Most of the resistance business is about penicillin derivatives, tetracyclines and vancomycin, all of which come from the 1950s or earlier.
Your conclusion is missing a vital piece of data. Vancomycin is the last line of defense for antibiotic-resistant infections in humans. That is why doctors avoid using it -- because it is vitally important that the bugs never acquire a resistance to it.
I remember a few years ago, when the industrial-farming folks pushed through approval to use vanco in cattle feed. The physicians in attendance made the obvious objection, and naturally were ignored in favor of the farms' colossal political power. Yee-haw, full speed ahead!
"Android has taken steps to inform users of this trust relationship and to limit the amount of trust a user must grant to any given application developer. We also provide developers with best practices about how to handle user data. We consistently advise users to only install apps they trust." -- Google
What a bunch of fluff. The relevant developers don't care about "best practices" or any other voluntary standard. And how the f*** are users supposed to establish trust in certain apps? The platform does not significantly monitor an application's ongoing behavior, nor is anyone performing serious code-reviews or blackbox testing. Google COULD HAVE set up profiling tests similar to those run in TFA, but didn't.
For ONCE would a company please admit that they reduced privacy in order to provide the dumbed-down usability needed to capture market share and attract developers?
People in Ivory Towers always love to treat everyone else like idiots needing their superior guidance. Because we're too stupid to function in a society without their wisdom and knowledge.
My brother relates a similar sentiment, but concerning the regulators themselves . . .
Suppose that somebody erected a control tower to oversee the car traffic in a busy Wal-Mart parking lot. The controllers in the tower work all day every day to direct the cars to and from their spaces. It is hectic work and they go home every day exhausted.
Now suppose we ask those controllers about the prospect of converting the parking lot back to uncontrolled. This question would immediately trigger their resistance to change and their desire to hang on to their jobs. But suppose they are honest enough to understand that this is happening to them, and so they ignore it and try to answer objectively.
The problem is that, in their objective experience, an uncontrolled parking lot is completely infeasible. Their jobs are hectic, even frantic, all day every day. If asked to imagine a parking lot without control, they would visualize a chaotic scene of collisions, arguments, and even gun battles. They HAVE to visualize that, in order to see themselves as useful and virtuous.
In September 1988 my car was reposessed and the bill collectors were hounding me like you wouldn't believe. I was laid off and my unemployment checks had run out. The only escape I had from the pressure of failure was my computer and my modem. I longed to turn my advocation into my vocation. This January 1989 my family and I went on a ten day cruise to the tropics. I bought a Lincoln Town Car for CASH in Feburary 1989.
[...]
When you are blowing the whistle, you got ask permission first. Because I am SURE the pentagon would happily lend a hand and help with releasing video of its soldiers slaughtering unarmed civilians complete with audio track of the soldiers enjoying the slaughter as if it is a game.
I think that is the crux of the whole apache/reporters/wikileaks issue. Our soldiers are professionals who ought to enjoy their work. And our soldiers are most definitely humans who, being predators, naturally enjoy the hunt and the kill. But these facts are now out of vogue, and they cause dissonance in the minds of We The People. So we ask (via a million subtle implications) our soldiers to be simultaneously effective yet miserably unhappy about their work.
Then the apache video comes out and dispels our precious delusion. Our dissonant reaction is to recoil from the whole war/occupation/"police action".
No wonder the Pentagon wants to keep stuff like this under wraps. They KNOW that we want -- more than anything else -- to be protected from the truth of what we humans are.
It has already been pointed out, by Schneier I think, that this misfeature allows anybody doing simple traffic analysis to discover exactly what you typed. That is because the reply traffic from typing 'a' is a slightly different size than the reply traffic from typing 'b', and so forth.
It is doing an awfully bad job of it. In the US you can turn on the radio and hear people calling the president a muslim, a fascist or homosexual. You can turn on the tv and watch people almost completely fabricate new charges against obama or his underlings. Castro has been in power for 50 years, North Korea has been in power for 60 years. The US does a better job when it doesn't try to silence enemies.
