The dollar hasn't even existed for 300 years before fiat money. Closer to 100.
And the statement you've made actually describes inflation during that period. The 100 years where the dollar was backed by metals occurred during greatest period of productivity improvements in the history of mankind: the industrial revolution. If the dollar had the same buying power before and after that, then it surely was affected by significant inflation.
No, infrastructure spending doesn't increase employment. At best it's a net breakeven. You have to spend resources on it, and those resources come from somewhere. They come from taxation. Everyone loses a fraction of their effort to compel a small number of people to work on the infrastructure project.
But those construction workers might very well have been hired into projects all over the rest of the economy if you hadn't bled it for the infrastructure project. Or maybe non-construction workers that are harder to count.
The benefit of any infrastructure project is the improvement in efficiency in transporting or creating goods and services by the very economic actors you bled to create it. The jobs to actually build the project, while highly visible are actually part of the *cost* of the project.
And that is why the stimulus failed, and why it will always fail. They thought they could buy "jobs" without really considering what a job really is.
So.. you are referring to the democrats in in the house, then? I seem to recall the republicans passing a bill which would've raised the debt limit....
Is there a "wages + dept service" share of gdp graph? From the first and last one, it looks like it would be very informative.. the years with the least debt seem to correspond to the years with the greatest wages share...
The major changes we'd need to make are not going to go over well. We need to bring the military home. When we do, unemployment will go above 12%.
I'm not so sure about that. Maybe if we brought them all home *tomorrow*, and laid them off right away there's be a brief spike, but any sanely executed drawdown will probably take months. Further, military personnel are fairly intelligent, usually quite motivated, young, fit, and these days often have skills that would transfer over quite well.
I think we'd see the same effect that we saw after WWII, when there were similar fears. But not spending on a huge military would free up resources in the free market, and the influx of high quality workers would only serve to create more wealth and jobs. Just as then, when the draw down of the government drain of resources and manpower ushered in one of the greatest periods of prosperity and employment we'd see a similar improvement.
As long as government can resist spending the "savings" on even bigger domestic white elephants. Unfortunately, the military is NOT the biggest draw on the federal budget, despite being the only thing that the federal government is actually charged with doing. A smaller military is good, but however big or small it is, aside from debt service, everything else should be much less.
Credit scores are actually a pretty good example. Information that the credit companies collect about you, which can affect you greatly. In the US, they are considered important enough that laws have been written to require the credit reporting agencies to provide you with your score on a periodic basis (if you ask) at NO charge.
The claims made by this group have public policy implications. Since their interpretation of the data could affect your lifestyle personally, don't you feel you should have the right to check their work? This means it needs to be obtainable by individuals at reasonable (i.e. no more than reproduction) cost.
Perhaps. On the other hand, the company they're betting isn't Google. It's all the companies selling Android devices that will have to basically start from scratch if there is an injunction....
A person who has spent the better part of a decade cramming as many (hopefully correct and up-to-date) facts into his head and relating them all to each other in such a way that they will have quick access to the important ones for each patient he is presented with.
In other words, an MD is a medical database in organic form! One that has to be built from scratch on each new piece of hardware running it. (and one whose pruning algorithm is a little aggressive....)
Frankly, I'm starting to wonder if the state of technology is such that we're getting to the point that it might be more effective to train medical technicians: people who are expert at recognizing symptoms, but maybe less skilled at knowing what a collection of symptoms means, who can the use their skills to query a computer database for a list of conditions, treatments, and ways to narrow down the list. Such technicians might be easier to train, so we could have more of them/ train them more robustly.
Researchers would then continue to build the database, but being computer-based, it could be copied any number of times to arbitrary fidelity.
Did they also mention that a 21" TV (which was mostly bezel...) in the 50s cost closer to two month's salary? Compare that to the two days salary for a 21" viewable screen you'd pay today...
No, that's a different problem. That problem is that you're searching for the name of the thing you want directly, rather than a tag, or a word IN the name of the thing you want.
