The problem is that he won't actually execute those ideas.
Things like this are what you make of them. If these questions come up and the President takes no action, in theory this would cause some sort of public awareness of the problem, and people would change their votes.
This doesn't happen though, because despite the fact they've set up the website very few people pay attention or care. I don't think Americans really want the sort of democracy where everything is petitioned and then they can follow up on the implementation themselves through transparent government. They'd much rather vote for people they like and then complain about the "system."
Advocating policies, and then pinning down politicians on those policies would force people to condition their vote on things that they really wouldn't want to: approximately zero voters would switch their vote from Obama to the viable Republican alternative over marijuana legalization, or habeas corpus, or IP legislation, or cessation of crony capitalism, Republicans are further to the right than him on all of those things. There's no need for him to take any action on these, and as long as the US has first-past-the-post balloting for the Presidency and Congress, alternative candidates will always be spoilers. And the voters won't condition their votes on these, because they know the viable alternative is worse and less-optimal for these goals.
Our system is designed to insulate elected officeholders from accountability to single-interest voter preferences.
Mercury is a neurotoxin that accumulates in the body.
In order to maintain this level of vigilance, you'll probably never be able to use an insect repellant around your child, or ever let them visit a farm, or a country where leaded gasoline is permitted. Such as Mexico.
I never claimed that it was an absolutely fixed value.
Well, except when you said "With a gold standard, dollars are fixed in value." If you're not using market value, what definition of value were you using here?
So when you have a gold standard, the value of your money is defined by something that usually remains rock-solid in real market value (the amount it takes to trade for other goods).
"Usually" is doing a lot of work here. I don't see how the solidity of the value of gold with regard to other goods aligns with the fact that the price of an ounce of gold is now over 500% what it was 10 years ago, yet core inflation has only been 23%, and even energy has only risen 90%. You can criticize these statistics but it would require you to assert a conspiracy on the part of the government.
The value I am referring to here is simply the amount of gold it would take to directly trade for other things.
Which is what we call the "price" of those respective other things. That it is denominated in a mass of gold does not make it a value and not a price.
The very fact that nobody fixes gold prices anymore is tacit admission that a gold standard is better than fiat money.
Either that, or they didn't want hard money, for either Keynesian or Monetarist reasons. You're presuming malice when stupidity would be sufficient to your case, but alas, very difficult to substantiate.
But when you set a fixed price in dollars, the only thing you are tying to market value is the market value of dollars, which varies wildly, sometimes from one day to the next.... At a fixed dollar price, when dollars go up and down in value, then the gold would go up and down in value to match.
But dollars can't go up and down in value because they are freely convertible to gold, and your thesis is that gold has rock-solid value. This counterexample you're giving is arguing that the value of gold is a fixed quantity, but the value of dollars is not, yet they are the same thing in a representative money system. Demand for dollars is a proxy for demand for gold and vice versa.
I mean, like, think of it legislatively. When the US had a gold standard, the law said, in so many words, "A dollar is redeemable for X troy ounces of gold." Is this the sort of legislation you would propose? How does my characterization of a gold standard differ from yours, in terms of the law you'd write?
And I replied with specific, verifiable examples of predictions that each made. No appeal to authority, no ad hominem.
Quoting people's opinions is an appeal to authority. The problem is that Laffer and Krugman can be wrong in specific cases but that neither makes their theories incorrect nor does it make people they disagree with correct. It's negative argumentation; your previous comment contained no positive argument for your beliefs at all, which I found remarkable. I was expecting a counter-scenario where you critique Krugman's solution and offer your own, but you never did, and still don't. Pointing out that people get things wrong isn't sufficient, nor are claims (unsubstantiated bare assertions on your part, really) that somehow someone gets things 80% more right than someone else. A stopped 12-hour clock tells the right time 100% more times in the day than a stopped 24-hour clock but neither are correct.
And I would add that most Austrian responses to the Co-Op problem involve just as much prediction and guessing as the Keynesian account.
Note that this was a subjunctive to my actual question, how to resolve the paradox of thrift. You never really did that, and I didn't challenge the quality of Austrian prediction here. The challenge is that both sides must make positive statements about the future and whichever course of action is taken, the monetary authority will set rules based on those predictions. What I was trying to attack was (what I would consider) the paradox in the consequentialism of Austrian theory, sorry it was a bit sloppy but I was expecting you'd respond to the meat and not the parsley of the argument.
The interesting thing here that ties into the gold standard question is that sometimes hard money advocates would try to characterize a gold standard as somehow not a regulation, or a law that is somehow subsumed in natural law or property rights, when it's really no such thing. When Bryan characterized the farmer as being nailed to a cross of gold, that's how he and a lot of people felt, and the government was doing the nailing; sure, sure rich bankers were holding the gold, but it was the state that was coming in and kicking people off their land at gunpoint. The state decided it was going to enforce certain values and used violence, the fact that the particular value was "hard money," versus alcohol prohibition, abortion prohibition, drug prohibition... doesn't really make a difference.
People like Hayek and Mises generally consider it sufficient to say that force is justified if you're protecting people's wealth, which I always found a suspicious and rather arbitrary place to draw the line on state violence.
I guess your argument would make sense to me if I accepted that there was such a thing as objective value.
In the situation you describe, gold is "fixed in price", and defined in terms of dollars. With a gold standard, dollars are fixed in value and defined in terms of gold.
