economics is nowhere near that of Greenspan or Bernanke, so I have no belief that you will properly manage your fiat currency.
So is the Fed part of the Government or not, according to your views?
It's part of the government, but it's very separate from the part of the government that sets the national budget, the part of the government that tries cases in court, and the part of the government that travels around the world killing people, such that none of those other institutions have too much control over the Fed.
So because it can legislate you consider it wise to trust them? I would say the other way around. They have also had the power to wreck money since ancient times (think of recalling gold coins and recoining with less metal, thus creating and spending money for wars) As you say, they have issued money, but at the same time they have always debased it. And specially in modern times they have proved not to be trustworthy: money crises and inflation in all continents: Argentina, Germany, Zimbabwe come to mind, and the record of the U.S. is not good, either.
Zimbabwe isn't an argument against trusting government with the money supply--it's an argument against trusting the government at all. Instead of "trust" we have legal, social, and political restraints. The evidence so far shows that those restraints work.
If you don't trust the USD anymore trade in EUR. If you don't trust EUR trade in GBP. If you don't trust GBP trade in YEN. OK, you might have to actually move from US to EU or UK or Japan to do that, but as a matter of fact I fully support your freedom to do so. Hey, CAD is doing better than USD right now, so you can even switch to a competing currency without overseas travel.
Oh yeah: legal tender laws are necessary because otherwise there would be no way for a court to redress grievances: if you owe me 1000 chickens, 100 bars of gold, or 5000 euro, but I only accept yen or depleted uranium, the government needs some way of making us agree on a shared medium of exchange.
Maybe he has a Firefox plugin for grammar checking. I don't think he has a Firefox plugin for checking whether or not his writings were even passably literate.
McCain's not gonna pick Giuliani, probably because Giuliani appeals to the Republican base almost less than McCain himself, and on top of that, Giuliani is unlikable. He could play the Spiro Agnew to McCain's Nixon, but no one wants that. I actually think Huckabee is a more likely choice: they already work together (they made a backroom deal in West Virginia to sink Mitt Romney and keep him from winning there) and Huckabee helps McCain nail down more of the base, which he needs to do to prop up Republican turnout and keep conservatives from revolting against him.
More relevant - and a good sign for the Democratic party as a whole, really - is the strength that Obama (and to a lesser extent Hillary) have shown in some battleground states. Obama got 300,000 votes in Alabama - a VERY red state. Huckabee - the winner on the GOP side, got 225,000. Both of them easily outpolled the nearest Republican in Missouri.
First, outpolling a Republican is a bad metric: a candidate in a 2 way race will outpoll a candidate in a 3 or 4 way race if the populations are anywhere near even. Second, a lot of Obama's wins in the South are due to the fact that he has attracted a lot of black voters. Black voters in the South already vote for the Democrat in the general election and the Democrat never wins.
The sad fact is, the exit polls pretty well indicate that this year is the heyday for identity politics. Middle-aged/old women vote for Hillary, black people vote for Obama, evangelicals vote for Huck, Mormons vote for Mitt, and the rest of the population (mainly white males) decides among themselves which of the white male candidates to vote for. Since the majority of voters are older white women, Hillary has the best chance to win it all.
Yep, they're called 'homeopathic remedies'. Seen a couple of ads on tv, one was at least a full minute long, pimping homeopathic crap. Very disturbing.
Please tell me they didn't make a full minute long version of "Head On! Apply directly to the forehead!".
There's nothing stopping people from using gold as a medium of exchange. The private ownership, possession, and exchange of commodities, including precious metals such as gold, is totally legal.
If you honestly consider fiat money valueless, then it logically follows that you won't mind giving it all to me. So how about it? Email me.
Incidentally, the myth of the gold standard being some sort of free enterprise money is bunk. The same legal tender laws that give fiat currency its value are what originally created and propped up the gold standard. Before federal laws changed, silver backed much of the currency due to bimetallism.
It is all about not trusting the government to debase currency by increasing the money supply.
I hate to break it to you, but mining gold increases the money supply under a gold standard, and mining silver increases the money supply under bimetallism (the gold/silver standard). One point that you gold bugs always like to harp on is that "the government" controls the money supply. It's the Federal Reserve that controls the money supply, and their decisions are completely independent of what the Congress or President decide to do. Other times, gold bugs try to claim that the Federal Reserve isn't part of the government, which exaggerates things the other way.
Do you think it is wise to trust the government with your money?
