Even if we ignore the complex -- and I suspect fundamentally specious -- arguments about how debt repayment won't be inflationary.
Read the post he linked to. The bloggers that run that site hold fairly sane views on a number of topics, so give their arguments a chance instead of dismissing on grounds that they're inconsistent with your worldview.
And, by the way, there's nothing inflationary about the Treasury minting $20 trillion to repay its debt in its entirety and secure cash for its next couple of budgets. I admittedly haven't read the linked post's author's reasoning, which I'd wager offers a few insightful remarks; but I can offer you my own remarks.
Consider, for a moment, the useful clue that central banks (not just Bernanke; also the ECB, etc.) actually have printed a few trillions since 2007, and that the only material price increases we can speak of since then are in commodities and stock markets -- which is to say, wall street is blowing new bubbles with the free cash instead of loaning it. Why? One reason is that financial institutions are just as over leveraged and insolvent today as they were in 2007; in some cases even more so. The liabilities and bad loans were merely swept under the rug, waiting to bite us in the ass even harder when hell breaks loose. Another is that they've essentially nobody to loan money to in this economy, except themselves.
Whichever combination of reasons it actually is, the net effect is that the money isn't finding its way into the consumer's pocket, and the consumer's pocket is where official inflation is being measured. If we factored all asset prices into official inflation, we'd probably have been measuring deflation for the past few years. Instead, we mostly look at household expenses like grocery shopping, where money running around after goods has been more or less the same (you stop paying your mortgage before you stop eating), and we thus observe no material price increases except those related to gasoline prices -- which have a lot to do with peak oil and events in the Persian Gulf, and which weed into grocery prices in the form of truck deliveries.
It's tempting to dismiss the latter observation as specious, on grounds that price increases are a mere consequence of inflation, that inflation itself is an increase in the money supply, i.e. that what we're really seeing here is banks sitting on cash hoards instead of handing it over the the public, and shit will hit the fan the minute banks decide to leak some of it to the public.
And I agree... except for the fact that inflation is not an increase in the supply of money; it is an increase in the supply of money and credit. Fractional reserve banking helping, the key creators of money in our economy are financial institutions; not governments or central banks. (As an aside, delve into Steve Keen's research for sane views on how this actually works.) incidentally, the private sector as a whole is currently deleveraging, destroying credit faster than the Fed is willing to print money, and that is why hyperinflationists have been proven wrong again and again in the past few years.
In that light, I'd opine that minting $20 trillion into the economy would have absolutely zero effect if, at the same time, financial institutions are regulated in such a way that they're forced to deleverage by a similar amount. This could be as simple (and in fact, sane) as requiring banks to maintain reserves at 30% of deposits and denying them to count junk like AAA-rated mortgage backed securities as reserves. (And I'd actually suggest that such a move would force them to deleverage be a shit ton more than whatever the Treasury mints.) Anyway, my $0.02 worth.
But how will that work on popular YouTube-like sites that aren't really YouTube?
Most larger sites tend to serve html5 video due to the 250 million or so iOS users.
Not all of them do so properly yet, however. Specifically, a number of sites still check the user agent, rather than for Flash presence. On Safari, you can work around this by enabling the developer toolbar in the settings -- you use it to make the browser advertise itself as an iPad, which reloads, and more often than not things will then work without a hiccup. Being based on Webkit, I'd be surprised if Chrome doesn't have a similar developer toolbar.
Along the same lines, some of the embed code that news sites offer always work when it's used on 3rd party sites. When this occurs, there's a good chance that the video actually works on the news site itself. Most sensible bloggers will post the link to the original along with the embedded video; when not, it's usually a google away and, more often than not, on youtube as well.
At any rate, I've been living without Flash at all for the past two years or so. Admittedly, I never played Flash games, nor used it for much other than youtube videos, so your mileage may vary. For what it's worth, I don't miss it at all.
But then, your argument completely falls apart because these users are mostly corporate users whose IT managers should know better.
Households users either worry about it and upgrade themselves, or have more savvy family or friends who do it for them. Do you leave your grand parents, parents or friends with a batshit crazy outdated browser lying around? Of course not. You upgrade it when you notice, and you ideally configure the PC to do so automatically in the future.
