The thing about the hot coffee lawsuit is that she was not the 1st person to complain about it. There was 700 people who filed complaints in a ten year period burn by the high temp coffee (some with 3rd degree burns. Yet McDonalds knowingly (documenting itself too) kept the temperature way too hot. This showed negligence on their part.
Turn in your geek card immediately, for failing to differentiate between gross and per capita rates.
700 coffee incidents is what percent of McDonalds' total coffee sales? Answer: about 1 in 24 million. And you call that 'negligent'?!
79 year old Stella Liebeck suffered third degree burns on her groin and inner thighs while trying to add sugar to her coffee at a McDonalds drive through. Third degree burns are the most serious kind of burn. McDonalds knew it had a problem. There were at least 700 previous cases of scalding coffee incidents at McDonalds before Liebeck's case. McDonalds had settled many claim before but refused Liebeck's request for $20,000 compensation, forcing the case into court. Lawyers found that McDonalds makes its coffee 30-50 degrees hotter than other restaurants, about 190 degrees.
You know that coffee is brewed with water that is on the verge of boiling, right? Ditto for hot tea, at least if you follow worldwide British/Indian custom. So if your coffee is served fresh, as Starbucks does serve it, then it will be about 190 degrees. There would be a storm of "ZOMG my five-dollar coffee isn't fresh!!1!" complaints if they didn't.
So I'd like to know the definition of "other restaurants" that plaintiff claims are serving cooler coffee. It is very telling that they do not cite any coffee- or restaurant-industry standard for coffee serve temperature.
For added enlightenment, next time you brew a pot of coffee, let it sit in the carafe for a while with the coffeemaker still on to keep it warm, and then check the temperature with a cooking thermometer. Then come back and tell us whether plaintiff was justified in claiming that McDonalds' procedure was somehow out-of-the-ordinary.
But what happens when civilization attacks the barbarians? Our violence should be ready for defending our country, not for regime building.
Nobody living in barbary can claim that their environment is right for humans, where "right for humans" means: conducive to human safety and comfort and rational thought. Therefore, no barbaric regime can claim the right to exist. Therefore, anyone has the right to end a barbaric regime and set up a civil society, although no civil society has the obligation to do so.
Glorifying deadly combat is more than a little twisted. Senseless violence is against the basic principal of civilization. If the army's goal is to build a civil society in Iraq it should be teaching its soldiers more about civility and less about headshots.
The army does not use "senseless violence". They are very clear on the importance of shooting only the bad guys, and Iraq demonstrates that they have a good success rate at doing so, at least compared to the whole rest of the history of war.
Your argument is a straw man, and not even a clever one.
Incidentally, one of the basic principles of civilization is "Keep a lot of violence ready for when the barbarians attack." Any civilization that fails to do so will end soon after. Don't let the current Pax Americana, the product of the West's skill with violence, lead you to believe that barbarians aren't still knocking at the gate.
Do you really think there are $90,000 worth of parts and labor in an S-Class Mercedes (does the S stand for stupid, or stinking rich, or both)? Also, when I go to a restaurant and order a $60 bottle of wine, it makes me feel bad when I see that same bottle in Bottle King for $12...
It is better for society if there isn't $90,000 worth of parts and labor in an S-Class Mercedes. The whole point of luxury items is to take a rich person's money and put it back into circulation, in the process reducing the concentration of power that his bankroll represents. The only question is, how much wealth will be consumed in the process?
Selling him a $80,000 Rolex burns about $4,000 in actual wealth to liberate the $80,000. That's efficient.
Him hiring a butler for $80,000 a year burns about $40,000 in actual wealth -- this is the wealth the butler could've created elsewhere, rather than scurrying around making the rich guy feel special. That's not efficient.
So, never criticize super-expensive trinkets; they are far far better for society's total net wealth than servants.
Ok thats it! We need to ban public telephones, pre-paid calling cards, search engines and Hotmail! I have also heard that the terrorist eat food! If we ban all production of food we will starve those bastards to death! Who is with me!
As the NSA, FBI, and CIA are involved, you CANNOT trust this plea bargain. The defendants in this case could've agreed to say such things whether or not they are true.
And why would the NSA, CIA, and/or FBI want them to say such a thing? Why in the world would the Powers That Be want to demonize these anonymous forms of communication?
The company has "innovations" in it's name, so their product probably won't work.
If it did work against true crypt, which is a yard stick of well implemented encryption, I'm sure they'll come up with a counter measure by the next minor release.
