My big problem with the war and the republicans is that they say they won't leave until they "won" the war. WTF is winning the war?
The fact that Republicans call it a "war" at all just means they utterly lost the propaganda battle with the Democrats, as usual. The war lasted about 2 weeks. The occupation lasted about 6 months. Since then it has been a military presence. Anything approaching an intelligible discussion should discuss it in those terms.
As for the Iraqi's themselves, they would vote McCain, because they would fear that Obama would withdraw US troops to quickly:
a) The value the money represents is not the GDP. The value of the money, like any other commodity, is what people are willing to trade for it.
Both are true -- the GDP is the aggregate value available to be traded for the total money supply. Therefore in an open market, the value of the dollar is equal to the value in the GDP divided by the number of dollars in the market.
When the money could be redemed for gold or silver the value of the money was essentially the same as the value of the gold or silver. (Having it in paper form gave it a slight added value due to convenience.)
When money could be redeemed for gold or silver, the value of gold or silver became inflated as the aggregate value of the GDP expanded. Around 1930, most European countries had currency redeemable for gold. But France's GDP was not contracting as fast as the other countries. This made gold as measured in Francs worth a lot more than gold as measured in any other currency, which made gold worth less in those countries than in France, and those currencies themselves worth less than the gold they could be redeemed for and then sold for Francs. This meant all the gold, and all the currency equivalents in Europe started funneling into France and out of every other country. This meant that the already rampant deflation across Europe countries became even more extreme, and every country dropped the gold standard like the bad habit that it was. The countries who did so quickest suffered the least.
All that to say, that tying a currency to gold does not increase the value of the currency (unless the GDP is less than the value of the gold reserves, in which case all the currency would be exported for its value in gold), rather it increases the value of gold to the value of the GDP / the gold reserves.
These days the only underlying value to the money is the goverment's promise to use the courts and police to force creditors to accept it as payment.
In a sense that's true. It's the legally guaranteed status of legal tender that makes the value of any currency equal to the value of its country's GDP / the supply of that currency.
b) There is no need to expand the currency to deal with an expanded GDP. You can just let the existing money supply deflate instead, lowering prices.
There is virtually NO amount of deflation that is sustainable. To see what happens in deflation, again see the Great Depression, or 1990's Japan. If the currency deflates, it is necessary to reduce prices and wages. However, workers generally don't accept reduced wages, so the inevitable result is a reduced payroll via layoffs instead. This means less value in the GDP, from the workers' lost work, which is the process by which the GDP follows the money supply down in a death spiral. It also means less aggregate demand from the works' lost wages, decreasing the effective money supply further. etc, etc.
There's no need to keep prices stable. A loaf of bread once cost a dime. Why shouldn't it cost a dime again?
See above. OTOH, here's a dime. I'll take sourdough with sesame seeds.
Printing more money doesn't reward those who create value. It rewards those who get hold of the new money first - mianly banks and the government's cronies and employees - and penalizes those who have paychecks, savings, and contracts denominated in dollars - who are usually the creators of new value.
No, the people who get the new money first are the people who take out loans, and the people who build the new houses, factories, and cars that people and companies take out the loans to buy. The banks get the new money third, as the loans are paid back. The people who make new value are absolutely rewarded by the creation of new money, because without it no one would be able to take out or provide loans, and those things would mostly not be purchased. And, of course, as pointed out above, without creating the new money, deflation would result, which would ultimately bankrupt everyone.
What is the standard of "basic reasoning skills", and who will make that decision.
As a constitutional amendment would be required, the people who would have to make those decisions would be the people's representatives in the federal and state legislatures.
All citiziens over the age of 18 who are not recent felons are entitled by law to vote. Any bar of "basic reasoning skills" you set will by definition be discriminatory.
Limiting the vote to citizens 18 and over is also, by definition, discriminatory. So?
Aren't stupid people entitled to representation too?
All people, including the under-18, for example, are entitled to representation; but not all people are entitled to participating in choosing their representatives.
Shouldn't people with strong political opinions but no technical sense be entitled to a voice in our democracy?