If your files and panels and whatnot are indexed properly, then when you search for network, you get all of the network related panels, and when you search for network settings, it doesn't just search for the string "network settings" but for all of the panels tagged, "network" which are also tagged, "settings." or have both words in the name.
developers everywhere are guilty of not making searches easy for users.
I seem to recall another software house doing some experimentation on price and finding that the $60 price point is pretty far from the revenue minimax point....
If most people only play your game once, then that is indication that the phrase, "fool me once..." is not working out in your favor...
When has the US f'd up and killed 10k people? Are you talking about the wars? Because I don't think that they map very well to reactor design and maintenance programs. I don't think it counts an engineering f-up if you intended to kill people...
Maybe you're talking about our transportation system, which focuses largely on individually-controlled discrete transportation units to offer maximum flexibility to the users of the system? I don't think we're going to reduce road deaths much more than we already have without doing something radical. Like fully automated cars.
I'm trying to map the phrase "cargo cult" onto the situation you've described and I'm coming up blank. Leaving aside the issue of whether or not thorium breeders are a good idea or not, the only meaning of the phrase "cargo cult" I can divine that might be relevant appears to be the usage of the phrase itself!
On the reactor type issue, though, thorium breeders are the future of energy production - there are orders of magnitude more of it accessible than uranium, although we do have an awful lot of available uranium. So, we don't need to switch to thorium breeders just yet, as long as we use uranium breeders and/or reprocessing to consume the "waste" (i.e. the other 98% of the fuel....)
But we'll need to switch to thorium at some point, unless we figure out how to do "really deep geothermal" before then. Still, even then it will probably be more cost-effective to just use the thorium on the surface until it runs out. Kind of like coal is today...
Letters of Mark are what you issue to create pirates. The recipient then goes and harasses the shipping of your enemies, and you hope(*) that they'll be treated as prisoners of war if captured, rather than summarily executed or whatever your enemy does to criminals and spies.
(*) you probably don't care, but you pretend to, to bolster the number of ships willing to take the deal.
They're at least a little bad, even your friend, because they took the jobs in the first place and continue working them once they're in. The choice isn't between being a state-sanctioned bully and not-eating, at worst it's between being a state-paid bully and accepting money from the state while not being a bully. More likely, your friend and most others could find real jobs, even in this economy.
Handing out headhunter referrals IS passive resistance. The goal is to get the people doing the job to think about not doing it any more. At least a few might, quite nonviolently, take up the opportunity to change employment. Thus reducing the size of the pool of willing agents. If enough people won't take that job for any amount of money, there would certainly have to be some consideration made about trying to continue it.
If they're needed at airports, where most people are just trying to get where they're going, how much more so are they needed at courthouses, where emotions are high and all kinds of high-value targets spend their entire day in exposed positions?
We should install the scanners at courthouses immediately, and since a lot can be concealed under a judge's robe, I don't see any reason why anyone should be exempt from the scrutiny. After all, the machines are safe and effective, right?
Your homeopathic doctor uses undiluted liquid nitrogen on warts? Scandal.
Also, you should probably tip her if she does. LN2 isn't exactly expensive (less per liter than milk, last I checked) but it doesn't store very long unless you get a lot of it. (square law/cube law stuff)
Counter-rotating pairs aren't magic. They have to be connected by something. The stress on the connecting member will be huge. How do you plan to attach them?
I don't know what "career criminals" do, but obviously, if they're making a career out of it, they must have figured out *some* way of not getting caught. Unless they're actually career jailbirds, that is...
The Americans are extremely bad at implementing any legal reforms due to the immense amount of lobbying going on there.
No, it's due to the ability of lawyers to work odd hours and practice tear-down speeches as part of their jobs. As such, they have plenty of free time to devote to "public service." e.g. getting involved in legislatures.
It is a bad idea of the highest degree to allow lawyers to even have a say in the lawmaking process. After all, they have a vested interest not in the quality of laws but the quantity....
Slashdot Mirror
The dollar hasn't even existed for 300 years before fiat money. Closer to 100.
And the statement you've made actually describes inflation during that period. The 100 years where the dollar was backed by metals occurred during greatest period of productivity improvements in the history of mankind: the industrial revolution. If the dollar had the same buying power before and after that, then it surely was affected by significant inflation.