Those yammering hooligans are not enemies.
Enemies are people who use a bread truck to try to sneak a nuclear weapon across the border and into downtown New York. THAT is what the serious three-letter-agencies are working to prevent.
If someone clicks on an advertisement then buys, does it really matter which spam site they arrived through? There's nothing that suggests they're getting less revenue; in fact, they may be getting more since the ads themselves will be relevant to what is searched for.
In the short term, no, it does not really matter.
In the long term, yes, it does really matter. If people click through certain spam sites to make a purchase, then those spam sites are rewarded, and therefore the creation of yet more and more spam sites is incentivized. That in turn causes the signal-to-noise ratio of the internet to drop still further.
In any case, it's up to google to reward high-signal sites with higher rankings, and turn a blind eye to the screenscraped drek churned out by the SEOs, because for so many of us, the internet *is* the google search results.
Although I never agreed with totality control, from sometime ago to this date, I started to change my mind about anonymous everything. I really started to suspect that the most interested parties are criminals. Well, as Google said, if you don't have anything to hide, why are you so afraid of not being anonymous at all? I can't see the point.
Because sometimes, society is mistaken about what it considers to be wrong. In that situation, which in my opinion is very very common, privacy allows you to act morally.
Derrida said that since every word is defined only by other words it doesn't matter how far back you go, you can never get to a solid anchor; change the underlying assumptions that the reader of a text holds and you change the meaning of the text, even though the words are still the same.
Perhaps you should choose your philosophical leaders more carefully, because I don't think Derrida ever considered the word 'blue'. The hindmost words are defined ostensibly -- by going outside and pointing at something, by reference to sensory data.
The framers may even have had an ostensive definition for 'arms': they could've pointed at a variety of muskets, bows, crossbows, and cannons, and then said "This is the definition we intend".
How the fuck is that vague? What part of SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED do people not understand?!?!?!
There is room for legitimate disagreement over the definition of 'arms'. To wit: does it include machine guns? Flamethrowers? SAMs? Nukes? Why or why not?
A political right means that anybody is automatically WRONG to interfere with you when you do it. By 'wrong' I mean: it would create an environment unsuitable for creatures with our nature and requirements. For example, it is wrong to ban books, because our nature as rational sovereigns is to pursue truth independently and then build consensus by persuasion.
Regarding the RKBA, it is automatically wrong for someone to take away a means of self-defense that is practical in those situations where the state can't protect you. Today that amounts to handguns, shotguns, etc.; tomorrow it will mean stun-phasers, sleep rays, whatever. It does not and will not include nukes (etc.) because it is the state's prerogative to protect you in those contexts... hence, nukes are not included in the RKBA. In other words, it is not automatically wrong for somebody to say you can't have a nuke.
That said, I'm a rabid gun owner, CCL, second-amendment advocate, and so forth. But I think we do ourselves a disservice when we insist that the RKBA is infinite, or without context.
Why would you want to go to all the trouble and energy of escaping the Earth's gravity well, only to drop back into another gravity well? I say we shoot for the asteroid belt -- it has both the necessary resources and easier access to them. Sure, it lacks gravity, but so does the moon.
Yep yep.
And besides, Mars is already a very nice place for whatever silicon-based transhumans evolve from us. It's cool, and has no moisture or oxygen; it's hopelessly wrong for us meat-based creatures but safe and comfortable for intelligent machines.
You might as well say that the bolts only have indirect utility in that others are manufacturing things to be fastened together. In what way would a lone bolt have any direct utility, after all?
Without it, a physical machine will break. Or a broken physical machine will be irreparable.
Currency is a complementary good. It requires other goods to be useful, yes, but that is no different from many other goods and does not detract from its utility.
That's where you've lost me. I regard money as a meta-good for these reasons:
Nobody intends to consume it; rather, they intend to trade it later for something (or part of something, if talking about bolts) valuable.
Any constriction in its supply causes it to have positive value, at which time the demand for it is infinite and ubiquitous.
