I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Both GNU components and the Linux kernel come with a writtenpermission to call it whatever you want. I can take all these components, distribute them even verbatim and call them "yomama", and I would be fully compliant with the licenses. The difference is that no one would have a clue what I am talking about.
For this reason it is correct to call it Linux, or Android or Ubuntu or any other name (subject to trademark laws of course). Just use the name most people are familiar with so they know what you are talking about. Calling these systems GNU is merely a courtesy, a form of respect you pay to the GNU project, not a requirement in any way, and not "the right way" but merely your preference.
This was predicted back in the 1930s, too. How did that work out for them?
Exactly!
People became more productive due to technology. Now you are able to produce enough for you and your family in 40 hours / week. Before this technology advancement, you needed to work 60-80 hours / week in order to produce enough.
What will happen if we are super productive as that professor claims? Have you seen the Jetsons? that is pretty much what will happen: you would work 2 days a week for 5 hours / day. Your job would not be canning tuna, but making sure that the machine that does it gets maintenance. We would spend our time, doing art, music, entertainment, or any other leisure related activity/job.
Consider this: we don't have to work to get air. All that it means, is that we can use the labor to produce something else. If we had to work to get air, we would simply switch some of the labor from their current occupation to air production, but we would not get the benefit from what they are currently doing.
Jobs are not a scarce resource, labor is. There is always enough jobs for everyone that wants one and then some, even if it means being self employed. The only reason there is unemployment at all, is because of bad laws.
If I was his manager and knew who it was, I would fire him immediately. Otherwise I would be risking him "venting" again in the future and embarrassing me even further. He is probably in violation of his employment agreements
How do we know he/she isn't an Apple developer, slapping on the name Microsoft to hide his/her identity?
In the original post, he added a hash signature, that supposedly proves he works for Microsoft (I have no clue how though). It has since been removed.
This was very stupid in my opinion, because with it, he could be identified.
Why not? "The hand that feeds you"? What kind of corporate-slave joke world do you live in? The company owes him for his services just as much as he owes them for his salary.
Employment is a symbiotic relationship. The employer wins because he gets software (or labor in general) that it values more than the money it pays, the developer wins because he gets money that he values more than the time and work he gives.
A person is employable as long as the company gets more value from employing him than without him. When he posts something like this, for many, the negative publicity means the employee is no longer worth the cost.
He is no slave of the company, nor is the company a slave of his. It is a voluntary agreement between the person and the company, and either one of them should be able to terminate the relationship if they determine they are not benefiting from it anymore. Laws often get in the way of this.
As part of the agreement, companies often ask employees not to disclose internal matters. They are often asked to sign an NDA. If the person violates such agreement, he would be subject to legal action. If the company does not have such agreement in place, they should still be able to fire him if they determine he is not productive enough, or detrimental to the company (as in this case), but not go after him legally. People are free to agree to the terms and start the relationship, or reject it and look for someone else to do business with.
Sure, people vent about frustrations at work. But you do that privately with your friends, family or select coworkers. You don't post something like that about your company on the web, embarrassing the hand that feeds you in front of the whole world. I am sure he did not think it would end up on Slashdot, but who's fault is that except his own?
If I was his manager and knew who it was, I would fire him immediately. Otherwise I would be risking him "venting" again in the future and embarrassing me even further. He is probably in violation of his employment agreements, so legal action might also be warranted. If his criticism are valid, sure, I would take a look at how to improve them, but still fire him for making them public. His retraction was too little too late, the cat was already out of the bag.
Ok - so where is the shop that I can go to with my usb stick and a certain amount of cash and buy your game?
It doesn't exist. That's the problem.
You assume everybody has a credit card. Many people in the world do not. etc etc.
Brick and mortar retail is essentially impossible for indie developers. However, both google play and apple sell cards for cash in many stores for cash, so there is no need for credit card in the major markets.
We actually added SMS as a form of payment too, but this backfired because people really got worried about the game requiring SMS permission.
Frankly, the whole boxed game is dying, and there is plenty of piracy with boxed games, just as much as with online distributed titles, I don't really see this as a solution to anything.
Moreover, while piracy is rampant in android, it is essentially non existent in ios which has the same methods of payment, so obviously CC requirements are not "the problem"
Sorry to reply to myself, the last statement should be:
Don't just say "DRM is bad". If you want to get across and convince content creators like myself, say: "I bought game X instead of Y because Y has DRM". Email them, let them know this is was an important deterrent for you, and actually buy X.
I am a game developer. My game is available for ios, android, mac, and pc. So I am giving my perspective on DRM from the other side of the fence.
I do not add DRM to the game. Piracy, especially in android, is rampant. I die a little inside every time I see someone stealing my work. Meanwhile DRM whispers to me "come and play". Laws are useless. I could spend my day sending take down notices all over the web. 5 minutes after I take one down, 10 pirates post it in some other place. So I don't do this either.
So what alternatives do we have? lets see...