No, infrastructure spending doesn't increase employment. At best it's a net breakeven. You have to spend resources on it, and those resources come from somewhere. They come from taxation. Everyone loses a fraction of their effort to compel a small number of people to work on the infrastructure project.
But those construction workers might very well have been hired into projects all over the rest of the economy if you hadn't bled it for the infrastructure project. Or maybe non-construction workers that are harder to count.
The benefit of any infrastructure project is the improvement in efficiency in transporting or creating goods and services by the very economic actors you bled to create it. The jobs to actually build the project, while highly visible are actually part of the *cost* of the project.
And that is why the stimulus failed, and why it will always fail. They thought they could buy "jobs" without really considering what a job really is.
So.. you are referring to the democrats in in the house, then? I seem to recall the republicans passing a bill which would've raised the debt limit....
Is there a "wages + dept service" share of gdp graph? From the first and last one, it looks like it would be very informative.. the years with the least debt seem to correspond to the years with the greatest wages share...
The major changes we'd need to make are not going to go over well. We need to bring the military home. When we do, unemployment will go above 12%.
I'm not so sure about that. Maybe if we brought them all home *tomorrow*, and laid them off right away there's be a brief spike, but any sanely executed drawdown will probably take months. Further, military personnel are fairly intelligent, usually quite motivated, young, fit, and these days often have skills that would transfer over quite well.
I think we'd see the same effect that we saw after WWII, when there were similar fears. But not spending on a huge military would free up resources in the free market, and the influx of high quality workers would only serve to create more wealth and jobs. Just as then, when the draw down of the government drain of resources and manpower ushered in one of the greatest periods of prosperity and employment we'd see a similar improvement.
As long as government can resist spending the "savings" on even bigger domestic white elephants. Unfortunately, the military is NOT the biggest draw on the federal budget, despite being the only thing that the federal government is actually charged with doing. A smaller military is good, but however big or small it is, aside from debt service, everything else should be much less.
Credit scores are actually a pretty good example. Information that the credit companies collect about you, which can affect you greatly. In the US, they are considered important enough that laws have been written to require the credit reporting agencies to provide you with your score on a periodic basis (if you ask) at NO charge.
The claims made by this group have public policy implications. Since their interpretation of the data could affect your lifestyle personally, don't you feel you should have the right to check their work? This means it needs to be obtainable by individuals at reasonable (i.e. no more than reproduction) cost.
To be fair, they may have spent a good deal more money on windows than they thought they would...
Perhaps. On the other hand, the company they're betting isn't Google. It's all the companies selling Android devices that will have to basically start from scratch if there is an injunction....
Although.. what IS a doctor (MD), really?
A person who has spent the better part of a decade cramming as many (hopefully correct and up-to-date) facts into his head and relating them all to each other in such a way that they will have quick access to the important ones for each patient he is presented with.
In other words, an MD is a medical database in organic form! One that has to be built from scratch on each new piece of hardware running it. (and one whose pruning algorithm is a little aggressive....)
Frankly, I'm starting to wonder if the state of technology is such that we're getting to the point that it might be more effective to train medical technicians: people who are expert at recognizing symptoms, but maybe less skilled at knowing what a collection of symptoms means, who can the use their skills to query a computer database for a list of conditions, treatments, and ways to narrow down the list. Such technicians might be easier to train, so we could have more of them/ train them more robustly.
Researchers would then continue to build the database, but being computer-based, it could be copied any number of times to arbitrary fidelity.
Did they also mention that a 21" TV (which was mostly bezel...) in the 50s cost closer to two month's salary? Compare that to the two days salary for a 21" viewable screen you'd pay today...
No, that's a different problem. That problem is that you're searching for the name of the thing you want directly, rather than a tag, or a word IN the name of the thing you want.
If your files and panels and whatnot are indexed properly, then when you search for network, you get all of the network related panels, and when you search for network settings, it doesn't just search for the string "network settings" but for all of the panels tagged, "network" which are also tagged, "settings." or have both words in the name.
developers everywhere are guilty of not making searches easy for users.
