The point is that the user probably won't tell you that My data should look like xyz. But he will tell you that There should be a button that makes my data look like xyz.
Yes, that's fine if you're talking about a GUI app. But you (presumably you, since it was an AC) said the following:
About 50% of the time the users will say "There should be a button there, and when you press it, [blah blah blah] happens". And it turns out that [blah blah blah] is significant functionality that requires a very different back-end design that I was envisioning.
There's no way you are going to get that sort of business user feedback from a set of class diagrams or commandline switches. It requires some sort of whiteboarding or "prototype".
My response is that if you're developing a CLI app, there's no way on this earth that you'd just present the user a list of switches apart from some demonstration or explanation of what they do. The "prototype" is sample/simulated output that demonstrates what each switch does, and you most certainly can get useful feedback from this.
You suggest that a GUI mockup is a way to "put it in terms that the user can conceptualize". Fine. But it's not the only way to do it. Seeing sample/simulated *results* likewise puts it in terms the user can understand - and arguably does so much more intelligently than a GUI.
I'm not challenging the validity of what you're doing. I'm not necessarily even championing the CLI over the GUI. I'm challenging the validity of your statement that you can't get good user feedback when prototyping a command-line app. You can; it's just a question of what you present to them for purposes of obtaining feedback.
There's no way you are going to get that sort of business user feedback from a set of class diagrams or commandline switches. It requires some sort of whiteboarding or "prototype".
But you wouldn't be presenting them a set of command line switches all by itself. You'd be presenting something more like:
"Here's what you get if you add this switch:"
blah bleh blih bloh bluh
So then your user looks at the output and says he needs a way to get output that looks like xyz instead. So instead of looking at a dopey form, he's looking at the data that he's actually interested in when telling you what he needs.
you see the file.tar.bz2 done, not a "hey, here I am!" message.
Actually, what you'll see is an error message, since x means you are extracting from a tarball, not creating one, and you specified a directory rather than a tarball as the target. Plus - since you added the v, you'll get extra verbosity.;-)
How then will this "empower" those who are deaf as well as blind?
The problem with attempting to create systems that are usable by literally anyone without assistance is the Windows problem: if you try to make something idiot proof, eventually they'll make a better idiot who will break your system.
The point is not that people with handicaps are idiots. The point is that it's not possible to design a voting system that can accommodate 100% of eligible voters in such a way that none of them will need help.
I'd go farther and say that when it comes to voting, it is far more important to focus upon security and reliability over usability. IMO the "benefits" of electronic voting are far outweighed by the liabilities.
Why would banks pay interest on accounts during deflation? They wouldn't have to -- they offer a service.
It depends upon the bank. If the bank doesn't lend money, then of course you're correct; they're providing a service by protecting your money. But I don't know any modern bank that does this. Do you? They always pay interest. They can do so because they're actually borrowing your money from you. They lend it to others, and you get a portion of the interest back that they earn on their loans to others. If people start "hoarding" their money at home, as you have alleged, then the banks are going to have to come up with clever ways to convince them to put their money in the bank instead. That usually means increasing the interest rates they pay to depositors, but it could mean giveaways for opening a new account or something.
Today, for instance, bank savings accounts pay less than inflation.
What they pay is less than the rate that they charge for loans they make to others. When banks charge higher rates for loans, they are in a position to pay more to depositors while still making a profit themselves.
I didn't realize you were considering a commodity that could actually be created/modified.
That's not what I said. I said "produced". Gold, for instance, is not "created". But it has to be found and dug out of the ground and refined before it's usable.
And you're opening yourself up to all the problems of a fiat currency.
No, you're not. Because nobody can just wave his hand and expand the money supply.
The real issue is whether the government has any business dictating what money is, and what people must accept in exchange for their property. The answer to both of these questions is "No." Certainly the government has a legitimate role in ensuring that people do not cheat each other, but this doesn't excuse or justify the notion that they ought to dictate what money is, or its value.
The government doesn't force you to use it's money, you know.
Um. Yes, they do. It's called "Legal Tender". If you owe me a debt, the legal tender laws state that you can satisfy that debt by paying me in dollars. Some people make nuisances of themselves, for instance, by forcing businesses to accept hundred dollar bills in payment for $2 worth of goods - because they can. The law gives the seller no recourse.
#1: Prices continuing to go down encourages consumers to put purchases off as long as possible, because the longer they put off purchasing something, the less it'll cost. I could buy that new car today for $20,000, but if I wait and buy a car next year, an equivalent model might be only $19,000. A business might spend $3,000,000 upgrading it's computers...or push the project off six months, and save $100,000 or so. Of course, the longer a purchase is pushed back, the more you save.
This was an interesting example, but I really don't think it helps your case at all. If people put off buying 2GHz P4 computers today, they'll be able to buy them for much less next year. But people still buy them today. They don't wait. Some do, of course; but enough people don't do so that manufacturers still have the incentive to produce things now, as well as seeking to improve them.
#2: Prices going down cuts into a business' profits.
You seem to think that this happens in a vacuum. It doesn't. If a company reduces its prices, it has reasons for doing so. It may have come up with ways to increase its efficiency, for instance; or the cost of materials may have gone down; or the cost of labor may have gone down; etc. Let's assume that a competitor lowers prices. Then our company must either lower its prices - in order to compete - or suffer the consequences (if any). If the new lower prices are insufficient to meet its expenses, then our company must somehow manage to reduce its expenses - perhaps by becoming more efficient, or by finding lower-priced material, or whatever.