At no marginal cost, a money-issuer can print money in any denomination, which means that his product causes inflation yet is not governed by it; he can print $100, then $1000, then $10000 bills and so on, which means he is immune to the normal downward pressure on the price of his good. There is no check on his production until all currency collapses. (Bank-issued currency didn't have this problem thanks to the reserve requirement.)
For these reasons, money deserves special treatment. That doesn't automatically imply that we need a government monopoly; I am just answering your claim that money is just like other goods.
Yes, and if a tribe had nothing to assemble it would not need bolts, nor would it acquire any wealth by producing them. Currency derives its value from the need for a medium of indirect exchange, just as bolts derive their value from the need for a means of connecting things together.
Unfair to transplant my bolt example out of context and then knock it down. A tribe doesn't necessarily need bolts, but it needs goods before it needs a metagood that can lower transaction costs etc. It needs water, wheat, guns, and so forth.
No member of the tribe could want, or be enriched by, currency unless other people were already holding goods of some kind that they would trade for it.
The higher transaction costs are not entirely due to the counterfeiters. Validation is only required to comply with anti-counterfeiting laws, which are an artifact of fiat currency.
Not true. If anyone could legally produce currency, and the market then settled on certain flavors as generally acceptable, we would have to constantly check whether the buyer's currency was a) one of that month's desirable flavors, and b) not a clever copy of one of the desirable flavors.
Much of the blame goes to those who would attempt to substitute fiat currency for that which does not require any such validation.
Like what? Tying currency to any tangible good is fraught with problems. This is the conversation that was had about the gold standard, but it applies to whatever object is backing the currency...
The biggest problem is the inflation/deflation lurches that occur when the supply of or demand for the backer good changes. Gold had the smallest lurches because its supply is now nearly static (practically all gold dug in all of history is still in circulation).
The second problem is an effect of solving the first problem: if the backer good is stable, then the supply of currency cannot change to follow the total amount of wealth in society. Once again we get inflation/deflation lurches.
I consider those problems to be worse than the cure. Lending or borrowing, which are critical for economic growth, are both perilous when inflation/deflation is not stable.
Anyway, we were talking about the utility of currency itself, however it was produced, not the act of counterfeiting per se. Currency has utility as a medium of e
Utility is in the eye of the beholder (or in this case, owner). Subjectively, those "small green pieces of fabric" have utility to me so long as others are willing to accept them in exchange for other goods, which is why I accept them myself. Objectively, as with any other good, the utility (value) of currency is defined by the demand for it, and you can hardly claim that there is no demand for currency. Any other measure is subjective, and thus meaningless in this context.
Bulls***! Money only has indirect utility, and it only has that because somebody is out there manufacturing bolts.
Or to put it another way: The bolt-maker doesn't need money to exist, but the money-printer needs bolts to exist. A society can survive without money; adding money serves to lower transaction costs but does not, itself, enrich anyone. If a tribe had zero wealth then it would not need money, nor would it acquire any wealth by printing it.
Use as a medium for indirect exchange is a perfectly valid form of utility, BTW, even by utilitarian standards. Indirect exchange depends on a medium (currency), and creates wealth relative to direct exchange by allowing transactions which would otherwise not occur.
That is so, but counterfeiters do not serve that purpose once a tribe has already converted to fiat currency. The addition of counterfeit money does not lower transaction costs; in fact it RAISES them, because now all traders must expend effort to validate the currency they recieve.
Overproduction would not create wealth, but counterfeiting is not overproduction: it only occurs because there is more demand for currency than there is supply.
There is NO demand for counterfeit currency, and everyone rejects it as soon as they become aware of it. You say that counterfeiters are responding to a demand for more currency, yet in today's inflationary climate (in which currency is slightly oversupplied) we see counterfeiters operating nonetheless, which means there is an error in your line of reasoning.
However, should public monetary policy really be motivated by a desire to enrich some (mainly borrowers) entirely at the expense of others (potential lenders)? If so, why?
