It's not backed by debt. It is backed by the power of the government to tax their residents.
The power to tax is what gives it enduring value because the government can tax current and future generations in order to pay its bills. Thus, it is backed by the sum total production of the economy rather than any one particular commodity. Gold backing is just like the government being able to tax gold producers. But modern money is backed by the ability of the government to tax everyone: gold producers, silver producers, paper producers, Microsoft, etc. That is a much more enduring, less distorting and stable way to determine the value of the currency than the amount of one particular commodity that is subject to a lot of volatility in its supply and demand.
Did you mean nostalgia rather than deja vu? You can tell them apart based on the location of the rash on your body - if the rash is on your torso it's deja vu, if the rash is in your groin it's nostalgia.
I'll agree with your sentiment but disagree in some respects.
It takes time for a child to learn language. A toddler can get frustrated when parents (or others) don't understand what they want. But the language acquisition process is not hard in the same way as learning is hard for adults. They do not need to conciously do it. It is more instinctive and automatic than if I were to try to learn another language. Furthermore, the problem is not understanding and learning the language - the problem is expressing themselves and being mature enough to deal with not getting what they want. Toddlers have amazing understanding, but limited ability to express themselves.
So I would argue that learning languages for children is easy (comparatively speaking). But there is a lot more to growing up and communicating than just learning language - and some of those bits are hard.
The toddlers have no problem talking. It's understanding them that is the difficult part.
My almost two year old is quite expressive - but his 'words' at the moment are single syllables. He quite clearly has a large vocabulary and knows what he means, but I have difficulty working out what he means. For example, on the bus the other day he kept saying "T", "T", "T". I couldn't work it out? Toe? T-shirt? No, I eventually worked out it was Tree. He was pointing to everyone he could see, and there were rather a lot of them.
All countries with developed banking systems guarantee deposits, up to some maximum, the purpose being to forestall bank runs. Sorry, that is incorrect.
A deposit guarantee system is not ubiquitous and it is not necessary to prevent bank runs. Australia, for one, has no explicit guarantee of bank deposits yet has had remarkably few bank failures and no runs in modern times. Furthermore, as you observe, a guarantee system is clearly not sufficient. The UK has a guarantee that involves a considerable time lag and only gives you back 90% of your funds above 2000 pounds. Given the option, I would prefer to have my money now rather than wait a long time to get back 90%.
Had the full guarantee been in place for 35,000, the Northern Rock run might never have happened. Maybe, or maybe it would have for exactly the same reasons. I would prefer to have my money now rather than wait for the whole thing to go pear shaped and wait some more time to get my money back.
Even if it did happen, the governement would have been in a politically viable position to allow the bank to fail, thus teaching "the entire industry a harsh lesson in the realities of financing." No government is going to allow an institution that holds the life savings of millions of voters to fail. It's all very well to talk tought now, but when push comes to shove, it's not going to happen. The government will bail it out to protect depositors/voters.
The need to nationalize is a consequence of the bank bailout The need to nationalise is not a consequence of the bank bailout. Absent the bank bailout it would already be nationalised or shut. The need to nationalise is a consequence of international financial markets being unwilling to purchase mortgage backed securities at any price and the resulting cash flow crunch for the bank - which is exactly the same reason for the bailout.
Actually, I think you will find that the biggest factor driving people towards or away from the middle is not the voting system so much as whether voting is compulsory or voluntary.
Voluntary voting means you need to rile your supporters up enough to get them out to vote. A result is that candidates are driven to pander to extremist interest groups who are well organised and can deliver thousands of motivated voters.
Compulsory voting, on the other hand, drives candidates to the middle because they need to capture the middle ground in the election as everyone will be voting anyway. You can already count on the extremists voting for you (because they have to vote and would certainly not vote for the other guys).
Just look at the pandering to minority (and often extreme) interest groups that goes on in the US as a result of the 'get out the vote' imperative. Could you ever imagine an NRA gun nut voting Democrat anyway? So why do the Republicans have to pander to them? If voting were compulsory, both parties could move to more temperate positions on this (and other) issues.
...and I know rotaries in the Boston area where, while people have no trouble navigating them, they break every rule in the book. For example, nobody gives way to traffic in the roundabout at the rotary between Concorde Ave and Fresh Pond Parkway in Cambridge. It's fine if you just do what everyone else does, but if you attempt to actually use it properly and expect all the entering traffic from Fresh Pond Parkway to give way - you'll cause an accident.