This will probably become an arms race, in order to use vs detect subtler and subtler patterns in the bytes.
In any case, this tool will probably end up being used by law-enforcement as a polygraph, or breathalyzer: not true, not quite false either, but exciting enough to get the suspect to confess.
Reminds me of a funny story about polygraphs. The cops were questioning a particularly stupid criminal, and they knew he did it (disclaimer, disclaimer). So they taped some stripped wire ends to his fingers, and ran the other ends of the wires into some random slot on a nearby xerox machine. They had secretly placed a paper onto the copier's glass with the words "HE'S LYING" written on it. When the guy answered a question and they knew he was lying, they'd fully press the copy button, rather than just pretending to press it. Out would come a copy of the paper -- HE'S LYING -- and the guy, whelmed, confessed. Ha ha, owned.:)
I RTFA, and there is a very telling reader comment at the end...
All the IT stuff is just a bunch of chaff that the consultant has to wade through to get to what is really wrong with you, which he could have gotten in a 2 or 3 minute phone call from your allergist. You may ask why this situation has developed in medicine. From my experience, your allergist, as much as he/she may care about you, does not want to have hospital privleges so he/she can have a life and therefore, while the handwritten note was, in your mind commendable, it was inadequate and the allergist probably knows that, but does not want to manage hospitalized patients.
The moral of the story, then, is that no amount of even well-organized information can compensate for a break in the continuity of care. The allergist tossed this guy to the wolves with a post-it note stuck to his forehead. The current system couldn't cope with that, and it's hard to imagine any system that could, because the hospital et. al. can't morally or legally just follow the instructions on the post-it note; they have to start from scratch.
The allergist had to know this, but dropped the ball anyway. Find a new allergist.
But maybe the third world should be looked at more like consumers with a lot of time and little money?
They have little money because their time does not produce anything particularly valuable. And a culture must produce before it can consume. Therefore, in the grand scheme of things, there are no poor consumers.
How about we stop runnaway spending and reduce the national debt.
The national debt is money borrowed from investors at about 1% interest rate. If you can think of something constructive to spend money on, you're a fool to turn it down at 1%... or even 0%, lately.
That said, these days the money is often spent on unconstructive things (entitlements), even anti-construtive things. But that's a problem with the programs, not with borrowing per se.
I just finished up undergraduate classes as an electrical engineer, and I would say the majority of people in my department used Adderall to help them study longer. Those people all ended up with better GPA's for it. It's almost the same question with sports and steroids, if I had used that kind of drug to increase my studying capacity, I probably could have gotten enough of an extra boost to enter "free Ph.D." territory.
I prefer the term "brain management". It's asinine to assume (as John Q. Public does assume) that everyone's bran operates in the approved western modern 40-hour-work-week manner. Those whose brains do not -- be they ornery, overly type A, sociopathic, a bully, depressed, whatever -- can have a better life if they can make some adjustments. The only question is, what are the risk tradeoffs for the current crop of brain-adjustment drugs?
There is going to be a lot of embarrassing public hue and cry about this, coming from those who luckily do not need any such adjustments.
I once worked for a guy for three years and was always mystified by his occasional "asshole" days, in which he was an insufferable type-A jerk. Years later I bumped into him in another city, and he apologized, explaining that those bad days were the ones when he'd run out of grass. inviolet was enlightened.
If you already have root access, WTF is the point, just install the root kit. The idea of exploits is to *GET* root access to be able to install these root kits.
Now while this might be moderately interesting if you can somehow manage to get a service running as root to run said code, but then, if you can get the service running as root to execute arbitrary code like this, then why not get it to install the root kit for you.
Stupidest exploit scare ever.
The point is virtual servers, in which this code in one infected VM can reach up into the hypervisor and then down into the other VMs.
Nice try. The F-35 is not a nuclear delivery system but a light tactical fighter-bomber.
It's also manned. Which means that it is already almost obsolete.
For all we know, the brass has realized that the F-35 is a waste of money to build, and they want to move on to more and better robots. So let the Chinese waste their money building it. The more extravagantly expensive the design is (multiple terabytes of design data anyone?), the better.
The reason for having an income tax is that it can be made progressive (in other words, you can make rich people pay proportionally more), in ways you can't with sales/excise taxes. That's the benefit of an income tax system... and yes, it is in fact a benefit.
Progressive taxes aim for "equal pain" taxation, in which we all have an equally painful chunk of our wealth taken.
