One of the purposes of the EU is to stop future wars in Europe. And it's been pretty successful - such conflicts as there have been have intra-national, and/or outside of the EU.
To be more specific, the EU was designed as a kind of MAD system: if the economy of any member nation collapses, so does that of others, thus making starting a war an economic suicide. Sure, it works, but it also means that when the amount of nations in the EU grows, the probability of at least one of them running into trouble approaches 1, thus the permanent EU-wide economic crisis.
This is all made worse by blind ideological adherence to austerity, which means that those of us who pay for the bailouts of bankrupt countries aren't even helping their people or economies, but rather ensuring that their debtors get paid. Profits are private but liabilities are public (at least as long as you're rich), that's the free market way.
They're not laughing all the way to the bank, because everytime someone tries to cash out another crash of the entire market occurs..
Even at the lowest point of the "crash", the prices stayed over what they'd been pre-bubble. And if you try to "cash out" all at once where your sell amounts to a significant percent of the market, in any market, you will get a similar effect - and only have yourself to blame.
The problem here is that unlike stocks, there is absolutely ZERO value in a bitcoin. It represents exactly nothing of value. Stocks at least have a book value and a P/E Ratio of the company behind the stock. Bitcoins are backed by nothing.
Bitcoins are backed by the utility of being able to send them between people without having to deal with any third parties. They present the value of everything that can be bought with Bitcoins; as that set is slowly growing, so is the value of Bitcoin. It's a classic network effect.
To bet on Bitcoin is to bet that PayPal, Visa, and banks will continue screwing their customers, which seems like a pretty safe bet.
As everybody can see from the situation with Greece and the other European PIGS, excessive debt means you've surrendered control of your own destiny.
What Greek, Cyprus and others teach us is that once you've surrendered your own money you lose control of your destiny. The practical result of Euro is that countries that are struggling can't let their currency devalue and result in natural rebalancing of imports and exports. It forces all the economies in Europe (well, those who joined it, anyway) to march in lockstep, but they're too different so it's going badly.
This attempt to build an unified Europe is coming to the same end all the previous ones have. The only question is: how chaotic will the collapse be?
With all due respect to the victims and their families and friends - this isn't world news. In quite a few parts of the world, not just Iraq and Afghanistan, that's a small note somewhere on page 5 of the local newspaper.
Explosions in America are world news, because they usually result in America doing things which then affect the rest of the world. Explosions in Middle-East are not, because the place has been a warzone ever since WWII.
Also, to put things into perspective: That is almost exactly the number of people who die in car accidents every hour in the USA. Not just in this hour, every hour, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
The difference, of course, is that those are just that: accidents. These bombings were deliberate.
And, most importantly and most disgustingly, we are still thinking in tribal norms. Our own dead and wounded are more important than the foreign ones.
But then again, is a problem with an issued computer your problem? Surely you have your own computer and only use the business computer for business matters? Who knows what spyware it might have, after all.
Why such half measures? A still better solution: provide infinite income! 20 Ferraris a week for everyone, with unlimited hookers and blow! Unlimited free health care, and no one has to work!
Strawman arguments are fun, aren't they? By making one you can avoid answering the actual proposal and instead pretend that an argument from ridicule against an unrelated proposal disproves it.
Or, you know, you could accept the reality that no one owes you anything, and you're going to have to work for your keep, or depend on charity (charity: what you get because the giver is generous, not because you deserve the gift).
It is foolish to confuse inherent reality with constructed one. The former cannot be changed, the latter can. For example, most people are nowadays granted citizenship by virtue of being born, while Roman empire only granted it to "deserving" individuals. Or compare feudal model with modern political system or mercantilism with free-market capitalism. All of these depend on taking some things for granted - such as "no one owes you anything" or "you have to work hard for your keep" - which forms their mythology. And myths can change.