The reason why this damages the immorality argument is that is can be argued (and is, at great length) that lower unemployment rates can justify inflation.
So - the end of lower unemployment justifies the means of theft? It appears to me that you are admitting that this is theft, but that it's okay because the government's goal is to reduce unemployment.
This doesn't damage the immorality argument at all. It raises more questions about the legitimacy of government tampering with the economy.
Nope, I'm still not mistaken, and this is the other part that shows an economic misunderstanding. The government doesn't create money by printing bills, because, as stated above, it wouldn't help. It creates money mostly by issuing bonds, and then spending the resulting income.
It's not a misunderstanding. It's a simplification for the sake of argument. The issue is whether it's immoral for the government to destroy the value of money by expanding the supply of money (by whatever means).
Here's the sentence that reveals armchair economics at its worst.
Whether I understand economics is of course a subject for some debate or other, but the statement to which you applied this isn't one that raises the question.;-)
I said: "The effect of counterfeiting - if left unchecked - is to destroy the value of money." This is absolutely true. If you're going to start inserting into the argument jibber-jabber about ones and zeroes in computers someplace - which really has no effect in the current context other than to deliberately and pointlessly obfuscate the issue, then of course I am free to expand my definition of counterfeiting to include criminals who attempt to create money by manipulating ones and zeroes in computers someplace. Counterfeiting - or the attempt to do it - occurs no matter what the form of the money is. Think of Ferris Bueller reducing the number of days he had missed class. On a primitive level, Joe Digital Counterfeiter can try and crack a bank's systems and change the amount of money in his accounts. This is no different from Joe Paper Counterfeiter with a printing press spewing out fake twenties.
The operative phrase was "if left unchecked." If the government doesn't nip counterfeiters in the bud, then everyone would run a printing press. Everyone would be cracking the banks and adding a few extra zeroes to their bank accounts. As I said: this would destroy the value of money if left unchecked.
More to the main point, though, is that while a forgery can indeed reduce the value of an original by confusing the potential market, this argument does not extend to currency, for the reason stated above that currency is a tiny portion of the money supply.
As already noted: expanding the original argument doesn't win you any points at all. If a million digital counterfeiters each spend a million counterfeit digital dollars into the economy, you've got a trillion dollar impact on the economy.
Yes. Your money will have more value. But, a year later, you'll have less money. Your wages will have gone down. You (and everyone else) will have every incentive to hoard money and little-to-no incentive to invest.
This is hit-and-miss. Sort of.;-)
You hit it when you imply that an inflated/inflating currency encourages people to "invest" - in this sense: an inflating currency reduces the incentive for people to simply hold their money - like, in a coffee can at home, for instance - because when they do this, their money is just losing value constantly. Therefore it makes more sense to do either of two things: 1) spend it (which is why modern Keynesian economists fret when consumer spending drops), or "invest" it in search of interest.
However, you miss it completely if you think that a stable currency encourages people to keep their money at home in a coffee can. They'll do the exact same sorts of investing, with perhaps more incentive to pursue somewhat safer investments. But let's assume that there really is more incentive to hoard. The consequence of this is that in order to get your money, those who want it - banks, stock brokers, etc. - will have to increase the incentives that they offer in order to get more people to put their money in banks. So that means that folks who do put their money in banks will get *more* interest.
Hint: banks and stock markets in the US predate fiat currency by quite a bit.;-)
if you have a commodity currency and population goes up, you will have deflation.
Not necessarily. If you have a commodity currency, the supply of the commodity may/probably will increase along with the population. Why? Because entrepreneurs will consider it profitable to produce more of the commodity.
But let's look at two possible outcomes to what happens if the supply of the commodity currency were to remain completely fixed. The most likely case is that if there weren't enough of a given commodity to be used as currency, people will simply switch to *other* commodities and use them as money instead of or alongside of the "real" currency. There are plenty of examples of this happening when supplies of real money are short: prisoners frequently use cigarettes as money, for one simple example.
Another alternative outcome is what you continue to miss. Let's assume that the commodity currency's supply is fixed. As the population increases, there are fewer bits of it available per capita. The consequence of this is that prices for goods will go down. It's inevitable, because buyers wouldn't have as many bits of money to spend. They will therefore refuse to pay old prices for things. Thus prices have to go down. In other words, the purchasing power of each bit of money will go up. It's inevitable. The long and short of it is that even if we assume the absurd - a commodity currency with an absolutely fixed supply - the free market still works. People would have fewer dollars in an absolute sense, but the value of those dollars would be increased.
In other words: no problem.
Deflation == bad.
What do you mean? Do you mean price deflation? How are lower prices a bad thing - ever? The idea is simply madness.
Or do you mean to refer to decreases in the money supply? It depends upon the nature of the decreases - why they happened. It also depends upon who is losing their dollars (after all, if the supply decreases, someone has fewer of them, right?). Keynesians typically fear this because it's *their* dollars that get lost. Investors fear it when it's a consequence of a collapsing stock market, and when shares they bought for $50 are now worth $5. This sort of thing is obviously bad for the ones losing their dollars, but to say that the government has some sort of responsibility to prevent this is to say that you don't like the free market - which, obviously, is a different argument - because you're asking the government to intervene in the markets to protect people fro
You're not getting it. I will have fewer dollars, but - as you yourself admitted, those dollars will be more valuable. That means that I haven't lost anything. It takes fewer of my dollars to buy a thing.
This is really not that hard. Think about it. Why did things cost less 50 years ago? It's because the dollar had not been so badly devalued by inflation. People didn't have as much money, but they didn't *need* to have as much, because they money that they had was more valuable.
