They don't. It's actually all a giant conspiracy to make people believe that Earth has a magnetic field so Electromagnetistists can get funding. Global Warming Conspiracy is an offshoot of it.
And if you want to go back to the creation of the Federal Bank, you'll find that the dollar has done nothing but depreciate since then. As a store of value, it seems pretty unworkable to me.
That's not a bug, it's a feature. Constant inflation is supposed to make investing your money a better alternative than simply sitting on it. This, in turn, keeps the economy growing, rather than stagnating.
By that logic I shouldn't need life insurance should I? Even though I've observed other people die, I haven't died yet and some of those people were younger than me so the logical conclusion is that I'm immortal.
Well, no, you will never benefit from life insurance. Bad example:).
Buying gold, silver, platinum and the like is like buying insurance, you might not like buying it, you might wish you could spend the money on something else, but you will, based on observation, eventually need it.
Even assuming that fiat currency collapses, wouldn't it make more sense to buy stock? It's backed by actual production capability, actually makes you some money on average (unlike insurance), and any economic collapse serious enough to destroy said stocks value will certainly devalue pretty metals as well.
The time is coming where the US will experience hyperinflation just like every fiat currency before it. To say that it won't is akin to saying you are immortal and don't need life insurance. Just look at the dramatic rise in prices over the last few years.
And the time will come when someone finds a large enough deposit or enough people are selling at the same time to completely collapse the value of gold. What's your point?
Besides, no, hyperinflation doesn't need to ever happen. Simply don't print more money unless the economy is expanding, and it won't. It's as easy as that.
While we probably won't see hyperinflation tomorrow or perhaps even several years down the road, saying that it will never happen is like saying because you haven't died yet you don't need to get life insurance.
The problem with your example is that you're assuming that your gold and silver will still have value in the case of economic collapse. They won't, because if the economy collapses I'm not willing to exchange my canned food and ammunition for inedible, useless metal.
This idea that a currency based on nothing can survive is laughable, our nation's currency is no better off than a gum wrapper with a logo printed on it.
The value of currency is based on what you can buy with it. This is true, whether the currency in question is made of gum wrappers or pretty yellow metal.
But hey, fiat currency is going to prove unworkable aaany day now...
Cuz there's all sorts of reasons to -not- strip mine a moon with no atmosphere.
Of course you're right. After all creation is ours for the taking. It says so right in the Bible.
Moon is ours for the taking, because there's nobody else around here to make the claim. Strip mining it hurts nobody since it's a dead rock, and has the potential to help people, so it should be done.
Now, do you or do you not have a reason why Moon shouldn't be strip mined? Or was your appeal to ridicule meant to hide the idiocy of your knee-jerk reaction to the thought of humans doing anything at all? Are you perhaps one of those "greens" who oppose everything?
More generally, this kind of thing leaves me in a bit of a bind: I like having clean air to breath, water to drink and food to eat, but if I support enviromental protection, I run the risk of supporting morons like this. What am I to do? Does anyone have a solution?
Further, these advances are without any need. Nothing runs slowly on yesterday's hottest new thing.
Pov-Ray runs slow on today's hottest new thing. So do various physics simulators. And just try to run a physics simulator and AI on a same machine (to do robot research without having to build actual robots)! In fact, even Dwarf Fortress, and ASCII game, still slows down occasionally!
Simply because you use a modern computer as a glorified typewriter doesn't mean that we all do.
Not at all! If there's no jack-booted thug standing behind us with a gun pointed at our backs, we're free to pool our resources. We can set up whatever agreement we like, and arrange what happens if I'm stupid enough to step into the street in front of a bus tomorrow morning.
You do realize that "corporation" is just a standardized way of handling such arrangements, right? And lack of standardized corporation formats will simply make it easier for conmen to fool the gullible out of their money.
Dunno what you mean by "jack-booted thug", since freeform partnership is certainly possible to do right now. It's simply that limited liability corporations tend to work better in practice, so most opt for that instead.