Neither inflation nor deflation have that motivation, because interest rates on loans always take account of the inflation/deflation rate and so neither lender nor borrower is enriched. That is why everybody gets angry when the inflation/deflation deviates from whatever is normal: because the deviation makes the loan harder or easier to repay than what was planned.
P.S. In a deflationary economy, "hoarding" currency is a real investment, in the same way that "hoarding" collectibles which one expects to increase in value is an investment.
Agreed.
It increases net wealth through savingpresent production financing future, not present, consumptionwhich is the only means of doing so aside from unpredictable technological windfalls. The fear surrounding currency deflation is irrational.
Well, I think the fear surrounding deflation stems from what I said earlier: all current loans and bonds are written with ~2% inflation in mind. If they had been written in a deflationary economy, then lenders would fear inflation.
That said, I disagree with your claim that hording currency increases net wealth, because the inflation-driven alternative to hoarding is not pure consumption; rather, it is investing (including bank savings accounts, which are just fronts for stocks and bonds).
And other increases in the supply of goods leading to their devaluationsuch as production in generalaren't "for personal private gain"?
Yes it is, but it is gain accomplished by the creation of new wealth. Whereas a counterfeiter produces no wealth to offset the inflation he causes. And anyway, we are talking about devaluation of dollars, not of comparable goods; in this sense, production causes deflation, which is why fiat currency is more efficient than gold when your society's production rate varies over time.
If I manufacture a bolt (for example) then I inflate the supply of bolts, leading to a small but real decrease in the value of (at least) all compatible bolts held by others. Manufacture of this bolt is motivated by profit: my own personal, private gain. Is this wrong? If so, why? If not, why does your answer change after substituting "twenty-dollar bill" for "bolt"?
As I said above, a paper bill has no utility, whereas a bolt does. Do you not see the difference? Or have you come up with a marvelous new use for small green pieces of fabric?
Now, if money was real, they wouldn't be able to print it, that's why they got off the gold standard in the first place - can't print gold.
Google "Don't crucify me on a cross of gold" to find out the real story on why everybody abandoned the gold standard.
In a nutshell: the gold (or silver or whatever) standard only works if the supply of gold keeps pace with the growth of total social wealth. If it doesn't, then money deflates, and deflation is a perverse incentive (it causes people to sit on their cash as an 'investment'). Low inflation is best, but that means that we'd have to dig gold faster then we grow everything else.
Digging that much gold was possible in the olden days, when the economy grew at a snail's pace and the amount of gold in circulation was not already collossal. But nowadays... can you imagine how much gold you would have to find, in order to increase the total world supply of gold by 3% per year?
Inflationmore generally, any increase in the supply of any good leading to its devaluationis not damage. Everyone has a right to their dollars, but, as with any good, no one has a right to receive any specific price for those dollars in the marketplace.
The problem is that people, with the strong encouragement of governments, insist on treating as a stable store of value objects which have essentially no direct use valued in proportional to the price paid for them, not even as raw material, and which thus only command a nonzero price due to the artificial scarcity granted them via enforcement of anti-counterfeiting laws and restraint on the part of the Treasury (as limited as that may be...).
That's backwards. Inflation is a desirable practice precisely because it discourages people from treating their dollars as a stable store of value. If we did not inflate the money supply in order to keep up with the increase in our total social wealth, then dollars would deflate, and consequently people would horde them as a profitable 'investment'. Whereas in the presence of inflation, individuals must seek out real investments.
Meanwhile, counterfeiting is wrong because it is the use of inflation for personal private gain.
Which is why HR1206 and S604 are essential beginnings to end the reign of the largest counterfeiter and thief of American wealth, The Federal Reserve.
The problem with indicting the Fed is this: as the amount of wealth in our society grows, so must the amount of money grow. Otherwise money will be constantly deflating, which is a Bad Thing because it rewards people for sitting on their cash.
Now perhaps we can argue whether the money supply should be grown by the Fed, or by private banks, or by whoever... but the fact remains: we must inflate our currency at about the same rate that we increase our ongoing wealth. Somebody's gotta do it. But not counterfeiters, not for personal gain.