I honestly don't see what's hard about this. Keynesians freely admit this is what is going on - but they don't care about the moral implications. They just ignore them. They think that it's preferable for the value of a currency to be under the control of the government, or a central bank. They don't care that when they devalue the currency by increasing the supply, they have destroyed the value of the currency held by citizens.
Similarly, if it's wrong for me to lock people up who break the law in my house, it must be wrong for the government?
You think you're clever, but you're not, unless you're ready to concede (wrongly) that might makes right. Where does the government get its "authority" devalue the currency?
There's nothing wrong with my printing my own money, that says "this is good money". Stores do it constantly, in the form of gift certificates.
Don't be absurd. You know perfectly well that this is entirely unlike what counterfeiters are doing.
Counterfeiters aren't inflating the money supply
Of course they are. Again, don't be silly. If this wasn't the fundamental evil behind counterfeiting, the government wouldn't care about it. It's *not* that they are forging the government currency; it's the *reason* that they are forging it that is the problem.
Counterfeiters attempt to pass fake money only because they think that they can produce their fake money at lower cost than actually obtaining real money. Otherwise there is absolutely no incentive for counterfeiting. None. Why would you counterfeit money if it cost you more to do it than the "value" of the bills you're creating?
Let's say Joe Mobster creates $1000 of bad bills, but it costs $1100 of real money for him to produce it. Is this cost effective for him? Of course not! So he'll never even bother trying, because it's a losing venture.
But if he can do it for, say, $800 or even less, well then it's a profitable venture - IF he can successfully create fake money that's convincing enough for someone to accept it as real money.
Boom. He's just added "money" to the total supply of money that's in circulation. If he's allowed to get away with this, others may do the same thing. Then you have lots of people doing it. Then you have lots and lots of people adding to the money supply, thereby devaluing the dollar.
You see? It's not just fraud. The feds wouldn't care about the lie so much if it weren't for the *effects* of it. The effect of counterfeiting - if left unchecked - is to destroy the value of money.
It's also incorrect to say that these knock-offs would devalue the original.
Then you don't know what you're talking about.
Let's suppose I own the ball that Barry Bonds hit for his 73rd home run. This thing recently sold for $450,000. Now let's suppose that someone takes this thing and throws it into a giant box of a million baseballs that look *exactly* the same. What's the Bonds ball worth now?
Answer: unless you can absolutely, positively, and with 100% certainty identify the Bonds ball, the Bonds ball has just become worthless (well, it's worth no more than any of the million other balls). In other words: it has been devalued.
And this is what counterfeiters attempt to do: persuade someone that the "money" or "Bonds ball" or whatever that they have is real, so that he will believe that it has the same value as the real thing. This works for a little while, but once you start having a lot of these things on the market, people begin to get wise that there's a problem: If three guys on your block claim to have the Bonds ball, it's pretty clear that at least two of them got screwed (and realistically, the third one did too, unless he can prove his claim). The same thing happens with money, too, *obviously*, though of course there's no easy way to discover the fakes: there can only be one real Bonds ball; there's normally a lot of money in circulation, though, so it's not so easy to detect that there are fakes (if the fakes are really good)...until there are lots and lots of fakes in circulation. But the same thing has happened. The real money gets devalued.
this drills an unrepairable hole in the "immoral to create new currency because it devalues currency" theory.
Now, if the government is increasing the supply of dollars by 12%/year -- a claim I don't believe -- then that's bad, but it's not a flaw with fiat currency, it's a flaw with the government policy.
No, it's both and more. It's a moral flaw, because inflating the money supply means that the dollars I possess become less valuable. When a government enacts a policy of inflating the money supply, they are enacting a policy of theft from all holders of the currency. This is immoral.
Think about it. The reasons why governments go after counterfeiters and check-bouncers and people who sell fake "art" and what not is because these crimes result in the devaluation of the original commodities (one joke is that the government goes after counterfeiters and check-bouncers - who are attempting to substitute their own fiat money for the government's - is that the government doesn't like competition).
One hand-painted portrait might be worth millions. A million cheaply printed duplicates of it are worth pennies. Supply and demand.
But if the counterfeiters are wrong for devaluing the currency, then so is the government, unless you're going to say that might makes right.
Well, thanks for the vote of confidence. When I went back and looked and saw "...the son of Joseph, which was the son of Heli,..." in the KJV, I got cold feet;-)
Of course, I've always heard that Luke presents Mary's lineage, which is what prompted my second point. But reading the KJV clouded my mind;-)
I suppose that it's reasonable to read "son" as "son-in-law", since I know that many parents refer to their children-in-law as their children. Still, at Slashdot, the zealots who are desperately seeking to misunderstand the Bible jump on things like this so often that I wanted to err on the side of caution by adding the disclaimer.
One kind of greed demands absurdly high prices for things, in an attempt at self-enrichment at any cost to others.
The other kind of greed refuses to part with anything it has at any price. It's reasonable to expect compensation; it's unreasonable to refuse any at all for a thing that will one day be in the public domain anyway. We're not talking about refusing to sell the Mona Lisa; we're talking about rights to restrict creation of a movie. Someone else's comparison to Smaug is apt, if indeed Mr. Tolkien is hoarding.
Joseph's lineage matters because although he was not the real father of Jesus, he certainly was the adoptive father (and for purposes of inheritance, adoption was as good as being natural-born).