Considering that governments have issued currency and had the power to pass legal tender laws by one means or another since ancient civilization, this is kind of a settled issue, isn't it?
Here are some interesting charts. It looks like over the past 10 years between 2500 and 2600 metric tons of gold were mined per year, for a cumulative 140,000-155,000 metric tons of world gold production. A high estimate of the rate of growth of the base of gold is thus 2600/140,000, or about 1.9%. World economic growth was closer to 5.2%. That difference in growth rates would cause deflation, and you're probably right that at the current size and growth rate of both our gold reserves and the world economy, gold production would probably not outpace economic growth. On the other hand, deflation is still to be avoided, and during much of the gold standard era, the cumulative production was low enough that gold rushes did cause inflationary periods.
Congress is responsible for the federal budget, and therefore the debt. The Federal Reserve is responsible for printing money. You're right in that it's a moral hazard for, for instance, a dictatorship that didn't have an operationally independent central bank, but that is emphatically not the situation the United States is in. Think by analogy--it's certainly a moral hazard for the judge and prosecutor to be the same person, but even though the judge and prosecutor both work for the government, they're operationally independent, so you don't get off saying "it's a moral hazard for the State of Iowa to both prosecute and judge accused criminals".
Well, here's a clue: being an Engineer means that when you screw up, people die.
My dad was an engineer in the Marine Corps. I know that's a different sense of the term, but when combat engineers screw up, people don't die. What do you have to say to that? I've run rings around you logically!
On the gold standard, there is no such thing as monetary deflation. What, do you evaporate gold?
Deflation occurs when the currency gains value against goods, inflation occurs when the currency loses value against goods. Seriously, you didn't know that?
Except that you do have market distortion, control, and manipulation with paper currency. For example, you cannot "print" more gold. But the FED seems quite adept and printing more dollars.
Yes, there are differences between fiat currency and the gold standard. My point was that the gold standard distorts the market value of gold (which is, after all, just a shiny metal that doesn't corrode much and conducts electricity).
You cannot arbitrarily inflate or deflate gold. Pegging the currency to gold wold keep prices fairly stable as opposed to the Fed pile driving interest rates, printing more cash, and sending the dollar through the floor.
You're right--a gold-based currency inflates and deflates unpredictably. This is not a good thing. On the average it would spend more time deflating than inflating, which is also not a good thing. If you want the value of one US Dollar to remain the same, then the currency base has to grow at the same rate at the economy. That's monetarism, a thoroughly sensible and libertarian solution that avoids the problems of the gold standard while not using the Fed as a means to try and manage the economy.
To add to this, the Fed isn't even federal. It's private. So you have these large central banks which have no oversight influencing and determining monetary policy.
The Federal Reserve is commissioned by Congress and its chairmen are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. It's as much a government agency as any other. It does have a wide degree of operating independence, but that's a very good thing: it stops the Congress from causing hyperinflations just because they want to pay for shiny things.
Besides, he doesn't want to suddenly switch back to commodity backed currency. That would create insanity, like it did when we went of the standard back in the 70s. He wants to create competing currencies, which I think would be an excellent idea. Over time, the stability would probably win people over in long run.
I wasn't aware, and didn't suspect, that Ron Paul even had a concrete policy stance on the issue. Let's be fair: Ron Paul wants to do a lot of things, but he's smart enough to realize that half of them aren't gonna get done. He's focusing on cutting spending and our military intervention overseas, which is wise. There are a thousand more important problems to solve--if the gold standard ever becomes a serious political issue, we pretty much have it made.
As far as him not understanding economics, unless you have an advanced degree on the subject you should probably keep quiet. Ron Paul has studied economics quite extensively. And if Wall Street big wigs are agreeing with his ideas, then perhaps they know something that you do not.
As far as I can tell, most people who do have advanced degrees on the subject feel as I do on the basic issue. I know because I've read them and spoken to them and taken their classes. Their ideas are convincing to me.
Inflation is just a way of decreasing real wages and "creating" jobs in this manner, but it is in no way required for economic growth.
I agree. It's best for the value of the dollar to stay exactly the same from year to year. However, given a choice between inflation and deflation, inflation is preferable, so it's best for central banks to err on the side of inflation. (The gold standard, by the way, completely fails to maintain a constant value due to deflation.)
As of 2001, it was estimated that all the gold ever mined totaled 145 000 tonnes. According to wikipedia, about 370 tonnes were mined in the first five years of the California Gold Rush, which equals 0.25% of the world's gold supply. Assuming a similar gold rush today, it would inflate a gold standard based currency by a yearly average of 0.05% for the first five years. To call that hyperinflation is absurd.