I always thought counterfeiting was the only crime that made any sense. Nobody gets hurt, there's no violence involved. You just make it and spend it.
That's probably why the G takes it so seriously. When they catch counterfeiters, they put them under the prison.
Report to Econ 101 please.
The damage from counterfeiting is inflation. Therefore, counterfeiting is a crime whose damage is divided among all individuals who are holding cash, or who are holding dollar-denominated assets at a fixed interest rate.
That the damage to each victim is very small is a secondary issue that perhaps could be considered at sentencing time.
The wood for paper is the branches from trees that were already harvested for lumber or are grown like a crop (on farmland) in the arid west and are more like shrubs. They harvest them at 7-10 years and they are hybrids that grow exceedingly quickly.
Incorrect. The warm wet southest of the country is full of Loblolly and Slash pine which are grown for lumber but thinned twice along the way, yielding two crops of pulpwood that usually becomes paper. (I grow Loblolly for this purpose and just this year had my stand thinned.)
If we used no new paper tomorrow, not a single living tree would be saved.
Incorrect, and perilously so. The wasting of paper provokes us landowners to grow more trees to meet the demand for pulpwood. The growing of a tree sequesters a lot of atmospheric carbon, which gets bound up in the paper. The paper hopefully then gets wasted and buried. Worst thing you can do, as far as carbon dioxide levels are concerned, is burn or recycle paper.
Furthermore, the move towards paper recycling and "paperless office" has crashed the pulpwood market. I only got $2/ton for it this year. This means that fewer and fewer of us will use our land to grow another crop of trees, which is unfortunate on several levels.
I don't like the privacy concerns if something like that was ever stolen or linked into...
Presumably they have two decryption keys: one that you own for use in retrieving stuff for personal use, and another held only by the state that can be obtained only with a court order.
On balance I'd say this prospect is a Good Thing, because it would make it vastly easier to prove somebody guilty or not-guilty. That, in turn, will pull the rug out from the more offensive aspects of our current justice system -- particularly the ridiculous business of conviction based on the testimony of a single eyewitness.
This is supposed to be news for nerds, please hand in your/. userid. The correct nerd response to a 48 hour game competition is "that would be fun" and not "what is the point". Some people do actually program for their own fun and not just to give you an updated version of NetHack. Anyone playing the games that result from these competitions are not doing so to find the next big classic game, but to see what people can achieve in a short time.
Yep yep.
Sorry to sound confrontational, but I can't understand why anyone could even think that this sort of competition should end up with some meaningful and influential game. This is the epitime of the original, true geek. The goal of the geek is the same as a mountaineer: you climb a mountain or solve a problem because it is there.
". . . because it is there, and because no matter how remote the mountain is located, a female might see you climbing it and decide to put out."
Really? The editor over there is named Sig Gissler?
Maybe I should buy stock now, because I am reminded of a classic passage from HHGTTG:
Shortly after this, the Guide was taken over by Megadodo Publications of Ursa Minor Beta, thus putting the whole thing on a very sound financial footing, and allowing the fourth editor, Lig Lury Jr, to embark on lunch-breaks of such breathtaking scope that even the efforts of recent editors, who have started undertaking sponsored lunch-breaks for charity, seem like mere sandwiches in comparison.
In fact, Lig never formally resigned his editorship - he merely left his office late one morning and has never since returned. Though well over a century has now passed, many members of the guide staff still retain the romantic notion that he has simply popped out for a ham croissant, and will yet return to put in a solid afternoon's work.
Strictly speaking, all editors since Lig Lury Jr have therefore been designated Acting Editors, and Lig's desk is still preserved the way he left it, with the addition of a small sign which says "Lig Lury Jr, Editor, Missing, presumed Fed".
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, lots of nerd cards getting turned in today. "10" in base-pi, converted to decimal, is 3.14159... squared.
The correct way to express pi in base-pi is "1".
Your conclusion is missing a vital piece of data. Vancomycin is the last line of defense for antibiotic-resistant infections in humans. That is why doctors avoid using it -- because it is vitally important that the bugs never acquire a resistance to it.