It seems to me that between Matthew and Luke, the bases are covered: Luke presents Mary's lineage, which also is Davidic. Thus, whether a critic prefers to pursue the issue based upon his mother's or father's ancestry, Jesus is unquestionably in the Davidic line.
The free market depends upon the legitimacy of private property, and of the property owner's freedom to dispose of his property as he chooses.
If private property rights are abridged, you don't have a free market. If property owners aren't free to do what they want with their goods, you don't have a free market. It doesn't matter how scarce or abundant things are if private property rights are non-existent. It wasn't scarcity or abundance of material that made the Soviet economy so horribly broken; it was state ownership of everything.
In the present context, however, it's plainly silly to pretend that information can be "owned". What happens when two competitors "own" the same fact? Or who owns the "fact" that the sun set at 5:15pm yesterday? This is sheer idiocy.
Although the default kernel would not boot after the install completed, the failsafe would. So I started playing around with the command-line options there until I found a combination that worked properly (the failsafe one turns off more stuff than is necessary; for one thing, IDE DMA works on my box, and the failsafe turns it off).
The acpi=ht option might not help you; IIRC, the ht is for hyperthreading, so unless you have a P4 with hyperthreading enabled, this might not do you any good.
I've got an ICH5 board and a Seagate SATA drive. The RH 9 installer wouldn't even boot, so I went to FreeBSD for a while, waiting for things to catch up in Linux (FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE worked fine).
I just installed SuSE 9, and it works fine. One caveat: on my machine, I had to add the following options:
apm=off acpi=ht
in order to get the thing working. And now it works fine. I'm not sure that I'm up to full SATA speed yet, but it's pretty fast.
Those wacky polytheistic idol-worshipping Xtians (full disclosure: I'm Jewish) also believed that barcodes were the mark of the beast. (I guess the "beast" is one of their many, many false gods.) Here is one of many references about what xtians think UPC codes are.
The mods are on drugs. That's the only way that anyone could believe that this post was "Informative".
When you're done tarring all Christians with the same brush, perhaps we can take a look at the... "diversity" of opinion within Judaism? And then maybe you'll get the idea that it's sheer nonsense to generalize about all Christians' views on the basis of a few loonies.
Which branch of modern Judaism is right? Reform? Orthodox? Conservative? Who was right, the Essenes? The Hasidim? Who are the monotheists? Was it your Molech and Baal-worshipping ancestors, offering their children as human sacrifices?
Most Christians never considered bar codes to be the mark of the beast. Most Christians don't think that UPCs are the mark of the beast. Most Christians have never visited that idiot "666" link of yours, and most Christians would think its contents are rubbish.
Minor nit: This was not an ad hominem. It was clearly guilt by association: "People who buy Michael Moore's book also bought this guy's book, so obviously this guy's book is as bad as Michael Moore's book."
An ad hominem would be a direct attack on the man himself: "This guy is a lowlife leftwing scumbag who wouldn't know the truth if it hit him between the eyes, so obviously his book is worthless."
In examining The Tyro's post, I don't see anything that I'd call an ad hominem. But clearly he did attack Moore and the others ("blatant political hacks and operatives"), and he did apologize for *that* ad hominem; and he did resort to guilt by association.
Do you believe that O'Reilly really did win a Peabody?
Citing one instance of a supposedly correct fact (I'm not questioning it; I'm not in a position to do so) doesn't prove that Franken's book is generally reliable.
Ann Coulter is a die-hard defender of Joe McCarthy...
So out of one side of your mouth you complain about The Tyro's use of the ad hominem, and out of the other you resort to it yourself?
Should the possible offence, in this case, almost non-existent
Slavery, "non-existent"? Ha!
Not if what
this guy says is right: he estimates 27 million people in slavery today. There are slaves in the Islamic countries; there are slaves in China; there are slaves in Africa.
To be sure of something, sure I have to see it myself and believe it can't be faked. But while I don't know the sun will rise (pardon the inaccurate stating) tomorrow, I act as if it will because it fits the evidence from the rest of my life, specifically that the sun "rises" every morning. I know I could be living in a very elaborate Truman Show, but there's no reason to believe I am, it's not the simplest solution.
Though you go to elaborate lengths to avoid it, this entire statement of yours is from start to finish a statement of faith. I'm not sure why you wish so much to avoid just admitting it, but it's really not a bad thing.
In the first place, you have faith in your eyes (that they function properly) and other faculties, that they are reliable. In the second place, you have faith in your ability to determine whether something can be faked. In the third place, you have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow.
Faith isn't a dirty word;-) It's essentially synonymous with trusting someone or something, or relying on someone or something.
When people want to belive they make it easier to fool them.
Please describe for me a way that a man living in the first century, with no available technology, is able to suddenly appear in the middle of a closed room - twice, and how he is able to to ascend into the sky, and how he is able to arrange for angels to immediately appear and talk to his followers.
Furthermore, I can say similar things: when a man believes that God doesn't exist, it makes it easier to fool him. Scientists who don't believe in God find what they're looking for, because they're not open to finding anything else - or even to the possibility of finding anything else. They're not open to the possibility of finding evidence that God exists, and therefore they don't find it.
Ahhh, so by that logic, you're responsible for all the inconsistent and crazy things that all religious people say, right?
No, this was not my point. I was not attempting to tar all evolutionists just because one guy thought a pig's tooth is a hominid. My point was what I said: all evidence is interpreted (BTW - the guy in question was the director of the American Museum of Natural History; his discovery was applauded by other experts; drawings of "Nebraska man" went into texts on evolution; and *then* the error was discovered. But again: my purpose here is not to jump on all evolutionists; my point for now is that all evidence is interpreted).