The gold rush happened in 1849, not 2001. Comparing the quantity of gold discovered in the 1849 gold rush to the known gold reserves of 2001 is a completely bullshit metric.
The problem is that fiat currencies always have, and always will be mismanaged. I realize that I'm slightly conflating fractional reserve banking and fiat currency, but in practice they're part of the same problem.
Fiat currencies throughout the world have, for the most part, been managed well enough to function better as currency than gold would. Most exceptions have had everything to do with blatant corruption and not fiat currency in and of itself.
Conservatives want government to do just a few things and to do them well, and aside from that to leave everyone alone. The conservative agenda addresses things like taxes, immigration, national security, social issues, limited government, individual freedom. Those issues are not unique to evangelicals, nor "war hawks," nor "business interests."
Sounds like someone's been feeding you a line. Issues like prohibiting abortion, keeping sodomy illegal, passing a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and flag burning, and teaching creationism and abstinence in schools are just as "conservative" as lowering taxes, deregulating industry, or having a strong military. It's just that banning evolution, banning gay marriage, and instituting school prayer appeal to different sets of people than lowering taxes or building up the military. Maybe you should do a little research other than swallowing someone else's agenda wholesale.
The whole point of fiat currency is that you can press a button and voilá, the money supply quadrupled.
No, the whole point of fiat currency is to stop distorting the value of real commodities, prevent deflation, and control the runaway inflation that occurs when a gold rush happens.
Fiat currency is a lot easier than gold to mismanage, but a properly-managed fiat currency beats gold any day. And since there is a currency market, the forces of that market can be brought to bear. Now, it's true that fiat currency leads to inflation in aggregate, but the effects of gentle inflation are fairly tame, especially compared to the effects of gentle deflation.
But "evangelical Christians", "pro-business types" and "war hawks" are fairly orthogonal designations, which is one reason why it's hard for many people to choose.
Exactly my point--it's easy to be all three, one but not the others, or two but not the others, and for the past 28 years the Republican tent has been big enough to hold all these people. It's really quite surprising that they were able to do that for so long, and a primary campaign like we have now was probably the inevitable consequence of building that coalition.
Slashdot Mirror
Already happened.
If you can't take your water or Coca-Cola through security, you have to pay twice as much for water or Coca-Cola on the inside. It's a financial boon to airport-based businesses.
So technically Scrabble could simply make a call, though Facebook, to get the religion of its users whenever they wanted it.
Only 1 out of a half-dozen phone companies told the NSA to go fuck themselves when they came asking for call records. How many application developers are there? How many people does the CIA have to ask until they find out what my favorite movies are?
In the olden days of 2 GB hard drives, often the data had to be read from the CD while the game was running. I still have an old Mac version of Civ II that had varying levels of installation. If you did the full installation, the installer quipped that if you had that much room available on your hard drive, you should call them and buy more games.
Of course not--it's already established that your understanding of economics is nowhere near that of Greenspan or Bernanke, so I have no belief that you will properly manage your fiat currency.
So is the Fed part of the Government or not, according to your views?It's part of the government, but it's very separate from the part of the government that sets the national budget, the part of the government that tries cases in court, and the part of the government that travels around the world killing people, such that none of those other institutions have too much control over the Fed.
So because it can legislate you consider it wise to trust them? I would say the other way around. They have also had the power to wreck money since ancient times (think of recalling gold coins and recoining with less metal, thus creating and spending money for wars) As you say, they have issued money, but at the same time they have always debased it. And specially in modern times they have proved not to be trustworthy: money crises and inflation in all continents: Argentina, Germany, Zimbabwe come to mind, and the record of the U.S. is not good, either.Zimbabwe isn't an argument against trusting government with the money supply--it's an argument against trusting the government at all. Instead of "trust" we have legal, social, and political restraints. The evidence so far shows that those restraints work.
If you don't trust the USD anymore trade in EUR. If you don't trust EUR trade in GBP. If you don't trust GBP trade in YEN. OK, you might have to actually move from US to EU or UK or Japan to do that, but as a matter of fact I fully support your freedom to do so. Hey, CAD is doing better than USD right now, so you can even switch to a competing currency without overseas travel.
Oh yeah: legal tender laws are necessary because otherwise there would be no way for a court to redress grievances: if you owe me 1000 chickens, 100 bars of gold, or 5000 euro, but I only accept yen or depleted uranium, the government needs some way of making us agree on a shared medium of exchange.