I'm not sure what "fixed in value" means empirically, however I know that in a gold standard gold is absolutely fixed in price, gold and currency are always convertible. All market actors have a different value for an ounce of gold -- it's worthless to me in use, it's worth a lot to a dentist, to a miner it's worth their labor in exchange -- it cannot be made equally valuable to all by fiat. This is also complicated by the fact that the 1000th ounce of gold you own is always far less valuable than the first due to its marginal utility. Please expand on the theory of value you're using.
I'm not going to spend yet more time trying to explain it to you.
The major difference being that the Austrians were usually right, and the Keynesians almost always wrong.
You sound like a Marxist in 1920 denouncing Henry Hazlitt. This is the sort of inept and hectoring form of argumentation we've unfortunately come to expect for the internet libertarian -- the Capitol Hill Babysitting Co-Op cannot be explained, so I'm going to go on for... how long did it take, 30 minutes?... about how Paul Krugman and anybody that thinks there's such a thing as a multiplier or aggregate demand is a doody head, and Keynesians are always wrong. I don't have to explain why because I have cherry-picked quotes from one Keynesian 10 years ago. You forgot to throw in typical admonition that I "simply do not understand the Real Business Cycle."
We're trying to talk about a particular problem, but you turn it into a huge argument ad hominem and appeal to your authorities. Particularly hilarious is your drafting of Friedman(!), a monetarist who would disagree with you on just about every position you've taken on hard money -- if you're going to quote monetarists I see your Krugman and raise you an Alan Greenspan. Friedman also didn't particularly agree with Austrians.
Also the fact of the Great Moderation simply flies in the face of the Austrian account of how a macroeconomy works. It generally can't explain stickiness in prices or wages, it completely fails at creating a model that predicts unemployment. It's complete ignorance of statistics and evidence gathering classes it as, at best, a sort of philosophical discipline. Also, you can only characterize the panics of the 19th century if you only look at price levels and ignore the fact that millions of people lost their savings, their jobs and their businesses in the process. The Long Depression was four years of contraction, nominal wages dropped by half, a quarter of the able bodies were unemployed, who cares if a pound of coal was the same price one month before and one month after?
(Well, that's easy, rentier capitalists and their pseudo-intellectual spear-carriers cared a great deal...)
In contrast, a hard money standard sets the value of money in terms of a commodity, like gold.
If the government will exchange a unit of currency for a fixed amount of gold, the currency is a representative money and the price has been fixed. Gold under such a situation won't exchange on the open market for any price aside from what the government offers, because any difference can simply be arbitraged with Fort Knox. Representative money is price-fixing of a commodity. The price of the commodity no longer fluctuates naturally according to endogenous supply and demand, but is fixed by arbitrary government action. They dictate what how many dollars to the ounce, and nothing in principle keeps them from changing the number, or the composition of the dollar, such as politics fancied -- Congress needed to fund the Civil War, it issued fiay currency and it worked for that purpose. Rural voters wanted bimetalism, they voted for it and got it. Bankers hated silver barons, so they demanded it be stopped and it was stopped.
Precious metal price standards are just government subsides on mining, creating a buyer of first and last resort for metal regardless of actual industrial demand.
You're going to have unwind that for me, I am only aware of the standard definitions of these terms, to wit:
Hard money policies are those which are opposed to fiat currency and thus in support of a specie standard, usually gold or silver, typically implemented with representative money. (thus)
2. Describes gold/silver/platinum (bullion) coins. A government that uses a hard money policy backs the value of the currency it uses with a hard, tangible and lasting material that will retain its relative value over time. (thus)
The term “hard money” usually refers to one of two things. It can, first of all, be used for actual gold or silver coins, for example. Using this definition, we can say that a hard money policy is one in which the government recognizes currency which is based on an actual, fixed item which is considered valuable.(thus)
I'm just grabbin' the first few out of Google, here, maybe you have some sort of non-standard definition of these terms.
"John McClusker." should read "John McCusker." I don't know his methodology, but I think most accounts of purchasing power based on a fixed basket of commodities or classes of expenditure are unreliable and don't reflect gains in productivity and the increase in value of the items. Houses cost more than they should if you account for inflation, but they're also much more luxurious, and often much more favorably located due to urban growth. Most durable goods you buy today are simply not comparable with durable goods available even 10 years ago in terms of energy efficiency and features.
It's a bit like when people argue that health care was so much cheaper in 1920, while ignoring that most health care in the 1920s didn't actually work -- what's the comparable good in 1920 to penicillin? Or even a disposable bandaid? You can't tell me that someone on an median wage today is worse off in terms of available disposable income, return on the value of their fixed expenses, than someone with a median wage in 1950. I know that's a somewhat different claim than the "purchasing power for time t is better than t-1" but I meant it figuratively. You can't compare the future with the past with accounting information, you have to look at people's lives.
As far as I am concerned, anybody who takes Krugman seriously hasn't read their history.
The three paragraphs at the end of this post do not respond to the Capitol Hill Babysitting Co-Op. There are good arguments as to how his completely historical and non-prognositcating account are wrong, but you have none of them here. And I would add that most Austrian responses to the Co-Op problem involve just as much prediction and guessing as the Keynesian account.
Uhm... Google has had a Siri-like Voice Search feature (it does a lot more than just "search") for a long time.
I've seen these and Vlingo, it's comparable but Siri is probably the best for the time being. The main difference is you don't have to use canned expressions to do certain things, it will infer rather well what you wanted to do, and it will generally do a good job of maintaining an interactive conversation with you when you want to edit or elaborate on an action.