Furthermore, you contradict yourself by omitting an obvious third alternative: simply take what you want. This omission only makes sense if you think that people owe observance of (at least some) laws (specifically, property rights) to each other, thus contradicting your claim that "no one owes you anything". You think that the world owes it to you to play by the rules you're used to. Upkeeping these rules requires a large expenditure of work and thus money, as well as limiting other people's ability to act in ways contradictory to them, yet you take it for granted that the world owes you that, so much so that it's not even worth mentioning.
The question, then, becomes: what chances in our constructed reality - our mythology - would it take to implement minimum income, and would them as a whole make people better or worse off?
Note that this doesn't actually have to happen - it's about risk. And the risk is quite high that you'll end up owing a lot more value than you planned to.
This risk is inherent whenever you take a loan. Compound interest makes loans inherently limitless liability, yet there's no getting around them in an inflationary system.
In this case, you'd be stupid to take out a loan. And if you had money, why put it in a bank when it'll gain value all on its own if you leave it under your digital mattress? So the first guy probably can't even get a loan in the first place, even if it made sense, which it doesn't.
No, it doesn't. What makes sense is the first guy to keep his money under his mattress while saving up. On bad side, it means that he can't buy the machine until he has, so the economy will grow slower; on the good, if something drastic happens during the save-up period, he can freely change his plans since he owes no one anything and in fact has capital.
Debt-based economy grows fast but is fragile due to all the debt easily triggering disaster dominoes; a savings-based economy grows slower since it's harder to leverage but it's better able to handle problems due to all the free capital in the system. Our current debt-based economies seem to be in a permanent state of crisis, so it might be a good idea to see how a different model operates in the modern world.
3: Inflation is a feature, not a bug. The work you did picking tomatoes last year is less valuable to the species than the work you did picking tomatoes today.
I coulda sworn I had to eat last year too, but maybe that's just me.
The species would be better served if you used that same frugality to horde useful items instead of tokens, which is why the market rewards investment over savings.
Actually, no. The species is better served if Joe Tomato Picker does not instantly spend his pay on cheap crap, because that allows the resources required to make that cheap crap to be spent on making better lab equipment for Joe Scientists instead, so he can invent fusion power. Furthermore, because Tomato Picker's money is not getting devalued, he has easier time saving up enough of it to invest - either financially or on durable quality items that will serve him for decades. The only one who suffers in this scenario is Joe Cheap Crap Factory Owner, who has a harder time selling cheap crap that breaks down quickly and needs to be replaced.
Inflation is yet another way to concentrate money and power on the hands of the wealthy, which of course is precisely why our modern economies do it.
Therefore -- and this is the heart of the matter -- Bitcoin should not fluctuate at all in DOLLAR value, except to the extent that computation time fluctuates in dollar value. And since computation time has not fluctuated much in value, then Bitcoin should also NOT have changed in $$ value.
Even if your statement about the price of computation was correct, which it's not, you forget that many (most?) miners don't live in the US and don't use dollars as their local currency. So Bitcoin would still fluctuate simply because various currencies do.
The upshot of this is: the Bitcoin market has been an utterly irrational "bubble", with the market valuing Bitcoins far higher than their actual intrinsic worth!
Bitcoin is designed to be a means of exchange. It's not useful for anything else; specifically, you can't get back the computing time used to produce it. It's value is thus purely the product of a network effect: the more people use Bitcoin, the more useful it becomes, and the more people use it. Given a tendency towards such virtuous (or vicious) circles, and that Bitcoin is starting to get accepted amongst less fringe services (like Wordpress), it's hardly surprising that its value rose so fast.
Also, European Union discrediting its own banking system probably caused at least some of that - people have to store their wealth somehow, and Bitcoin shares many qualities with Swiss bank accounts, yet are useful for the little people too. Risking volatile exchange rate might seem better than risking total cutoff and confiscation.
It is almost as if, with the gold standard having been gone for decades now, people have somehow forgotten how standards are supposed to work.