I remember a few years ago, when the industrial-farming folks pushed through approval to use vanco in cattle feed. The physicians in attendance made the obvious objection, and naturally were ignored in favor of the farms' colossal political power. Yee-haw, full speed ahead!
What a bunch of fluff. The relevant developers don't care about "best practices" or any other voluntary standard. And how the f*** are users supposed to establish trust in certain apps? The platform does not significantly monitor an application's ongoing behavior, nor is anyone performing serious code-reviews or blackbox testing. Google COULD HAVE set up profiling tests similar to those run in TFA, but didn't.
For ONCE would a company please admit that they reduced privacy in order to provide the dumbed-down usability needed to capture market share and attract developers?
My brother relates a similar sentiment, but concerning the regulators themselves . . .
Suppose that somebody erected a control tower to oversee the car traffic in a busy Wal-Mart parking lot. The controllers in the tower work all day every day to direct the cars to and from their spaces. It is hectic work and they go home every day exhausted.
Now suppose we ask those controllers about the prospect of converting the parking lot back to uncontrolled. This question would immediately trigger their resistance to change and their desire to hang on to their jobs. But suppose they are honest enough to understand that this is happening to them, and so they ignore it and try to answer objectively.
The problem is that, in their objective experience, an uncontrolled parking lot is completely infeasible. Their jobs are hectic, even frantic, all day every day. If asked to imagine a parking lot without control, they would visualize a chaotic scene of collisions, arguments, and even gun battles. They HAVE to visualize that, in order to see themselves as useful and virtuous.
Dear Friends,
My name is Tyson Rohdes.
In September 1988 my car was reposessed and the bill collectors were hounding me like you wouldn't believe. I was laid off and my unemployment checks had run out. The only escape I had from the pressure of failure was my computer and my modem. I longed to turn my advocation into my vocation. This January 1989 my family and I went on a ten day cruise to the tropics. I bought a Lincoln Town Car for CASH in Feburary 1989. [...]
I think that is the crux of the whole apache/reporters/wikileaks issue. Our soldiers are professionals who ought to enjoy their work. And our soldiers are most definitely humans who, being predators, naturally enjoy the hunt and the kill. But these facts are now out of vogue, and they cause dissonance in the minds of We The People. So we ask (via a million subtle implications) our soldiers to be simultaneously effective yet miserably unhappy about their work.
Then the apache video comes out and dispels our precious delusion. Our dissonant reaction is to recoil from the whole war/occupation/"police action".
No wonder the Pentagon wants to keep stuff like this under wraps. They KNOW that we want -- more than anything else -- to be protected from the truth of what we humans are.
Well, you're half right.
It has already been pointed out, by Schneier I think, that this misfeature allows anybody doing simple traffic analysis to discover exactly what you typed. That is because the reply traffic from typing 'a' is a slightly different size than the reply traffic from typing 'b', and so forth.
Those yammering hooligans are not enemies.
Enemies are people who use a bread truck to try to sneak a nuclear weapon across the border and into downtown New York. THAT is what the serious three-letter-agencies are working to prevent.
In the short term, no, it does not really matter.
In the long term, yes, it does really matter. If people click through certain spam sites to make a purchase, then those spam sites are rewarded, and therefore the creation of yet more and more spam sites is incentivized. That in turn causes the signal-to-noise ratio of the internet to drop still further.
In any case, it's up to google to reward high-signal sites with higher rankings, and turn a blind eye to the screenscraped drek churned out by the SEOs, because for so many of us, the internet *is* the google search results.
Because sometimes, society is mistaken about what it considers to be wrong. In that situation, which in my opinion is very very common, privacy allows you to act morally.
Recent examples come to mind:
Perhaps you should choose your philosophical leaders more carefully, because I don't think Derrida ever considered the word 'blue'. The hindmost words are defined ostensibly -- by going outside and pointing at something, by reference to sensory data.
The framers may even have had an ostensive definition for 'arms': they could've pointed at a variety of muskets, bows, crossbows, and cannons, and then said "This is the definition we intend".