In app purchase? Hated by a lot of people. Maybe even more than DRM. Subscription?: Hated Bundling (humble bundle)?: You can do that once or twice, not a long term solution Advertising? No revenue.
So yes, go on, oppose DRM if you like. As I said before I don't do it. But don't stop there, think which one of these other business models you do support. Don't just say "I won't buy this game because of DRM", instead say "I will buy game X instead of Y because of DRM", as that speaks much more loudly.
Pulverized horse poop is orders of magnitude worse than anything that can come out of a car.
[citation needed]
You are either an idiot or a troll. Burning gasoline produces large quantities of very fine soot which are a major carcinogen. Also, unburned gasoline comes out of the tailpipe of every gasoline car at startup, and that is much worse than anything which can come out of a horse.
In case anyone is wondering, they're using CO2 as the sole measurement of 'dirty,' ignoring things like sulfur, mercury, and lead, which are probably important.
Exactly! Consider what was going on before cars. People used horses to move around. You know what horses do besides transporting people? They poop, and then step all over it pulverizing it. Pulverized horse poop is orders of magnitude worse than anything that can come out of a car. Consider also all the epidemics that went on for centuries without aqueducts.
Despite what environmentalist would have you believe, technology is actually making the world less and less polluted over time. Just looking at CO2 and ignoring all sorts of pollutants that it replaced, is just myopic.
If you wish to read actual economics, I suggest another nobel prize winner: Hayek, or the more recent Rothbard.
Your analysis on how coinage came to be is correct, and it was done privately, not by governments. Coinage did have a big impact in the adoption of gold and silver as currencies.
Mises, "human action" does a much better job than Robert Lucas about predicting and explaining recessions, and does not resort to imaginary math models that don't apply to real world. You can also get that for free, but it is a hard read.
I recommend the origins of money by Carl Menger. Here you can have it for free.
It explains exactly what you are asking: why a farmer would accept gold as method of payment with or without government, and how a society naturally goes from barter to adopting gold (and other commodities) as money by simple voluntary exchanges.
Mises then elaborates on this by explaining interest rates time preference and inflation, though Mises is not entry level material.
A counter example of your "tax" theory: Ireland had no government between 700 and 1700, and their currency was gold.
That is incorrect. Gold is not fiat, fiat means "by mandate". Gold is a commodity currency chosen by free markets. It was a currency before any government existed. Even in countries without government gold was the currency. Government's _hate_ gold as a currency, because it restrict their ability to create money to finance their doings. However people like gold for the exact same reason. Other commodity currencies have existed: cows, cigarettes, rocks, leafs, diamonds, you name it. Gold and silver beat all of them and became the world's reserve currencies because of it's physical properties, nice value/weight ratio and ideal scarcity.
In fact, the dollar existed before government adopted it as money. The government looked around searching for what was the most often used and most reputable coin, and found the silver dollar.
Initially, gold and silver were simply stamped to declare that it had some specific weight. But this failed because people just cut off bits of it around the stamp. So people came up with a way to put a stamp all around a piece of gold to prevent this, and this became the coin. Further improvements like milling the edges prevented people from filing around the coin. This was all done by entrepreneurs.
Gold-backed does not require government involvement at all. Before the federal reserve, you could go to the bank with your gold, deposit it and they would give you a bank note in return. You could exchange the bank note for goods, and the carrier of the note could go to the bank and redeem it for gold. The government was not involved in this. There is a complication with gold-backed currencies, which is fractional reserve. If a bank prints too many notes, more than they have gold for, and people get wind of this, they can get their gold out and bankrupt the bank (this is known as a bank run). So the free market can and does get rid of banks that do this, and people naturally adopt the bank notes from the most reputable banks. This is exactly how the paper dollar came to be, as a bank note from the federal reserve. The government gave the FED a monopoly and prevented other bank notes from being used. Having the monopoly, they did print more notes that they had gold for, and eventually defaulted and stopped redeeming the notes. If other bank notes would have been available, people would have simply switched, and the FED would have had a limit to the amount of fractional reserve they did.
Also note that the dollar is not the first fiat currency in America, the previous one was called the continental, and went to 0 like all fiat currencies do, only to be replaced by (you guessed it) gold and silver. We are merely repeating an already failed experiment.
With respect to saving and investment. Money is just a tool, that facilitates exchange between people. Saving does not mean saving money, saving means accumulating capital. Leverage is not required, an investor simply accumulates capital by buying stock, commodities, machines, etc... It is perfectly fine (and natural) for the amount of capital in the country to increase, yet maintaining the amount of money the same.
All fiat currencies in history since the roman invented them have collapsed. Only to be replaced by gold and silver. They always end up the same way: government starts printing a lot of it until hyperinflation kicks in and people abandon it in favor of more stable alternatives. The current fiat currency is strictly speaking only 40 years old, and if history is any indication, it is destined to fail.