They work by some credible entity guaranteeing that you can get a certain quantity of the standard (e.g. gold) for certain amount of the pegged item (e.g. one dollar). No entity guarantees any kind of exchange rate between any combination of Bitcoins, computing time or dollars, so I'd have to say that you're a prime example of your own assertion.
As opposed to real currencies. You know, those who's value is inherent and thus not subject to inflation, deflation or any other kind of price fluctuation.
The term "imaginary currency" is a bit like "electromagnetic light": it's using an unnecessary qualifier to suggest that the entity under consideration is somehow different from the case where the qualifier is missing. In other words, a clever lie.
If companies think that this kind of innication nd productivity is a bad fit then it's because they're assuming implicitly that they won't be around for more than a year.
Companies don't think because they don't exist. They're legal fiction. The people who work in those companies may or may not think, but they have no long term interest in the company either due to lack of job security. Nor do shareholders have much interest in the long-term viability of the company, which is why removing your workforce typically increases the share price; they just want a short spike in share price to sell.
Nations (sometimes) get around this through patriotism, but companies have done everything in their power to lose any loyalty anyone might have for them, and now we all pay the price.
It's more correctly "a server designed specifically to distribute as many purchased copies of the game as possible."
You can't purchase games. You can't license them either, since if you had a right to use them, things like the recent Simcity launch would get companies sued for interfering with that with their always-connected requirements. I'm not sure just what the legal construct is, or even if one exists, but if it does it certainly doesn't resemble anything else.
"Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration." -Edison
In the real world we care about results not effort. If you have to reduce your department head count by one and your have to to select from the lazy guy who gets all his work or a hard worker bee who never completes his assigned takes, lazy will still be collecting a paycheck while the hard worker will be on unemployment.
In the real world we call people who never do their work lazy, not the guy who completes his every assignment. But perhaps these words have different meanings in your world.
Results are what matter, teaching kids any different is a disservice to them and the society they join.
So consider the results of teaching them that effort doesn't matter.
The majority of people got off the Hindenburg. Jokes are funnier when they're based on truth.
Can you spot the difference between a zeppelin catching fire while landing and while flying through a thunderstorm at cruising altitude? Hint: it has to do with gravity and available escape routes.
Bad management didn't have anything to do with it though, did it?
Economics 101: if the economy does badly, it's the fault of unions, while if it does well, it's the merit of execs and investors. Also, an industry can only be succesfull if it gets to share risks but not profits with the employees.
IMHO, mathematics should not be patentable AT ALL and IN ANY FORM.
The problem with that is that everything can be seen as mathematics. The operation of any machine or process is really just evaluation of quantum mechanical wave equations. So mathematics IN ANY FORM includes physical reality itself.
Business method patents would still be fine, though, due to the disconnect between economics and reality.
What is it about fiscal responsibility, honoring the Constitution (for those who care, a real "social contract"), and reduction in government power that brings out such "hate speech" to use the term of the day?
The combination of expected consequences of such actions and the assumption that anyone who disagrees with you about them is arguing in bad faith. The expected consequences of Tea Party policies are (in the opinion of its opponents) bad, and since they are self-obviously so (since otherwise said opponents would have to consider that they might be wrong), Tea Party members must be aware of them too, and are thus knowingly and willingly advocating actions which have bad outcomes - clearly, such monsters must be reviled.
Most online discussions tend to go that way, no matter what the subject.
Slashdot Mirror
To be more specific, the EU was designed as a kind of MAD system: if the economy of any member nation collapses, so does that of others, thus making starting a war an economic suicide. Sure, it works, but it also means that when the amount of nations in the EU grows, the probability of at least one of them running into trouble approaches 1, thus the permanent EU-wide economic crisis.
This is all made worse by blind ideological adherence to austerity, which means that those of us who pay for the bailouts of bankrupt countries aren't even helping their people or economies, but rather ensuring that their debtors get paid. Profits are private but liabilities are public (at least as long as you're rich), that's the free market way.