After viewing that film a few years back, I couldn't help thinking how Bill Still's otherwise interesting ideas and viewpoints were, very sadly, polluted by poor fact checking.
Specifically, entire segments of the movie, for instance most of what he says of the Rothchilds and entire chunks of the history he depicts of 19th century banking, are based on a revisionist version of history promulgated by nazi propaganda, which itself can be traced to pre-nazi aryan/atlantist theorists such as Blavatsky. These "truths" eventually entered common lore by repetition, and found their way into the 21st century.
Anyway, while no specialist in these topics myself, I knew enough for it to raise red flags. And I spent most of the movie wondering where he sourced his information.
In the end, it removed little from the key takeaways, since most were grounded in economic ideas which were either convincing or interesting, but it did not help him drive the point home.
You miss the whole point of the story. This story isn't JUST about US tax being avoided.
paid Irish taxes of about $4.64 million on its entire non-U.S. profits of $1.344 billion
The problem here is that Ireland offers ridiculously low tax rates to attract investment and employment.
Ireland's corporate tax rate is not "ridiculously low" and, contrary to what TFS suggests, Dublin is no tax haven. The Irish corporate tax rate is low by EU standards, but let's get real here: it's a far cry from being at Cayman level.
Let me to requote TFS with a bit more emphasis:
paid ***Irish*** taxes of about $4.64 million on its entire ***non-U.S.*** profits of $1.344 billion
What's the going corporate tax rate in Ireland again? 10%? 15%? Whichever it is, this means that they booked well under $100 million in profits over there. $1.344 billion is the profit booked in the Cayman.
Also, if Facebook is indeed siphoning profits out of Irland the way TFS says it does, I'd be very surprised that the Irish taxman won't eventually knock at the door. EU governments have little sense of humor when they need money, and $1.2 billion for having the rights to Facebook's IP is a bad joke that is virtually guaranteed to be investigated.
European countries are, for the most part, exemplar in the way they legalized porn. Give an honest look into the list and consider the roaches:
One is Azerbaijan. I say no. Not just no; Hell, no. Europe traditionally stops at the Caucus mountain. Look it up on a map: It has long border with oh-so-notoriously-porn-friendly Iran... The place doesn't even sound European. No game.
There are then a couple of Central and Eastern European countries with stricter laws, namely Bulgaria, Poland, some Baltic and Balkan States, and Ukraine. They're still barely out of the Soviet block, which as you're keenly aware was a model in its forward thinking. I'd then stress that throughout history, new ideas in Europe have mostly come from the West, and then spread to the East; and that this here is no different. Lastly, and frankly, the law merely needs to catch up with society in most if not all of these countries.
Amongst the latter group, Albania might stand out as more traditional, due to it being a Muslim country. I've admittedly never been there, so I cannot say for sure. But having observed bearded Muslims in Moroccan night clubs, I'm highly suspicious that it makes much difference.
The last country worth a mention is Malta. Fwiw, the place is the most reactionary State that catholic Europe has to offer, bar the Vatican itself. The church is so influential that Malta legalized divorce a mere two years ago, and by a rather thin margin at that. Most locals go to church, but WO a caveat: my sampling is admittedly anecdotal, but the younger generations do so less and less. This is a 40-year process, really: the island has been changing at rapid pace since it became a tourist resort. The Maltese youth gets drunk and gets laid like in any other western country: in a gigantic feast of debaucheries and sex games. Methinks there too,, law needs to catch up with society.
Anyway, yeah, there are a few traditional communities in Europe. Here's the thing, though: they're catching up, and not turning back. In contrast, the US features reasonably modern and sophisticated communities, some more traditional ones, and then there are openly backward ones -- some of which actively reject modernity to the point of regression. Of the latter, it seems to me that Europe has very, very few.
I'd view robotics, even with an AI flavor, as the natural continuation of IT, and suggest that 3d printing or nanotechnologies are good candidates for IR4.
I haven't used WP in a long time, so I don't know precisely what Total Cache does nowadays, but it seems to me that the security hole you disclosed would only ever apply if object and/or query caching is turned on with the disk used as the persistent store.
