Capital wouldn't be finite. Productivity drives growth and growth drives investment which in turn drives productivity.
Interest rates send the signal that lets people know what the price of investment is - set it too low and people will invest more than they should (for example, in dot coms or in the housing sector); set it too high and you lose investment, productivity and growth.
Central bankers think that their army of economists and sophisticated computer analysis will tell them exactly what the rate should be.
To see how ridiculous this is, just notice the fact that all their sophisticated analysis always results in numbers that are multiples of.25!
Personally I prefer the UK approach, the Data Protection Act. No doubt it is flawed, and sadly not enforced as rigorously as it should be, but the concept is better. Rather than mandate specific technological approaches, it imposes a set of general requirements on any organisation that holds personal data:
A better approach would be to stop pretending that a 10 digit number that is stored in a million different places is 'personal information'.
You missed a step. The one where Google corners the market, lowers their price and drives all competitors out of business. Then when they have 100% market share they can name any price they want and drastically reduce efficiency.
I think you did not read the latter half of my comment. The one where I explain that a product has more competition that you think.
Even without that, when the monopoly increases prices, it will attract new investment to take advantage of the high profits. And not even a company of Google's size can afford to take losses year after year to drive any new competition away.
Once one company has a certain market share its not really competition anymore, its a monopoly. Is Microsoft's near monopoly causing them to be a terrifically efficient company?
How much did an operating system (that you could install on commodity hardware) cost before MS came along?
If conventional wisdom about such big mergers - that they will 'corner' the market and increase prices - is correct, then shouldn't the competitors be happy that their competitor will raise prices and hence drive customers to them?
The obvious conclusion, supported by lots of data for those inclined to look, is that big mergers always increase efficiency and hence reduce prices for the consumer. It is precisely that outcome that terrifies competitors and forces them to rush to government and feign a concern for the well-being of the consumer.
But why should the new megacorp reduce prices if they have no competitors, you ask?
This is only possible if you think that the only competitor to, for example an airline, is another airline. That is false. The airlines compete with cars, trains, USPS, the telephone and lately, in my case, with web-conferencing.
So, a male centric and predominantly misogynistic country u
Just curious, how many years have you spent in India? How old are you?
I'm Indian and I've lived in America for 7 years now. I still struggle to understand the culture and what sort of behavior is condoned and what isn't. I wonder how much time you've spent in India to sum up the entire country in 15 words.
1. Congress has more influence on economic policy than presidents.
2. Correlation is not causation. Economic forces take years to play out. The current downturn for example is a result of (in my opinion) policies from 2001/02.
3. You can increase the number of jobs by doing many things that harm the economy. The make work programs of the New Deal created a lot of jobs. But it was done with capital that was desperately needed in the private sector.
4. The point of my post is to show that both sides see the other side as voting for dumb ideas.
people who'll be casting a ballot this fall still believe that Iraq had something to do with the 9/11 attacks.
Good point. But just to be fair, maybe you should also mention the people who believe that raising taxes on the rich will not make the economy worse? Or, how about the people who think that more protectionism is a good thing?
I consider these views as wrong as the one about Iraq and 9/11. But, that is the nature of a democracy and you have to take the bad with the good. The stupid people aren't all on the other side.
As to non-lawyers representing other people...... well I don't think you'd want me taking your appendix out. The risk of mortality would go way up.
If that is truly the reason, then that would be true only in cases where there is a threat of death, correct? There wouldn't be any problem with me representing my friend in a divorce or immigration case - is that correct?
Come on now, we both know why that law is on the books.
I guess my broader point was that, the way the courts are setup (not just in the USA), people with money to spend will always have the upper hand over people with little money or time to spend. There is no law or regulation that can change that. The problem is inherent to the system.
We just had to settle with a large credit card company about a patent that (we believe) does not apply to us at all. But, just to contest that in court will take about a million dollars - money that we just don't have and money that Ame..oops, the credit card company, can easily afford.
Most of the cost comes about because lawyers and judges have an incentive to make things more complex. There is no incentive for the court system to make things simpler so a normal person can litigate.
A good example of this is the laws against regular people practising law.
Even though I've lived here for 6 years, I believe I'm still better informed about India than many people here, who think that by reading a few articles or visiting that country for a few months they become experts.
The kind of problems plaguing schools and universities in India are mostly cultural and will not be fixed soon. The attitude of parents and teachers is for the student to get good grades - acquiring knowledge is not a priority.