Any "corporation" that grows "too big to fail" needs to be broken into smaller pieces so it isn't. This isn't just a matter of "general welfare." It's a matter of national security.
And no Bill Gates and co don't count. These guys worked bloody hard and took big risks to get their respective companies started and keep them going. They didn't just sit around collecting everyone else's "tax".
Actually, according to both US and EU courts, ol'Bill's success is based on criminal activities. But I guess a criminal could still be hard-working...
But yes, Bill built his own company, no matter how unethical, illegal and harmful his methods might have been. Most rich people haven't, but simply inherited enough money from their parents to live off the interest - in other words, other people's work.
I think its just jealously. You think you deserve to be "rich" more than the next fellow. Well you don't. Some are rich because they worked hard and got a little bit lucky, some are rich because they got lucky and some are rich cus daddy was lucky. But that makes them no less deserving of wealth than you.
So, if they're no more deserving of being rich and getting a free ride than the rest of us, why should they get one at our expense? Tax them their fair share and use the money to fix crumbling infrastructure and pay up national debt.
And that, boys and girls, journalists and government ministers, is how our tax system works.
Except that it doesn't. You forgot the part where everyone but the richest guy is working for a living, and the richest guy doesn't, since he gets a cut off of everyone else's work. This is known as "capitalism", and it has attained somewhat of a religious status in Western world. One of the results is the current depression.
The people who already pay the highest taxes will naturally get the most benefit from a tax reduction.
The powerful usually get the most benefit of anything, especially things devised by their equally powerful friends.
Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore.
They aren't being attacked for being wealthy. They are being attacked for complaining that their free ride isn't fancy enough.
In fact, they might start drinking overseas, where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.
Thus leaving more beer for the rest of us, while no more forcing us to give up most the fruits of our labour to him. I'm all for it.
What I'd like to see is corporations not sheltering investors from non-financial risk. We'd see a lot less bad activity from corporations if the owners were personally liable for the evil sometimes done in the name of profit.
That would also make it even harder to invest if you have a day job, thus increasing and enforcing the separation of society into investing and working classes. Limited liability exists for a reason.
A better solution would be to simply punish corporations harder, and make any fines deduced from future dividends (and adjusted for inflation and/or interest, of course). This would make them depress the stock value, thus making any shenigans less financially sensible while preventing the side effect of disturbing business (and thus punishing any dependent third parties).
There are plenty of possible other alternatives. The most obvious one is an actual free market. Not the monstrosity that people like Bush and Greenspan promoted as a free market. No bailouts, no safety nets, no corporate subsidies, no preferential tax breaks, no "too big to fail," no hiding behind corporate entities when someone in a company commits a crime. No corporations at all.
That's all nice and good. However, if you don't have corporations, you don't have a means for people to pool their wealth to start a business, which is bad. Nor do you have continuity of business in case of individual existence failures or loss of interest, which is again bad (for everyone who had anything to do with said business). And if you do have corporations (and even if you don't), they will eventually grow to the point of being too big to fail, because them failing would start a cascade effect that would take down your whole economy.
The basic problem of free market is that if you have competition, then someone will eventually win.
That is exactly what it is. A minor punishment for a minor crime.
A huge, arbitrary punishment for a minor crime. In short, just the kind the "tough on crime" -crowd will be salivating over, thus helping this judge get re-elected at this kid's expence.
Detroit is still heavily populated by good hard working people, that will work long hard hours for good pay. Unfortunately, the unions made a mess of things.
Yeah; they demanded good pay for long hard hours.
It became more cost effective to to move production away, which killed Detroit.
Indeed, Chinese slave labour - or slave labour in general - is more cost effective.
Manufacturing could move back to Detroit and be very successful, but only if payroll was not artificially inflated.
If only the peons knew their place and worked for peanuts!
Artificially inflated payroll is just as bad as artificially inflated real estate and artificially inflated stocks. We've seen them all fail with tragic results.
Trying to equate demanding a living wage with stock market games is just... wow. Just wow.