If so, I'd like to stress that this is a horrific setup which doesn't scale at all. The initial WP object caching implementation functioned precisely the same way in the WP core. It got disabled by default almost immediately because the high amount of disk I/O that it generated led a few hosts to shut down busy WP sites. It then got replaced by an object cache that uses a non-persistent in-memory store; and the latter can be upgraded to a persistent memcached-based store on busier sites, and this scales fine.
Imho, if more than a handful of sites are affected (which I doubt), you should suggest the plugin's author that he should prevent users from using such an inanely high amount of disk I/O in the first place, rather than suggesting him to bandaid that broken setup by adding htaccess files in relevant directories.
As a forewarning, your child's eye sight isn't fully developed yet at this age, and should probably not use the device before age 2-3 any more than a 3d game consol.
Now, if you still let him or her look at the screen at arm's range, he or she will see bright lights with vague shapes. You'll be able to tell because he or she will have a hard time distinguishing and interacting with precise UI features. Thus, at least do your kid a service by dimming the screen's brightness to the lowest possible setting.
If my own nephew is any indicator, btw, tasting the device will your infant's primary interest, alongside an occasional crash test when it slips. You've little need for fancy apps for that, the device itself and some simple music or drawing app will suffice.
Lastly, as many other posters have suggested already, you should be playing with and talking (very important) to your child, instead of delegating babysitting to a screen.
I don't see how tablets are any different from netbooks. They're semi-useful devices that have a limited place but are outclassed by more capable machines which have been around for a long time.
I think you don't get it. I'm admittedly no typical user, but I've the honest impression that I wouldn't need my laptop at all if I weren't programming. For the past two years, I've been doing everything else from a tablet, with the added bonus of being able to do so from a comfortable couch, a hammock, a beach club, wherever -- and without the need for a surface to sit the device on.
Do I periodically wish there were massive games like Civ 5? Sure, but they'll get there eventually. In the meanwhile, I can no longer be bothered to sit at a desk (and develop carpal tunnel) to play a video game.
In light of how tablets are selling, I trust I'm not alone with this impression. Only future will tell, obviously, but methinks the hey days of laptops and desktops in households are behind us.
If you are right in ten years they'll be facing a huge bill to try to do it all again with the extra complication and expense of doing little bits at a time between trains or something.
Liu Zhijun got sacked precisely because these complications were already there insofar as I've been following.
Sociology usually isn't any indicator to anything, but in this case it has interesting things to say: Mauss and follow-ups suggest that the exchange and the unwrapping of the gift is just as important, as a social event, if not more, than the gift itself.
Methinks you're fantasizing. China needs the US and the EU as much as the US and the EU needs China for cheap wares. If the the US and the EU go down and crash, China will crash even more. They've no interior market/consumption to speak of, and need to rebalance.
They eventually did, after a world war that destroyed half of the world's production capacity -- the other half being, for all intents and purposes, in the US. I dearly hope that such a scenario isn't on the table today.
Trouble is, they're building ghost cities, they build railroads with subpar concrete (hint, since it's not explicit in the NYT article: to make proper high speed rail concete you basically need a derivative of volcanic ash, and the amount thereof produced per year is lower than the amount needed to fit the needs of China's yearly consumption, which dwarves the consumption by that of all other countries; in other words, their railway infrastructure's lifespan is roughly 10-20 years, vs 50-100 in developed countries), they need to rebalance, and so many other things can go wrong...
And your theorietical reasoning would make sense if you lived in an ivory tower, oblivious to the world around you.
The sorry truth, however, is that you live in a very real community, and that community expects you to file taxes (in a currency) and pay taxes (in a currency). As much as I agree with your ideas in theory, the reality is that in such a context, tax laws and accounting trump whichever definition of value you and I might fantasize. You pay taxes in USD or Euros or whatever it is that your government expects where you live, and you book realized and unrealized gains and losses accordingly, value be damned.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if we ignore the complex -- and I suspect fundamentally specious -- arguments about how debt repayment won't be inflationary.
Read the post he linked to. The bloggers that run that site hold fairly sane views on a number of topics, so give their arguments a chance instead of dismissing on grounds that they're inconsistent with your worldview.
And, by the way, there's nothing inflationary about the Treasury minting $20 trillion to repay its debt in its entirety and secure cash for its next couple of budgets. I admittedly haven't read the linked post's author's reasoning, which I'd wager offers a few insightful remarks; but I can offer you my own remarks.