Why religion, and why yours?
Why not my religion?;-) But seriously: I'll give you the same kind of answer that you gave me when I challenged you for making reason the ultimate authority: what else is there? Blind faith in reason?
Let me ask you some other questions. Where do you think you come from? Where did mankind come from? Why are we here? Do we have a purpose, or do we just exist?
What was it that convinced you that you needed religion and that this specific one was the right one?
My answer would be incomprehensible to you - not because you are stupid, but because the answer to this question is completely rooted in what I have come to believe. It makes no sense to attempt to frame such things in other ways. If you insist on knowing, I'll tell you. I'm not ashamed at all, but if you're looking for something that's going to pass the test of reason when reason is in the service of denying the possibility of the supernatural, you won't find it. (No, I didn't hear voices or see things;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that's fine if you're talking about a GUI app. But you (presumably you, since it was an AC) said the following:
About 50% of the time the users will say "There should be a button there, and when you press it, [blah blah blah] happens". And it turns out that [blah blah blah] is significant functionality that requires a very different back-end design that I was envisioning.
There's no way you are going to get that sort of business user feedback from a set of class diagrams or commandline switches. It requires some sort of whiteboarding or "prototype".
My response is that if you're developing a CLI app, there's no way on this earth that you'd just present the user a list of switches apart from some demonstration or explanation of what they do. The "prototype" is sample/simulated output that demonstrates what each switch does, and you most certainly can get useful feedback from this.
You suggest that a GUI mockup is a way to "put it in terms that the user can conceptualize". Fine. But it's not the only way to do it. Seeing sample/simulated *results* likewise puts it in terms the user can understand - and arguably does so much more intelligently than a GUI.
I'm not challenging the validity of what you're doing. I'm not necessarily even championing the CLI over the GUI. I'm challenging the validity of your statement that you can't get good user feedback when prototyping a command-line app. You can; it's just a question of what you present to them for purposes of obtaining feedback.
But you wouldn't be presenting them a set of command line switches all by itself. You'd be presenting something more like:
"Here's what you get if you add this switch:"
blah bleh blih bloh bluh
So then your user looks at the output and says he needs a way to get output that looks like xyz instead. So instead of looking at a dopey form, he's looking at the data that he's actually interested in when telling you what he needs.
tar -jxvf dir/
you see the file.tar.bz2 done, not a "hey, here I am!" message.
Actually, what you'll see is an error message, since x means you are extracting from a tarball, not creating one, and you specified a directory rather than a tarball as the target. Plus - since you added the v, you'll get extra verbosity. ;-)
The problem with attempting to create systems that are usable by literally anyone without assistance is the Windows problem: if you try to make something idiot proof, eventually they'll make a better idiot who will break your system.
The point is not that people with handicaps are idiots. The point is that it's not possible to design a voting system that can accommodate 100% of eligible voters in such a way that none of them will need help.
I'd go farther and say that when it comes to voting, it is far more important to focus upon security and reliability over usability. IMO the "benefits" of electronic voting are far outweighed by the liabilities.
It depends upon the bank. If the bank doesn't lend money, then of course you're correct; they're providing a service by protecting your money. But I don't know any modern bank that does this. Do you? They always pay interest. They can do so because they're actually borrowing your money from you. They lend it to others, and you get a portion of the interest back that they earn on their loans to others. If people start "hoarding" their money at home, as you have alleged, then the banks are going to have to come up with clever ways to convince them to put their money in the bank instead. That usually means increasing the interest rates they pay to depositors, but it could mean giveaways for opening a new account or something.
Today, for instance, bank savings accounts pay less than inflation.
What they pay is less than the rate that they charge for loans they make to others. When banks charge higher rates for loans, they are in a position to pay more to depositors while still making a profit themselves.
I didn't realize you were considering a commodity that could actually be created/modified.
That's not what I said. I said "produced". Gold, for instance, is not "created". But it has to be found and dug out of the ground and refined before it's usable.
And you're opening yourself up to all the problems of a fiat currency.
No, you're not. Because nobody can just wave his hand and expand the money supply.
The real issue is whether the government has any business dictating what money is, and what people must accept in exchange for their property. The answer to both of these questions is "No." Certainly the government has a legitimate role in ensuring that people do not cheat each other, but this doesn't excuse or justify the notion that they ought to dictate what money is, or its value.
The government doesn't force you to use it's money, you know.
Um. Yes, they do. It's called "Legal Tender". If you owe me a debt, the legal tender laws state that you can satisfy that debt by paying me in dollars. Some people make nuisances of themselves, for instance, by forcing businesses to accept hundred dollar bills in payment for $2 worth of goods - because they can. The law gives the seller no recourse.
#1: Prices continuing to go down encourages consumers to put purchases off as long as possible, because the longer they put off purchasing something, the less it'll cost. I could buy that new car today for $20,000, but if I wait and buy a car next year, an equivalent model might be only $19,000. A business might spend $3,000,000 upgrading it's computers...or push the project off six months, and save $100,000 or so. Of course, the longer a purchase is pushed back, the more you save.
This was an interesting example, but I really don't think it helps your case at all. If people put off buying 2GHz P4 computers today, they'll be able to buy them for much less next year. But people still buy them today. They don't wait. Some do, of course; but enough people don't do so that manufacturers still have the incentive to produce things now, as well as seeking to improve them.
#2: Prices going down cuts into a business' profits.