Maybe he has a Firefox plugin for grammar checking. I don't think he has a Firefox plugin for checking whether or not his writings were even passably literate.
The IE 6 remark was probably a reference to Firefox having a spell checker.
McCain's not gonna pick Giuliani, probably because Giuliani appeals to the Republican base almost less than McCain himself, and on top of that, Giuliani is unlikable. He could play the Spiro Agnew to McCain's Nixon, but no one wants that. I actually think Huckabee is a more likely choice: they already work together (they made a backroom deal in West Virginia to sink Mitt Romney and keep him from winning there) and Huckabee helps McCain nail down more of the base, which he needs to do to prop up Republican turnout and keep conservatives from revolting against him.
First, outpolling a Republican is a bad metric: a candidate in a 2 way race will outpoll a candidate in a 3 or 4 way race if the populations are anywhere near even. Second, a lot of Obama's wins in the South are due to the fact that he has attracted a lot of black voters. Black voters in the South already vote for the Democrat in the general election and the Democrat never wins.
The sad fact is, the exit polls pretty well indicate that this year is the heyday for identity politics. Middle-aged/old women vote for Hillary, black people vote for Obama, evangelicals vote for Huck, Mormons vote for Mitt, and the rest of the population (mainly white males) decides among themselves which of the white male candidates to vote for. Since the majority of voters are older white women, Hillary has the best chance to win it all.
Well, at the time (I was 16 so my judgment was questionable) they seemed fairly attractive. The bruises just added to the effect.
Please tell me they didn't make a full minute long version of "Head On! Apply directly to the forehead!".
That's still not synonymous with "increasing the money supply", which happens under the gold standard every time someone pans for gold in the river.
There's nothing stopping people from using gold as a medium of exchange. The private ownership, possession, and exchange of commodities, including precious metals such as gold, is totally legal.
If you honestly consider fiat money valueless, then it logically follows that you won't mind giving it all to me. So how about it? Email me.
Incidentally, the myth of the gold standard being some sort of free enterprise money is bunk. The same legal tender laws that give fiat currency its value are what originally created and propped up the gold standard. Before federal laws changed, silver backed much of the currency due to bimetallism.
It is all about not trusting the government to debase currency by increasing the money supply.I hate to break it to you, but mining gold increases the money supply under a gold standard, and mining silver increases the money supply under bimetallism (the gold/silver standard). One point that you gold bugs always like to harp on is that "the government" controls the money supply. It's the Federal Reserve that controls the money supply, and their decisions are completely independent of what the Congress or President decide to do. Other times, gold bugs try to claim that the Federal Reserve isn't part of the government, which exaggerates things the other way.
Do you think it is wise to trust the government with your money?Considering that governments have issued currency and had the power to pass legal tender laws by one means or another since ancient civilization, this is kind of a settled issue, isn't it?
Here are some interesting charts. It looks like over the past 10 years between 2500 and 2600 metric tons of gold were mined per year, for a cumulative 140,000-155,000 metric tons of world gold production. A high estimate of the rate of growth of the base of gold is thus 2600/140,000, or about 1.9%. World economic growth was closer to 5.2%. That difference in growth rates would cause deflation, and you're probably right that at the current size and growth rate of both our gold reserves and the world economy, gold production would probably not outpace economic growth. On the other hand, deflation is still to be avoided, and during much of the gold standard era, the cumulative production was low enough that gold rushes did cause inflationary periods.
Congress is responsible for the federal budget, and therefore the debt. The Federal Reserve is responsible for printing money. You're right in that it's a moral hazard for, for instance, a dictatorship that didn't have an operationally independent central bank, but that is emphatically not the situation the United States is in. Think by analogy--it's certainly a moral hazard for the judge and prosecutor to be the same person, but even though the judge and prosecutor both work for the government, they're operationally independent, so you don't get off saying "it's a moral hazard for the State of Iowa to both prosecute and judge accused criminals".
My dad was an engineer in the Marine Corps. I know that's a different sense of the term, but when combat engineers screw up, people don't die. What do you have to say to that? I've run rings around you logically!
You wouldn't think floating point libraries would be life-critical either, until they put one into a life support system.
Deflation occurs when the currency gains value against goods, inflation occurs when the currency loses value against goods. Seriously, you didn't know that?
Yes, there are differences between fiat currency and the gold standard. My point was that the gold standard distorts the market value of gold (which is, after all, just a shiny metal that doesn't corrode much and conducts electricity).