Flat taxes, by contrast, aim for "equal contribution", in which we all pay a fixed fee or a fixed percentage in fairness to the fact that wealthier folks tend (strongly) to be that way because they generate more real wealth for society.
Regressive taxes aim for "contribution equal to consumption of public services", in which the lower classes pay more in fairness to the larger real expenses they impose on society.
You cannot honestly claim to know that one of these goals clearly trumps the others. They are all fraught with problems, and it is not obvious which flavor of 'fairness', or which time horizon, we should prefer.
The ACLU has happened on yet one more issue that would be completely a non-issue if schools were not an extension of government.
Schools should be able to do whatever they want, or whatever the parents want.
Yes. And there is a good reason behind this assertion: Schools are tax-funded. That one fact creates some impossible problems, chief among them being:
People are forced to fund the propagation of ideas that they consider false and evil.
If we try to solve the former by democratically choosing which ideas are taught, up to 49% of the people still get screwed per idea... and since there are many ideas at stake (evolution? paganism? AI vs soul? sexuality?), the number can rise to 100%.
And anyway, the majority can be completely wrong-headed. Often.
The burden of school taxes precludes many people from being able to afford private schools that meet their requirements.
Due to the preceding, private schools can't muster the volume in order to get prices down.
Vouchers are the obvious answer to almost all of this mess, but we all now know what an uphill political battle that is.
No. Rail lines and companies were systematically dismantled by the auto companies, GM in particular. GM participated in anti-competitive practices and all they got for it was a slap on the hand.
It was dishonest of you to omit the very interesting text at the bottom of that wikipedia article.
The text in question notes that all street-car systems died even though the conspiracy only owned 10% of them... as if GM et. al. were guilty of taking a couple of sniper shots through the windows of a bus as it plummeted off a cliff.
Gitmo is bigger threat to your liberty than whether or not kids get to take music without paying.
It is a threat to your liberty insofar as it is used against American citizens. So far it has not. Whether it will is an open question.
It is a boon to your liberty for reasons that caught me by surprise when it was first explained to me. My partner, who has done tours of duty in the middle east, explained that everyone in the world knows about Gitmo. Its mere existence persuades people to talk, even to help us.
There doesn't even have to be anybody there for it to achieve this effect. The bad press alone is what does it.
Its value as a deterrant and as an intelligence tool against people who are not in it is big, and could compete against your civic objections to it.
- How's going?
- Bad... I got Mankind.
- Had it also. Not a big problem though, it goes away.
- Oh good.
- Actually it's a useful way to get all your carbon back out of the ground and back in circulation.
- Yeah?
- Yeah, and they'll slaughter themselves once all the carbon is extracted. So, problem solved.
- Sweet!
I would argue that the real economy does not grow much at all, only that living standards get continually better through advance of technology
What in the world do you suppose the economy is, if not that?
The progress of safety and comfort is wealth. The same acre of land becomes a greater chunk of wealth based on what is constructed on it, around it, near it.
and that the inflated economy we see today is a result of profit from a position of debt.
It's the result of foreign investment, yes, which is very low-interest debt. It is rational to borrow money at 1% in order to expand one's concerns, which is why we can't resist doing it. Were we an unreliable bet, we (our central bank) would have to pay a higher interest rate for foreign capital, and that would stop the deficit spending.
None of this is obviously objectionable, and the use of the word 'debt' to describe it can be considered dishonestly provocative, because at these ridiculously low interest rates, it is a whole different class of debt than (say) a credit card. You would criticize a businessman for borrowing at 21% to build a second warehouse, but you'd laugh at him if he didn't borrow at 1% to open another storefront.
In any case, from your non-answer I assume you are (like me) an angry o'ist who knows the current situation is wrong but doesn't know how to make it right. Welcome to the club.
More wealth isn't really being generated, it is being added to the pile because others are taking it out...
If the net size of the pile is stable, then the economy is not growing. That may be acceptable, in which case we do not need to change the supply of money. However, most of us agree that Western economies are all growing (other than the periodic recessions), in the sense that the pile is becoming larger, and becoming composed of higher-valued items. If the money supply is not increased, then money must deflate, because the net value of actual wealth in the pile is higher.
It is hard to argue that deflation is socially useful. So unless you want to make that argument, you need an answer to the question of how, and who, increases the money supply to keep pace with the pile. If you propose precious metal, you need to explain how we keep the growth of mined gold equal to the size of our economies. (This was *the* argument of the "Don't crucify me on a cross of gold" movement that ended the original gold standard.)
A small number of individuals take far more out of the economy than they put back in.