You seem to think that this happens in a vacuum. It doesn't. If a company reduces its prices, it has reasons for doing so. It may have come up with ways to increase its efficiency, for instance; or the cost of materials may have gone down; or the cost of labor may have gone down; etc. Let's assume that a competitor lowers prices. Then our company must either lower its prices - in order to compete - or suffer the consequences (if any). If the new lower prices are insufficient to meet its expenses, then our company must somehow manage to reduce its expenses - perhaps by becoming more efficient, or by finding lower-priced material, or whatever.
A company doe
So - the end of lower unemployment justifies the means of theft? It appears to me that you are admitting that this is theft, but that it's okay because the government's goal is to reduce unemployment.
This doesn't damage the immorality argument at all. It raises more questions about the legitimacy of government tampering with the economy.
Nope, I'm still not mistaken, and this is the other part that shows an economic misunderstanding. The government doesn't create money by printing bills, because, as stated above, it wouldn't help. It creates money mostly by issuing bonds, and then spending the resulting income.
It's not a misunderstanding. It's a simplification for the sake of argument. The issue is whether it's immoral for the government to destroy the value of money by expanding the supply of money (by whatever means).
Here's the sentence that reveals armchair economics at its worst.
Whether I understand economics is of course a subject for some debate or other, but the statement to which you applied this isn't one that raises the question. ;-)
I said: "The effect of counterfeiting - if left unchecked - is to destroy the value of money." This is absolutely true. If you're going to start inserting into the argument jibber-jabber about ones and zeroes in computers someplace - which really has no effect in the current context other than to deliberately and pointlessly obfuscate the issue, then of course I am free to expand my definition of counterfeiting to include criminals who attempt to create money by manipulating ones and zeroes in computers someplace. Counterfeiting - or the attempt to do it - occurs no matter what the form of the money is. Think of Ferris Bueller reducing the number of days he had missed class. On a primitive level, Joe Digital Counterfeiter can try and crack a bank's systems and change the amount of money in his accounts. This is no different from Joe Paper Counterfeiter with a printing press spewing out fake twenties.
The operative phrase was "if left unchecked." If the government doesn't nip counterfeiters in the bud, then everyone would run a printing press. Everyone would be cracking the banks and adding a few extra zeroes to their bank accounts. As I said: this would destroy the value of money if left unchecked.
More to the main point, though, is that while a forgery can indeed reduce the value of an original by confusing the potential market, this argument does not extend to currency, for the reason stated above that currency is a tiny portion of the money supply.
As already noted: expanding the original argument doesn't win you any points at all. If a million digital counterfeiters each spend a million counterfeit digital dollars into the economy, you've got a trillion dollar impact on the economy.
This is hit-and-miss. Sort of. ;-)
You hit it when you imply that an inflated/inflating currency encourages people to "invest" - in this sense: an inflating currency reduces the incentive for people to simply hold their money - like, in a coffee can at home, for instance - because when they do this, their money is just losing value constantly. Therefore it makes more sense to do either of two things: 1) spend it (which is why modern Keynesian economists fret when consumer spending drops), or "invest" it in search of interest.
However, you miss it completely if you think that a stable currency encourages people to keep their money at home in a coffee can. They'll do the exact same sorts of investing, with perhaps more incentive to pursue somewhat safer investments. But let's assume that there really is more incentive to hoard. The consequence of this is that in order to get your money, those who want it - banks, stock brokers, etc. - will have to increase the incentives that they offer in order to get more people to put their money in banks. So that means that folks who do put their money in banks will get *more* interest.
Hint: banks and stock markets in the US predate fiat currency by quite a bit. ;-)
if you have a commodity currency and population goes up, you will have deflation.
Not necessarily. If you have a commodity currency, the supply of the commodity may/probably will increase along with the population. Why? Because entrepreneurs will consider it profitable to produce more of the commodity.
But let's look at two possible outcomes to what happens if the supply of the commodity currency were to remain completely fixed. The most likely case is that if there weren't enough of a given commodity to be used as currency, people will simply switch to *other* commodities and use them as money instead of or alongside of the "real" currency. There are plenty of examples of this happening when supplies of real money are short: prisoners frequently use cigarettes as money, for one simple example.
Another alternative outcome is what you continue to miss. Let's assume that the commodity currency's supply is fixed. As the population increases, there are fewer bits of it available per capita. The consequence of this is that prices for goods will go down. It's inevitable, because buyers wouldn't have as many bits of money to spend. They will therefore refuse to pay old prices for things. Thus prices have to go down. In other words, the purchasing power of each bit of money will go up. It's inevitable. The long and short of it is that even if we assume the absurd - a commodity currency with an absolutely fixed supply - the free market still works. People would have fewer dollars in an absolute sense, but the value of those dollars would be increased.
In other words: no problem.
Deflation == bad.
What do you mean? Do you mean price deflation? How are lower prices a bad thing - ever? The idea is simply madness.
Or do you mean to refer to decreases in the money supply? It depends upon the nature of the decreases - why they happened. It also depends upon who is losing their dollars (after all, if the supply decreases, someone has fewer of them, right?). Keynesians typically fear this because it's *their* dollars that get lost. Investors fear it when it's a consequence of a collapsing stock market, and when shares they bought for $50 are now worth $5. This sort of thing is obviously bad for the ones losing their dollars, but to say that the government has some sort of responsibility to prevent this is to say that you don't like the free market - which, obviously, is a different argument - because you're asking the government to intervene in the markets to protect people fro
You're not getting it. I will have fewer dollars, but - as you yourself admitted, those dollars will be more valuable. That means that I haven't lost anything. It takes fewer of my dollars to buy a thing.