It is perfectly possible to save more than you spend. Simply because people do not save money, they save capital. Meaning, they invest the money, the accumulate stock, open new companies, accumulate commodities, etc. The amount of money is irrelevant so long it remains constant. People are not richer because there is more money, they are richer because there is more capital.
There is a reason gold has been the currency of the world for thousands of years, and has always come back after every failed fiat currency.
Here are just a few samples of how failed this system has proven to be. It isn't hard to find hundreds more.
1) It has some actual industrial uses. 2) Silver and gold were chosen by the free market as money. The dollar was forced upon us by government. First they forced everyone into paper in 1933 and confiscated all the gold, with the promise that each dollar was equivalent to 1/20 ounce of gold. Once all gold was confiscated, they defaulted and lowered the value of the paper to 1/35, then on 1971 they defaulted again and make it 0. 3) Silver and gold just like bitcoins have a limited supply 4) Gold does not rust 5) Gold and silver are very hard to counterfeit 6) Silver and gold were valuable much before they were currencies. The were highly valued as jewelry and for religious ceremonies. 7) Silver and gold have a supply that is not too high or too little giving them an ideal value for a coin.
For these properties, gold and silver superseded all other commodities as currencies and were chosen by people to be the reserve currency of the world. Up until the government hijacked it and forced everyone into paper.
You realize that without "money printing," growth requires private credit expansion, right? You're always going to need some amount of new money unless you want the average leverage to go up into the thousands and beyond, forever.
Do you realize that the period of greatest economic growth in the us was during the industrial revolution? They had gold back there, and what happened was that prices kept going down, because productivity increased faster than the supply of money. This is a _good_ thing, as the cost of living goes down as productivity increases.
It is only Keynesians and governments that tell you that lower prices are bad. Usually the argument is that if prices go down, people would not buy anything. This argument is ridiculous in it's face for 3 reasons:
1) We all know that cell phones, computer prices and tv's go down. You can expect them to be lower next year. These items by no means are essentials. Are people buying them? of course. Is it possible that someone delayed purchase of a computer waiting for a better price? yes, so what? if you delayed a purchase today, the guy that delayed yesterday buys it anyway. And this sector is thriving, this is not a problem. If money supply remained constant, this effect would be the same on all sectors just at different speeds.
2) The argument completely ignores the time preference of people. All else being equal, normally an item is worth more right now than in the future, therefore it is only logical that there is a price difference between now and the future. By devaluing the currency, the government distorts and interferes with the time preference of people, and pushes them to purchase right now, when their preference was really to purchase later.
3) Devaluing the currency destroys the incentive for saving. Saving is the lifeblood of the economy (not spending). Without saving there can be no investment, and no growth. An economy only grows if it saves more than it spends, if you spend more than you save, then you are shrinking and you are going broke.
Its actually GNU/Linux because desktop and laptop systems mostly use GNU software with the Linux kernel. For simplicity sake, the family of operating systems is referred to as "Linux". Most distros refer to it the same way.
Linux is just a kernel. GNU is a collection of tools used on top of the linux kernel. Many desktop distributions include both Linux and GNU tools. But the most popular linux distribution by far (android) does not have any GNU software at all.
You can combine them (or not) and call them _whatever you like_. As my post says, the authors of linux and GNU tools gave a written permission for you to do that. It is entirely up to you to call your own distribution "Linux" or "GNU/Linux" or whatever else you like, as long as the name you pick does not violate any trademark ( you can't call it windows:) ).
Do it. Nine times out of 10 or more, I'll bet the attendant will say "Nice try buddy. That's a dime. It's worth 10 cents. Now pay up!"
Are you serious? If you try to cash in a silver dime for it's face value, you would be an idiot. Just like you would be pretty dumb to cash in a gold dollar for 1 dollar.
If you want the gallon of gas, you would first exchange your valuable silver coin for something that the the gas station would accept, most likely paper dollars.
The point is that the silver dime preserved it's value not because it is a dime, but because it is made out of silver.
The ultimate value of a dollar is zero... anything.
The dollar used to be a receipt for a certain amount of gold that you owned in the federal reserve. But starting from 1971, the government defaulted on this commitment and the dollar became just a piece of paper.
Bitcoin is not different in this aspect. There is nothing behind it either. The difference is that there is a limit to the amount of bitcoins that can exist, but there is no limit to the amount of dollars the government can print. The government and the bank cartel known as the federal reserve can and do print insane amount of money every year to finance government spending, at the expense of the value of every other dollar in existence.
To illustrate this, take a dime from 1942, you could buy a gallon of gas with it back then. But you can still buy a gallon of gas with the same dime _because_ it is made out of silver. So it is not that things are more expensive, it is that the money changed, there are a lot more dollars circulating now that the government and the FED printed, which has caused it to lose a lot of value over time. This kind of devaluation by printing money is mathematically impossible with bitcoins.