India used to produce good researchers when the British were there - Bose, Ramanujan, Raman, Mahalanobis, etc. Not anymore - when was the last time you heard about some breakthrough research from India?
I spend about 5-10 hours a week talking to folks back home. I spend about 1 month a year back in India.
Any information I get about India is not from some newspaper or from someone who spent a few weeks there to write a book.
So, I think I know a lot more about what is going on in India than many people here.
All the best minds leave India. This has changed in the last 5 years, but it is still the exception for someone smart to stay back in India.
The schools and colleges in India suck - I once had a professor (meaning, he had completed his Ph.d) who, when stuck with some equation of the form d(...)/dt, cancelled d & d and 'assumed t=1' and solved the equation. This was one of the senior professors.
In school, answers are graded based on how long they are not by what they say. If you think the education in USA is bad ( and I agree that it is), then you should see what happens in India.
The amount of resources America can throw at education is probably equal to a good % of the total GDP of India. I still remember how my friend and I felt when we saw a community college here - a freaking community college was bigger and better equipped than any college we saw in India.
So, anytime someone here talks about India beating the USA in science, I know they're full of BS.
My old advisor has been spending a lot of time in China and India lately. In his eyes, India really is moving in the direction of major fundamental research. He thinks that if things move at their current pace, there will be a crossover in about 20-30 years when India passes America in innovation.
I'm 29. I'm from India. I've lived in America for the last 6 years. Your advisor must be smoking something good. Please ask him to stop.
where the party litigating with the content-maniacs is a corporation which has the resources to get good lawyering
That, precisely, is the problem many see with the legal system. You may not agree that that is a problem, but then, I see you as part of the system.
..the judges are starting to wake up to the fraud that has been perpetrated on them.
Anyone with a little bit of technical knowledge knew what these cases were full of BS when they started. Yet, it took the legal system how many months to understand that? And how many lives were ruined because the judiciary did not make sure that the judges had some subject knowledge before they were assigned these cases?
Part of the problem is the way society looks at judges. Instead of seeing them as a normal service provider - like a plumber or doctor - they are seen as super-humans. Wonder how many judges are reprimanded for poor performance.
Exactly. I wish the govt would just announce that on January 1, 2009 they will put up a website that publicly reveals everyone's SSN. Banks and other institutions have until then to work out some other means of authentication.
That would solve this problem of 'identity theft' better than any of the other schemes they keep proposing. But it wouldn't make as much money though.
demonstrate the lack of care being taken by government to protect the private information of individuals."
Why is a social security number, a number that helps the social security administration track payments, 'private information'?
Isn't that the bigger problem? Instead of spending more and more money to hide this number (or blame companies who lose such data), intelligent people should be asking why this number should be private.
But the differences between Fisher and Keynes seem small when compared to the differences between the policymakers and both economists. In physics, it would be like watching an academic debate over the meaning of quantum mechanics while policymakers are unable to grasp the simple concept of gravity.
For another, it strikes me that your application should not expose any information, except as part of the well-defined UI. Just because you cannot connect the dots and do anything nefarious does not preclude a gang of thugs in Zambiniland from unsavory acts.
Pretending that some information is confidential when it isn't is a far greater security threat than a bug in an application. That is the reason for the mess with the social security numbers and it also results in smart people using moronic phrases like 'identity theft'.
How about minimizing the amount of individual data collected?
How about not making information worth anything? Maybe the people who give out loans based on a 9-digit number should eat their losses?
Then this 'identity theft' nonsense will stop.
I'm currently responding to an RFP from a large health insurance company. They make the claim that a person's name and address is confidential information and hence should be encrypted,etc,etc.
How on earth are a person's name and address confidential? Or rather, why are should a person's name and address be confidential?
oh, this has the making of a beautiful class action suit against RIAA
And then we'll hear all about how "the system works".
I'm surprised that no one here blames the legal system that enables the likes of the RIAA - if the system is setup in such a way that some bully can take advantage of people, they eventually will.
Because with only three blogs in the blog-o-sphere, the millions of Americans these blogs serve really deserve government-mandated balance.
Oh, what's that, there's more than three? How many, then? Five?
We can fix that easily enough. Just make blogs get all the government approvals that newspapers, TV and radio stations have to get and we'll have the 5 blogs that you want.
On the other hand, you can remove all the regulations that govern newspapers and tv stations and maybe we'll have more than a handful of those.
Slashdot Mirror
In a true free market, capital is finite, so
.25!
Capital wouldn't be finite. Productivity drives growth and growth drives investment which in turn drives productivity.