This is really not that hard. Think about it. Why did things cost less 50 years ago? It's because the dollar had not been so badly devalued by inflation. People didn't have as much money, but they didn't *need* to have as much, because they money that they had was more valuable.
I honestly don't see what's hard about this. Keynesians freely admit this is what is going on - but they don't care about the moral implications. They just ignore them. They think that it's preferable for the value of a currency to be under the control of the government, or a central bank. They don't care that when they devalue the currency by increasing the supply, they have destroyed the value of the currency held by citizens.
Similarly, if it's wrong for me to lock people up who break the law in my house, it must be wrong for the government?
You think you're clever, but you're not, unless you're ready to concede (wrongly) that might makes right. Where does the government get its "authority" devalue the currency?
Don't be absurd. You know perfectly well that this is entirely unlike what counterfeiters are doing.
Counterfeiters aren't inflating the money supply
Of course they are. Again, don't be silly. If this wasn't the fundamental evil behind counterfeiting, the government wouldn't care about it. It's *not* that they are forging the government currency; it's the *reason* that they are forging it that is the problem.
Counterfeiters attempt to pass fake money only because they think that they can produce their fake money at lower cost than actually obtaining real money. Otherwise there is absolutely no incentive for counterfeiting. None. Why would you counterfeit money if it cost you more to do it than the "value" of the bills you're creating?
Let's say Joe Mobster creates $1000 of bad bills, but it costs $1100 of real money for him to produce it. Is this cost effective for him? Of course not! So he'll never even bother trying, because it's a losing venture.
But if he can do it for, say, $800 or even less, well then it's a profitable venture - IF he can successfully create fake money that's convincing enough for someone to accept it as real money.
Boom. He's just added "money" to the total supply of money that's in circulation. If he's allowed to get away with this, others may do the same thing. Then you have lots of people doing it. Then you have lots and lots of people adding to the money supply, thereby devaluing the dollar.
You see? It's not just fraud. The feds wouldn't care about the lie so much if it weren't for the *effects* of it. The effect of counterfeiting - if left unchecked - is to destroy the value of money.
It's also incorrect to say that these knock-offs would devalue the original.
Then you don't know what you're talking about.
Let's suppose I own the ball that Barry Bonds hit for his 73rd home run. This thing recently sold for $450,000. Now let's suppose that someone takes this thing and throws it into a giant box of a million baseballs that look *exactly* the same. What's the Bonds ball worth now?
Answer: unless you can absolutely, positively, and with 100% certainty identify the Bonds ball, the Bonds ball has just become worthless (well, it's worth no more than any of the million other balls). In other words: it has been devalued.
And this is what counterfeiters attempt to do: persuade someone that the "money" or "Bonds ball" or whatever that they have is real, so that he will believe that it has the same value as the real thing. This works for a little while, but once you start having a lot of these things on the market, people begin to get wise that there's a problem: If three guys on your block claim to have the Bonds ball, it's pretty clear that at least two of them got screwed (and realistically, the third one did too, unless he can prove his claim). The same thing happens with money, too, *obviously*, though of course there's no easy way to discover the fakes: there can only be one real Bonds ball; there's normally a lot of money in circulation, though, so it's not so easy to detect that there are fakes (if the fakes are really good)...until there are lots and lots of fakes in circulation. But the same thing has happened. The real money gets devalued.
this drills an unrepairable hole in the "immoral to create new currency because it devalues currency" theory.
As you can see, you are quite mistaken.
If he had said, "I took the initiative in expanding the Internet, and in making it publicly available", then no one would be likely to quibble.
That is NOT what he said.
Accept the fact that he lied by exaggerating (beyond all reason). You only make yourself look completely silly.
No, it's both and more. It's a moral flaw, because inflating the money supply means that the dollars I possess become less valuable. When a government enacts a policy of inflating the money supply, they are enacting a policy of theft from all holders of the currency. This is immoral.
Think about it. The reasons why governments go after counterfeiters and check-bouncers and people who sell fake "art" and what not is because these crimes result in the devaluation of the original commodities (one joke is that the government goes after counterfeiters and check-bouncers - who are attempting to substitute their own fiat money for the government's - is that the government doesn't like competition).
One hand-painted portrait might be worth millions. A million cheaply printed duplicates of it are worth pennies. Supply and demand.
But if the counterfeiters are wrong for devaluing the currency, then so is the government, unless you're going to say that might makes right.
Of course, I've always heard that Luke presents Mary's lineage, which is what prompted my second point. But reading the KJV clouded my mind ;-)
I suppose that it's reasonable to read "son" as "son-in-law", since I know that many parents refer to their children-in-law as their children. Still, at Slashdot, the zealots who are desperately seeking to misunderstand the Bible jump on things like this so often that I wanted to err on the side of caution by adding the disclaimer.
I appreciate the clarification.
The other kind of greed refuses to part with anything it has at any price. It's reasonable to expect compensation; it's unreasonable to refuse any at all for a thing that will one day be in the public domain anyway. We're not talking about refusing to sell the Mona Lisa; we're talking about rights to restrict creation of a movie. Someone else's comparison to Smaug is apt, if indeed Mr. Tolkien is hoarding.
Luke presents Joseph's lineage as well. Thus my 2nd suggestion is void; but the first one was/is more significant.
If private property rights are abridged, you don't have a free market. If property owners aren't free to do what they want with their goods, you don't have a free market. It doesn't matter how scarce or abundant things are if private property rights are non-existent. It wasn't scarcity or abundance of material that made the Soviet economy so horribly broken; it was state ownership of everything.