Ideally, I think people capable of reasoned decision-making, and insightful judgment of character, and vested interest in the state of the republic, should be the ones selecting the representatives. Of course, that is far easier to say than to form a practical system for objectively determining those characteristics in people. Nevertheless, I think it is important to identify what the ideal would be. And in the ideal, strong political opinion, without the above qualities, does nothing to contribute to the system.
At the best, setting a bar for voting of "basic reasoning skills" is elitist.
Basic reasoning skills is no more elitist than the age requirement. IMO, to the degree that it is elitist, it would be a good kind of elitist... sort of like the kind where they only let people with the appropriate education and experience design nuclear reactors.
At worst, such a bar is arbitrarily discrminatory because it can be set anywhere to disallow electoral participation by the bar setters of any group(s) they don't think should be allowed to vote.
Yep, and that would be the main obstacle to coming up with a reasonable system for doing it.
No, voting should be open to all. It should be easy and as unconfusing as possible. One shouldn't be requried to pass any implicit intellegence test to vote, and the only qualifications besides age, citizenship and not having recently committed any felonies should be the desire to vote and a decision as to whom to vote for.
What gives age, citizenship, and recent felony conviction special status as acceptable bases of discrimination, other than that that is the current state of the law? Age is an implicit reasoning ability test. Citizenship (formerly land ownership) is an implicit vested interest test. Felony conviction is an implicit political test.
Enough of the paper-trail fetish already. As with almost every other potential failure case, a paper record of votes in this case would have accomplished absolutely nothing.
"That means there may or may not be life. A fossil would mean there is proof of life."
A fossil would be a long way from "proof." Since we have no idea what Mars life should look like, unless it happens to look a whole lot like earth life, it would probably be 95% speculation as to whether the fossilized thing had been a form of life.
Now regarding the actual article, what they seem to be saying is that there might have been a longer window for life to develop on Mars. Frankly this was always an unlikely event...Mars is and probably always has been dead.
Based on what? We have no idea. For all we know it may be virtually impossible for a planet to go 1,000 years with liquid water on its surface without acquiring life.
Is there anyone with any depth technical knowledge at all, that seriously believes that we should use such a corruptible technology as electronic voting machines in our sacred voting process?
You can't secure them. Anybody with an ounce of sense about computer security knows this. Plus, there is no way to verify whether they are programmed to do what they should.
Paper is 1000% more corruptible than digital information. Paper cannot be digitally encrypted or signed. As a result, there are no methods for reliably preventing unauthorized duplications. That's why there's a centuries-old history of fraud in paper votes. It's as easy as a teamster bringing in an extra crate of votes to be counted. Obviously, a poor design is bad, regardless of the medium. But a well-designed digital system, with a well-designed protocol, a well-designed UI, and extensive encrypted, signed, and timestamped logs at all points of interest, would be the ideal voting system. Far better and far more protected from fraud and human error than paper.
But this is voting, for God's sake. WE MUST MAKE IT EASY for anyone or we have failed
I say the opposite is true. We should make it moderately difficult to complete a valid vote. That way the final tally will reflect the subset of voters with basic reasoning skills.
Side note: makes much more sense then the big bang theory, which reeks of creationism.
That was exactly the approach of the Scientific Religionists who denied the Big Bang for generations on that very basis. And then the cosmic background radiation was discovered, which put an end to the denial. Someone really needs to formulate a new Scientific Method, which doesn't make use of evidence. That way we can come up with scientific theories that smell just the way we like.
this senile old bastard is trying to drop the blame ball on someone else than himself. he was the person who ushered the 'let everyone run around lawless' era in finance. he was praising it and saying that 'free market' was this and that. now he comes up saying he is 'shocked' to see the market not regulating ITSELF.
i have news for you, bastard, what you call market is comprised of PEOPLE, and its a social activity. just like life doesnt 'regulate' itself so that you still need laws and justice system, the social activity you call 'market' also is comprised of people and full of opportunists, schemers, bastards, exploiters, criminals and crooks. if you just let everything be, IT BREAKS. and IT DID.
any person with only a few decade of life experience under his/her belt would be able to realize this.
but you and your fellows in the church of holistic economists were SO zealots in your belief that, you were unable to realize this simple fact of social existence despite your 5-6 decades on the face of this world.