I seem to recall another software house doing some experimentation on price and finding that the $60 price point is pretty far from the revenue minimax point....
If most people only play your game once, then that is indication that the phrase, "fool me once..." is not working out in your favor...
The world is a very backward place where police are using wiretapping laws against citizens..
When has the US f'd up and killed 10k people? Are you talking about the wars? Because I don't think that they map very well to reactor design and maintenance programs. I don't think it counts an engineering f-up if you intended to kill people...
Maybe you're talking about our transportation system, which focuses largely on individually-controlled discrete transportation units to offer maximum flexibility to the users of the system? I don't think we're going to reduce road deaths much more than we already have without doing something radical. Like fully automated cars.
I'm trying to map the phrase "cargo cult" onto the situation you've described and I'm coming up blank. Leaving aside the issue of whether or not thorium breeders are a good idea or not, the only meaning of the phrase "cargo cult" I can divine that might be relevant appears to be the usage of the phrase itself!
On the reactor type issue, though, thorium breeders are the future of energy production - there are orders of magnitude more of it accessible than uranium, although we do have an awful lot of available uranium. So, we don't need to switch to thorium breeders just yet, as long as we use uranium breeders and/or reprocessing to consume the "waste" (i.e. the other 98% of the fuel....)
But we'll need to switch to thorium at some point, unless we figure out how to do "really deep geothermal" before then. Still, even then it will probably be more cost-effective to just use the thorium on the surface until it runs out. Kind of like coal is today...
You got your understanding of the parable of the broken window by watching the villain in "The Fifth Element?"
Letters of Mark are what you issue to create pirates. The recipient then goes and harasses the shipping of your enemies, and you hope(*) that they'll be treated as prisoners of war if captured, rather than summarily executed or whatever your enemy does to criminals and spies.
(*) you probably don't care, but you pretend to, to bolster the number of ships willing to take the deal.
There is indeed an inverse relationship between someone's competence, and their own belief in their competence.
<pedant>Wait.. so what does that say about your competence?</pedant>
They're at least a little bad, even your friend, because they took the jobs in the first place and continue working them once they're in. The choice isn't between being a state-sanctioned bully and not-eating, at worst it's between being a state-paid bully and accepting money from the state while not being a bully. More likely, your friend and most others could find real jobs, even in this economy.
Handing out headhunter referrals IS passive resistance. The goal is to get the people doing the job to think about not doing it any more. At least a few might, quite nonviolently, take up the opportunity to change employment. Thus reducing the size of the pool of willing agents. If enough people won't take that job for any amount of money, there would certainly have to be some consideration made about trying to continue it.
If they're needed at airports, where most people are just trying to get where they're going, how much more so are they needed at courthouses, where emotions are high and all kinds of high-value targets spend their entire day in exposed positions?
We should install the scanners at courthouses immediately, and since a lot can be concealed under a judge's robe, I don't see any reason why anyone should be exempt from the scrutiny. After all, the machines are safe and effective, right?
in the real world, we tend to pay them uncompetitive salaries
[citation] please.
Your homeopathic doctor uses undiluted liquid nitrogen on warts? Scandal.
Also, you should probably tip her if she does. LN2 isn't exactly expensive (less per liter than milk, last I checked) but it doesn't store very long unless you get a lot of it. (square law/cube law stuff)
Counter-rotating pairs aren't magic. They have to be connected by something. The stress on the connecting member will be huge. How do you plan to attach them?
I don't know what "career criminals" do, but obviously, if they're making a career out of it, they must have figured out *some* way of not getting caught. Unless they're actually career jailbirds, that is...
The Americans are extremely bad at implementing any legal reforms due to the immense amount of lobbying going on there.
No, it's due to the ability of lawyers to work odd hours and practice tear-down speeches as part of their jobs. As such, they have plenty of free time to devote to "public service." e.g. getting involved in legislatures.
It is a bad idea of the highest degree to allow lawyers to even have a say in the lawmaking process. After all, they have a vested interest not in the quality of laws but the quantity....