There have been apps around for ages that add to its functionality too. I realise the rest of your post was a joke, but too many people are ignorant of the facts and probably would assume Voice Search was added to copy Siri.
Google's ineptness at positioning its services to impact a large audience is well known. The entire organization revels in invitation-only betas, guru modes and a "good enough for Gospel" approach to UX.
If you maintained any significant portion of your current assets in Bitcoin you could be in a lot of trouble, and if you'd made any employment contracts over the last three months with people denominated in Bitcoin THEY'd now be in a lot of trouble.
Bitcoin is great for sending money over the internet if you instantly convert your cash into it, and then your recipient instantly converts it back, but doesn't that sort of defeat the whole "decentralization" aspect? All of your transactions are now doubled up at your exchange, which necessarily binds Bitcoin wallets to real names and bank information, can be easily seized by the government, and with every transaction you're losing a bid-ask spread and transaction fee.
Submit a patch. Of course, a particular criticism I have with Bitcoin is that there's no public forum for submitting and considering patches, or any official procedure for implementation, or even a list of committers with their real names, affiliations and holdings.
the purchasing power of our money has been on a steady decline.
But the purchasing power of wages has been steadily increasing or remaining constant. The value of a dollar over 80 years would only mean something to somebody that earned a dollar 80 years ago and kept it in his mattress. The whole point of the thing is to prevent that sort of thing, because it allows you do extremely artificial things like retain wealth at zero cost or risk, and when everybody saves money that way you have a recession.
Re-read Krugman's "Capitol Hill Babysitting Co-op." You need to dispose of the paradox of thrift before you can seriously defend hard money. If you want to bury wealth for your children, bury gold, don't advocate price controls on commodities like gold, which is, in the end, what hard money is about.
You don't know how right you are. As a professor of critical and literary theory, my job description very specifically included the term "moralistic aesthete".
Well, you know what they say about those that can, and those that cannot, perfesser.
Are you sure you didn't just write some Kurzweil-esque thesis in 1996 about democratization of media and the toppling of the established power structures, and now since it isn't happening you're taking it personally?
Also I think you have to distinguish between the goals of entertainment and art. Entertainment is shit people watch for money to feel better. Art isn't. Critical theory isn't an appropriate methodology for determining the value of entertainment -- sometimes it can, and god how it tries, but it's not necessary and it generally isn't productive. Transfomers 2 was a nightmare but it still made between six and eight-thousand man-years of a (tenured) professor's salary. I don't think that's the most important thing in the world, but it's certainly more important than any one man's opinion.
And I'm certainly not going to make anybody who walks around claiming to be an artist some kind of protected panda just because more successful people make shows that I think are poopypants. The internet has enough self-aggrandizing bozos and gurus and faux-visionaries telling me what kind of media is right to watch and what kind of software is right to run, and why you're a sellout this week and how you can escape that fate. They greatest trick Eric S. Raymond ever pulled was convincing you he wasn't a marketer and an archconservative, and that for most people a "cathedral" is just "any church that doesn't give me what I want."
But they didn't start life as corporate dictators.
This impression was unfounded. Netflix got rich by playing a rentier-- it didn't make any movies, it was a middleman, and when they started streaming on the internet they became the leaders in DRM. As long as Youtube was owned by Google it's been an aggressive information aggregator and ad seller. Youtube is a machine where eyeballs go in one end and little boxes, tagged with your gender and age, likes and dislikes, yearly income and zip code, for sale to ad buyers come out the other. Any positive feelings you had about these companies is the result of (apparently successful) branding and positioning.
I'm not sure how old you are, but there was a time when there were greater hopes for the Internet than it turning into some high-priced corporate theme park/shopping mall.
These hopes were mistaken; the internet is a buncha cables owned by Qwest, Verizon and Level 3, it is not Burning Man, it is not an ideology. Anything you could do on the Internet you can still do today, faster than ever. Youtube spending $100 million on original content won't make usenet stop working, If you don't wanna watch K-PAX, don't, it's really easy. The fact that Youtube is spending $100 million on content doesn't reflect any sort of spiritual truth about the internet, its just a reflection the values and demands of internet users.
I don't see how three websites owned by Viacom are catching old media flat-footed. There's no doubt that television distibution will die, but it's not clear that that's going to fundamentally change the corporate players, the funding mechanism for new projects or the diversity of new projects.
The point is, if Trey Parker and Matt Stone switched to pure Internet distribution today, they'd be out of business in a week. If you want to create your own passion project nothing is stopping you, but if you make something that becomes popular and has a potential to attract a big audience, there are better alternatives than self-funding your shows on the web.
You want to make it sound like Kevin Spacey is bad, but your real problem is with the system and that he's still a successful entertainer and you're still a moralistic aesthete. Are we supposed to ban Kevin Spacey and David Fincher from the Internet, or just ban them from charging money?
You know they aren't taking away the ability to self-publish on YouTube, it's all still there and will remain there. You just can't accept the fact that nobody wants to watch that stuff. Or maybe they want to watch it for 3 minutes and then they're done; the Internet excels at producing, and then quickly clearing, fads and flashes in the pan.
Regardless, I don't see how Netflix and Google weren't corporate dictators before they started packaging content, and suddenly became them afterward. All of the mediums for self-publication on the Internet are highly corporate and spy on, and advertise to, their viewers. There were ways of putting content on the internet before Youtube and Netflix, but none of them were practical.
Even the humblest, BitTorrent-distributed "Indie" projects still have fundraising mechanisms that tie intimately into social media to track down new audiences and suckers, er, backers. And for all that they're still terrible.