Linux is just a kernel. Naming the whole system after a kernel seems a bit excessive to me, especially since it would be relatively simple to replace the kernel with other kernels such as the BSD, and no user would be able to tell the difference. Most of the software would still run without modification since the chromebooks are all about web apps and almost no native code.
Moreover, Linus and all other kernel developers game a written consent to everyone to do this.
So the authors of the kernel are fine with this and gave written permission to do it. Google is fine with this and seeks what they perceive to be the best marketing strategy. Who are you to complain? this is really a matter to be resolved between the authors of the kernel and Google, no one else has any skin in this game.
So it will not stop the pirates. But it will annoy the consumers.
I am an indie developer selling a game for ios, android, pc and mac. I am not a fan of DRM myself, and I did not put it in the game. That said, ios sort of has one built in since the user cannot side load apps (unless the device is jailbroken which only a fraction of users do).
The result is that I am making more money on ios than on android, and piracy of my game on android is rampant. Trying to shut down pirates is futile, even if I take 1 down, 10 more pop up in 10 minutes.
For us content creators, there really is no way to make everyone happy: * If I do DRM, people like yourself hate me. Also, all DRM schemes can be broken, it is just a matter of time. However, the numbers are speaking for themselves. * Ok, lets do in app purchase then. Nope, people hate me even more for that. * Well subscription could work right?. Sure, if I want to die burning at the stake. * How about ads? It annoys my customer base, plus: where is the money?
Honestly the only way to make people happy seems to be making the app fully free, but then I would not make enough money to develop the game and it would die right there and then.
I have a game in google play and I am strongly considering doing micro-transactions for my upcoming MMO. The questions you ask, while reasonable, don't have a simple answer:
1) How much is this going to cost me at the end of the day? I may outlay $60 when I buy the game but then get an incomplete experience because 1/3rd (exaggerating) of the game has been held back for DLC. Call of Duty games now cost up to $180 for all the content. I'd rather everything be included up front with that price tag so I can decide if I want to blow my money or not.
If you do micro-transactions correctly, the price can be anywhere between $0 and infinity. The reason people choose micro-transactions over say subscription is that the revenue per customer is unbounded. It should depend on the customer and how much value he gets from the game. A person that just plays a few minutes a day would most likely not pay anything. A person that would like to enjoy the better features would pay more
If a game costed $180 up front, very few people would buy it. You would be paying $180 for features you don't care about (how many different hair styles do you need?). However a lot of people would consider paying $0.10, $0.20, etc for their favorite hair style, shirt, scar, etc... So instead of paying $180 for pointless things, some people end up paying $2-$5 for the features they care about the most. Notice this is a win-win: the developer can target a bigger audience, and the customers maximize the value they get for their $2-$5. The reason this model is successful is that it does a good job at maximizing value for both the developer and the customer over say subscription or upfront purchase
It is not like the developer can charge whatever they want. Price things too high, and only a handful of people would buy, yielding poor revenue. Price things too low, and one doesn't get much revenue even if with millions of purchases. There is a sweet spot, where the value is maximized for both the developer and the customers, and the best entrepreneurs are the ones that find it.
2) How long are the servers going to be online if the game has multiplayer - give me a date at the beginning, I don't care what it is but let me know
While it would be great to know, it is impossible for the developer to determine. A game can be kept online as long as he has the funds to do so. If people buy the game, this can be for a long time, if people don't buy the game, it would go offline quickly. So the only reasonable answer is "as long as people buy it"
3) If it is micro-transactions am I realistically going to be able to complete the game without outlaying shit tonnes of cash? No one really has an issue with optional content - pay to be able to progress is what really pisses people off.
This is a very reasonable question. It is true that not every company will tell you this upfront (I know I will). But you can usually get the answer by looking at reviews from the game, So this information is usually readily available.
The recommendations from the experts in the industry is to use micro-transactions only for optional content to maximize revenue. Why? because if you sell a god sword, you ruin the game for both the purchaser (no challenge), and others as well (unfair advantage). If people need to buy something in order to move forward, they will often lose interest and unistall the game right there, with no possibility of selling anything to him
So the developers that want to maximize revenue are recommended to do exactly what you want: use micro-transactions for optional content only
It isn't like EA is making bucketloads of money with that strategy, they lost, what, a few hundred million last year? Something like that.
Then the voting is working. The beauty of capitalism is that if companies don't listen to their customers, and don't deliver value, they go bankrupt. It does not matter if management is listening, no company can lose money in perpetuity. They will either change course or go bankrupt. Either way, they will stop doing the wasteful activity.
And what happens if they go bankrupt? well, all those developers will find jobs at companies that are more successful (deliver what people want) and are not wasting resources. So simply by buying the games you do like (voting with your money), the free market will allocate more resources to it regardless of any individual company's ego.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Both GNU components and the Linux kernel come with a written permission to call it whatever you want. I can take all these components, distribute them even verbatim and call them "yomama", and I would be fully compliant with the licenses. The difference is that no one would have a clue what I am talking about.