Yes, there are too many zealots on both sides. Regulate Everything! Regulate Nothing! They both need to do a lot more thinking and a lot less ideologizing. It takes experience, and it takes learning from failures, and a lot of uncommon objectivity, to start cluing in to what a lawful society fundamentally needs to regulate, and what a lawful society fundamentally needs to not regulate. We have a long way to go.
However, I don't believe for a second that Greenspan is one of the zealots. He was not surprised that it turns out that the financial system needs regulating, like you seem to imply. What he was surprised by was that corporations, working towards their own self-interests, with all the risks that banks and insurance companies especially take extraordinary measures to insulate themselves against, would fail to insulate themselves from risks that could utterly destroy them in one fell swoop. You don't expect self-interest to solve ever problem, but you generally do expect it to solve the problem of self-preservation -- especially self-preservation of the most powerful entities in the country. I think it's reasonable for him to be surprised that that didn't happen. That some of the biggest banks and insurers in the country would basically simultaneously stupid themselves to death en mass. The critical mass of short-sightedness required for that to happen is not even imaginable to me, at least the way that I imagine banks and insurance companies operating.
I've heard this statement many times, but I've never heard it explained. How would the Fed set the Federal Funds Rate in such a way as to be natural rather than artificial? It's one thing to put forth the opinion that the Fed should just walk the line closer to deflation, but I don't understand the whole "artificial" thing.
I agree the Fed reserve printing money at will is a crock
I also agree that the Fed printing money at will is a crock... especially since the Fed doesn't have any printing presses.;) Anyway, believe the last time the government raised money by having the Treasury just print some up was when Lincoln did so during the Civil War. It wasn't a popular move.
And yes, printing money right now is a horrible mistake. 1 trillion there another trillion here. I hope everyone is ready for the upcoming hyper inflation and 15%+ interest rates!
You might have missed the part where untold tens of trillions of dollars just vanished from the economy. Injecting a trillion back in not only isn't going to cause inflation, it's not even going to put a significant dent in the deflation tsunami that's quietly barreling towards us. Interest rates are not going to be 15%; they're going to be 0.01%, but still no one will be willing to borrow, because deflation will cause the money they will have to pay back to be worth more than the money they borrowed by an unpredictable amount.
When the Federal Reserve prints (or equivalent) and loans out ANY money, the new money gets its value by diluting the value of ALL the money, thus stealing value from the money already out there.
You can say that new money gets its value by diluting the rest of the money. But the reason it is necessary to expand the money supply in the first place is because the underlying value represented by the money (the GDP) is growing. The Fed does not expand or contract the money supply to take value away from your dollars. It does so to keep the value of your dollars as constant as possible without deflating. The Federal Reserve system is ingenious in the way that it tends towards maintaining this equilibrium automatically... That is, new money is generally only created as asset-backed loans. That is, a big chunk of new value is added to the GDP as a new home or a new factory, and new money is created to balance with it in the form of the loan that the homeowner or the corporation takes out to pay for it.
They believe that ALL money should consist of, or be 100% backed by, a valuable commodity. The value of the money would fluctuate ONLY according to the value of the commodity (and, in the case of "backed" tokens, by the perception of the reliability of the commodity warehousing operation). Thus it would be impossible for the government or its proxies to steal the value out of money already out there to give to its cronies.
All money IS backed by a valuable commodity -- the GDP of the issuing country. That's what money exists for. It does not exist to represent a single commodity within the GDP and the whole GDP simultaneously. When you try to make money do that, all it does is artificially inflate the value of the commodity to the value of the GDP, and put a cap on the ability of the GDP, to grow in value, and ultimately set the country up for a deflation spiral. That's the best case. The worst case is if a whole lot of countries are all doing that, and, stupidly, all using the same underlying commodity, and at the same time trading with each other. Then you have the insanity that was the global economy of the 1930s, with market-driven flows of gold into and out of countries out of control of everyone, and decimating the economy of every single country on the gold-standard.
I realize there is a rampant cultish belief out there that money that is not a promissory note for shiny metal is not really money. But if that belief is identified with Libertarianism, I have to be more careful not to associate myself with that term.