If that were true, then Netflix would be dictating Kevin Spacey and David Fincher's price,
Kevin Spacey still makes movies? I thought after the disastrous Bobby Darin biopic that he was marooned in voiceover-land, which by the way, he was very good as the voice of Gertie in Moon.
I guess he'll be "dictating" the terms Netflix will pay for The Father of Invention.
You know, he didn't put a gun to their head. There's a lot of things he could be doing and a series for Netflix is actually something of a risk, particularly after "Bubble" and the established trend of programming on Crackle.com, FunnyOrDie and the whole motley crew.
How much is Kevin Spacey worth? It's sortof an interesting process, what happens is there are a bunch of companies called "foreign sales agents" that market scripts and movie stars to international film and television distributors, and they can tell you, to the dollar, exactly how much money a Japanese or Phillipine or Israeli film distributor will pay for a film starring Tom Hanks, or Zoe Saldana, or Kevin Spacey. Foreign distributors only need to know the film is starring the name, the genre of the film and the budget, and they will write a check on the spot for the right to distribute the film; they generally don't even read the script. That's why movie stars dictate their terms, because there are huge audiences of people that will just watch them, doesn't matter in what. If you're making an independent film and a star agrees to star in it, distributors will suddenly just hand you money, and any gap can be covered by a banker. In small projects, like "House of Cards" the star's presence decides if the show is made or not, period.
I guess I'm trying to say that every day the Internet becomes more like cable television. Like most of the ecosystems on Earth, we should have been more careful with it.
So you basically want the internet to become a nature preserve for mediocrity? Where nothing worth doing for money is possible because any business model where people pay is impractical? Internet reflects the needs and wants of its users, and what you're really saying is you don't like how people are using the internet, as if you know what's best for them, and what someone on the internet has the right to do.
I guess I could look at the world like you, and write off 90% of the Earth as morons and unworthy of the Internet, but that's sorta megalomaniacal.
I mean, LotR and the Hobbit shouldn't have any sort of audience reach either by that measure
And it continues to be a rather nichy thing, but:
* if you put a buncha million dollar battles on screen
* and Viggo Mortensen, and Magneto, and Steven Tyler's hot daughter, and Will Turner
* and bankrupt New Line Cinema marketing it.
...suddenly you've got something a lotta people wanna see. If people wanted to see LotR for the story then they could just get the Bakshi out of the library. But again, the story is a substrate.
Just saying, I'd much rather see them come up with 100 hours of a wide variety of content from small house producers than 3 hours of generic retred with the stars for the same cost
Variety is expensive and overrated. The vast majority of people just want to be entertained in the most conventional way possible, with faces they know and like, with maybe a little grit that lets them know somebody might be trying to challenge them. That's why it's "entertainment" and not "art."
Really, $100 million for a retred of yet another generic format TV program?
If you look at it, $100 million would be a rather reasonable figure if you consider you're getting Spacey and Fincher-level talent -- for a standard 26 ep order that's two series at a little under $2 million an ep. The Sopranos, in 1999, cost about $2 million an ep, that's in line with what The Wire and other series were spending at the time. Terra Nova costs $4 million an ep and the pilot cost $20 million, amortized over the season.
This is just another example of the corporate world being caught flat-footed by the Internet.
If that were true, then Netflix would be dictating Kevin Spacey and David Fincher's price, not the other way around. Do you really believe executives at Columbia and 20th Century-Fox are being caught "flat-footed" by Lolcats, 40 minute reviews of Star Wars movies and time-lapse photography of flowers blooming on Vimeo?
Do any of you really feel the need to "fix" Youtube by adding more "professionally produced Hollywood content"?
The problem is you're thinking of Youtube as a content producer when it's really just a distribution medium. You'll still have the same people making movies that have always been making them, you just will be seeing it streaming on your Roku box instead of buying a DVD pressed by Buena Vista Pictures Distribution.
Youtube's problem is that they've now been stuck with the stigma of a bargain-bin distributor-- "Youtube" is a garbage brand, in the same way the $2 DVDs in the Walgreen's bin are garbage, and that takes more and more of a cut from ad revenues while the established distributors form themselves around Hulu and Apple and Netflix at the top of the value hierarchy. People actually pay money to watch movies on iTunes and Hulu, and now Youtube wants in on that action.
Really, $100 million for a retred of yet another generic format TV program?
Most of the money is going to Kevin Spacey merely to appear and have his name at the front of each episode. People are generally drawn to stars, that's where the value is. The "generic format" is just a substrate.
We have tons of small-house production studios that are doing amazing work on a shoe-string budget comparitively. (sic)
Red vs. Blue doesn't have the sort of audience reach they're looking for. Now I can't speak for the demographics of "Dorkness Rising," but...
Personally, I try very hard to be sure Im not making a purchase for status.
Why? Do you think status is an invalid reason to buy something? Normally I'd consider that a rather subjective value judgement.
Maybe you're insecure. Maybe you think you'll look like a chump if you buy a popular thing. Deciding you won't buy something for "status" is really just a way of saying "I'm buying something that rejects prevailing trends." Of course, that still makes the phone you buy a status symbol, it's just tuned to a different value system and peers.
Nobody needs a dual-core 1GHz cellphone with a gig of RAM; all the marginal attributes are really just an expression of yourself and your subjective values.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that he won't actually execute those ideas.