Interest rates send the signal that lets people know what the price of investment is - set it too low and people will invest more than they should (for example, in dot coms or in the housing sector); set it too high and you lose investment, productivity and growth.
Central bankers think that their army of economists and sophisticated computer analysis will tell them exactly what the rate should be.
To see how ridiculous this is, just notice the fact that all their sophisticated analysis always results in numbers that are multiples of
bingo! Greenspan did exactly what all the .... and Libertarians wanted
And who is it that speaks for all Libertarians?
Personally I prefer the UK approach, the Data Protection Act. No doubt it is flawed, and sadly not enforced as rigorously as it should be, but the concept is better. Rather than mandate specific technological approaches, it imposes a set of general requirements on any organisation that holds personal data:
A better approach would be to stop pretending that a 10 digit number that is stored in a million different places is 'personal information'.
You missed a step. The one where Google corners the market, lowers their price and drives all competitors out of business. Then when they have 100% market share they can name any price they want and drastically reduce efficiency.
I think you did not read the latter half of my comment. The one where I explain that a product has more competition that you think.
Even without that, when the monopoly increases prices, it will attract new investment to take advantage of the high profits. And not even a company of Google's size can afford to take losses year after year to drive any new competition away.
Once one company has a certain market share its not really competition anymore, its a monopoly. Is Microsoft's near monopoly causing them to be a terrifically efficient company?
How much did an operating system (that you could install on commodity hardware) cost before MS came along?
Why are Google's competitors opposing the deal?
If conventional wisdom about such big mergers - that they will 'corner' the market and increase prices - is correct, then shouldn't the competitors be happy that their competitor will raise prices and hence drive customers to them?
The obvious conclusion, supported by lots of data for those inclined to look, is that big mergers always increase efficiency and hence reduce prices for the consumer. It is precisely that outcome that terrifies competitors and forces them to rush to government and feign a concern for the well-being of the consumer.
But why should the new megacorp reduce prices if they have no competitors, you ask? This is only possible if you think that the only competitor to, for example an airline, is another airline. That is false. The airlines compete with cars, trains, USPS, the telephone and lately, in my case, with web-conferencing.
So it is with *all* other industries.
management and unskilled labourers tend to get paid amounts quite disproportionate to the amount of work they do or how intelligent they are
How would you figure out what the correct pay would/should be?
So, a male centric and predominantly misogynistic country u
Just curious, how many years have you spent in India? How old are you?
I'm Indian and I've lived in America for 7 years now. I still struggle to understand the culture and what sort of behavior is condoned and what isn't. I wonder how much time you've spent in India to sum up the entire country in 15 words.
How about outlawing automated trading programs? sounds like a solution to me.
How about letting stupid people lose money? Sounds like a better solution to me.
1. Congress has more influence on economic policy than presidents.
2. Correlation is not causation. Economic forces take years to play out. The current downturn for example is a result of (in my opinion) policies from 2001/02.
3. You can increase the number of jobs by doing many things that harm the economy. The make work programs of the New Deal created a lot of jobs. But it was done with capital that was desperately needed in the private sector.
4. The point of my post is to show that both sides see the other side as voting for dumb ideas.
people who'll be casting a ballot this fall still believe that Iraq had something to do with the 9/11 attacks.
Good point. But just to be fair, maybe you should also mention the people who believe that raising taxes on the rich will not make the economy worse? Or, how about the people who think that more protectionism is a good thing?
I consider these views as wrong as the one about Iraq and 9/11. But, that is the nature of a democracy and you have to take the bad with the good. The stupid people aren't all on the other side.
If that is truly the reason, then that would be true only in cases where there is a threat of death, correct? There wouldn't be any problem with me representing my friend in a divorce or immigration case - is that correct?
Come on now, we both know why that law is on the books.
I guess my broader point was that, the way the courts are setup (not just in the USA), people with money to spend will always have the upper hand over people with little money or time to spend. There is no law or regulation that can change that. The problem is inherent to the system.
We just had to settle with a large credit card company about a patent that (we believe) does not apply to us at all. But, just to contest that in court will take about a million dollars - money that we just don't have and money that Ame..oops, the credit card company, can easily afford.
Most of the cost comes about because lawyers and judges have an incentive to make things more complex. There is no incentive for the court system to make things simpler so a normal person can litigate.
A good example of this is the laws against regular people practising law.
Even though I've lived here for 6 years, I believe I'm still better informed about India than many people here, who think that by reading a few articles or visiting that country for a few months they become experts.