"There are few things that anger me more than the privatization of social responsibility."
What does this mean? Is social responsibility not an inherently private matter to begin with? If social responsibility is collectivized, it's no longer social responsibility, but something else.
Still, the conditions there have a perhaps unconscious effect on the way they do things. Take for example this picture of the astronauts on the rocket, before it was tilted up into the vertical position.
I think the US, more than India, is developing India's scientists and engineers, at least at the higher education level.
discouraging all rational thought (God did it!)
I agree that we are increasingly discouraging rational thought. That discouragement comes from people on both sides of religion. It is polarization and animosity between ideologies, whether political, religious, philosophical, or anything else, that discourages rationality. I don't know how you intended what you said, but the implication is that you consider thought about God, or attributing causes to God, to be irrational, a priori.
Knowledge and rationality comes in in many forms and by many paths. For people with a knowledge of God to be confronted with a statement like the above, is simply to encourage them to respond, "if that's what rational thought is, then I want nothing to do with it." In other words, you're doing the thing you're complaining about.
But you have to realize that this is a fundamental human problem for every human being, regardless of status, class, intellect, or education, many of histories brightest minds were horribly wrong in enormous ways about other things. Look at Newton for instance and the amount he wrote concerning religion, etc.
Newton was horribly wrong for writing extensively on theology???
Socrates showed a long time ago that all knowledge and claims to morals and truth is political.
Not sure what you mean by that. Socrates tried to show, probably more than anything else, that knowledges were innate. And that in the most fundamental things, learning is not really learning, but in some sense "remembering" what we already know.
WP is an interesting experiment in expanding the scientific method by removing the "peer" from "peer-review". Ironically, it works exactly there where we-as-common-humans are peers - in the facts of everyday life, that are within our capabilities to verify and thusly thanks to the vast popularity of WP, there'll always be someone to spot the error and correct it.
I don't see WP having anything whatsoever to do with the scientific method. Peer-review is NOT part of the scientific method. The scientific method is specifically excluded from wikipedia as "original research". The idea of an encyclopedia is to trust the vetting process of well-established and respectable secondary sources (hence "verifiability"), not to vet primary sources directly, or conduct actual experiments to try to determine truth.
An Encyclopedia is a tertiary reference source, based on secondary sources. Hence, verifiability is the key. This is nothing particular to wikipedia. It is general to every encyclopedia. This is not Truth. It is not a revelation from God. Truth has nothing to do with it. If wikipedia -- or any other encyclopedia -- is successful in its endeavor, then it will be as accurate as its secondary sources; no more, no less.
The concept of truth is reserved for the domains of philosophy and theology.
here's the actual vote: SENATE: 100% Democrats; 100% Republicans (unaminous) HOUSE: 90% Democrats; 85% Republicans (veto-proof) PRESIDENT: Signed by *democrat* William J. Clinton in 1998.
What was that about being a "republican" bill? It looks like a typical Duopoly bill to me, supported by BOTH sides, since they both pretty much act alike.
And Clinton still defends it, and says it has nothing to do with the current crisis:
"I don't see that signing that bill had anything to do with the current crisis. Indeed, one of the things that has helped stabilize the current situation as much as it has is the purchase of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America, which was much smoother than it would have been if I hadn't signed that bill... On the Glass-Steagall thing, like I said, if you could demonstrate to me that it was a mistake, I'd be glad to look at the evidence."
And though I despise Bill Clinton with every fiber of my being, I have to admit he makes an excellent point about the bill allowing some of the mergers that are now saving banks without the need for government to step in and help.
There are arguments for public healthcare that are nothing to do with whether we should have welfare for the poor:
* Everyone benefits from a healthy society, such as stopping contagious diseases, and having a healthy workforce.
So if something benefits the public, it should be nationalized??? Great, we just need to put everything into two buckets: If it's beneficial, nationalize it. If it's not, outlaw it. Enjoy your worker's paradise.
* Private companies tend to discriminate, making it unfair to anyone with any pre-existing conditions for example. I'm happy to pay for costs myself (whether towards a policy, or taxation), but I'd rather not gamble my health with the private insurance companies, thanks.