Things like this are what you make of them. If these questions come up and the President takes no action, in theory this would cause some sort of public awareness of the problem, and people would change their votes.
This doesn't happen though, because despite the fact they've set up the website very few people pay attention or care. I don't think Americans really want the sort of democracy where everything is petitioned and then they can follow up on the implementation themselves through transparent government. They'd much rather vote for people they like and then complain about the "system."
Advocating policies, and then pinning down politicians on those policies would force people to condition their vote on things that they really wouldn't want to: approximately zero voters would switch their vote from Obama to the viable Republican alternative over marijuana legalization, or habeas corpus, or IP legislation, or cessation of crony capitalism, Republicans are further to the right than him on all of those things. There's no need for him to take any action on these, and as long as the US has first-past-the-post balloting for the Presidency and Congress, alternative candidates will always be spoilers. And the voters won't condition their votes on these, because they know the viable alternative is worse and less-optimal for these goals.
Our system is designed to insulate elected officeholders from accountability to single-interest voter preferences.
The aspirin will make your aneurism clot slower :)
Mercury is a neurotoxin that accumulates in the body.
In order to maintain this level of vigilance, you'll probably never be able to use an insect repellant around your child, or ever let them visit a farm, or a country where leaded gasoline is permitted. Such as Mexico.
I knew I still had'ya.
I never claimed that it was an absolutely fixed value.
Well, except when you said "With a gold standard, dollars are fixed in value." If you're not using market value, what definition of value were you using here?
So when you have a gold standard, the value of your money is defined by something that usually remains rock-solid in real market value (the amount it takes to trade for other goods).
"Usually" is doing a lot of work here. I don't see how the solidity of the value of gold with regard to other goods aligns with the fact that the price of an ounce of gold is now over 500% what it was 10 years ago, yet core inflation has only been 23%, and even energy has only risen 90%. You can criticize these statistics but it would require you to assert a conspiracy on the part of the government.
The value I am referring to here is simply the amount of gold it would take to directly trade for other things.
Which is what we call the "price" of those respective other things. That it is denominated in a mass of gold does not make it a value and not a price.
The very fact that nobody fixes gold prices anymore is tacit admission that a gold standard is better than fiat money.
Either that, or they didn't want hard money, for either Keynesian or Monetarist reasons. You're presuming malice when stupidity would be sufficient to your case, but alas, very difficult to substantiate.
But when you set a fixed price in dollars, the only thing you are tying to market value is the market value of dollars, which varies wildly, sometimes from one day to the next. ... At a fixed dollar price, when dollars go up and down in value, then the gold would go up and down in value to match.
But dollars can't go up and down in value because they are freely convertible to gold, and your thesis is that gold has rock-solid value. This counterexample you're giving is arguing that the value of gold is a fixed quantity, but the value of dollars is not, yet they are the same thing in a representative money system. Demand for dollars is a proxy for demand for gold and vice versa.
I mean, like, think of it legislatively. When the US had a gold standard, the law said, in so many words, "A dollar is redeemable for X troy ounces of gold." Is this the sort of legislation you would propose? How does my characterization of a gold standard differ from yours, in terms of the law you'd write?
And I replied with specific, verifiable examples of predictions that each made. No appeal to authority, no ad hominem.
Quoting people's opinions is an appeal to authority. The problem is that Laffer and Krugman can be wrong in specific cases but that neither makes their theories incorrect nor does it make people they disagree with correct. It's negative argumentation; your previous comment contained no positive argument for your beliefs at all, which I found remarkable. I was expecting a counter-scenario where you critique Krugman's solution and offer your own, but you never did, and still don't. Pointing out that people get things wrong isn't sufficient, nor are claims (unsubstantiated bare assertions on your part, really) that somehow someone gets things 80% more right than someone else. A stopped 12-hour clock tells the right time 100% more times in the day than a stopped 24-hour clock but neither are correct.
And I would add that most Austrian responses to the Co-Op problem involve just as much prediction and guessing as the Keynesian account.
Note that this was a subjunctive to my actual question, how to resolve the paradox of thrift. You never really did that, and I didn't challenge the quality of Austrian prediction here. The challenge is that both sides must make positive statements about the future and whichever course of action is taken, the monetary authority will set rules based on those predictions. What I was trying to attack was (what I would consider) the paradox in the consequentialism of Austrian theory, sorry it was a bit sloppy but I was expecting you'd respond to the meat and not the parsley of the argument.
The interesting thing here that ties into the gold standard question is that sometimes hard money advocates would try to characterize a gold standard as somehow not a regulation, or a law that is somehow subsumed in natural law or property rights, when it's really no such thing. When Bryan characterized the farmer as being nailed to a cross of gold, that's how he and a lot of people felt, and the government was doing the nailing; sure, sure rich bankers were holding the gold, but it was the state that was coming in and kicking people off their land at gunpoint. The state decided it was going to enforce certain values and used violence, the fact that the particular value was "hard money," versus alcohol prohibition, abortion prohibition, drug prohibition... doesn't really make a difference.
People like Hayek and Mises generally consider it sufficient to say that force is justified if you're protecting people's wealth, which I always found a suspicious and rather arbitrary place to draw the line on state violence.
Have a nice day.
I don't believe that for a second, kiddo.
I guess your argument would make sense to me if I accepted that there was such a thing as objective value.
In the situation you describe, gold is "fixed in price", and defined in terms of dollars. With a gold standard, dollars are fixed in value and defined in terms of gold.