But hey, in the end it doesn't really matter. The United States will collapse, China will rise. Maybe they will recognize US nobility, maybe they won't. It's just a new empire replacing the old and corrupt one. We shall see if China too will flirt with individual freedoms, and if they'll get those confused with letting the rich and the powerful to oppress everyone else and sell the country piece by piece, like the US did.
Yeah it sucks. And it's slow (CPU intensive). And I can't get back to the classic (plain text) index even though I've un-checked and checked it multiple times.
From your use page: Help & preferences -> Discussions -> Vieving -> Slashdot Classic Discussion System.
Took me a while to figure it out too. Kinda panicked when I thought that I'd be stuck with the new system.
If you're making squeaky, saccharine, money-grabbing crap music, yes.
And by "squeaky, saccharine, money-grabbing crap music" you mean music you don't like? Because it seems that quite a lot of people do. Yet the only real measurement of quality is lasting popularity - which this "saccharine crap" may or may not have. However, the character of Miku herself is certainly already a part of Internet pop culture, and unlikely to disappear anywhere.
Question: isn't it much more likely that we exist in one of the simulated universes instead of the original one?
Every simulated universe exist inside the original universe, as does everything inside them. The real question is: is it possible to figure out the physics of the containing universe from the simulated one? In other words, could the simulated universe be simulated by different "host" universes, and perhaps be transferred between them, in the manner of a virtual machine?
Even more interestingly: is it possible to have entirely encapsulated simulated universes, or do the abstractions always leak enough to allow the inhabitants of the simulations to deduce the truth?
Coming to think of it, it could be said that our everyday experience is a simulation: the Universe actually runs on some combination of Quantum physics and General Relativity, yet we live in a world of Newtonian physics where everything has definitive place, speed and other variables.
At somebody, not that far into the future if you compare it to the age of the universe, you will have computers to run a simulated universe that contains autonomous agents to whom the universe appears real.
You can already do that - it's what every computer game is, at heart.
I don't think they will because I believe that Apple would rather developers use Objective-C over Java for OSX development for the very same reasons they would rather developers use Objective-C over Flash for iOS development.
I'm sure they would, but is it very likely that people are going to start doing OSX only development? Apple doesn't really have that much marketshare, and as this very incident once again shows, it's dangerous to trust them.
If Mac loses Java, then Mac loses Java programs, not gain native ones. And frankly, Mac can ill afford to lose software.
In five years, you'll be able to watch YouTube videos of Hatsune Miku getting drunk at a party, slapping a fan, and lifting her top for Virtual Girls Gone Wild.
those are in English? The text is English but it doesn't sound like any English I've ever heard, only thing I understood was "Ah....."
That's because Miku is basically a vocal typesetting program, reading aloud (or singing) Japanese text by finding the best sound bits for the input from its library and combining them. Using this for English is possible, since English and Japanese have similar phonemes due to being both produced by human throats, but...
I've seen dogs that spoke better English
...it's going to sound exactly like this, and for the exact same reason.
It's only a matter of time until someone links one of the numerous music-generation algorithms up to Vocaloid, adds a vocal writing algorithm (there are automated scientific paper generators, and 99.9% of lyrics are total nonsensical garbage anyway), and uses some artificial phoneme seed samples (from, say, a fluid dynamic simulation of a model of the human vocal cords), and you'd have songs written and sung pretty much entirely without human intervention.
Isn't simulating echoes in a given environment old technology already? And vocal chords themselves simply create sound with various pitches, it's the rest of the throat/mouth/nasal cavity system that turns it into words.
Anyway, the main problem - and why Miku sounds so horrible when used with English - is mapping various "sound bits" to parts of words. It can be likened to typesetting, where the appearance of each glyph can and should be altered based on its neighbours. Then there's pitch, tempo, emphasis, and mood, all of which depend on the message being delivered.
It's certainly a possible problem to solve - human brains do so, after all - but it's by no means easy.
If that's your opinion, well great. I'll go for talented musicians putting their hearts and souls into the music
Suppose I'm a talented musician and programmer, putting my heart and soul into writing a singing and dancing program? Is that really any different than using an electric guitar as my tool?