Even at the lowest point of the "crash", the prices stayed over what they'd been pre-bubble. And if you try to "cash out" all at once where your sell amounts to a significant percent of the market, in any market, you will get a similar effect - and only have yourself to blame.
Bitcoins are backed by the utility of being able to send them between people without having to deal with any third parties. They present the value of everything that can be bought with Bitcoins; as that set is slowly growing, so is the value of Bitcoin. It's a classic network effect.
To bet on Bitcoin is to bet that PayPal, Visa, and banks will continue screwing their customers, which seems like a pretty safe bet.
You do realize that $90/BTC is still over twice what it was before the bubble, right?
As are those who bought in the after-bubble crash, before the price rebounced to the current level.
I guess that's one way of getting craptastic works published.
By this definition the official Python interpreter is not an implementation of Python, since it's written in C instead of Python.
What Greek, Cyprus and others teach us is that once you've surrendered your own money you lose control of your destiny. The practical result of Euro is that countries that are struggling can't let their currency devalue and result in natural rebalancing of imports and exports. It forces all the economies in Europe (well, those who joined it, anyway) to march in lockstep, but they're too different so it's going badly.
This attempt to build an unified Europe is coming to the same end all the previous ones have. The only question is: how chaotic will the collapse be?
Explosions in America are world news, because they usually result in America doing things which then affect the rest of the world. Explosions in Middle-East are not, because the place has been a warzone ever since WWII.
The difference, of course, is that those are just that: accidents. These bombings were deliberate.
It is rather foolish to be disgusted about having only a limited number of neurons in your brain.
But then again, is a problem with an issued computer your problem? Surely you have your own computer and only use the business computer for business matters? Who knows what spyware it might have, after all.
Strawman arguments are fun, aren't they? By making one you can avoid answering the actual proposal and instead pretend that an argument from ridicule against an unrelated proposal disproves it.
It is foolish to confuse inherent reality with constructed one. The former cannot be changed, the latter can. For example, most people are nowadays granted citizenship by virtue of being born, while Roman empire only granted it to "deserving" individuals. Or compare feudal model with modern political system or mercantilism with free-market capitalism. All of these depend on taking some things for granted - such as "no one owes you anything" or "you have to work hard for your keep" - which forms their mythology. And myths can change.
Furthermore, you contradict yourself by omitting an obvious third alternative: simply take what you want. This omission only makes sense if you think that people owe observance of (at least some) laws (specifically, property rights) to each other, thus contradicting your claim that "no one owes you anything". You think that the world owes it to you to play by the rules you're used to. Upkeeping these rules requires a large expenditure of work and thus money, as well as limiting other people's ability to act in ways contradictory to them, yet you take it for granted that the world owes you that, so much so that it's not even worth mentioning.
The question, then, becomes: what chances in our constructed reality - our mythology - would it take to implement minimum income, and would them as a whole make people better or worse off?
I'm curious: what more risks are you taking than a regular employee?
This risk is inherent whenever you take a loan. Compound interest makes loans inherently limitless liability, yet there's no getting around them in an inflationary system.
No, it doesn't. What makes sense is the first guy to keep his money under his mattress while saving up. On bad side, it means that he can't buy the machine until he has, so the economy will grow slower; on the good, if something drastic happens during the save-up period, he can freely change his plans since he owes no one anything and in fact has capital.
Debt-based economy grows fast but is fragile due to all the debt easily triggering disaster dominoes; a savings-based economy grows slower since it's harder to leverage but it's better able to handle problems due to all the free capital in the system. Our current debt-based economies seem to be in a permanent state of crisis, so it might be a good idea to see how a different model operates in the modern world.
I coulda sworn I had to eat last year too, but maybe that's just me.
Actually, no. The species is better served if Joe Tomato Picker does not instantly spend his pay on cheap crap, because that allows the resources required to make that cheap crap to be spent on making better lab equipment for Joe Scientists instead, so he can invent fusion power. Furthermore, because Tomato Picker's money is not getting devalued, he has easier time saving up enough of it to invest - either financially or on durable quality items that will serve him for decades. The only one who suffers in this scenario is Joe Cheap Crap Factory Owner, who has a harder time selling cheap crap that breaks down quickly and needs to be replaced.