Consider, for a moment, the useful clue that central banks (not just Bernanke; also the ECB, etc.) actually have printed a few trillions since 2007, and that the only material price increases we can speak of since then are in commodities and stock markets -- which is to say, wall street is blowing new bubbles with the free cash instead of loaning it. Why? One reason is that financial institutions are just as over leveraged and insolvent today as they were in 2007; in some cases even more so. The liabilities and bad loans were merely swept under the rug, waiting to bite us in the ass even harder when hell breaks loose. Another is that they've essentially nobody to loan money to in this economy, except themselves.
Whichever combination of reasons it actually is, the net effect is that the money isn't finding its way into the consumer's pocket, and the consumer's pocket is where official inflation is being measured. If we factored all asset prices into official inflation, we'd probably have been measuring deflation for the past few years. Instead, we mostly look at household expenses like grocery shopping, where money running around after goods has been more or less the same (you stop paying your mortgage before you stop eating), and we thus observe no material price increases except those related to gasoline prices -- which have a lot to do with peak oil and events in the Persian Gulf, and which weed into grocery prices in the form of truck deliveries.
It's tempting to dismiss the latter observation as specious, on grounds that price increases are a mere consequence of inflation, that inflation itself is an increase in the money supply, i.e. that what we're really seeing here is banks sitting on cash hoards instead of handing it over the the public, and shit will hit the fan the minute banks decide to leak some of it to the public.
And I agree... except for the fact that inflation is not an increase in the supply of money; it is an increase in the supply of money and credit. Fractional reserve banking helping, the key creators of money in our economy are financial institutions; not governments or central banks. (As an aside, delve into Steve Keen's research for sane views on how this actually works.) incidentally, the private sector as a whole is currently deleveraging, destroying credit faster than the Fed is willing to print money, and that is why hyperinflationists have been proven wrong again and again in the past few years.
In that light, I'd opine that minting $20 trillion into the economy would have absolutely zero effect if, at the same time, financial institutions are regulated in such a way that they're forced to deleverage by a similar amount. This could be as simple (and in fact, sane) as requiring banks to maintain reserves at 30% of deposits and denying them to count junk like AAA-rated mortgage backed securities as reserves. (And I'd actually suggest that such a move would force them to deleverage be a shit ton more than whatever the Treasury mints.) Anyway, my $0.02 worth.
Yeah, it would be more fun if they shrunk it further and called it Chucky
But how will that work on popular YouTube-like sites that aren't really YouTube?
Most larger sites tend to serve html5 video due to the 250 million or so iOS users.
Not all of them do so properly yet, however. Specifically, a number of sites still check the user agent, rather than for Flash presence. On Safari, you can work around this by enabling the developer toolbar in the settings -- you use it to make the browser advertise itself as an iPad, which reloads, and more often than not things will then work without a hiccup. Being based on Webkit, I'd be surprised if Chrome doesn't have a similar developer toolbar.
Along the same lines, some of the embed code that news sites offer always work when it's used on 3rd party sites. When this occurs, there's a good chance that the video actually works on the news site itself. Most sensible bloggers will post the link to the original along with the embedded video; when not, it's usually a google away and, more often than not, on youtube as well.
At any rate, I've been living without Flash at all for the past two years or so. Admittedly, I never played Flash games, nor used it for much other than youtube videos, so your mileage may vary. For what it's worth, I don't miss it at all.
Have you tried actually uninstalling Flash? When you do, YouTube serves an html5 video.
But then, your argument completely falls apart because these users are mostly corporate users whose IT managers should know better.
Households users either worry about it and upgrade themselves, or have more savvy family or friends who do it for them. Do you leave your grand parents, parents or friends with a batshit crazy outdated browser lying around? Of course not. You upgrade it when you notice, and you ideally configure the PC to do so automatically in the future.
Why would anyone deserve to get hacked for just running an old version of a software?
Because the immense majority of them are corporate users whose IT managers should know better.
Anyone still using IE6 or IE7 deserves to get hacked anyway. I might have a crocodile tear for IE8 users
http://www.themoneymasters.com/
After viewing that film a few years back, I couldn't help thinking how Bill Still's otherwise interesting ideas and viewpoints were, very sadly, polluted by poor fact checking.