I'm not sure what "fixed in value" means empirically, however I know that in a gold standard gold is absolutely fixed in price, gold and currency are always convertible. All market actors have a different value for an ounce of gold -- it's worthless to me in use, it's worth a lot to a dentist, to a miner it's worth their labor in exchange -- it cannot be made equally valuable to all by fiat. This is also complicated by the fact that the 1000th ounce of gold you own is always far less valuable than the first due to its marginal utility. Please expand on the theory of value you're using.
I'm not going to spend yet more time trying to explain it to you.
Roll your eyes all you like.
The major difference being that the Austrians were usually right, and the Keynesians almost always wrong.
You sound like a Marxist in 1920 denouncing Henry Hazlitt. This is the sort of inept and hectoring form of argumentation we've unfortunately come to expect for the internet libertarian -- the Capitol Hill Babysitting Co-Op cannot be explained, so I'm going to go on for... how long did it take, 30 minutes? ... about how Paul Krugman and anybody that thinks there's such a thing as a multiplier or aggregate demand is a doody head, and Keynesians are always wrong. I don't have to explain why because I have cherry-picked quotes from one Keynesian 10 years ago. You forgot to throw in typical admonition that I "simply do not understand the Real Business Cycle."
We're trying to talk about a particular problem, but you turn it into a huge argument ad hominem and appeal to your authorities. Particularly hilarious is your drafting of Friedman(!), a monetarist who would disagree with you on just about every position you've taken on hard money -- if you're going to quote monetarists I see your Krugman and raise you an Alan Greenspan. Friedman also didn't particularly agree with Austrians.
Also the fact of the Great Moderation simply flies in the face of the Austrian account of how a macroeconomy works. It generally can't explain stickiness in prices or wages, it completely fails at creating a model that predicts unemployment. It's complete ignorance of statistics and evidence gathering classes it as, at best, a sort of philosophical discipline. Also, you can only characterize the panics of the 19th century if you only look at price levels and ignore the fact that millions of people lost their savings, their jobs and their businesses in the process. The Long Depression was four years of contraction, nominal wages dropped by half, a quarter of the able bodies were unemployed, who cares if a pound of coal was the same price one month before and one month after?
(Well, that's easy, rentier capitalists and their pseudo-intellectual spear-carriers cared a great deal...)
In contrast, a hard money standard sets the value of money in terms of a commodity, like gold.
If the government will exchange a unit of currency for a fixed amount of gold, the currency is a representative money and the price has been fixed. Gold under such a situation won't exchange on the open market for any price aside from what the government offers, because any difference can simply be arbitraged with Fort Knox. Representative money is price-fixing of a commodity. The price of the commodity no longer fluctuates naturally according to endogenous supply and demand, but is fixed by arbitrary government action. They dictate what how many dollars to the ounce, and nothing in principle keeps them from changing the number, or the composition of the dollar, such as politics fancied -- Congress needed to fund the Civil War, it issued fiay currency and it worked for that purpose. Rural voters wanted bimetalism, they voted for it and got it. Bankers hated silver barons, so they demanded it be stopped and it was stopped.
Precious metal price standards are just government subsides on mining, creating a buyer of first and last resort for metal regardless of actual industrial demand.
What's the best platform for my project that Tivo-izes Linux?
You're going to have unwind that for me, I am only aware of the standard definitions of these terms, to wit:
Hard money policies are those which are opposed to fiat currency and thus in support of a specie standard, usually gold or silver, typically implemented with representative money. (thus)
2. Describes gold/silver/platinum (bullion) coins. A government that uses a hard money policy backs the value of the currency it uses with a hard, tangible and lasting material that will retain its relative value over time. (thus)
The term “hard money” usually refers to one of two things. It can, first of all, be used for actual gold or silver coins, for example. Using this definition, we can say that a hard money policy is one in which the government recognizes currency which is based on an actual, fixed item which is considered valuable.(thus)
I'm just grabbin' the first few out of Google, here, maybe you have some sort of non-standard definition of these terms.
"John McClusker." should read "John McCusker." I don't know his methodology, but I think most accounts of purchasing power based on a fixed basket of commodities or classes of expenditure are unreliable and don't reflect gains in productivity and the increase in value of the items. Houses cost more than they should if you account for inflation, but they're also much more luxurious, and often much more favorably located due to urban growth. Most durable goods you buy today are simply not comparable with durable goods available even 10 years ago in terms of energy efficiency and features.
It's a bit like when people argue that health care was so much cheaper in 1920, while ignoring that most health care in the 1920s didn't actually work -- what's the comparable good in 1920 to penicillin? Or even a disposable bandaid? You can't tell me that someone on an median wage today is worse off in terms of available disposable income, return on the value of their fixed expenses, than someone with a median wage in 1950. I know that's a somewhat different claim than the "purchasing power for time t is better than t-1" but I meant it figuratively. You can't compare the future with the past with accounting information, you have to look at people's lives.
As far as I am concerned, anybody who takes Krugman seriously hasn't read their history.
The three paragraphs at the end of this post do not respond to the Capitol Hill Babysitting Co-Op. There are good arguments as to how his completely historical and non-prognositcating account are wrong, but you have none of them here. And I would add that most Austrian responses to the Co-Op problem involve just as much prediction and guessing as the Keynesian account.
Uhm... Google has had a Siri-like Voice Search feature (it does a lot more than just "search") for a long time.
I've seen these and Vlingo, it's comparable but Siri is probably the best for the time being. The main difference is you don't have to use canned expressions to do certain things, it will infer rather well what you wanted to do, and it will generally do a good job of maintaining an interactive conversation with you when you want to edit or elaborate on an action.
There have been apps around for ages that add to its functionality too. I realise the rest of your post was a joke, but too many people are ignorant of the facts and probably would assume Voice Search was added to copy Siri.
Google's ineptness at positioning its services to impact a large audience is well known. The entire organization revels in invitation-only betas, guru modes and a "good enough for Gospel" approach to UX.
If you maintained any significant portion of your current assets in Bitcoin you could be in a lot of trouble, and if you'd made any employment contracts over the last three months with people denominated in Bitcoin THEY'd now be in a lot of trouble.
Bitcoin is great for sending money over the internet if you instantly convert your cash into it, and then your recipient instantly converts it back, but doesn't that sort of defeat the whole "decentralization" aspect? All of your transactions are now doubled up at your exchange, which necessarily binds Bitcoin wallets to real names and bank information, can be easily seized by the government, and with every transaction you're losing a bid-ask spread and transaction fee.
Submit a patch. Of course, a particular criticism I have with Bitcoin is that there's no public forum for submitting and considering patches, or any official procedure for implementation, or even a list of committers with their real names, affiliations and holdings.
the purchasing power of our money has been on a steady decline.
But the purchasing power of wages has been steadily increasing or remaining constant. The value of a dollar over 80 years would only mean something to somebody that earned a dollar 80 years ago and kept it in his mattress. The whole point of the thing is to prevent that sort of thing, because it allows you do extremely artificial things like retain wealth at zero cost or risk, and when everybody saves money that way you have a recession.
Re-read Krugman's "Capitol Hill Babysitting Co-op." You need to dispose of the paradox of thrift before you can seriously defend hard money. If you want to bury wealth for your children, bury gold, don't advocate price controls on commodities like gold, which is, in the end, what hard money is about.
You don't know how right you are. As a professor of critical and literary theory, my job description very specifically included the term "moralistic aesthete".
Well, you know what they say about those that can, and those that cannot, perfesser.
Are you sure you didn't just write some Kurzweil-esque thesis in 1996 about democratization of media and the toppling of the established power structures, and now since it isn't happening you're taking it personally?
Also I think you have to distinguish between the goals of entertainment and art. Entertainment is shit people watch for money to feel better. Art isn't. Critical theory isn't an appropriate methodology for determining the value of entertainment -- sometimes it can, and god how it tries, but it's not necessary and it generally isn't productive. Transfomers 2 was a nightmare but it still made between six and eight-thousand man-years of a (tenured) professor's salary. I don't think that's the most important thing in the world, but it's certainly more important than any one man's opinion.
And I'm certainly not going to make anybody who walks around claiming to be an artist some kind of protected panda just because more successful people make shows that I think are poopypants. The internet has enough self-aggrandizing bozos and gurus and faux-visionaries telling me what kind of media is right to watch and what kind of software is right to run, and why you're a sellout this week and how you can escape that fate. They greatest trick Eric S. Raymond ever pulled was convincing you he wasn't a marketer and an archconservative, and that for most people a "cathedral" is just "any church that doesn't give me what I want."
But they didn't start life as corporate dictators.
This impression was unfounded. Netflix got rich by playing a rentier-- it didn't make any movies, it was a middleman, and when they started streaming on the internet they became the leaders in DRM. As long as Youtube was owned by Google it's been an aggressive information aggregator and ad seller. Youtube is a machine where eyeballs go in one end and little boxes, tagged with your gender and age, likes and dislikes, yearly income and zip code, for sale to ad buyers come out the other. Any positive feelings you had about these companies is the result of (apparently successful) branding and positioning.
I'm not sure how old you are, but there was a time when there were greater hopes for the Internet than it turning into some high-priced corporate theme park/shopping mall.
These hopes were mistaken; the internet is a buncha cables owned by Qwest, Verizon and Level 3, it is not Burning Man, it is not an ideology. Anything you could do on the Internet you can still do today, faster than ever. Youtube spending $100 million on original content won't make usenet stop working, If you don't wanna watch K-PAX, don't, it's really easy. The fact that Youtube is spending $100 million on content doesn't reflect any sort of spiritual truth about the internet, its just a reflection the values and demands of internet users.
I don't see how three websites owned by Viacom are catching old media flat-footed. There's no doubt that television distibution will die, but it's not clear that that's going to fundamentally change the corporate players, the funding mechanism for new projects or the diversity of new projects.
The point is, if Trey Parker and Matt Stone switched to pure Internet distribution today, they'd be out of business in a week. If you want to create your own passion project nothing is stopping you, but if you make something that becomes popular and has a potential to attract a big audience, there are better alternatives than self-funding your shows on the web.
You want to make it sound like Kevin Spacey is bad, but your real problem is with the system and that he's still a successful entertainer and you're still a moralistic aesthete. Are we supposed to ban Kevin Spacey and David Fincher from the Internet, or just ban them from charging money?
You know they aren't taking away the ability to self-publish on YouTube, it's all still there and will remain there. You just can't accept the fact that nobody wants to watch that stuff. Or maybe they want to watch it for 3 minutes and then they're done; the Internet excels at producing, and then quickly clearing, fads and flashes in the pan.
Regardless, I don't see how Netflix and Google weren't corporate dictators before they started packaging content, and suddenly became them afterward. All of the mediums for self-publication on the Internet are highly corporate and spy on, and advertise to, their viewers. There were ways of putting content on the internet before Youtube and Netflix, but none of them were practical.
Even the humblest, BitTorrent-distributed "Indie" projects still have fundraising mechanisms that tie intimately into social media to track down new audiences and suckers, er, backers. And for all that they're still terrible.
Kevin Spacey still makes movies? I thought after the disastrous Bobby Darin biopic that he was marooned in voiceover-land, which by the way, he was very good as the voice of Gertie in Moon.
I guess he'll be "dictating" the terms Netflix will pay for The Father of Invention.
You know, he didn't put a gun to their head. There's a lot of things he could be doing and a series for Netflix is actually something of a risk, particularly after "Bubble" and the established trend of programming on Crackle.com, FunnyOrDie and the whole motley crew.
How much is Kevin Spacey worth? It's sortof an interesting process, what happens is there are a bunch of companies called "foreign sales agents" that market scripts and movie stars to international film and television distributors, and they can tell you, to the dollar, exactly how much money a Japanese or Phillipine or Israeli film distributor will pay for a film starring Tom Hanks, or Zoe Saldana, or Kevin Spacey. Foreign distributors only need to know the film is starring the name, the genre of the film and the budget, and they will write a check on the spot for the right to distribute the film; they generally don't even read the script. That's why movie stars dictate their terms, because there are huge audiences of people that will just watch them, doesn't matter in what. If you're making an independent film and a star agrees to star in it, distributors will suddenly just hand you money, and any gap can be covered by a banker. In small projects, like "House of Cards" the star's presence decides if the show is made or not, period.
I guess I'm trying to say that every day the Internet becomes more like cable television. Like most of the ecosystems on Earth, we should have been more careful with it.
So you basically want the internet to become a nature preserve for mediocrity? Where nothing worth doing for money is possible because any business model where people pay is impractical? Internet reflects the needs and wants of its users, and what you're really saying is you don't like how people are using the internet, as if you know what's best for them, and what someone on the internet has the right to do.
I guess I could look at the world like you, and write off 90% of the Earth as morons and unworthy of the Internet, but that's sorta megalomaniacal.
I mean, LotR and the Hobbit shouldn't have any sort of audience reach either by that measure
And it continues to be a rather nichy thing, but:
* if you put a buncha million dollar battles on screen
* and Viggo Mortensen, and Magneto, and Steven Tyler's hot daughter, and Will Turner
* and bankrupt New Line Cinema marketing it.
...suddenly you've got something a lotta people wanna see. If people wanted to see LotR for the story then they could just get the Bakshi out of the library. But again, the story is a substrate.
Just saying, I'd much rather see them come up with 100 hours of a wide variety of content from small house producers than 3 hours of generic retred with the stars for the same cost
Variety is expensive and overrated. The vast majority of people just want to be entertained in the most conventional way possible, with faces they know and like, with maybe a little grit that lets them know somebody might be trying to challenge them. That's why it's "entertainment" and not "art."
Really, $100 million for a retred of yet another generic format TV program?
If you look at it, $100 million would be a rather reasonable figure if you consider you're getting Spacey and Fincher-level talent -- for a standard 26 ep order that's two series at a little under $2 million an ep. The Sopranos, in 1999, cost about $2 million an ep, that's in line with what The Wire and other series were spending at the time. Terra Nova costs $4 million an ep and the pilot cost $20 million, amortized over the season.
This is just another example of the corporate world being caught flat-footed by the Internet.
If that were true, then Netflix would be dictating Kevin Spacey and David Fincher's price, not the other way around. Do you really believe executives at Columbia and 20th Century-Fox are being caught "flat-footed" by Lolcats, 40 minute reviews of Star Wars movies and time-lapse photography of flowers blooming on Vimeo?
Do any of you really feel the need to "fix" Youtube by adding more "professionally produced Hollywood content"?
The problem is you're thinking of Youtube as a content producer when it's really just a distribution medium. You'll still have the same people making movies that have always been making them, you just will be seeing it streaming on your Roku box instead of buying a DVD pressed by Buena Vista Pictures Distribution.
Youtube's problem is that they've now been stuck with the stigma of a bargain-bin distributor-- "Youtube" is a garbage brand, in the same way the $2 DVDs in the Walgreen's bin are garbage, and that takes more and more of a cut from ad revenues while the established distributors form themselves around Hulu and Apple and Netflix at the top of the value hierarchy. People actually pay money to watch movies on iTunes and Hulu, and now Youtube wants in on that action.
Really, $100 million for a retred of yet another generic format TV program?
Most of the money is going to Kevin Spacey merely to appear and have his name at the front of each episode. People are generally drawn to stars, that's where the value is. The "generic format" is just a substrate.
We have tons of small-house production studios that are doing amazing work on a shoe-string budget comparitively. (sic)
Red vs. Blue doesn't have the sort of audience reach they're looking for. Now I can't speak for the demographics of "Dorkness Rising," but...
He keeps all of his conversations in a folder in his cwd named "80%"
Personally, I try very hard to be sure Im not making a purchase for status.
Why? Do you think status is an invalid reason to buy something? Normally I'd consider that a rather subjective value judgement.
Maybe you're insecure. Maybe you think you'll look like a chump if you buy a popular thing. Deciding you won't buy something for "status" is really just a way of saying "I'm buying something that rejects prevailing trends." Of course, that still makes the phone you buy a status symbol, it's just tuned to a different value system and peers.
Nobody needs a dual-core 1GHz cellphone with a gig of RAM; all the marginal attributes are really just an expression of yourself and your subjective values.