Your leftist screed is out of place in this discussion... but I'll answer it anyway. The opportunity to consume a larger share of the pile is the incentive to work hard. More than one formerly-wealthy region has bankrupted itself by removing that incentive.
[...] the real problems with the economy can be attributed to the creation of the Federal Reserve (putting banks in charge of the economy in the first place), and the dissolution of the gold standard (allowing the Fed to create as much money as it wants, without creating actual wealth to accompany it).
I've thought this way too, and it's led me to a question that we need to be able to answer:
Suppose the economy is growing and more wealth is being added to the pile. That means that somebody needs to issue additional money apace, or else existing money will deflate. Deflation causes problems, chief among them being that it discourages real investment; putting money in a mattress becomes profitable despite being socially costly. Not to mention surprise deflation, as would occur if the economy suddenly grew more than money-issuers could keep up with, hurts all borrowers.
With fiat money, somebody can issue money to match the rate of economic growth, and thereby prevent inflation or deflation. With backed money, your supply of backer material has got to keep pace with the economy or else you'll distort the value of money and disrupt all financial arrangements. It is hard to imagine a backer material that fits the bill. Precious metals are the obvious choice but the global supply of them does not grow at the rate the economy usually does, which is a problem. The management of the backer material is also socially costly, because the act of management of (say) a fort full of gold does not, itself, generate any wealth.
And clearly you don't want the government printing fiat money, because they can't resist running up a bit of inflation as an under-the-table tax. So what do you propose we do?
Next time you auction off spectrum that could be used for JUST THIS PURPOSE, stop setting the minimum bids at astronomical numbers. "Public benefit" doesn't necessarily mean "get as much money for the gov't as possible".
You do understand that the big boys will still join the auction, which means the final sale price will still be an astronomical number.
Or were you thinking of banning the big boys? Even though they are, due to their size, more efficiently able to capitalize a big asset like "this frequency over this whole state"? Or do you suppose "Vern's Tobacco and Wireless Internet Shop" will more efficiently employ the spectrum?
More generally, in economics and politics, the word "simple" means "wrong". I know you don't believe me yet, but you will. When a solution sounds simple, it's because you've been told (or are telling) only half the story.
The ones that know how the bubble works will know when to jump ship. There are people that got rich during dot.com. The ones that knew when to bail and leave the mountains of debt to the suckers. Just like in real economy.
It's no secret how they did it, either. Warren Buffet (I think?) summed it up when he said, "I knew we were in trouble when the average Joe was flipping houses." The point being: by the time you hear about a great investment, it's not a great investment.
The point of the point being: start shorting when the public goes bullish on some new investment sector. Because that public craze *is* the reason why the price is high.
Slashdot Mirror
Turn in your geek card immediately, for failing to differentiate between gross and per capita rates.
700 coffee incidents is what percent of McDonalds' total coffee sales? Answer: about 1 in 24 million. And you call that 'negligent'?!
You know that coffee is brewed with water that is on the verge of boiling, right? Ditto for hot tea, at least if you follow worldwide British/Indian custom. So if your coffee is served fresh, as Starbucks does serve it, then it will be about 190 degrees. There would be a storm of "ZOMG my five-dollar coffee isn't fresh!!1!" complaints if they didn't.
So I'd like to know the definition of "other restaurants" that plaintiff claims are serving cooler coffee. It is very telling that they do not cite any coffee- or restaurant-industry standard for coffee serve temperature.
For added enlightenment, next time you brew a pot of coffee, let it sit in the carafe for a while with the coffeemaker still on to keep it warm, and then check the temperature with a cooking thermometer. Then come back and tell us whether plaintiff was justified in claiming that McDonalds' procedure was somehow out-of-the-ordinary.
Nobody living in barbary can claim that their environment is right for humans, where "right for humans" means: conducive to human safety and comfort and rational thought. Therefore, no barbaric regime can claim the right to exist. Therefore, anyone has the right to end a barbaric regime and set up a civil society, although no civil society has the obligation to do so.
The army does not use "senseless violence". They are very clear on the importance of shooting only the bad guys, and Iraq demonstrates that they have a good success rate at doing so, at least compared to the whole rest of the history of war.
Your argument is a straw man, and not even a clever one.
Incidentally, one of the basic principles of civilization is "Keep a lot of violence ready for when the barbarians attack." Any civilization that fails to do so will end soon after. Don't let the current Pax Americana, the product of the West's skill with violence, lead you to believe that barbarians aren't still knocking at the gate.