Exactly, private companies tend to discriminate. And the government is utterly incapable of performing any task which requires discrimination... like insurance. Take fire insurance. The more of your house is engulfed in flames, the more you need fire insurance. Yet these greedy, rich, corporate, evil, insurance companies will deny you fire insurance if your house has a pre-existing condition of being ablaze at the time you're applying for coverage. You'll get no such bigotry from the government!
The US has state schools does it not? Surely we should privatise schools instead of having this "socialist" schooling system?
That is correct. That's why our higher education system is the envy of the rest of the world, and our secondary education system is the joke of the rest of the world.
And what about the military, what's this nonsense about Government funded defence? Anyone who suggests otherwise has a "gimme gimme gimme" attitude, and they want to "raid their neighbors' wallets", right?
Here you're wrong. While diversity makes almost all types of things thrive, including insurance and education, the opposite is true for an army to provide a common defense of a country. That's why it's one of the only roles, along with supplying a uniform currency, which is entrusted to the federal government by the Constitution.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that Republicans call it a "war" at all just means they utterly lost the propaganda battle with the Democrats, as usual. The war lasted about 2 weeks. The occupation lasted about 6 months. Since then it has been a military presence. Anything approaching an intelligible discussion should discuss it in those terms.
As for the Iraqi's themselves, they would vote McCain, because they would fear that Obama would withdraw US troops to quickly:
Both are true -- the GDP is the aggregate value available to be traded for the total money supply. Therefore in an open market, the value of the dollar is equal to the value in the GDP divided by the number of dollars in the market.
When money could be redeemed for gold or silver, the value of gold or silver became inflated as the aggregate value of the GDP expanded. Around 1930, most European countries had currency redeemable for gold. But France's GDP was not contracting as fast as the other countries. This made gold as measured in Francs worth a lot more than gold as measured in any other currency, which made gold worth less in those countries than in France, and those currencies themselves worth less than the gold they could be redeemed for and then sold for Francs. This meant all the gold, and all the currency equivalents in Europe started funneling into France and out of every other country. This meant that the already rampant deflation across Europe countries became even more extreme, and every country dropped the gold standard like the bad habit that it was. The countries who did so quickest suffered the least.
All that to say, that tying a currency to gold does not increase the value of the currency (unless the GDP is less than the value of the gold reserves, in which case all the currency would be exported for its value in gold), rather it increases the value of gold to the value of the GDP / the gold reserves.
In a sense that's true. It's the legally guaranteed status of legal tender that makes the value of any currency equal to the value of its country's GDP / the supply of that currency.
There is virtually NO amount of deflation that is sustainable. To see what happens in deflation, again see the Great Depression, or 1990's Japan. If the currency deflates, it is necessary to reduce prices and wages. However, workers generally don't accept reduced wages, so the inevitable result is a reduced payroll via layoffs instead. This means less value in the GDP, from the workers' lost work, which is the process by which the GDP follows the money supply down in a death spiral. It also means less aggregate demand from the works' lost wages, decreasing the effective money supply further. etc, etc.
See above. OTOH, here's a dime. I'll take sourdough with sesame seeds.
No, the people who get the new money first are the people who take out loans, and the people who build the new houses, factories, and cars that people and companies take out the loans to buy. The banks get the new money third, as the loans are paid back. The people who make new value are absolutely rewarded by the creation of new money, because without it no one would be able to take out or provide loans, and those things would mostly not be purchased. And, of course, as pointed out above, without creating the new money, deflation would result, which would ultimately bankrupt everyone.
As a constitutional amendment would be required, the people who would have to make those decisions would be the people's representatives in the federal and state legislatures.
Limiting the vote to citizens 18 and over is also, by definition, discriminatory. So?
All people, including the under-18, for example, are entitled to representation; but not all people are entitled to participating in choosing their representatives.
Ideally, I think people capable of reasoned decision-making, and insightful judgment of character, and vested interest in the state of the republic, should be the ones selecting the representatives. Of course, that is far easier to say than to form a practical system for objectively determining those characteristics in people. Nevertheless, I think it is important to identify what the ideal would be. And in the ideal, strong political opinion, without the above qualities, does nothing to contribute to the system.