Slashdot Mirror
They don't. It's actually all a giant conspiracy to make people believe that Earth has a magnetic field so Electromagnetistists can get funding. Global Warming Conspiracy is an offshoot of it.
That's not a bug, it's a feature. Constant inflation is supposed to make investing your money a better alternative than simply sitting on it. This, in turn, keeps the economy growing, rather than stagnating.
Well, no, you will never benefit from life insurance. Bad example :).
Even assuming that fiat currency collapses, wouldn't it make more sense to buy stock? It's backed by actual production capability, actually makes you some money on average (unlike insurance), and any economic collapse serious enough to destroy said stocks value will certainly devalue pretty metals as well.
And the time will come when someone finds a large enough deposit or enough people are selling at the same time to completely collapse the value of gold. What's your point?
Besides, no, hyperinflation doesn't need to ever happen. Simply don't print more money unless the economy is expanding, and it won't. It's as easy as that.
The problem with your example is that you're assuming that your gold and silver will still have value in the case of economic collapse. They won't, because if the economy collapses I'm not willing to exchange my canned food and ammunition for inedible, useless metal.
The value of currency is based on what you can buy with it. This is true, whether the currency in question is made of gum wrappers or pretty yellow metal.
But hey, fiat currency is going to prove unworkable aaany day now...
Moon is ours for the taking, because there's nobody else around here to make the claim. Strip mining it hurts nobody since it's a dead rock, and has the potential to help people, so it should be done.
Now, do you or do you not have a reason why Moon shouldn't be strip mined? Or was your appeal to ridicule meant to hide the idiocy of your knee-jerk reaction to the thought of humans doing anything at all? Are you perhaps one of those "greens" who oppose everything?
More generally, this kind of thing leaves me in a bit of a bind: I like having clean air to breath, water to drink and food to eat, but if I support enviromental protection, I run the risk of supporting morons like this. What am I to do? Does anyone have a solution?
Pov-Ray runs slow on today's hottest new thing. So do various physics simulators. And just try to run a physics simulator and AI on a same machine (to do robot research without having to build actual robots)! In fact, even Dwarf Fortress, and ASCII game, still slows down occasionally!
Simply because you use a modern computer as a glorified typewriter doesn't mean that we all do.
You do realize that "corporation" is just a standardized way of handling such arrangements, right? And lack of standardized corporation formats will simply make it easier for conmen to fool the gullible out of their money.
Dunno what you mean by "jack-booted thug", since freeform partnership is certainly possible to do right now. It's simply that limited liability corporations tend to work better in practice, so most opt for that instead.
Agreed.
You do know about stocks and dividends, right?
Actually, according to both US and EU courts, ol'Bill's success is based on criminal activities. But I guess a criminal could still be hard-working...
But yes, Bill built his own company, no matter how unethical, illegal and harmful his methods might have been. Most rich people haven't, but simply inherited enough money from their parents to live off the interest - in other words, other people's work.
So, if they're no more deserving of being rich and getting a free ride than the rest of us, why should they get one at our expense? Tax them their fair share and use the money to fix crumbling infrastructure and pay up national debt.
Except that it doesn't. You forgot the part where everyone but the richest guy is working for a living, and the richest guy doesn't, since he gets a cut off of everyone else's work. This is known as "capitalism", and it has attained somewhat of a religious status in Western world. One of the results is the current depression.
The powerful usually get the most benefit of anything, especially things devised by their equally powerful friends.
They aren't being attacked for being wealthy. They are being attacked for complaining that their free ride isn't fancy enough.
Thus leaving more beer for the rest of us, while no more forcing us to give up most the fruits of our labour to him. I'm all for it.
That would also make it even harder to invest if you have a day job, thus increasing and enforcing the separation of society into investing and working classes. Limited liability exists for a reason.
A better solution would be to simply punish corporations harder, and make any fines deduced from future dividends (and adjusted for inflation and/or interest, of course). This would make them depress the stock value, thus making any shenigans less financially sensible while preventing the side effect of disturbing business (and thus punishing any dependent third parties).