There is room for legitimate disagreement over the definition of 'arms'. To wit: does it include machine guns? Flamethrowers? SAMs? Nukes? Why or why not?
A political right means that anybody is automatically WRONG to interfere with you when you do it. By 'wrong' I mean: it would create an environment unsuitable for creatures with our nature and requirements. For example, it is wrong to ban books, because our nature as rational sovereigns is to pursue truth independently and then build consensus by persuasion.
Regarding the RKBA, it is automatically wrong for someone to take away a means of self-defense that is practical in those situations where the state can't protect you. Today that amounts to handguns, shotguns, etc.; tomorrow it will mean stun-phasers, sleep rays, whatever. It does not and will not include nukes (etc.) because it is the state's prerogative to protect you in those contexts... hence, nukes are not included in the RKBA. In other words, it is not automatically wrong for somebody to say you can't have a nuke.
That said, I'm a rabid gun owner, CCL, second-amendment advocate, and so forth. But I think we do ourselves a disservice when we insist that the RKBA is infinite, or without context.
Yep yep.
And besides, Mars is already a very nice place for whatever silicon-based transhumans evolve from us. It's cool, and has no moisture or oxygen; it's hopelessly wrong for us meat-based creatures but safe and comfortable for intelligent machines.
Without it, a physical machine will break. Or a broken physical machine will be irreparable.
That's where you've lost me. I regard money as a meta-good for these reasons:
For these reasons, money deserves special treatment. That doesn't automatically imply that we need a government monopoly; I am just answering your claim that money is just like other goods.
Unfair to transplant my bolt example out of context and then knock it down. A tribe doesn't necessarily need bolts, but it needs goods before it needs a metagood that can lower transaction costs etc. It needs water, wheat, guns, and so forth.
No member of the tribe could want, or be enriched by, currency unless other people were already holding goods of some kind that they would trade for it.
Not true. If anyone could legally produce currency, and the market then settled on certain flavors as generally acceptable, we would have to constantly check whether the buyer's currency was a) one of that month's desirable flavors, and b) not a clever copy of one of the desirable flavors.
Like what? Tying currency to any tangible good is fraught with problems. This is the conversation that was had about the gold standard, but it applies to whatever object is backing the currency...
The biggest problem is the inflation/deflation lurches that occur when the supply of or demand for the backer good changes. Gold had the smallest lurches because its supply is now nearly static (practically all gold dug in all of history is still in circulation).
The second problem is an effect of solving the first problem: if the backer good is stable, then the supply of currency cannot change to follow the total amount of wealth in society. Once again we get inflation/deflation lurches.
I consider those problems to be worse than the cure. Lending or borrowing, which are critical for economic growth, are both perilous when inflation/deflation is not stable.
Bulls***! Money only has indirect utility, and it only has that because somebody is out there manufacturing bolts.
Or to put it another way: The bolt-maker doesn't need money to exist, but the money-printer needs bolts to exist. A society can survive without money; adding money serves to lower transaction costs but does not, itself, enrich anyone. If a tribe had zero wealth then it would not need money, nor would it acquire any wealth by printing it.
That is so, but counterfeiters do not serve that purpose once a tribe has already converted to fiat currency. The addition of counterfeit money does not lower transaction costs; in fact it RAISES them, because now all traders must expend effort to validate the currency they recieve.
There is NO demand for counterfeit currency, and everyone rejects it as soon as they become aware of it. You say that counterfeiters are responding to a demand for more currency, yet in today's inflationary climate (in which currency is slightly oversupplied) we see counterfeiters operating nonetheless, which means there is an error in your line of reasoning.
Neither inflation nor deflation have that motivation, because interest rates on loans always take account of the inflation/deflation rate and so neither lender nor borrower is enriched. That is why everybody gets angry when the inflation/deflation deviates from whatever is normal: because the deviation makes the loan harder or easier to repay than what was planned.
Agreed.