The kind of problems plaguing schools and universities in India are mostly cultural and will not be fixed soon. The attitude of parents and teachers is for the student to get good grades - acquiring knowledge is not a priority.
India used to produce good researchers when the British were there - Bose, Ramanujan, Raman, Mahalanobis, etc. Not anymore - when was the last time you heard about some breakthrough research from India?
I spend about 5-10 hours a week talking to folks back home. I spend about 1 month a year back in India.
Any information I get about India is not from some newspaper or from someone who spent a few weeks there to write a book.
So, I think I know a lot more about what is going on in India than many people here.
All the best minds leave India. This has changed in the last 5 years, but it is still the exception for someone smart to stay back in India.
The schools and colleges in India suck - I once had a professor (meaning, he had completed his Ph.d) who, when stuck with some equation of the form d(...)/dt, cancelled d & d and 'assumed t=1' and solved the equation. This was one of the senior professors.
In school, answers are graded based on how long they are not by what they say. If you think the education in USA is bad ( and I agree that it is), then you should see what happens in India.
The amount of resources America can throw at education is probably equal to a good % of the total GDP of India. I still remember how my friend and I felt when we saw a community college here - a freaking community college was bigger and better equipped than any college we saw in India.
So, anytime someone here talks about India beating the USA in science, I know they're full of BS.
Well, I must've misunderstood your positions then - my apologies.
My old advisor has been spending a lot of time in China and India lately. In his eyes, India really is moving in the direction of major fundamental research. He thinks that if things move at their current pace, there will be a crossover in about 20-30 years when India passes America in innovation.
I'm 29. I'm from India. I've lived in America for the last 6 years. Your advisor must be smoking something good. Please ask him to stop.
where the party litigating with the content-maniacs is a corporation which has the resources to get good lawyering
..the judges are starting to wake up to the fraud that has been perpetrated on them.
That, precisely, is the problem many see with the legal system. You may not agree that that is a problem, but then, I see you as part of the system.
Anyone with a little bit of technical knowledge knew what these cases were full of BS when they started. Yet, it took the legal system how many months to understand that? And how many lives were ruined because the judiciary did not make sure that the judges had some subject knowledge before they were assigned these cases?
Part of the problem is the way society looks at judges. Instead of seeing them as a normal service provider - like a plumber or doctor - they are seen as super-humans. Wonder how many judges are reprimanded for poor performance.
Exactly. I wish the govt would just announce that on January 1, 2009 they will put up a website that publicly reveals everyone's SSN. Banks and other institutions have until then to work out some other means of authentication.
That would solve this problem of 'identity theft' better than any of the other schemes they keep proposing. But it wouldn't make as much money though.
demonstrate the lack of care being taken by government to protect the private information of individuals."
Why is a social security number, a number that helps the social security administration track payments, 'private information'?
Isn't that the bigger problem? Instead of spending more and more money to hide this number (or blame companies who lose such data), intelligent people should be asking why this number should be private.
I liked this line from the comments:
But the differences between Fisher and Keynes seem small when compared to the differences between the policymakers and both economists. In physics, it would be like watching an academic debate over the meaning of quantum mechanics while policymakers are unable to grasp the simple concept of gravity.
For another, it strikes me that your application should not expose any information, except as part of the well-defined UI. Just because you cannot connect the dots and do anything nefarious does not preclude a gang of thugs in Zambiniland from unsavory acts.
Pretending that some information is confidential when it isn't is a far greater security threat than a bug in an application. That is the reason for the mess with the social security numbers and it also results in smart people using moronic phrases like 'identity theft'.
How about minimizing the amount of individual data collected?
How about not making information worth anything? Maybe the people who give out loans based on a 9-digit number should eat their losses?
Then this 'identity theft' nonsense will stop.
I'm currently responding to an RFP from a large health insurance company. They make the claim that a person's name and address is confidential information and hence should be encrypted,etc,etc.
How on earth are a person's name and address confidential? Or rather, why are should a person's name and address be confidential?
oh, this has the making of a beautiful class action suit against RIAA
And then we'll hear all about how "the system works".
I'm surprised that no one here blames the legal system that enables the likes of the RIAA - if the system is setup in such a way that some bully can take advantage of people, they eventually will.
We can fix that easily enough. Just make blogs get all the government approvals that newspapers, TV and radio stations have to get and we'll have the 5 blogs that you want.
On the other hand, you can remove all the regulations that govern newspapers and tv stations and maybe we'll have more than a handful of those.