For this reason it is correct to call it Linux, or Android or Ubuntu or any other name (subject to trademark laws of course). Just use the name most people are familiar with so they know what you are talking about. Calling these systems GNU is merely a courtesy, a form of respect you pay to the GNU project, not a requirement in any way, and not "the right way" but merely your preference.
This was predicted back in the 1930s, too. How did that work out for them?
Exactly!
People became more productive due to technology. Now you are able to produce enough for you and your family in 40 hours / week. Before this technology advancement, you needed to work 60-80 hours / week in order to produce enough.
What will happen if we are super productive as that professor claims? Have you seen the Jetsons? that is pretty much what will happen: you would work 2 days a week for 5 hours / day. Your job would not be canning tuna, but making sure that the machine that does it gets maintenance. We would spend our time, doing art, music, entertainment, or any other leisure related activity/job.
Consider this: we don't have to work to get air. All that it means, is that we can use the labor to produce something else. If we had to work to get air, we would simply switch some of the labor from their current occupation to air production, but we would not get the benefit from what they are currently doing.
Jobs are not a scarce resource, labor is. There is always enough jobs for everyone that wants one and then some, even if it means being self employed. The only reason there is unemployment at all, is because of bad laws.
If I was his manager and knew who it was, I would fire him immediately. Otherwise I would be risking him "venting" again in the future and embarrassing me even further. He is probably in violation of his employment agreements
How do we know he/she isn't an Apple developer, slapping on the name Microsoft to hide his/her identity?
In the original post, he added a hash signature, that supposedly proves he works for Microsoft (I have no clue how though). It has since been removed.
This was very stupid in my opinion, because with it, he could be identified.
Why not? "The hand that feeds you"? What kind of corporate-slave joke world do you live in? The company owes him for his services just as much as he owes them for his salary.
Employment is a symbiotic relationship. The employer wins because he gets software (or labor in general) that it values more than the money it pays, the developer wins because he gets money that he values more than the time and work he gives.
A person is employable as long as the company gets more value from employing him than without him. When he posts something like this, for many, the negative publicity means the employee is no longer worth the cost.
He is no slave of the company, nor is the company a slave of his. It is a voluntary agreement between the person and the company, and either one of them should be able to terminate the relationship if they determine they are not benefiting from it anymore. Laws often get in the way of this.
As part of the agreement, companies often ask employees not to disclose internal matters. They are often asked to sign an NDA. If the person violates such agreement, he would be subject to legal action. If the company does not have such agreement in place, they should still be able to fire him if they determine he is not productive enough, or detrimental to the company (as in this case), but not go after him legally. People are free to agree to the terms and start the relationship, or reject it and look for someone else to do business with.
Sure, people vent about frustrations at work. But you do that privately with your friends, family or select coworkers. You don't post something like that about your company on the web, embarrassing the hand that feeds you in front of the whole world. I am sure he did not think it would end up on Slashdot, but who's fault is that except his own?
If I was his manager and knew who it was, I would fire him immediately. Otherwise I would be risking him "venting" again in the future and embarrassing me even further. He is probably in violation of his employment agreements, so legal action might also be warranted. If his criticism are valid, sure, I would take a look at how to improve them, but still fire him for making them public.
His retraction was too little too late, the cat was already out of the bag.
Ok - so where is the shop that I can go to with my usb stick and a certain amount of cash and buy your game?
It doesn't exist. That's the problem.
You assume everybody has a credit card. Many people in the world do not. etc etc.
Brick and mortar retail is essentially impossible for indie developers. However, both google play and apple sell cards for cash in many stores for cash, so there is no need for credit card in the major markets.
We actually added SMS as a form of payment too, but this backfired because people really got worried about the game requiring SMS permission.
Frankly, the whole boxed game is dying, and there is plenty of piracy with boxed games, just as much as with online distributed titles, I don't really see this as a solution to anything.
Moreover, while piracy is rampant in android, it is essentially non existent in ios which has the same methods of payment, so obviously CC requirements are not "the problem"
Sorry to reply to myself, the last statement should be:
Don't just say "DRM is bad". If you want to get across and convince content creators like myself, say: "I bought game X instead of Y because Y has DRM". Email them, let them know this is was an important deterrent for you, and actually buy X.
I am a game developer. My game is available for ios, android, mac, and pc. So I am giving my perspective on DRM from the other side of the fence.
I do not add DRM to the game.
Piracy, especially in android, is rampant. I die a little inside every time I see someone stealing my work. Meanwhile DRM whispers to me "come and play".
Laws are useless. I could spend my day sending take down notices all over the web. 5 minutes after I take one down, 10 pirates post it in some other place. So I don't do this either.
So what alternatives do we have? lets see...
In app purchase? Hated by a lot of people. Maybe even more than DRM.
Subscription?: Hated
Bundling (humble bundle)?: You can do that once or twice, not a long term solution
Advertising? No revenue.