It is better for society if there isn't $90,000 worth of parts and labor in an S-Class Mercedes. The whole point of luxury items is to take a rich person's money and put it back into circulation, in the process reducing the concentration of power that his bankroll represents. The only question is, how much wealth will be consumed in the process?
Selling him a $80,000 Rolex burns about $4,000 in actual wealth to liberate the $80,000. That's efficient.
Him hiring a butler for $80,000 a year burns about $40,000 in actual wealth -- this is the wealth the butler could've created elsewhere, rather than scurrying around making the rich guy feel special. That's not efficient.
So, never criticize super-expensive trinkets; they are far far better for society's total net wealth than servants.
...whereas those who study history will recognize it when they are repeating it.
/sorry, feeling cynical tonight
As the NSA, FBI, and CIA are involved, you CANNOT trust this plea bargain. The defendants in this case could've agreed to say such things whether or not they are true.
And why would the NSA, CIA, and/or FBI want them to say such a thing? Why in the world would the Powers That Be want to demonize these anonymous forms of communication?
You are more wrong about this issue than can be excused as innocent error.
So, *plonk*. I'm done listening to you, at least in this life.
This will probably become an arms race, in order to use vs detect subtler and subtler patterns in the bytes.
In any case, this tool will probably end up being used by law-enforcement as a polygraph, or breathalyzer: not true, not quite false either, but exciting enough to get the suspect to confess.
Reminds me of a funny story about polygraphs. The cops were questioning a particularly stupid criminal, and they knew he did it (disclaimer, disclaimer). So they taped some stripped wire ends to his fingers, and ran the other ends of the wires into some random slot on a nearby xerox machine. They had secretly placed a paper onto the copier's glass with the words "HE'S LYING" written on it. When the guy answered a question and they knew he was lying, they'd fully press the copy button, rather than just pretending to press it. Out would come a copy of the paper -- HE'S LYING -- and the guy, whelmed, confessed. Ha ha, owned. :)
I RTFA, and there is a very telling reader comment at the end...
The moral of the story, then, is that no amount of even well-organized information can compensate for a break in the continuity of care. The allergist tossed this guy to the wolves with a post-it note stuck to his forehead. The current system couldn't cope with that, and it's hard to imagine any system that could, because the hospital et. al. can't morally or legally just follow the instructions on the post-it note; they have to start from scratch.
The allergist had to know this, but dropped the ball anyway. Find a new allergist.
They have little money because their time does not produce anything particularly valuable. And a culture must produce before it can consume. Therefore, in the grand scheme of things, there are no poor consumers.
The national debt is money borrowed from investors at about 1% interest rate. If you can think of something constructive to spend money on, you're a fool to turn it down at 1%... or even 0%, lately.
That said, these days the money is often spent on unconstructive things (entitlements), even anti-construtive things. But that's a problem with the programs, not with borrowing per se.
I prefer the term "brain management". It's asinine to assume (as John Q. Public does assume) that everyone's bran operates in the approved western modern 40-hour-work-week manner. Those whose brains do not -- be they ornery, overly type A, sociopathic, a bully, depressed, whatever -- can have a better life if they can make some adjustments. The only question is, what are the risk tradeoffs for the current crop of brain-adjustment drugs?
There is going to be a lot of embarrassing public hue and cry about this, coming from those who luckily do not need any such adjustments.
I once worked for a guy for three years and was always mystified by his occasional "asshole" days, in which he was an insufferable type-A jerk. Years later I bumped into him in another city, and he apologized, explaining that those bad days were the ones when he'd run out of grass. inviolet was enlightened.
The point is virtual servers, in which this code in one infected VM can reach up into the hypervisor and then down into the other VMs.
It's also manned. Which means that it is already almost obsolete.
For all we know, the brass has realized that the F-35 is a waste of money to build, and they want to move on to more and better robots. So let the Chinese waste their money building it. The more extravagantly expensive the design is (multiple terabytes of design data anyone?), the better.
You cannot honestly claim to know that one of these goals clearly trumps the others. They are all fraught with problems, and it is not obvious which flavor of 'fairness', or which time horizon, we should prefer.
Yes. And there is a good reason behind this assertion: Schools are tax-funded. That one fact creates some impossible problems, chief among them being:
Vouchers are the obvious answer to almost all of this mess, but we all now know what an uphill political battle that is.
It was dishonest of you to omit the very interesting text at the bottom of that wikipedia article.
The text in question notes that all street-car systems died even though the conspiracy only owned 10% of them... as if GM et. al. were guilty of taking a couple of sniper shots through the windows of a bus as it plummeted off a cliff.