Additionally, legal jargon is efficient -- a single word in legal jargon communicates an idea that would take many words to describe unambiguously in the vernacular.
No. The only reason that a single word in legal jargon communicates an idea is that it is backed up by thousands of pages of precedent. In common law countries, the only way you can hope to understand why the word means what you think it means is to read all the precedents. Furthermore, it is always possible that you might have missed one. Thus, you need to do an exhaustive search of possibly related cases to see if any judge ever interpreted the word differently and find out the context.
It is so much worse than English. In English you can look up a word in a dictionary. In the law you have to look up a word in a thousand dictionaries, with each dictionary only giving you part of the definition.
That isn't really encryption is it. The raison d'etre of encryption is that someone else can recover the message following a defined process.
If I take a signal and add random noise to it then remove all references to the specific random numbers I won't be able to recover the original signal. That's not encryption - that's more like shredding and burning.
The Wikipedia link discusses the problem of bringing copyright violation charges. But, even if it is released in the public domain, the problem for the publisher and author is the charge of plagiarism.
Many high-profile authors have been brought down by charges of plagiarism. They have not been sued for copyright violations but they have suffered significant consequences nonetheless. See, for example, the recent case of Kaavya Viswanathan. As such, I would think that the copyright violation angle can be pretty much ignored. It's distracting and weak. The plagiarism charge, however, could have significant consequences.
I'm not limiting experimental to table-top or to measurement. I am trying to emphasise the ability to 'hold everything else constant' as the defining feature of an "experimental science". Perhaps I should call it "experimental" and "observational" to emphasise the point that in "observational" science the scientist can't get in the process and control it, but must merely observe the outcomes and conduct inference from that. So I'm not making a theoretical vs experimental division.
Thus, in social science areas you can't normally control the whole process because of ethical or practical problems. Biological processes are sufficiently complicated that, while some experiments can be conducted, all variables can not be isolated and controlled so inference is thereby limited. At the other extreme would be a chemical reaction in a sealed chamber.
All science aims to be predictive - but the nature of the data available (or that can be collected) to make those predictions varies by the subject under examination.
Your terminology would be better if you referred to the distinction between "experimental science" and "non-experimental science". "Hard" science is a distinction that doesn't illuminate or categorise in any useful way.
Thus, social sciences, such as economics, are mostly non-experimental (but that is changing in recent years). Astronomy is non-experimental although it may rely on experimental results or observations. Theoretical physics is mostly mathematics and, at some stage, might become experimental but rarely is. Finally, we have the sciences everyone knows and loves, Physics and Chemistry, that are the experimental sciences.
Whether you can conduct an experiment affects the way you conduct inference. The whole point of the experiment is to hold everything constant except for that which you are investigating. That is the only way in which people accept that it is "causation". But really, it is just correlation where most everything else has been held constant. In the "non-experimental sciences" you can't easily control everything else. But with careful design you can, in fact, approach the experimental ideal. A common approach in fiancial matters is to conduct "event studies". In these people focus on what happened around the time of a major announcement. In this way, you limit the possible other factors that might have influenced the result. Thus, you can look at the stock price in the hours around a mining companies announcement of a big find and be fairly confident that nothing else was happening that caused the result. Thus, they approach the experimental ideal of holding everything else constant.
You remove stones when you capture them (remove all their liberties). And cycles are, thus, possible. But there is a rule to prevent this - you can not repeat a position on the board. As a result you end up gettin into Ko fights.
Scholarships exist to ensure that those who are admitted will not be prevented from attending because of financial need. Thus, the requirements to receive a scholarship from MIT are academic merit and financial need. That's merit-based in my book.
Some tend to confuse US citizens and residents with everyone else on the planet, and pretend that the Constitution actually applies to everyone on Earth (which it doesn't), or that it should (which it shouldn't - perhaps in an idealized world, someday, everyone can expect and enjoy such a baseline of freedoms and rights).
Perhaps the Consitution doesn't apply to everyone. But by explicitly acknowledging that you make it clear that any moral authority the US believes it has is fundamentally undermined. The US believes itself to be a nation founded on certain principles and the bringer of light to the dark corners of the world...
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,...
I imagine that it would have been much more accurate if that had said: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, but US Citizens are more equal than others.
Interface consistency and Windows applications are not two phrases that are often heard in the same sentence. Tell me, in any random Windows application I care to name (other than Office 2007 of course) how do you open a file? How do you quit the application? What happens when you drag something to the desktop? What are the shortcut key combinations to achieve these?
These are the same people who compress the recording so they only use 10% of the dynamic range of the CD (the top 10% if you were wondering) because they think it sells better.
If they are worried about the degradation in quality from MP3s - the apocalypse arrived well before that. It was when some budding sound engineer said I can make your CD sound louder and all the producers said - Yeah! Louder is better! Who cares if the quality goes to pot.
I'm guessing that it is the 24-bit rather than the 192khz?
As Flanders and Swann said about much earlier technology: Flanders: All the highest notes neither sharp nor flat, Swann: The ear can't hear as high as that. Flanders: Still, I ought to please any passing bat, Swann: With my high fidelity.
The ability to create money represents a masive wealth transfer from eveybody else to the people that can create the money.
No - you need to update your economics.
The right to print currency and earn seignorage is a nice little earner - but that right is restricted to central banks and the government. Ordinary banks can't print money any more than you or I can.
Just because you use a definition of "money" that includes deposits at banks doesn't mean that there is anything magical about those deposits. All the definition o "money" you are using means is that deposits at a bank tend to be accepted by others in payment for debts - not that they can print currency. Banks make their money from intermediation - taking deposits from people who have excess cash and lending it to people who need more. They also earn a bit of their money because they are accepting short-term liabilities (deposits from customers) and lending them out to create long-term assets (home loans). This involves a bit of risk and there is a return to them for taking on that risk.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not backed by debt. It is backed by the power of the government to tax their residents.
The power to tax is what gives it enduring value because the government can tax current and future generations in order to pay its bills. Thus, it is backed by the sum total production of the economy rather than any one particular commodity. Gold backing is just like the government being able to tax gold producers. But modern money is backed by the ability of the government to tax everyone: gold producers, silver producers, paper producers, Microsoft, etc. That is a much more enduring, less distorting and stable way to determine the value of the currency than the amount of one particular commodity that is subject to a lot of volatility in its supply and demand.
Did you mean nostalgia rather than deja vu? You can tell them apart based on the location of the rash on your body - if the rash is on your torso it's deja vu, if the rash is in your groin it's nostalgia.
At any rate, ABBA never died. They live on in Australia thanks to the efforts of Bjorn Again, Muriel's Wedding and a lack of alternatives.
Actually - they are usually failsafe. You don't need residual power.
Think about what that means - their failure mode is safe. It is a well established design and engineering principle.
For example, the brakes are held open by compressed air. If something goes wrong the compressed air supply shuts off and the brakes stop the train.
I'll agree with your sentiment but disagree in some respects.
It takes time for a child to learn language. A toddler can get frustrated when parents (or others) don't understand what they want. But the language acquisition process is not hard in the same way as learning is hard for adults. They do not need to conciously do it. It is more instinctive and automatic than if I were to try to learn another language. Furthermore, the problem is not understanding and learning the language - the problem is expressing themselves and being mature enough to deal with not getting what they want. Toddlers have amazing understanding, but limited ability to express themselves.
So I would argue that learning languages for children is easy (comparatively speaking). But there is a lot more to growing up and communicating than just learning language - and some of those bits are hard.
The toddlers have no problem talking. It's understanding them that is the difficult part.
My almost two year old is quite expressive - but his 'words' at the moment are single syllables. He quite clearly has a large vocabulary and knows what he means, but I have difficulty working out what he means. For example, on the bus the other day he kept saying "T", "T", "T". I couldn't work it out? Toe? T-shirt? No, I eventually worked out it was Tree. He was pointing to everyone he could see, and there were rather a lot of them.
I'm more interested in ethylation in the right places.
All countries with developed banking systems guarantee deposits, up to some maximum, the purpose being to forestall bank runs.
Sorry, that is incorrect.
A deposit guarantee system is not ubiquitous and it is not necessary to prevent bank runs. Australia, for one, has no explicit guarantee of bank deposits yet has had remarkably few bank failures and no runs in modern times. Furthermore, as you observe, a guarantee system is clearly not sufficient. The UK has a guarantee that involves a considerable time lag and only gives you back 90% of your funds above 2000 pounds. Given the option, I would prefer to have my money now rather than wait a long time to get back 90%.
Had the full guarantee been in place for 35,000, the Northern Rock run might never have happened.
Maybe, or maybe it would have for exactly the same reasons. I would prefer to have my money now rather than wait for the whole thing to go pear shaped and wait some more time to get my money back.
Even if it did happen, the governement would have been in a politically viable position to allow the bank to fail, thus teaching "the entire industry a harsh lesson in the realities of financing."
No government is going to allow an institution that holds the life savings of millions of voters to fail. It's all very well to talk tought now, but when push comes to shove, it's not going to happen. The government will bail it out to protect depositors/voters.
The need to nationalize is a consequence of the bank bailout
The need to nationalise is not a consequence of the bank bailout. Absent the bank bailout it would already be nationalised or shut. The need to nationalise is a consequence of international financial markets being unwilling to purchase mortgage backed securities at any price and the resulting cash flow crunch for the bank - which is exactly the same reason for the bailout.
Actually, I think you will find that the biggest factor driving people towards or away from the middle is not the voting system so much as whether voting is compulsory or voluntary.
Voluntary voting means you need to rile your supporters up enough to get them out to vote. A result is that candidates are driven to pander to extremist interest groups who are well organised and can deliver thousands of motivated voters.
Compulsory voting, on the other hand, drives candidates to the middle because they need to capture the middle ground in the election as everyone will be voting anyway. You can already count on the extremists voting for you (because they have to vote and would certainly not vote for the other guys).
Just look at the pandering to minority (and often extreme) interest groups that goes on in the US as a result of the 'get out the vote' imperative. Could you ever imagine an NRA gun nut voting Democrat anyway? So why do the Republicans have to pander to them? If voting were compulsory, both parties could move to more temperate positions on this (and other) issues.
...and I know rotaries in the Boston area where, while people have no trouble navigating them, they break every rule in the book. For example, nobody gives way to traffic in the roundabout at the rotary between Concorde Ave and Fresh Pond Parkway in Cambridge. It's fine if you just do what everyone else does, but if you attempt to actually use it properly and expect all the entering traffic from Fresh Pond Parkway to give way - you'll cause an accident.
Additionally, legal jargon is efficient -- a single word in legal jargon communicates an idea that would take many words to describe unambiguously in the vernacular.
No. The only reason that a single word in legal jargon communicates an idea is that it is backed up by thousands of pages of precedent. In common law countries, the only way you can hope to understand why the word means what you think it means is to read all the precedents. Furthermore, it is always possible that you might have missed one. Thus, you need to do an exhaustive search of possibly related cases to see if any judge ever interpreted the word differently and find out the context.
It is so much worse than English. In English you can look up a word in a dictionary. In the law you have to look up a word in a thousand dictionaries, with each dictionary only giving you part of the definition.
That isn't really encryption is it. The raison d'etre of encryption is that someone else can recover the message following a defined process.
If I take a signal and add random noise to it then remove all references to the specific random numbers I won't be able to recover the original signal. That's not encryption - that's more like shredding and burning.
If it conks out in 6 months it should be covered by warranty.
Says so right here and would, in any case, be an implied consumer right under many 'fitness for purpose' consumer protection regimes.
The Wikipedia link discusses the problem of bringing copyright violation charges. But, even if it is released in the public domain, the problem for the publisher and author is the charge of plagiarism.
Many high-profile authors have been brought down by charges of plagiarism. They have not been sued for copyright violations but they have suffered significant consequences nonetheless. See, for example, the recent case of Kaavya Viswanathan. As such, I would think that the copyright violation angle can be pretty much ignored. It's distracting and weak. The plagiarism charge, however, could have significant consequences.
But can you tell me precisely how improbable that is?
If not, all you'll manage to do is make all the molecules of your underwear jump one foot simultaneously to the left.
I'm not limiting experimental to table-top or to measurement. I am trying to emphasise the ability to 'hold everything else constant' as the defining feature of an "experimental science". Perhaps I should call it "experimental" and "observational" to emphasise the point that in "observational" science the scientist can't get in the process and control it, but must merely observe the outcomes and conduct inference from that. So I'm not making a theoretical vs experimental division.
Thus, in social science areas you can't normally control the whole process because of ethical or practical problems. Biological processes are sufficiently complicated that, while some experiments can be conducted, all variables can not be isolated and controlled so inference is thereby limited. At the other extreme would be a chemical reaction in a sealed chamber.
All science aims to be predictive - but the nature of the data available (or that can be collected) to make those predictions varies by the subject under examination.
(As for Biology - how about Mendel? But he did fudge his results.)
Your terminology would be better if you referred to the distinction between "experimental science" and "non-experimental science". "Hard" science is a distinction that doesn't illuminate or categorise in any useful way.
Thus, social sciences, such as economics, are mostly non-experimental (but that is changing in recent years). Astronomy is non-experimental although it may rely on experimental results or observations. Theoretical physics is mostly mathematics and, at some stage, might become experimental but rarely is. Finally, we have the sciences everyone knows and loves, Physics and Chemistry, that are the experimental sciences.
Whether you can conduct an experiment affects the way you conduct inference. The whole point of the experiment is to hold everything constant except for that which you are investigating. That is the only way in which people accept that it is "causation". But really, it is just correlation where most everything else has been held constant. In the "non-experimental sciences" you can't easily control everything else. But with careful design you can, in fact, approach the experimental ideal. A common approach in fiancial matters is to conduct "event studies". In these people focus on what happened around the time of a major announcement. In this way, you limit the possible other factors that might have influenced the result. Thus, you can look at the stock price in the hours around a mining companies announcement of a big find and be fairly confident that nothing else was happening that caused the result. Thus, they approach the experimental ideal of holding everything else constant.
You remove stones when you capture them (remove all their liberties). And cycles are, thus, possible. But there is a rule to prevent this - you can not repeat a position on the board. As a result you end up gettin into Ko fights.
Admission is merit-based.
Scholarships exist to ensure that those who are admitted will not be prevented from attending because of financial need. Thus, the requirements to receive a scholarship from MIT are academic merit and financial need. That's merit-based in my book.
So happy that you are not asked to pay school fees if you can run or jump.
MIT doesn't offer athletic scholarships. Academic yes, athletic no. (It's a condition of their participation in NCAA Division III.)
Some tend to confuse US citizens and residents with everyone else on the planet, and pretend that the Constitution actually applies to everyone on Earth (which it doesn't), or that it should (which it shouldn't - perhaps in an idealized world, someday, everyone can expect and enjoy such a baseline of freedoms and rights).
Perhaps the Consitution doesn't apply to everyone. But by explicitly acknowledging that you make it clear that any moral authority the US believes it has is fundamentally undermined. The US believes itself to be a nation founded on certain principles and the bringer of light to the dark corners of the world...
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,...
I imagine that it would have been much more accurate if that had said:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, but US Citizens are more equal than others.
Ctrl-O for options (when it's not open)
Ctrl-L for load (when it's not left align)
And do you want to [Alt]-f-x exit or [Alt]-f-c close or ctrl-q quit?
Surely you jest.
Interface consistency and Windows applications are not two phrases that are often heard in the same sentence. Tell me, in any random Windows application I care to name (other than Office 2007 of course) how do you open a file? How do you quit the application? What happens when you drag something to the desktop? What are the shortcut key combinations to achieve these?
These are the same people who compress the recording so they only use 10% of the dynamic range of the CD (the top 10% if you were wondering) because they think it sells better.
If they are worried about the degradation in quality from MP3s - the apocalypse arrived well before that. It was when some budding sound engineer said I can make your CD sound louder and all the producers said - Yeah! Louder is better! Who cares if the quality goes to pot.
the difference is obvious
I'm guessing that it is the 24-bit rather than the 192khz?
As Flanders and Swann said about much earlier technology:
Flanders: All the highest notes neither sharp nor flat,
Swann: The ear can't hear as high as that.
Flanders: Still, I ought to please any passing bat,
Swann: With my high fidelity.
The ability to create money represents a masive wealth transfer from eveybody else to the people that can create the money.
No - you need to update your economics.
The right to print currency and earn seignorage is a nice little earner - but that right is restricted to central banks and the government. Ordinary banks can't print money any more than you or I can.
Just because you use a definition of "money" that includes deposits at banks doesn't mean that there is anything magical about those deposits. All the definition o "money" you are using means is that deposits at a bank tend to be accepted by others in payment for debts - not that they can print currency. Banks make their money from intermediation - taking deposits from people who have excess cash and lending it to people who need more. They also earn a bit of their money because they are accepting short-term liabilities (deposits from customers) and lending them out to create long-term assets (home loans). This involves a bit of risk and there is a return to them for taking on that risk.