So yes, go on, oppose DRM if you like. As I said before I don't do it. But don't stop there, think which one of these other business models you do support.
Don't just say "I won't buy this game because of DRM", instead say "I will buy game X instead of Y because of DRM", as that speaks much more loudly.
Pulverized horse poop is orders of magnitude worse than anything that can come out of a car.
[citation needed]
You are either an idiot or a troll. Burning gasoline produces large quantities of very fine soot which are a major carcinogen. Also, unburned gasoline comes out of the tailpipe of every gasoline car at startup, and that is much worse than anything which can come out of a horse.
Here is one citation
Here is another
Perhaps you prefer the new york times
Other sources are easy to find
Like it or not, the car was the solution for one of the worst pollution problems in cities.
In case anyone is wondering, they're using CO2 as the sole measurement of 'dirty,' ignoring things like sulfur, mercury, and lead, which are probably important.
Exactly! Consider what was going on before cars. People used horses to move around. You know what horses do besides transporting people? They poop, and then step all over it pulverizing it. Pulverized horse poop is orders of magnitude worse than anything that can come out of a car.
Consider also all the epidemics that went on for centuries without aqueducts.
Despite what environmentalist would have you believe, technology is actually making the world less and less polluted over time. Just looking at CO2 and ignoring all sorts of pollutants that it replaced, is just myopic.
If you wish to read actual economics, I suggest another nobel prize winner: Hayek, or the more recent Rothbard.
Your analysis on how coinage came to be is correct, and it was done privately, not by governments. Coinage did have a big impact in the adoption of gold and silver as currencies.
Mises, "human action" does a much better job than Robert Lucas about predicting and explaining recessions, and does not resort to imaginary math models that don't apply to real world. You can also get that for free, but it is a hard read.
Sorry, I don't read chicago school economics or Keynesians. I might as well read witchcraft lol.
I recommend the origins of money by Carl Menger. Here you can have it for free.
It explains exactly what you are asking: why a farmer would accept gold as method of payment with or without government, and how a society naturally goes from barter to adopting gold (and other commodities) as money by simple voluntary exchanges.
Mises then elaborates on this by explaining interest rates time preference and inflation, though Mises is not entry level material.
A counter example of your "tax" theory: Ireland had no government between 700 and 1700, and their currency was gold.
That is incorrect. Gold is not fiat, fiat means "by mandate". Gold is a commodity currency chosen by free markets. It was a currency before any government existed. Even in countries without government gold was the currency. Government's _hate_ gold as a currency, because it restrict their ability to create money to finance their doings. However people like gold for the exact same reason. Other commodity currencies have existed: cows, cigarettes, rocks, leafs, diamonds, you name it. Gold and silver beat all of them and became the world's reserve currencies because of it's physical properties, nice value/weight ratio and ideal scarcity.
In fact, the dollar existed before government adopted it as money. The government looked around searching for what was the most often used and most reputable coin, and found the silver dollar.
Initially, gold and silver were simply stamped to declare that it had some specific weight. But this failed because people just cut off bits of it around the stamp. So people came up with a way to put a stamp all around a piece of gold to prevent this, and this became the coin. Further improvements like milling the edges prevented people from filing around the coin. This was all done by entrepreneurs.
Gold-backed does not require government involvement at all. Before the federal reserve, you could go to the bank with your gold, deposit it and they would give you a bank note in return. You could exchange the bank note for goods, and the carrier of the note could go to the bank and redeem it for gold. The government was not involved in this. There is a complication with gold-backed currencies, which is fractional reserve. If a bank prints too many notes, more than they have gold for, and people get wind of this, they can get their gold out and bankrupt the bank (this is known as a bank run). So the free market can and does get rid of banks that do this, and people naturally adopt the bank notes from the most reputable banks. This is exactly how the paper dollar came to be, as a bank note from the federal reserve. The government gave the FED a monopoly and prevented other bank notes from being used. Having the monopoly, they did print more notes that they had gold for, and eventually defaulted and stopped redeeming the notes. If other bank notes would have been available, people would have simply switched, and the FED would have had a limit to the amount of fractional reserve they did.
Also note that the dollar is not the first fiat currency in America, the previous one was called the continental, and went to 0 like all fiat currencies do, only to be replaced by (you guessed it) gold and silver. We are merely repeating an already failed experiment.
With respect to saving and investment. Money is just a tool, that facilitates exchange between people. Saving does not mean saving money, saving means accumulating capital. Leverage is not required, an investor simply accumulates capital by buying stock, commodities, machines, etc... It is perfectly fine (and natural) for the amount of capital in the country to increase, yet maintaining the amount of money the same.
All fiat currencies in history since the roman invented them have collapsed. Only to be replaced by gold and silver. They always end up the same way: government starts printing a lot of it until hyperinflation kicks in and people abandon it in favor of more stable alternatives. The current fiat currency is strictly speaking only 40 years old, and if history is any indication, it is destined to fail.