You cannot arbitrarily inflate or deflate gold. Pegging the currency to gold wold keep prices fairly stable as opposed to the Fed pile driving interest rates, printing more cash, and sending the dollar through the floor.You're right--a gold-based currency inflates and deflates unpredictably. This is not a good thing. On the average it would spend more time deflating than inflating, which is also not a good thing. If you want the value of one US Dollar to remain the same, then the currency base has to grow at the same rate at the economy. That's monetarism, a thoroughly sensible and libertarian solution that avoids the problems of the gold standard while not using the Fed as a means to try and manage the economy.
To add to this, the Fed isn't even federal. It's private. So you have these large central banks which have no oversight influencing and determining monetary policy.The Federal Reserve is commissioned by Congress and its chairmen are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. It's as much a government agency as any other. It does have a wide degree of operating independence, but that's a very good thing: it stops the Congress from causing hyperinflations just because they want to pay for shiny things.
Besides, he doesn't want to suddenly switch back to commodity backed currency. That would create insanity, like it did when we went of the standard back in the 70s. He wants to create competing currencies, which I think would be an excellent idea. Over time, the stability would probably win people over in long run.I wasn't aware, and didn't suspect, that Ron Paul even had a concrete policy stance on the issue. Let's be fair: Ron Paul wants to do a lot of things, but he's smart enough to realize that half of them aren't gonna get done. He's focusing on cutting spending and our military intervention overseas, which is wise. There are a thousand more important problems to solve--if the gold standard ever becomes a serious political issue, we pretty much have it made.
As far as him not understanding economics, unless you have an advanced degree on the subject you should probably keep quiet. Ron Paul has studied economics quite extensively. And if Wall Street big wigs are agreeing with his ideas, then perhaps they know something that you do not.As far as I can tell, most people who do have advanced degrees on the subject feel as I do on the basic issue. I know because I've read them and spoken to them and taken their classes. Their ideas are convincing to me.
I agree. It's best for the value of the dollar to stay exactly the same from year to year. However, given a choice between inflation and deflation, inflation is preferable, so it's best for central banks to err on the side of inflation. (The gold standard, by the way, completely fails to maintain a constant value due to deflation.)
As of 2001, it was estimated that all the gold ever mined totaled 145 000 tonnes. According to wikipedia, about 370 tonnes were mined in the first five years of the California Gold Rush, which equals 0.25% of the world's gold supply. Assuming a similar gold rush today, it would inflate a gold standard based currency by a yearly average of 0.05% for the first five years. To call that hyperinflation is absurd.The gold rush happened in 1849, not 2001. Comparing the quantity of gold discovered in the 1849 gold rush to the known gold reserves of 2001 is a completely bullshit metric.
The problem is that fiat currencies always have, and always will be mismanaged. I realize that I'm slightly conflating fractional reserve banking and fiat currency, but in practice they're part of the same problem.Fiat currencies throughout the world have, for the most part, been managed well enough to function better as currency than gold would. Most exceptions have had everything to do with blatant corruption and not fiat currency in and of itself.
Since the largest debt currently held by anyone is denominated in US dollars, that's a hell of an intrinsic value.
I make no assumptions, only inferences based upon the evidence I'm given. Perhaps I struck a nerve?
Sounds like someone's been feeding you a line. Issues like prohibiting abortion, keeping sodomy illegal, passing a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and flag burning, and teaching creationism and abstinence in schools are just as "conservative" as lowering taxes, deregulating industry, or having a strong military. It's just that banning evolution, banning gay marriage, and instituting school prayer appeal to different sets of people than lowering taxes or building up the military. Maybe you should do a little research other than swallowing someone else's agenda wholesale.
No, the whole point of fiat currency is to stop distorting the value of real commodities, prevent deflation, and control the runaway inflation that occurs when a gold rush happens.
Fiat currency is a lot easier than gold to mismanage, but a properly-managed fiat currency beats gold any day. And since there is a currency market, the forces of that market can be brought to bear. Now, it's true that fiat currency leads to inflation in aggregate, but the effects of gentle inflation are fairly tame, especially compared to the effects of gentle deflation.
Exactly my point--it's easy to be all three, one but not the others, or two but not the others, and for the past 28 years the Republican tent has been big enough to hold all these people. It's really quite surprising that they were able to do that for so long, and a primary campaign like we have now was probably the inevitable consequence of building that coalition.