That's all nice and good. However, if you don't have corporations, you don't have a means for people to pool their wealth to start a business, which is bad. Nor do you have continuity of business in case of individual existence failures or loss of interest, which is again bad (for everyone who had anything to do with said business). And if you do have corporations (and even if you don't), they will eventually grow to the point of being too big to fail, because them failing would start a cascade effect that would take down your whole economy.
The basic problem of free market is that if you have competition, then someone will eventually win.
The Elder Party. The stars are right, so why settle for the lesser evil? Cthulhu for President!
...The only thing is, I get the sinking feeling that His Tentacled Majesty would be a lesser evil than either of those...
This one broke my ironymeter.
A huge, arbitrary punishment for a minor crime. In short, just the kind the "tough on crime" -crowd will be salivating over, thus helping this judge get re-elected at this kid's expence.
Just saying.
Yeah; they demanded good pay for long hard hours.
Indeed, Chinese slave labour - or slave labour in general - is more cost effective.
If only the peons knew their place and worked for peanuts!
Trying to equate demanding a living wage with stock market games is just... wow. Just wow.
But hey, in the end it doesn't really matter. The United States will collapse, China will rise. Maybe they will recognize US nobility, maybe they won't. It's just a new empire replacing the old and corrupt one. We shall see if China too will flirt with individual freedoms, and if they'll get those confused with letting the rich and the powerful to oppress everyone else and sell the country piece by piece, like the US did.
From your use page: Help & preferences -> Discussions -> Vieving -> Slashdot Classic Discussion System.
Took me a while to figure it out too. Kinda panicked when I thought that I'd be stuck with the new system.
And by "squeaky, saccharine, money-grabbing crap music" you mean music you don't like? Because it seems that quite a lot of people do. Yet the only real measurement of quality is lasting popularity - which this "saccharine crap" may or may not have. However, the character of Miku herself is certainly already a part of Internet pop culture, and unlikely to disappear anywhere.
Sorry to answer twice.
Every simulated universe exist inside the original universe, as does everything inside them. The real question is: is it possible to figure out the physics of the containing universe from the simulated one? In other words, could the simulated universe be simulated by different "host" universes, and perhaps be transferred between them, in the manner of a virtual machine?
Even more interestingly: is it possible to have entirely encapsulated simulated universes, or do the abstractions always leak enough to allow the inhabitants of the simulations to deduce the truth?
Coming to think of it, it could be said that our everyday experience is a simulation: the Universe actually runs on some combination of Quantum physics and General Relativity, yet we live in a world of Newtonian physics where everything has definitive place, speed and other variables.
You can already do that - it's what every computer game is, at heart.
Or they figure out a bug in the simulation which allows us to escape it, spread to and infect the Olympian Internet, and hold the gods hostage.
I'm sure they would, but is it very likely that people are going to start doing OSX only development? Apple doesn't really have that much marketshare, and as this very incident once again shows, it's dangerous to trust them.
If Mac loses Java, then Mac loses Java programs, not gain native ones. And frankly, Mac can ill afford to lose software.
In five years?
That's because Miku is basically a vocal typesetting program, reading aloud (or singing) Japanese text by finding the best sound bits for the input from its library and combining them. Using this for English is possible, since English and Japanese have similar phonemes due to being both produced by human throats, but...
...it's going to sound exactly like this, and for the exact same reason.
Isn't simulating echoes in a given environment old technology already? And vocal chords themselves simply create sound with various pitches, it's the rest of the throat/mouth/nasal cavity system that turns it into words.
Anyway, the main problem - and why Miku sounds so horrible when used with English - is mapping various "sound bits" to parts of words. It can be likened to typesetting, where the appearance of each glyph can and should be altered based on its neighbours. Then there's pitch, tempo, emphasis, and mood, all of which depend on the message being delivered.
It's certainly a possible problem to solve - human brains do so, after all - but it's by no means easy.
Suppose I'm a talented musician and programmer, putting my heart and soul into writing a singing and dancing program? Is that really any different than using an electric guitar as my tool?