Specifically, entire segments of the movie, for instance most of what he says of the Rothchilds and entire chunks of the history he depicts of 19th century banking, are based on a revisionist version of history promulgated by nazi propaganda, which itself can be traced to pre-nazi aryan/atlantist theorists such as Blavatsky. These "truths" eventually entered common lore by repetition, and found their way into the 21st century.
Anyway, while no specialist in these topics myself, I knew enough for it to raise red flags. And I spent most of the movie wondering where he sourced his information.
In the end, it removed little from the key takeaways, since most were grounded in economic ideas which were either convincing or interesting, but it did not help him drive the point home.
You miss the whole point of the story. This story isn't JUST about US tax being avoided.
paid Irish taxes of about $4.64 million on its entire non-U.S. profits of $1.344 billion
The problem here is that Ireland offers ridiculously low tax rates to attract investment and employment.
Ireland's corporate tax rate is not "ridiculously low" and, contrary to what TFS suggests, Dublin is no tax haven. The Irish corporate tax rate is low by EU standards, but let's get real here: it's a far cry from being at Cayman level.
Let me to requote TFS with a bit more emphasis:
paid ***Irish*** taxes of about $4.64 million on its entire ***non-U.S.*** profits of $1.344 billion
What's the going corporate tax rate in Ireland again? 10%? 15%? Whichever it is, this means that they booked well under $100 million in profits over there. $1.344 billion is the profit booked in the Cayman.
Also, if Facebook is indeed siphoning profits out of Irland the way TFS says it does, I'd be very surprised that the Irish taxman won't eventually knock at the door. EU governments have little sense of humor when they need money, and $1.2 billion for having the rights to Facebook's IP is a bad joke that is virtually guaranteed to be investigated.
This is not insightful at all...
European countries are, for the most part, exemplar in the way they legalized porn. Give an honest look into the list and consider the roaches:
One is Azerbaijan. I say no. Not just no; Hell, no. Europe traditionally stops at the Caucus mountain. Look it up on a map: It has long border with oh-so-notoriously-porn-friendly Iran... The place doesn't even sound European. No game.
There are then a couple of Central and Eastern European countries with stricter laws, namely Bulgaria, Poland, some Baltic and Balkan States, and Ukraine. They're still barely out of the Soviet block, which as you're keenly aware was a model in its forward thinking. I'd then stress that throughout history, new ideas in Europe have mostly come from the West, and then spread to the East; and that this here is no different. Lastly, and frankly, the law merely needs to catch up with society in most if not all of these countries.
Amongst the latter group, Albania might stand out as more traditional, due to it being a Muslim country. I've admittedly never been there, so I cannot say for sure. But having observed bearded Muslims in Moroccan night clubs, I'm highly suspicious that it makes much difference.
The last country worth a mention is Malta. Fwiw, the place is the most reactionary State that catholic Europe has to offer, bar the Vatican itself. The church is so influential that Malta legalized divorce a mere two years ago, and by a rather thin margin at that. Most locals go to church, but WO a caveat: my sampling is admittedly anecdotal, but the younger generations do so less and less. This is a 40-year process, really: the island has been changing at rapid pace since it became a tourist resort. The Maltese youth gets drunk and gets laid like in any other western country: in a gigantic feast of debaucheries and sex games. Methinks there too,, law needs to catch up with society.
Anyway, yeah, there are a few traditional communities in Europe. Here's the thing, though: they're catching up, and not turning back. In contrast, the US features reasonably modern and sophisticated communities, some more traditional ones, and then there are openly backward ones -- some of which actively reject modernity to the point of regression. Of the latter, it seems to me that Europe has very, very few.
I'd view robotics, even with an AI flavor, as the natural continuation of IT, and suggest that 3d printing or nanotechnologies are good candidates for IR4.
I haven't used WP in a long time, so I don't know precisely what Total Cache does nowadays, but it seems to me that the security hole you disclosed would only ever apply if object and/or query caching is turned on with the disk used as the persistent store.