Well, I think the fear surrounding deflation stems from what I said earlier: all current loans and bonds are written with ~2% inflation in mind. If they had been written in a deflationary economy, then lenders would fear inflation.
That said, I disagree with your claim that hording currency increases net wealth, because the inflation-driven alternative to hoarding is not pure consumption; rather, it is investing (including bank savings accounts, which are just fronts for stocks and bonds).
Yes it is, but it is gain accomplished by the creation of new wealth. Whereas a counterfeiter produces no wealth to offset the inflation he causes. And anyway, we are talking about devaluation of dollars, not of comparable goods; in this sense, production causes deflation, which is why fiat currency is more efficient than gold when your society's production rate varies over time.
As I said above, a paper bill has no utility, whereas a bolt does. Do you not see the difference? Or have you come up with a marvelous new use for small green pieces of fabric?
Google "Don't crucify me on a cross of gold" to find out the real story on why everybody abandoned the gold standard.
In a nutshell: the gold (or silver or whatever) standard only works if the supply of gold keeps pace with the growth of total social wealth. If it doesn't, then money deflates, and deflation is a perverse incentive (it causes people to sit on their cash as an 'investment'). Low inflation is best, but that means that we'd have to dig gold faster then we grow everything else.
Digging that much gold was possible in the olden days, when the economy grew at a snail's pace and the amount of gold in circulation was not already collossal. But nowadays... can you imagine how much gold you would have to find, in order to increase the total world supply of gold by 3% per year?
That's backwards. Inflation is a desirable practice precisely because it discourages people from treating their dollars as a stable store of value. If we did not inflate the money supply in order to keep up with the increase in our total social wealth, then dollars would deflate, and consequently people would horde them as a profitable 'investment'. Whereas in the presence of inflation, individuals must seek out real investments.
Meanwhile, counterfeiting is wrong because it is the use of inflation for personal private gain.
The problem with indicting the Fed is this: as the amount of wealth in our society grows, so must the amount of money grow. Otherwise money will be constantly deflating, which is a Bad Thing because it rewards people for sitting on their cash.
Now perhaps we can argue whether the money supply should be grown by the Fed, or by private banks, or by whoever... but the fact remains: we must inflate our currency at about the same rate that we increase our ongoing wealth. Somebody's gotta do it. But not counterfeiters, not for personal gain.
Report to Econ 101 please.
The damage from counterfeiting is inflation. Therefore, counterfeiting is a crime whose damage is divided among all individuals who are holding cash, or who are holding dollar-denominated assets at a fixed interest rate.
That the damage to each victim is very small is a secondary issue that perhaps could be considered at sentencing time.
Incorrect. The warm wet southest of the country is full of Loblolly and Slash pine which are grown for lumber but thinned twice along the way, yielding two crops of pulpwood that usually becomes paper. (I grow Loblolly for this purpose and just this year had my stand thinned.)
Incorrect, and perilously so. The wasting of paper provokes us landowners to grow more trees to meet the demand for pulpwood. The growing of a tree sequesters a lot of atmospheric carbon, which gets bound up in the paper. The paper hopefully then gets wasted and buried. Worst thing you can do, as far as carbon dioxide levels are concerned, is burn or recycle paper.
Furthermore, the move towards paper recycling and "paperless office" has crashed the pulpwood market. I only got $2/ton for it this year. This means that fewer and fewer of us will use our land to grow another crop of trees, which is unfortunate on several levels.
Presumably they have two decryption keys: one that you own for use in retrieving stuff for personal use, and another held only by the state that can be obtained only with a court order.
On balance I'd say this prospect is a Good Thing, because it would make it vastly easier to prove somebody guilty or not-guilty. That, in turn, will pull the rug out from the more offensive aspects of our current justice system -- particularly the ridiculous business of conviction based on the testimony of a single eyewitness.
Yep yep.
". . . because it is there, and because no matter how remote the mountain is located, a female might see you climbing it and decide to put out."
Really? The editor over there is named Sig Gissler?
Maybe I should buy stock now, because I am reminded of a classic passage from HHGTTG: