it's not just the bit coin supporters, but even people with your argument have a very poor understanding of economics and why deflation can, in some circumstances, be bad.
It does not keep the poor stuck without money or reward the rich. There are ample examples of deflation occurring in a perfectly functioning economy. There is really only 1 reason for a small, structural, rate of inflation (which actually harms the poor quite a bit, but doesn't harm the rich who can easily hedge their inflation exposure): it allows for the real level of interest rates to go negative when very large stimulus is required. Over the last 5 years, real interest rates in the US have been consistently negative. And at least for the first short period of the recession, it proved to be very helpful to have a central bank drive the real rate of interest to a very negative number. In a functioning, growing economy, whether there is 1% inflation or -1% inflation is pretty damn irrelevant. It neither helps nor harms the economy. Why? simple, all your loans will come 200 basis points cheaper (so that 6% mortgage will be a 4% mortgage, or if you are in Japan, 2.3% for a 0 down mortgage, 30 yr fixed). Markets aren't stupid.
I get it,it's hard to wrap your head around if you haven't actually done any real studying of deflationary economies and inflationary ones and which is worse (hint, both have done horrid things to people, mostly the lower and middle class). But structurally, the market can handle it just fine. Here are 2 good examples: US post the civil war and Japan from 1998 to 2007.
not true. it will be like most countries without income taxes historically. All taxes are done via VAT/sales/import duty/export duty/stamp duties, coupled with extremely strict punishment for avoiding taxes (on people who primarily provide services). The US didn't have a national currency in circulation before the civil war (notes were drawing rights against private banks, with no guarantee on their value), but somehow the governments at all levels was able to tax.
And of course, you require that all taxes are paid in your national currency. That way people who have bitcoins will have to continue to provide demand for US Dollars.
Obviously there will be cheating, but there is also lots of cheating on income taxes. Somehow countries currently and historically have managed.
12 students were offered north of 10 mio INR, and the top was 13.6 mio (roughly 205k, depending on the fx rate on the given day). By the way, they turned that number down.
And this isn't just one person. This is large sets of grads from all the different IIT branches commanding these wages now. Not the top 1 or 2 people
well, that's also why wages are converging to US levels very fast in those industries. I know friends of mine in finance there would tell me they could easily negotiate 25% salary increases YoY back in 2006.
of course, but you can hire a low level moron in the US for the same amount. It's not that hard to find people who will go for it. But the fact 100k+ starting salaries are becoming regular offers from the IT companies in India for highly qualified new grads means the market is flattening very fast. I actually don't know any new IT grands that pull down 100k their first year but I'm sure they are out there.
it's funny because you are a solid 10 years out of date. Top grads in India now make comparable amounts to their US equivalents. Hell, just a couple months ago Oracle was offering grands 200k+ for Mumbai based roles. The days of indians taking jobs based solely are salary are quickly coming to a close. Now it's just ability and ease of hiring.
except Japan went through 15 years of pretty constant deflation (the only spike in the mid 90s was due to the imposition of a national sales tax) and didn't see severe hoarding. People still bought goods, the economy continued to grow, if more slowly, and interest rates dropped proportionally (so my friend has a 30y 2.3% mortgage with no money down).
But then again, fi you look at their economic growth, it's pretty alright considering a shrinking workforce, a shrinking population, but steady efficiency gains.
Catastrophic deflation is bad (i.e. people dumping goods to pay off debts that are being called causing an uncontrolled downward spiral in general prices). This happened in the 1930s and 1913 and other banking crises because banks issued loans that they could call.
But steady, slow deflation is not. And having lived in the stupid inflation of London and the steady prices of Japan and the slow inflation of the US, I can say only London was a real pain in the ass because you found yourself having trouble saving for any big purchases. Slow deflation is also bad because if you believe in central bank management of an economy, a negative inflation rate leaves the CB with less freedom to move real interest rates and therefore stimulate short term demand (i.e. When bernanke went all in, he was able to take 5y real interest rates to -1%, for Japan to do this at it's worst you would need to somehow get people offering the government 5y loans at -2.5%, not possible, so Japan found itself unable to use the extreme stimulus of negative real rates).
In the article, Krugman literally says if inflation goes north of 2% I can go to the Fed and sell back my dollars (for what, god knows??), and that sets a floor on the dollar.
He is about 80 years out of date with his information. And that is just the first ridiculous statement he quoted as proof BTC is bad. That he is grasping for reasons when he has none is telling when you have a well educated economist believe that the Fed will buy back your dollars.
Or did you not read the article and realize quite a number of his arguments were FACTUALLY inaccurate?
I"m not saying BTC is good or bad. I don't own any and don't really care to as they offer me nothing I care about (I don't care to commit tax fraud or engage in illegal activity, so I might as well use my much safer credit cards and move on). But the article you linked to was one of the most pitiful refutations of using bitcoins I have ever seen. There are real arguments that can be made about a fixed supply currency, something no other currency is. But the idea that my US dollars are having their value protected by the Fed is idiotic. The USD is protected by the most powerful military in the world (the stick) and the biggest consumer economy in the world (the carrot).
who cares? Of course in most things early adopters find themselves earning windfall profits. That is the payoff for being an early adopter. That is why they got 1000x return. Even if no one else does, who cares? BTC is not an investment vehicle for making you rich in 3 years. It is a currency with no central authority that can seize your holdings or devalue your holdings.
where in the world do you see yourself paying 30% for chargeback services?
The vast majority of credit card companies extend that insurance for a nominal fee (about 2%) if you are the seller along with FX charges to the buyer of usually around 1%. In what world do you expect to pay 35% of your revenue away or pay a 35% fee to buy things from overseas? I do it all the time with any of my credit cards. It is instant and the one time a seller tried to get away without sending me the product all it took was a quick call to the credit card company to get my money back. These are SMALL fees relative to bit coin FX charges right now. It may be at some point bit coin will get cheap enough to move against real currency that this isn't the case, but right now you are looking at a 1.4% charge on either side from most exchanges, along with bank transfer fees (which won't by on a transaction by transaction basis usually).
If you are in europe or Australia, it is even cheaper to take credit cards as the interchange fees are highly regulated. It may require less than 1% of your revenue to receive payment. That is trivial for most businesses vs trying to manage bitcoins efficiently.
I'm a fan of a lot of what BTC allows you to do. But efficient overseas payments with a reasonably low fee structure is not one of them yet, and one it has to improve on vastly to get to.
you realize one example is irrelevant right? If you are talking about societal pressures, the best way to compare is to compare across different societies. And it holds pretty damn well at that scale. I had a cousin we tried to treat like a guy but he only wanted to be treated like a little girl. He would cry, run around with the girls, want to put on make up, and his favorite colored material was frilly pink.
This DOES NOT MEAN all guys act like this or that there aren't real defined roles/colors/activities for men and women. It happens to be your daughter at this stage doesn't care about gadgets. Que sera. The question being asked is why is this lack of women in the fields that correlate with these interests pretty unique to the US and a few other countries that also have gender biases that are in the same direction.
You don't see a dearth of female programmers or hardware designers in countries where it isn't seen as a male/female divided profession. Why? that is the question that is generally being asked. Unfortunately, we generally try to correct a large scale issue with programs that don't really address the problem. If the problem is (I'm not sure this is the case, but let's assume it is) women are discouraged from an extremely young age from engaging in any technical fields, it's highly unlikely a couple of programs to get kids to program in high school will have any noticeable impact on the overall rate of women in programming (and let's be really specific, we are talking about native born women in programming, foreign women will still come over via H1-B visas or family connections).
Actually, it's not a needless push for diversity. It is looking for the primary drivers of large differences in participation (if you want more white people in basketball, have them grow in in the inner city where education is not nearly as valued as driving to the hoop, a great example is how most black players are terrible passers but excellent ball handlers because the latter is a desirable trait where most of them learn to play basketball) and asking are these structural (i.e. our rules make them more likely to happen) or not.
In India, they came to the realization that it was structural and cultural and to cause a shift, they reserved 60% of all seats in medical school in the 60s and 70s for the underrepresented. But doing this, they attempted to build at least a generation of education and wealth in the traditionally discriminated classes to quickly change things. It helps it is a country that highly values education, but with this push, you end up with people who haven't gone to high school happily working 16 hour days 7 days a week so their children can become engineers (it was doctors 20 years ago, but every time I do these interactions, it seems to be more and more engineering). But it helped that they knew due to government policies if they could provide the money, and their kid worked hard, the seat was damn near guaranteed, even if there was a more qualified candidate on exams.
My point is, if you haven't come up with why things are the way they are, or if there are structural (and at the very least, legal hurdles, including hurdles in the way the law is enforced) you can't come up with some conclusions that efforts at diversity or more or less helpful than the status quo. In the US, at least historically and against very specific minority groups, there were good reasons for aggressive policies to correct a wrong, whether the current set of rules were enough or not I don't know, I haven't done nearly enough research in all the programs and their efficacy.
Just one note, government jobs are not dominated by black people. The post office is 73% white (non-hispanic) and 17% black as of the last numbers I could find (note, this is a bit out of date, the 2002 report on diversity to congress). Hispanics are very underrepresented, was my takeaway from it. I can't say much about media policies or whether race is mentioned or not, but I do know I'd need to see actual research on this, as compared to people's sense or feeling, as usually people hear what they want to (including me).
Yes, as many women have rich parents as men. Absolutely. My point was that it is ridiculous to say things like "these men were fearless, taking such risks and others did" when the facts on the ground say you are massively over-exagerating the risks they are taking (this would be a racial argument especially, because you have to admit the average family wealth of a white person is higher than a black, and the skew is extreme). The original article was about both race and gender, though I appologize for pushing your argument onto the racial discrepencies rather than just gender. But I do take issue with making it sound like all these tech entrepreneurs are somehow living on the edge of survival trying to do something. It is part of this needless glorification.
And as gender goes, you are absolutely right that women have as much family money. But there are large swaths of the country and communities (I know, I grew up in one of these highly educated, wealthy communities) that will not give this money to a daughter, and will never accept the fact a daughter drops out of school for the chance to do something big.
I'm not saying it's UNIVERSAL mind you. Just that I was part of communities where a women who did this would not be backed by family money for seed investments and would not find a welcoming environment from their support group for doing this. On the other hand, I would have been supported with everything I needed. That is a real experience, but obviously this doesn't explain why OTHER women didn't break off, drop out of college, and start something.
Granted, it has been shown that men are far more willing to take risks (even small ones) if they think it will help get them laid. And frankly, I think that is a MUCH BIGGER reason you see men doing risky behavior. And if you are already enabled to take risks by a safety net, it wouldn't be surprising to me to see you go bigger in risk than other men (or women, obviously).
this is quite funny. You only think the white man is being abused because you are obviously from a white dominated country (one where, for hundreds of years, white men were the only ones allowed to succeed by legal structures in place until rather recently and therefore, have a vast generational advantage in resources).
In India they are trying to fix the same thing, that the Brahmin caste dominates most learned professions. This is slowly changing, but I've never heard cries of "their picking on us for being Brahmin), because at least it seems people realize that Brahmins for hundreds of years in society were given legal and societal protections to be the best at the knowledge industries and the fact that so many families of that caste now are high academic performers says a lot more about hundreds of years of being the only group to do it than about any inherent racial difference.
or possibly because calculus is considered part of the standard curiculum of college bound high performers in high school? It was understood that the top students in our school took calculus (and this was across 2 high schools I attended). Why wouldn't you expect women, who generally score higher and graduate and go on to college more than men to take an AP course that is considered par for the course? CS is not par for the course. AP exams that aren't considered core are usually not pushed as hard when you go talk to you guidance counselor.
in reminds me of creationists, who start with a reasonable point (xyz has no legitimate explanation within the understood framework of evolution) that could equally be an argument for an extension or new understanding of the framework. instead they go off and say "then, it must be this random idea I pulled out of my ass"
have you seen how much family money usually backs the biggest start ups? Apple is one of the FEW not backed by real generational wealth. Where do you think this money comes from usually?
It's the same in finance. Many of the young powerhouses were backed by real family money. Nothing of much consideration, other than a couple of years in your 20s was risked.
By the way, I'm not minimizing the contributions of many of these folks. I'm just saying it isn't a big risk if you know when it doesn't work out you still havee a home, food, car, and the ability to go back and finish your college education. You haven't really risked everything, just a little bit of time.
the problem is you don't understand either the debt ceiling or why it would breach and cause a default.
payment of interest and principal on the debt is not a statutory payment the federal government must make. On the other hand, medicare, obamacare, SS, and several other programs, most of which are welfare programs, are mandatory programs. The government has no choice and must use incoming tax money to pay for them first. If those payments happen to eat up so much tax money in a given month and a required debt repayment (like say, a notional repayment on a bond) then the US government defaults and a whole lot of financial triggers are fired.
The US government could run a balanced budget in aggregate and still have this default problem because payments and receipts do not happen at the same time. This was what the default was going to be, not some grand scheme where suddenly the US couldn't pay for anything. Just the US couldn't on a given day meet it's obligations because tax laws are this big aggregate thing that assume the federal government can issue short term debt (like commercial paper in the private industry or a revolver) to smooth out the differences.
all of Krugman's questions have been very succinctly answered well before he asked the question. Just because he fails to do any research what so ever is meaningless.
A store of value is as reliable as the people who use it say it is. That is all. That is the store of value of the US dollar, gold, Yen, and the Argentinian Peso. That Krugman and many economists take for granted that the US Dollar is a store of value without ever asking why such a situation exists is hilarious. The exact same logic for US Dollar value exists for bit coins. If people begin denominating their regular transactions in bit coins, they will then have grounded value in real assets, and it is done. As most real assets in the world are denominated in US Dollars, US dollars have a sticky value that allows it to be a store. But this wasn't always the case and reading about some basic monetary history of the US would tell you this.
And I have no idea what a pricing floor is regarding a currency, and having spent the majority of my life doing finance and econ, I am pretty sure that means you are misusing terms. Might you mean a trading band denominated in another currency (like the HKD or CNY)? That is irrelevant. A currency does not need to be easily convertible into foreign currencies or stably converted. Just look at the INR or TRY this last year.
actually that is trivial to do. In the UK, if you have a salary of 125,000 GBP. You pay 50k GBP in payroll taxes. Your employer pays 16000 GBP. This means functionally, your income was 141,000 and we already have 66000 paid in taxes. I need to find 4500 GBP more in taxes, and given council tax and VAT (20%), that is simplistic to do.
I'm not talking about millionaires, just upper middle class incomes.
I can even get close in the UK with much more modest earnings.
salary , 50k GBP. payroll taxes: 14k employer contribution: 6k effective tax before VAT and council : 20/56 = 36%
If you then spend 20k pounds in VAT items (very easy if you support a family), you have another 3.4k in taxes,and let's add 600 gbp of council tax, which brings us to 4k or 9%. I have taken an eminently middle income household and made it pay 45% before other government duties you have to pay (say for car ownership, and the like).
It is TRIVIAL to get to 50% in most of europe without earning very much and you can get damn close in the US at high incomes (without being a millionaire) if you live in cities like NY, with expensive sales, city income, state income, and federal rates stacking quite nastily. But if you are only familiar with the US, which is ultra progressive in it's taxation, you wouldn't realize what rates are like for non-super wealthy professionals in lots of countries.
have you ever tried to transfer 100k USD? Ever heard of anti-money laundering regs? I got caught in those moving savings between banks. You can find your money lost to you for weeks as the bank tries to figure out if you are doing anything with drugs/terrorism/whatever.
not probably, in no way is a future promise to deliver an item a debt security. It is a standard manner in which many businesses function (receiving money well before delivery, this happens a lot of building a new home) and it does not require any type of auditing or SEC approval.
it's probably the 100 investor or general selling provisions or both that can trigger filing requirements. If 101 different legal entities hold your shares, you have huge SEC filing requirements and if you do a general public offering (i.e. anyone can buy, like a crowd funded project) it automatically falls under their purview.
Granted, you could make it a private investment vehicle and loop through it (set up a small PE shop people invest in and that buys the shares) but that is some nasty overhead and investors have to meet minimum income and/or net worth tests.
Slashdot Mirror
it's not just the bit coin supporters, but even people with your argument have a very poor understanding of economics and why deflation can, in some circumstances, be bad.
It does not keep the poor stuck without money or reward the rich. There are ample examples of deflation occurring in a perfectly functioning economy. There is really only 1 reason for a small, structural, rate of inflation (which actually harms the poor quite a bit, but doesn't harm the rich who can easily hedge their inflation exposure): it allows for the real level of interest rates to go negative when very large stimulus is required. Over the last 5 years, real interest rates in the US have been consistently negative. And at least for the first short period of the recession, it proved to be very helpful to have a central bank drive the real rate of interest to a very negative number. In a functioning, growing economy, whether there is 1% inflation or -1% inflation is pretty damn irrelevant. It neither helps nor harms the economy. Why? simple, all your loans will come 200 basis points cheaper (so that 6% mortgage will be a 4% mortgage, or if you are in Japan, 2.3% for a 0 down mortgage, 30 yr fixed). Markets aren't stupid.
I get it,it's hard to wrap your head around if you haven't actually done any real studying of deflationary economies and inflationary ones and which is worse (hint, both have done horrid things to people, mostly the lower and middle class). But structurally, the market can handle it just fine. Here are 2 good examples: US post the civil war and Japan from 1998 to 2007.
not true. it will be like most countries without income taxes historically. All taxes are done via VAT/sales/import duty/export duty/stamp duties, coupled with extremely strict punishment for avoiding taxes (on people who primarily provide services). The US didn't have a national currency in circulation before the civil war (notes were drawing rights against private banks, with no guarantee on their value), but somehow the governments at all levels was able to tax.
And of course, you require that all taxes are paid in your national currency. That way people who have bitcoins will have to continue to provide demand for US Dollars.
Obviously there will be cheating, but there is also lots of cheating on income taxes. Somehow countries currently and historically have managed.
easy:
http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/rs-1-crore-package-for-12-iit-kanpur-students-455434
12 students were offered north of 10 mio INR, and the top was 13.6 mio (roughly 205k, depending on the fx rate on the given day). By the way, they turned that number down.
And this isn't just one person. This is large sets of grads from all the different IIT branches commanding these wages now. Not the top 1 or 2 people
well, that's also why wages are converging to US levels very fast in those industries. I know friends of mine in finance there would tell me they could easily negotiate 25% salary increases YoY back in 2006.
of course, but you can hire a low level moron in the US for the same amount. It's not that hard to find people who will go for it. But the fact 100k+ starting salaries are becoming regular offers from the IT companies in India for highly qualified new grads means the market is flattening very fast. I actually don't know any new IT grands that pull down 100k their first year but I'm sure they are out there.
it's funny because you are a solid 10 years out of date. Top grads in India now make comparable amounts to their US equivalents. Hell, just a couple months ago Oracle was offering grands 200k+ for Mumbai based roles. The days of indians taking jobs based solely are salary are quickly coming to a close. Now it's just ability and ease of hiring.
except Japan went through 15 years of pretty constant deflation (the only spike in the mid 90s was due to the imposition of a national sales tax) and didn't see severe hoarding. People still bought goods, the economy continued to grow, if more slowly, and interest rates dropped proportionally (so my friend has a 30y 2.3% mortgage with no money down).
But then again, fi you look at their economic growth, it's pretty alright considering a shrinking workforce, a shrinking population, but steady efficiency gains.
Catastrophic deflation is bad (i.e. people dumping goods to pay off debts that are being called causing an uncontrolled downward spiral in general prices). This happened in the 1930s and 1913 and other banking crises because banks issued loans that they could call.
But steady, slow deflation is not. And having lived in the stupid inflation of London and the steady prices of Japan and the slow inflation of the US, I can say only London was a real pain in the ass because you found yourself having trouble saving for any big purchases. Slow deflation is also bad because if you believe in central bank management of an economy, a negative inflation rate leaves the CB with less freedom to move real interest rates and therefore stimulate short term demand (i.e. When bernanke went all in, he was able to take 5y real interest rates to -1%, for Japan to do this at it's worst you would need to somehow get people offering the government 5y loans at -2.5%, not possible, so Japan found itself unable to use the extreme stimulus of negative real rates).
In the article, Krugman literally says if inflation goes north of 2% I can go to the Fed and sell back my dollars (for what, god knows??), and that sets a floor on the dollar.
He is about 80 years out of date with his information. And that is just the first ridiculous statement he quoted as proof BTC is bad. That he is grasping for reasons when he has none is telling when you have a well educated economist believe that the Fed will buy back your dollars.
Or did you not read the article and realize quite a number of his arguments were FACTUALLY inaccurate?
I"m not saying BTC is good or bad. I don't own any and don't really care to as they offer me nothing I care about (I don't care to commit tax fraud or engage in illegal activity, so I might as well use my much safer credit cards and move on). But the article you linked to was one of the most pitiful refutations of using bitcoins I have ever seen. There are real arguments that can be made about a fixed supply currency, something no other currency is. But the idea that my US dollars are having their value protected by the Fed is idiotic. The USD is protected by the most powerful military in the world (the stick) and the biggest consumer economy in the world (the carrot).
who cares? Of course in most things early adopters find themselves earning windfall profits. That is the payoff for being an early adopter. That is why they got 1000x return. Even if no one else does, who cares? BTC is not an investment vehicle for making you rich in 3 years. It is a currency with no central authority that can seize your holdings or devalue your holdings.
where in the world do you see yourself paying 30% for chargeback services?
The vast majority of credit card companies extend that insurance for a nominal fee (about 2%) if you are the seller along with FX charges to the buyer of usually around 1%. In what world do you expect to pay 35% of your revenue away or pay a 35% fee to buy things from overseas? I do it all the time with any of my credit cards. It is instant and the one time a seller tried to get away without sending me the product all it took was a quick call to the credit card company to get my money back. These are SMALL fees relative to bit coin FX charges right now. It may be at some point bit coin will get cheap enough to move against real currency that this isn't the case, but right now you are looking at a 1.4% charge on either side from most exchanges, along with bank transfer fees (which won't by on a transaction by transaction basis usually).
If you are in europe or Australia, it is even cheaper to take credit cards as the interchange fees are highly regulated. It may require less than 1% of your revenue to receive payment. That is trivial for most businesses vs trying to manage bitcoins efficiently.
I'm a fan of a lot of what BTC allows you to do. But efficient overseas payments with a reasonably low fee structure is not one of them yet, and one it has to improve on vastly to get to.
you realize one example is irrelevant right? If you are talking about societal pressures, the best way to compare is to compare across different societies. And it holds pretty damn well at that scale. I had a cousin we tried to treat like a guy but he only wanted to be treated like a little girl. He would cry, run around with the girls, want to put on make up, and his favorite colored material was frilly pink.
This DOES NOT MEAN all guys act like this or that there aren't real defined roles/colors/activities for men and women. It happens to be your daughter at this stage doesn't care about gadgets. Que sera. The question being asked is why is this lack of women in the fields that correlate with these interests pretty unique to the US and a few other countries that also have gender biases that are in the same direction.
You don't see a dearth of female programmers or hardware designers in countries where it isn't seen as a male/female divided profession. Why? that is the question that is generally being asked. Unfortunately, we generally try to correct a large scale issue with programs that don't really address the problem. If the problem is (I'm not sure this is the case, but let's assume it is) women are discouraged from an extremely young age from engaging in any technical fields, it's highly unlikely a couple of programs to get kids to program in high school will have any noticeable impact on the overall rate of women in programming (and let's be really specific, we are talking about native born women in programming, foreign women will still come over via H1-B visas or family connections).
Actually, it's not a needless push for diversity. It is looking for the primary drivers of large differences in participation (if you want more white people in basketball, have them grow in in the inner city where education is not nearly as valued as driving to the hoop, a great example is how most black players are terrible passers but excellent ball handlers because the latter is a desirable trait where most of them learn to play basketball) and asking are these structural (i.e. our rules make them more likely to happen) or not.
In India, they came to the realization that it was structural and cultural and to cause a shift, they reserved 60% of all seats in medical school in the 60s and 70s for the underrepresented. But doing this, they attempted to build at least a generation of education and wealth in the traditionally discriminated classes to quickly change things. It helps it is a country that highly values education, but with this push, you end up with people who haven't gone to high school happily working 16 hour days 7 days a week so their children can become engineers (it was doctors 20 years ago, but every time I do these interactions, it seems to be more and more engineering). But it helped that they knew due to government policies if they could provide the money, and their kid worked hard, the seat was damn near guaranteed, even if there was a more qualified candidate on exams.
My point is, if you haven't come up with why things are the way they are, or if there are structural (and at the very least, legal hurdles, including hurdles in the way the law is enforced) you can't come up with some conclusions that efforts at diversity or more or less helpful than the status quo. In the US, at least historically and against very specific minority groups, there were good reasons for aggressive policies to correct a wrong, whether the current set of rules were enough or not I don't know, I haven't done nearly enough research in all the programs and their efficacy.
Just one note, government jobs are not dominated by black people. The post office is 73% white (non-hispanic) and 17% black as of the last numbers I could find (note, this is a bit out of date, the 2002 report on diversity to congress). Hispanics are very underrepresented, was my takeaway from it. I can't say much about media policies or whether race is mentioned or not, but I do know I'd need to see actual research on this, as compared to people's sense or feeling, as usually people hear what they want to (including me).
well, I'll say 2 points.
Yes, as many women have rich parents as men. Absolutely. My point was that it is ridiculous to say things like "these men were fearless, taking such risks and others did" when the facts on the ground say you are massively over-exagerating the risks they are taking (this would be a racial argument especially, because you have to admit the average family wealth of a white person is higher than a black, and the skew is extreme). The original article was about both race and gender, though I appologize for pushing your argument onto the racial discrepencies rather than just gender. But I do take issue with making it sound like all these tech entrepreneurs are somehow living on the edge of survival trying to do something. It is part of this needless glorification.
And as gender goes, you are absolutely right that women have as much family money. But there are large swaths of the country and communities (I know, I grew up in one of these highly educated, wealthy communities) that will not give this money to a daughter, and will never accept the fact a daughter drops out of school for the chance to do something big.
I'm not saying it's UNIVERSAL mind you. Just that I was part of communities where a women who did this would not be backed by family money for seed investments and would not find a welcoming environment from their support group for doing this. On the other hand, I would have been supported with everything I needed. That is a real experience, but obviously this doesn't explain why OTHER women didn't break off, drop out of college, and start something.
Granted, it has been shown that men are far more willing to take risks (even small ones) if they think it will help get them laid. And frankly, I think that is a MUCH BIGGER reason you see men doing risky behavior. And if you are already enabled to take risks by a safety net, it wouldn't be surprising to me to see you go bigger in risk than other men (or women, obviously).
this is quite funny. You only think the white man is being abused because you are obviously from a white dominated country (one where, for hundreds of years, white men were the only ones allowed to succeed by legal structures in place until rather recently and therefore, have a vast generational advantage in resources).
In India they are trying to fix the same thing, that the Brahmin caste dominates most learned professions. This is slowly changing, but I've never heard cries of "their picking on us for being Brahmin), because at least it seems people realize that Brahmins for hundreds of years in society were given legal and societal protections to be the best at the knowledge industries and the fact that so many families of that caste now are high academic performers says a lot more about hundreds of years of being the only group to do it than about any inherent racial difference.
or possibly because calculus is considered part of the standard curiculum of college bound high performers in high school? It was understood that the top students in our school took calculus (and this was across 2 high schools I attended). Why wouldn't you expect women, who generally score higher and graduate and go on to college more than men to take an AP course that is considered par for the course? CS is not par for the course. AP exams that aren't considered core are usually not pushed as hard when you go talk to you guidance counselor.
in reminds me of creationists, who start with a reasonable point (xyz has no legitimate explanation within the understood framework of evolution) that could equally be an argument for an extension or new understanding of the framework. instead they go off and say "then, it must be this random idea I pulled out of my ass"
have you seen how much family money usually backs the biggest start ups? Apple is one of the FEW not backed by real generational wealth. Where do you think this money comes from usually?
It's the same in finance. Many of the young powerhouses were backed by real family money. Nothing of much consideration, other than a couple of years in your 20s was risked.
By the way, I'm not minimizing the contributions of many of these folks. I'm just saying it isn't a big risk if you know when it doesn't work out you still havee a home, food, car, and the ability to go back and finish your college education. You haven't really risked everything, just a little bit of time.
the problem is you don't understand either the debt ceiling or why it would breach and cause a default.
payment of interest and principal on the debt is not a statutory payment the federal government must make. On the other hand, medicare, obamacare, SS, and several other programs, most of which are welfare programs, are mandatory programs. The government has no choice and must use incoming tax money to pay for them first. If those payments happen to eat up so much tax money in a given month and a required debt repayment (like say, a notional repayment on a bond) then the US government defaults and a whole lot of financial triggers are fired.
The US government could run a balanced budget in aggregate and still have this default problem because payments and receipts do not happen at the same time. This was what the default was going to be, not some grand scheme where suddenly the US couldn't pay for anything. Just the US couldn't on a given day meet it's obligations because tax laws are this big aggregate thing that assume the federal government can issue short term debt (like commercial paper in the private industry or a revolver) to smooth out the differences.
all of Krugman's questions have been very succinctly answered well before he asked the question. Just because he fails to do any research what so ever is meaningless.
A store of value is as reliable as the people who use it say it is. That is all. That is the store of value of the US dollar, gold, Yen, and the Argentinian Peso. That Krugman and many economists take for granted that the US Dollar is a store of value without ever asking why such a situation exists is hilarious. The exact same logic for US Dollar value exists for bit coins. If people begin denominating their regular transactions in bit coins, they will then have grounded value in real assets, and it is done. As most real assets in the world are denominated in US Dollars, US dollars have a sticky value that allows it to be a store. But this wasn't always the case and reading about some basic monetary history of the US would tell you this.
And I have no idea what a pricing floor is regarding a currency, and having spent the majority of my life doing finance and econ, I am pretty sure that means you are misusing terms. Might you mean a trading band denominated in another currency (like the HKD or CNY)? That is irrelevant. A currency does not need to be easily convertible into foreign currencies or stably converted. Just look at the INR or TRY this last year.
actually that is trivial to do.
In the UK, if you have a salary of 125,000 GBP. You pay 50k GBP in payroll taxes. Your employer pays 16000 GBP. This means functionally, your income was 141,000 and we already have 66000 paid in taxes. I need to find 4500 GBP more in taxes, and given council tax and VAT (20%), that is simplistic to do.
I'm not talking about millionaires, just upper middle class incomes.
I can even get close in the UK with much more modest earnings.
salary , 50k GBP.
payroll taxes: 14k
employer contribution: 6k
effective tax before VAT and council : 20/56 = 36%
If you then spend 20k pounds in VAT items (very easy if you support a family), you have another 3.4k in taxes,and let's add 600 gbp of council tax, which brings us to 4k or 9%. I have taken an eminently middle income household and made it pay 45% before other government duties you have to pay (say for car ownership, and the like).
It is TRIVIAL to get to 50% in most of europe without earning very much and you can get damn close in the US at high incomes (without being a millionaire) if you live in cities like NY, with expensive sales, city income, state income, and federal rates stacking quite nastily. But if you are only familiar with the US, which is ultra progressive in it's taxation, you wouldn't realize what rates are like for non-super wealthy professionals in lots of countries.
have you ever tried to transfer 100k USD? Ever heard of anti-money laundering regs? I got caught in those moving savings between banks. You can find your money lost to you for weeks as the bank tries to figure out if you are doing anything with drugs/terrorism/whatever.
I'd be interested in any source you have of that. I've never heard that the Earps were running a protection racket.
not probably, in no way is a future promise to deliver an item a debt security. It is a standard manner in which many businesses function (receiving money well before delivery, this happens a lot of building a new home) and it does not require any type of auditing or SEC approval.
it's probably the 100 investor or general selling provisions or both that can trigger filing requirements. If 101 different legal entities hold your shares, you have huge SEC filing requirements and if you do a general public offering (i.e. anyone can buy, like a crowd funded project) it automatically falls under their purview.
Granted, you could make it a private investment vehicle and loop through it (set up a small PE shop people invest in and that buys the shares) but that is some nasty overhead and investors have to meet minimum income and/or net worth tests.
being conservative is always unpopular until liberal rules affect things you care about. Then suddenly everyone is a card carrying liberatarian.