It is perfectly possible to save more than you spend. Simply because people do not save money, they save capital. Meaning, they invest the money, the accumulate stock, open new companies, accumulate commodities, etc. The amount of money is irrelevant so long it remains constant. People are not richer because there is more money, they are richer because there is more capital.
There is a reason gold has been the currency of the world for thousands of years, and has always come back after every failed fiat currency.
Here are just a few samples of how failed this system has proven to be. It isn't hard to find hundreds more.
And silver is valuable why exactly?
For several reasons:
1) It has some actual industrial uses.
2) Silver and gold were chosen by the free market as money. The dollar was forced upon us by government. First they forced everyone into paper in 1933 and confiscated all the gold, with the promise that each dollar was equivalent to 1/20 ounce of gold. Once all gold was confiscated, they defaulted and lowered the value of the paper to 1/35, then on 1971 they defaulted again and make it 0.
3) Silver and gold just like bitcoins have a limited supply
4) Gold does not rust
5) Gold and silver are very hard to counterfeit
6) Silver and gold were valuable much before they were currencies. The were highly valued as jewelry and for religious ceremonies.
7) Silver and gold have a supply that is not too high or too little giving them an ideal value for a coin.
For these properties, gold and silver superseded all other commodities as currencies and were chosen by people to be the reserve currency of the world. Up until the government hijacked it and forced everyone into paper.
You realize that without "money printing," growth requires private credit expansion, right? You're always going to need some amount of new money unless you want the average leverage to go up into the thousands and beyond, forever.
Do you realize that the period of greatest economic growth in the us was during the industrial revolution? They had gold back there, and what happened was that prices kept going down, because productivity increased faster than the supply of money. This is a _good_ thing, as the cost of living goes down as productivity increases.
It is only Keynesians and governments that tell you that lower prices are bad. Usually the argument is that if prices go down, people would not buy anything. This argument is ridiculous in it's face for 3 reasons:
1) We all know that cell phones, computer prices and tv's go down. You can expect them to be lower next year. These items by no means are essentials. Are people buying them? of course. Is it possible that someone delayed purchase of a computer waiting for a better price? yes, so what? if you delayed a purchase today, the guy that delayed yesterday buys it anyway. And this sector is thriving, this is not a problem. If money supply remained constant, this effect would be the same on all sectors just at different speeds.
2) The argument completely ignores the time preference of people. All else being equal, normally an item is worth more right now than in the future, therefore it is only logical that there is a price difference between now and the future. By devaluing the currency, the government distorts and interferes with the time preference of people, and pushes them to purchase right now, when their preference was really to purchase later.
3) Devaluing the currency destroys the incentive for saving. Saving is the lifeblood of the economy (not spending). Without saving there can be no investment, and no growth. An economy only grows if it saves more than it spends, if you spend more than you save, then you are shrinking and you are going broke.
Its actually GNU/Linux because desktop and laptop systems mostly use GNU software with the Linux kernel. For simplicity sake, the family of operating systems is referred to as "Linux". Most distros refer to it the same way.
There is almost no GNU software in chromium os.
Linux is just a kernel. GNU is a collection of tools used on top of the linux kernel. Many desktop distributions include both Linux and GNU tools.
But the most popular linux distribution by far (android) does not have any GNU software at all.
You can combine them (or not) and call them _whatever you like_. As my post says, the authors of linux and GNU tools gave a written permission for you to do that. It is entirely up to you to call your own distribution "Linux" or "GNU/Linux" or whatever else you like, as long as the name you pick does not violate any trademark ( you can't call it windows :) ).
Do it. Nine times out of 10 or more, I'll bet the attendant will say "Nice try buddy. That's a dime. It's worth 10 cents. Now pay up!"
Are you serious? If you try to cash in a silver dime for it's face value, you would be an idiot. Just like you would be pretty dumb to cash in a gold dollar for 1 dollar.
If you want the gallon of gas, you would first exchange your valuable silver coin for something that the the gas station would accept, most likely paper dollars.
The point is that the silver dime preserved it's value not because it is a dime, but because it is made out of silver.
The ultimate value of a dollar is zero ... anything.
The dollar used to be a receipt for a certain amount of gold that you owned in the federal reserve. But starting from 1971, the government defaulted on this commitment and the dollar became just a piece of paper.
Bitcoin is not different in this aspect. There is nothing behind it either. The difference is that there is a limit to the amount of bitcoins that can exist, but there is no limit to the amount of dollars the government can print. The government and the bank cartel known as the federal reserve can and do print insane amount of money every year to finance government spending, at the expense of the value of every other dollar in existence.
To illustrate this, take a dime from 1942, you could buy a gallon of gas with it back then. But you can still buy a gallon of gas with the same dime _because_ it is made out of silver. So it is not that things are more expensive, it is that the money changed, there are a lot more dollars circulating now that the government and the FED printed, which has caused it to lose a lot of value over time. This kind of devaluation by printing money is mathematically impossible with bitcoins.