Inflation is yet another way to concentrate money and power on the hands of the wealthy, which of course is precisely why our modern economies do it.
Even if your statement about the price of computation was correct, which it's not, you forget that many (most?) miners don't live in the US and don't use dollars as their local currency. So Bitcoin would still fluctuate simply because various currencies do.
Bitcoin is designed to be a means of exchange. It's not useful for anything else; specifically, you can't get back the computing time used to produce it. It's value is thus purely the product of a network effect: the more people use Bitcoin, the more useful it becomes, and the more people use it. Given a tendency towards such virtuous (or vicious) circles, and that Bitcoin is starting to get accepted amongst less fringe services (like Wordpress), it's hardly surprising that its value rose so fast.
Also, European Union discrediting its own banking system probably caused at least some of that - people have to store their wealth somehow, and Bitcoin shares many qualities with Swiss bank accounts, yet are useful for the little people too. Risking volatile exchange rate might seem better than risking total cutoff and confiscation.
They work by some credible entity guaranteeing that you can get a certain quantity of the standard (e.g. gold) for certain amount of the pegged item (e.g. one dollar). No entity guarantees any kind of exchange rate between any combination of Bitcoins, computing time or dollars, so I'd have to say that you're a prime example of your own assertion.
As opposed to real currencies. You know, those who's value is inherent and thus not subject to inflation, deflation or any other kind of price fluctuation.
The term "imaginary currency" is a bit like "electromagnetic light": it's using an unnecessary qualifier to suggest that the entity under consideration is somehow different from the case where the qualifier is missing. In other words, a clever lie.
Companies don't think because they don't exist. They're legal fiction. The people who work in those companies may or may not think, but they have no long term interest in the company either due to lack of job security. Nor do shareholders have much interest in the long-term viability of the company, which is why removing your workforce typically increases the share price; they just want a short spike in share price to sell.
Nations (sometimes) get around this through patriotism, but companies have done everything in their power to lose any loyalty anyone might have for them, and now we all pay the price.
You can't purchase games. You can't license them either, since if you had a right to use them, things like the recent Simcity launch would get companies sued for interfering with that with their always-connected requirements. I'm not sure just what the legal construct is, or even if one exists, but if it does it certainly doesn't resemble anything else.
Well, it's a business school, so that is just karma getting a head start :).
"Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration." -Edison
In the real world we call people who never do their work lazy, not the guy who completes his every assignment. But perhaps these words have different meanings in your world.
So consider the results of teaching them that effort doesn't matter.
Can you spot the difference between a zeppelin catching fire while landing and while flying through a thunderstorm at cruising altitude? Hint: it has to do with gravity and available escape routes.
Well, I guess having the whole thing go down in a blaze and burning everyone inside to ashes is one way to ensure they don't get cancer.
It accomplished the groundwork that made the recent advances possible.
Economics 101: if the economy does badly, it's the fault of unions, while if it does well, it's the merit of execs and investors. Also, an industry can only be succesfull if it gets to share risks but not profits with the employees.
The problem with that is that everything can be seen as mathematics. The operation of any machine or process is really just evaluation of quantum mechanical wave equations. So mathematics IN ANY FORM includes physical reality itself.
Business method patents would still be fine, though, due to the disconnect between economics and reality.
The combination of expected consequences of such actions and the assumption that anyone who disagrees with you about them is arguing in bad faith. The expected consequences of Tea Party policies are (in the opinion of its opponents) bad, and since they are self-obviously so (since otherwise said opponents would have to consider that they might be wrong), Tea Party members must be aware of them too, and are thus knowingly and willingly advocating actions which have bad outcomes - clearly, such monsters must be reviled.
Most online discussions tend to go that way, no matter what the subject.