It is a threat to your liberty insofar as it is used against American citizens. So far it has not. Whether it will is an open question.
It is a boon to your liberty for reasons that caught me by surprise when it was first explained to me. My partner, who has done tours of duty in the middle east, explained that everyone in the world knows about Gitmo. Its mere existence persuades people to talk, even to help us.
There doesn't even have to be anybody there for it to achieve this effect. The bad press alone is what does it.
Its value as a deterrant and as an intelligence tool against people who are not in it is big, and could compete against your civic objections to it.
- Oh good.
- Actually it's a useful way to get all your carbon back out of the ground and back in circulation.
- Yeah?
- Yeah, and they'll slaughter themselves once all the carbon is extracted. So, problem solved.
- Sweet!
What in the world do you suppose the economy is, if not that?
The progress of safety and comfort is wealth. The same acre of land becomes a greater chunk of wealth based on what is constructed on it, around it, near it.
It's the result of foreign investment, yes, which is very low-interest debt. It is rational to borrow money at 1% in order to expand one's concerns, which is why we can't resist doing it. Were we an unreliable bet, we (our central bank) would have to pay a higher interest rate for foreign capital, and that would stop the deficit spending.
None of this is obviously objectionable, and the use of the word 'debt' to describe it can be considered dishonestly provocative, because at these ridiculously low interest rates, it is a whole different class of debt than (say) a credit card. You would criticize a businessman for borrowing at 21% to build a second warehouse, but you'd laugh at him if he didn't borrow at 1% to open another storefront.
In any case, from your non-answer I assume you are (like me) an angry o'ist who knows the current situation is wrong but doesn't know how to make it right. Welcome to the club.
If the net size of the pile is stable, then the economy is not growing. That may be acceptable, in which case we do not need to change the supply of money. However, most of us agree that Western economies are all growing (other than the periodic recessions), in the sense that the pile is becoming larger, and becoming composed of higher-valued items. If the money supply is not increased, then money must deflate, because the net value of actual wealth in the pile is higher.
It is hard to argue that deflation is socially useful. So unless you want to make that argument, you need an answer to the question of how, and who, increases the money supply to keep pace with the pile. If you propose precious metal, you need to explain how we keep the growth of mined gold equal to the size of our economies. (This was *the* argument of the "Don't crucify me on a cross of gold" movement that ended the original gold standard.)
Your leftist screed is out of place in this discussion... but I'll answer it anyway. The opportunity to consume a larger share of the pile is the incentive to work hard. More than one formerly-wealthy region has bankrupted itself by removing that incentive.
I've thought this way too, and it's led me to a question that we need to be able to answer:
Suppose the economy is growing and more wealth is being added to the pile. That means that somebody needs to issue additional money apace, or else existing money will deflate. Deflation causes problems, chief among them being that it discourages real investment; putting money in a mattress becomes profitable despite being socially costly. Not to mention surprise deflation, as would occur if the economy suddenly grew more than money-issuers could keep up with, hurts all borrowers.
With fiat money, somebody can issue money to match the rate of economic growth, and thereby prevent inflation or deflation. With backed money, your supply of backer material has got to keep pace with the economy or else you'll distort the value of money and disrupt all financial arrangements. It is hard to imagine a backer material that fits the bill. Precious metals are the obvious choice but the global supply of them does not grow at the rate the economy usually does, which is a problem. The management of the backer material is also socially costly, because the act of management of (say) a fort full of gold does not, itself, generate any wealth.
And clearly you don't want the government printing fiat money, because they can't resist running up a bit of inflation as an under-the-table tax. So what do you propose we do?
You do understand that the big boys will still join the auction, which means the final sale price will still be an astronomical number.
Or were you thinking of banning the big boys? Even though they are, due to their size, more efficiently able to capitalize a big asset like "this frequency over this whole state"? Or do you suppose "Vern's Tobacco and Wireless Internet Shop" will more efficiently employ the spectrum?
More generally, in economics and politics, the word "simple" means "wrong". I know you don't believe me yet, but you will. When a solution sounds simple, it's because you've been told (or are telling) only half the story.
It's no secret how they did it, either. Warren Buffet (I think?) summed it up when he said, "I knew we were in trouble when the average Joe was flipping houses." The point being: by the time you hear about a great investment, it's not a great investment.
The point of the point being: start shorting when the public goes bullish on some new investment sector. Because that public craze *is* the reason why the price is high.