Linux is just a kernel. Naming the whole system after a kernel seems a bit excessive to me, especially since it would be relatively simple to replace the kernel with other kernels such as the BSD, and no user would be able to tell the difference. Most of the software would still run without modification since the chromebooks are all about web apps and almost no native code.
Moreover, Linus and all other kernel developers game a written consent to everyone to do this.
So the authors of the kernel are fine with this and gave written permission to do it. Google is fine with this and seeks what they perceive to be the best marketing strategy. Who are you to complain? this is really a matter to be resolved between the authors of the kernel and Google, no one else has any skin in this game.
Is there any indie developer doing money with patronage? Who would be a patron?
I don't know anyone else making any money with the humble bundle model other than the humble bundle.
So it will not stop the pirates. But it will annoy the consumers.
I am an indie developer selling a game for ios, android, pc and mac.
I am not a fan of DRM myself, and I did not put it in the game. That said, ios sort of has one built in since the user cannot side load apps (unless the device is jailbroken which only a fraction of users do).
The result is that I am making more money on ios than on android, and piracy of my game on android is rampant. Trying to shut down pirates is futile, even if I take 1 down, 10 more pop up in 10 minutes.
For us content creators, there really is no way to make everyone happy:
* If I do DRM, people like yourself hate me. Also, all DRM schemes can be broken, it is just a matter of time. However, the numbers are speaking for themselves.
* Ok, lets do in app purchase then. Nope, people hate me even more for that.
* Well subscription could work right?. Sure, if I want to die burning at the stake.
* How about ads? It annoys my customer base, plus: where is the money?
Honestly the only way to make people happy seems to be making the app fully free, but then I would not make enough money to develop the game and it would die right there and then.
1) How much is this going to cost me at the end of the day? I may outlay $60 when I buy the game but then get an incomplete experience because 1/3rd (exaggerating) of the game has been held back for DLC. Call of Duty games now cost up to $180 for all the content. I'd rather everything be included up front with that price tag so I can decide if I want to blow my money or not.
If you do micro-transactions correctly, the price can be anywhere between $0 and infinity. The reason people choose micro-transactions over say subscription is that the revenue per customer is unbounded. It should depend on the customer and how much value he gets from the game. A person that just plays a few minutes a day would most likely not pay anything. A person that would like to enjoy the better features would pay more
If a game costed $180 up front, very few people would buy it. You would be paying $180 for features you don't care about (how many different hair styles do you need?). However a lot of people would consider paying $0.10, $0.20, etc for their favorite hair style, shirt, scar, etc... So instead of paying $180 for pointless things, some people end up paying $2-$5 for the features they care about the most. Notice this is a win-win: the developer can target a bigger audience, and the customers maximize the value they get for their $2-$5. The reason this model is successful is that it does a good job at maximizing value for both the developer and the customer over say subscription or upfront purchase
It is not like the developer can charge whatever they want. Price things too high, and only a handful of people would buy, yielding poor revenue. Price things too low, and one doesn't get much revenue even if with millions of purchases. There is a sweet spot, where the value is maximized for both the developer and the customers, and the best entrepreneurs are the ones that find it.
2) How long are the servers going to be online if the game has multiplayer - give me a date at the beginning, I don't care what it is but let me know
While it would be great to know, it is impossible for the developer to determine. A game can be kept online as long as he has the funds to do so. If people buy the game, this can be for a long time, if people don't buy the game, it would go offline quickly. So the only reasonable answer is "as long as people buy it"
3) If it is micro-transactions am I realistically going to be able to complete the game without outlaying shit tonnes of cash? No one really has an issue with optional content - pay to be able to progress is what really pisses people off.
This is a very reasonable question. It is true that not every company will tell you this upfront (I know I will). But you can usually get the answer by looking at reviews from the game, So this information is usually readily available.
The recommendations from the experts in the industry is to use micro-transactions only for optional content to maximize revenue. Why? because if you sell a god sword, you ruin the game for both the purchaser (no challenge), and others as well (unfair advantage). If people need to buy something in order to move forward, they will often lose interest and unistall the game right there, with no possibility of selling anything to him
So the developers that want to maximize revenue are recommended to do exactly what you want: use micro-transactions for optional content only
It isn't like EA is making bucketloads of money with that strategy, they lost, what, a few hundred million last year? Something like that.
Then the voting is working. The beauty of capitalism is that if companies don't listen to their customers, and don't deliver value, they go bankrupt. It does not matter if management is listening, no company can lose money in perpetuity. They will either change course or go bankrupt. Either way, they will stop doing the wasteful activity.
And what happens if they go bankrupt? well, all those developers will find jobs at companies that are more successful (deliver what people want) and are not wasting resources. So simply by buying the games you do like (voting with your money), the free market will allocate more resources to it regardless of any individual company's ego.