In the present context, however, it's plainly silly to pretend that information can be "owned". What happens when two competitors "own" the same fact? Or who owns the "fact" that the sun set at 5:15pm yesterday? This is sheer idiocy.
Although the default kernel would not boot after the install completed, the failsafe would. So I started playing around with the command-line options there until I found a combination that worked properly (the failsafe one turns off more stuff than is necessary; for one thing, IDE DMA works on my box, and the failsafe turns it off).
The acpi=ht option might not help you; IIRC, the ht is for hyperthreading, so unless you have a P4 with hyperthreading enabled, this might not do you any good.
HTH, HAND
I just installed SuSE 9, and it works fine. One caveat: on my machine, I had to add the following options:
apm=off acpi=ht
in order to get the thing working. And now it works fine. I'm not sure that I'm up to full SATA speed yet, but it's pretty fast.
The mods are on drugs. That's the only way that anyone could believe that this post was "Informative".
When you're done tarring all Christians with the same brush, perhaps we can take a look at the ... "diversity" of opinion within Judaism? And then maybe you'll get the idea that it's sheer nonsense to generalize about all Christians' views on the basis of a few loonies.
Which branch of modern Judaism is right? Reform? Orthodox? Conservative? Who was right, the Essenes? The Hasidim? Who are the monotheists? Was it your Molech and Baal-worshipping ancestors, offering their children as human sacrifices?
Most Christians never considered bar codes to be the mark of the beast. Most Christians don't think that UPCs are the mark of the beast. Most Christians have never visited that idiot "666" link of yours, and most Christians would think its contents are rubbish.
Minor nit: This was not an ad hominem. It was clearly guilt by association: "People who buy Michael Moore's book also bought this guy's book, so obviously this guy's book is as bad as Michael Moore's book."
An ad hominem would be a direct attack on the man himself: "This guy is a lowlife leftwing scumbag who wouldn't know the truth if it hit him between the eyes, so obviously his book is worthless."
In examining The Tyro's post, I don't see anything that I'd call an ad hominem. But clearly he did attack Moore and the others ("blatant political hacks and operatives"), and he did apologize for *that* ad hominem; and he did resort to guilt by association.
Do you believe that O'Reilly really did win a Peabody?
Citing one instance of a supposedly correct fact (I'm not questioning it; I'm not in a position to do so) doesn't prove that Franken's book is generally reliable.
Ann Coulter is a die-hard defender of Joe McCarthy...
So out of one side of your mouth you complain about The Tyro's use of the ad hominem, and out of the other you resort to it yourself?
Hmmm.
Slavery, "non-existent"? Ha!
Not if what this guy says is right: he estimates 27 million people in slavery today. There are slaves in the Islamic countries; there are slaves in China; there are slaves in Africa.
Slavery's not gone. It's just hiding from you.
Tom
Of course. Otherwise there'd be a lot more rapes, murders, robberies, etc.
You're in the minority thinking that lustful thoughts ("Wow, she's hot!") are damaging and need to be avoided.
No doubt. Of course, that hasn't always been the case (at least, not in this country), and popularity is a very poor measure of truth.
Though you go to elaborate lengths to avoid it, this entire statement of yours is from start to finish a statement of faith. I'm not sure why you wish so much to avoid just admitting it, but it's really not a bad thing.
In the first place, you have faith in your eyes (that they function properly) and other faculties, that they are reliable. In the second place, you have faith in your ability to determine whether something can be faked. In the third place, you have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow.
Faith isn't a dirty word ;-) It's essentially synonymous with trusting someone or something, or relying on someone or something.
When people want to belive they make it easier to fool them.
Please describe for me a way that a man living in the first century, with no available technology, is able to suddenly appear in the middle of a closed room - twice, and how he is able to to ascend into the sky, and how he is able to arrange for angels to immediately appear and talk to his followers.
Furthermore, I can say similar things: when a man believes that God doesn't exist, it makes it easier to fool him. Scientists who don't believe in God find what they're looking for, because they're not open to finding anything else - or even to the possibility of finding anything else. They're not open to the possibility of finding evidence that God exists, and therefore they don't find it.
Ahhh, so by that logic, you're responsible for all the inconsistent and crazy things that all religious people say, right?
No, this was not my point. I was not attempting to tar all evolutionists just because one guy thought a pig's tooth is a hominid. My point was what I said: all evidence is interpreted (BTW - the guy in question was the director of the American Museum of Natural History; his discovery was applauded by other experts; drawings of "Nebraska man" went into texts on evolution; and *then* the error was discovered. But again: my purpose here is not to jump on all evolutionists; my point for now is that all evidence is interpreted).
Why religion, and why yours?
Why not my religion? ;-) But seriously: I'll give you the same kind of answer that you gave me when I challenged you for making reason the ultimate authority: what else is there? Blind faith in reason?
Let me ask you some other questions. Where do you think you come from? Where did mankind come from? Why are we here? Do we have a purpose, or do we just exist?
What was it that convinced you that you needed religion and that this specific one was the right one?
My answer would be incomprehensible to you - not because you are stupid, but because the answer to this question is completely rooted in what I have come to believe. It makes no sense to attempt to frame such things in other ways. If you insist on knowing, I'll tell you. I'm not ashamed at all, but if you're looking for something that's going to pass the test of reason when reason is in the service of denying the possibility of the supernatural, you won't find it. (No, I didn't hear voices or see things ;-)