If so, I'd like to stress that this is a horrific setup which doesn't scale at all. The initial WP object caching implementation functioned precisely the same way in the WP core. It got disabled by default almost immediately because the high amount of disk I/O that it generated led a few hosts to shut down busy WP sites. It then got replaced by an object cache that uses a non-persistent in-memory store; and the latter can be upgraded to a persistent memcached-based store on busier sites, and this scales fine.
Imho, if more than a handful of sites are affected (which I doubt), you should suggest the plugin's author that he should prevent users from using such an inanely high amount of disk I/O in the first place, rather than suggesting him to bandaid that broken setup by adding htaccess files in relevant directories.
As a forewarning, your child's eye sight isn't fully developed yet at this age, and should probably not use the device before age 2-3 any more than a 3d game consol.
Now, if you still let him or her look at the screen at arm's range, he or she will see bright lights with vague shapes. You'll be able to tell because he or she will have a hard time distinguishing and interacting with precise UI features. Thus, at least do your kid a service by dimming the screen's brightness to the lowest possible setting.
If my own nephew is any indicator, btw, tasting the device will your infant's primary interest, alongside an occasional crash test when it slips. You've little need for fancy apps for that, the device itself and some simple music or drawing app will suffice.
Lastly, as many other posters have suggested already, you should be playing with and talking (very important) to your child, instead of delegating babysitting to a screen.
From my iPad, just like this one.
I don't see how tablets are any different from netbooks. They're semi-useful devices that have a limited place but are outclassed by more capable machines which have been around for a long time.
I think you don't get it. I'm admittedly no typical user, but I've the honest impression that I wouldn't need my laptop at all if I weren't programming. For the past two years, I've been doing everything else from a tablet, with the added bonus of being able to do so from a comfortable couch, a hammock, a beach club, wherever -- and without the need for a surface to sit the device on.
Do I periodically wish there were massive games like Civ 5? Sure, but they'll get there eventually. In the meanwhile, I can no longer be bothered to sit at a desk (and develop carpal tunnel) to play a video game.
In light of how tablets are selling, I trust I'm not alone with this impression. Only future will tell, obviously, but methinks the hey days of laptops and desktops in households are behind us.
Cool. Will it blend too?
It doesn't take intelligence to drive, it takes coordination and decentish reflexes..
It takes quite a bit of intelligence too imho, since you need to anticipate other drivers' behaviors and your environment.
If you are right in ten years they'll be facing a huge bill to try to do it all again with the extra complication and expense of doing little bits at a time between trains or something.
Liu Zhijun got sacked precisely because these complications were already there insofar as I've been following.
Sociology usually isn't any indicator to anything, but in this case it has interesting things to say: Mauss and follow-ups suggest that the exchange and the unwrapping of the gift is just as important, as a social event, if not more, than the gift itself.
Methinks you're fantasizing. China needs the US and the EU as much as the US and the EU needs China for cheap wares. If the the US and the EU go down and crash, China will crash even more. They've no interior market/consumption to speak of, and need to rebalance.
They eventually did, after a world war that destroyed half of the world's production capacity -- the other half being, for all intents and purposes, in the US. I dearly hope that such a scenario isn't on the table today.
Well, maybe.
Trouble is, they're building ghost cities, they build railroads with subpar concrete (hint, since it's not explicit in the NYT article: to make proper high speed rail concete you basically need a derivative of volcanic ash, and the amount thereof produced per year is lower than the amount needed to fit the needs of China's yearly consumption, which dwarves the consumption by that of all other countries; in other words, their railway infrastructure's lifespan is roughly 10-20 years, vs 50-100 in developed countries), they need to rebalance, and so many other things can go wrong...
That's extremely surprising considering everything they make is crap.
That's only because you're thinking of 'Research & Development'. In China R&D stands for 'Reverse-engineering & Duplication'.
If you put it like that, they've surpassed the US and the EU combined a very long time ago.
China will slow down or have crashed by then.
And your theorietical reasoning would make sense if you lived in an ivory tower, oblivious to the world around you.
The sorry truth, however, is that you live in a very real community, and that community expects you to file taxes (in a currency) and pay taxes (in a currency). As much as I agree with your ideas in theory, the reality is that in such a context, tax laws and accounting trump whichever definition of value you and I might fantasize. You pay taxes in USD or Euros or whatever it is that your government expects where you live, and you book realized and unrealized gains and losses accordingly, value be damned.