Basic reasoning skills is no more elitist than the age requirement. IMO, to the degree that it is elitist, it would be a good kind of elitist... sort of like the kind where they only let people with the appropriate education and experience design nuclear reactors.
Yep, and that would be the main obstacle to coming up with a reasonable system for doing it.
What gives age, citizenship, and recent felony conviction special status as acceptable bases of discrimination, other than that that is the current state of the law? Age is an implicit reasoning ability test. Citizenship (formerly land ownership) is an implicit vested interest test. Felony conviction is an implicit political test.
Enough of the paper-trail fetish already. As with almost every other potential failure case, a paper record of votes in this case would have accomplished absolutely nothing.
"That means there may or may not be life. A fossil would mean there is proof of life."
A fossil would be a long way from "proof." Since we have no idea what Mars life should look like, unless it happens to look a whole lot like earth life, it would probably be 95% speculation as to whether the fossilized thing had been a form of life.
Based on what? We have no idea. For all we know it may be virtually impossible for a planet to go 1,000 years with liquid water on its surface without acquiring life.
You mean, unless Barack Obama is elected president.
"Republican Senator Chuck Hagel actually owned the company that controlled the elctronic voting in the election that he won."
Uh... no. He owned $1 million in shares of a company that owned 25% interest in the company that made the voting machines.
Paper is 1000% more corruptible than digital information. Paper cannot be digitally encrypted or signed. As a result, there are no methods for reliably preventing unauthorized duplications. That's why there's a centuries-old history of fraud in paper votes. It's as easy as a teamster bringing in an extra crate of votes to be counted. Obviously, a poor design is bad, regardless of the medium. But a well-designed digital system, with a well-designed protocol, a well-designed UI, and extensive encrypted, signed, and timestamped logs at all points of interest, would be the ideal voting system. Far better and far more protected from fraud and human error than paper.
I say the opposite is true. We should make it moderately difficult to complete a valid vote. That way the final tally will reflect the subset of voters with basic reasoning skills.
Uh... GWB served in the military.
That was exactly the approach of the Scientific Religionists who denied the Big Bang for generations on that very basis. And then the cosmic background radiation was discovered, which put an end to the denial. Someone really needs to formulate a new Scientific Method, which doesn't make use of evidence. That way we can come up with scientific theories that smell just the way we like.
Yes, there are too many zealots on both sides. Regulate Everything! Regulate Nothing! They both need to do a lot more thinking and a lot less ideologizing. It takes experience, and it takes learning from failures, and a lot of uncommon objectivity, to start cluing in to what a lawful society fundamentally needs to regulate, and what a lawful society fundamentally needs to not regulate. We have a long way to go.
However, I don't believe for a second that Greenspan is one of the zealots. He was not surprised that it turns out that the financial system needs regulating, like you seem to imply. What he was surprised by was that corporations, working towards their own self-interests, with all the risks that banks and insurance companies especially take extraordinary measures to insulate themselves against, would fail to insulate themselves from risks that could utterly destroy them in one fell swoop. You don't expect self-interest to solve ever problem, but you generally do expect it to solve the problem of self-preservation -- especially self-preservation of the most powerful entities in the country. I think it's reasonable for him to be surprised that that didn't happen. That some of the biggest banks and insurers in the country would basically simultaneously stupid themselves to death en mass. The critical mass of short-sightedness required for that to happen is not even imaginable to me, at least the way that I imagine banks and insurance companies operating.
I've heard this statement many times, but I've never heard it explained. How would the Fed set the Federal Funds Rate in such a way as to be natural rather than artificial? It's one thing to put forth the opinion that the Fed should just walk the line closer to deflation, but I don't understand the whole "artificial" thing.
I also agree that the Fed printing money at will is a crock... especially since the Fed doesn't have any printing presses. ;) Anyway, believe the last time the government raised money by having the Treasury just print some up was when Lincoln did so during the Civil War. It wasn't a popular move.
You might have missed the part where untold tens of trillions of dollars just vanished from the economy. Injecting a trillion back in not only isn't going to cause inflation, it's not even going to put a significant dent in the deflation tsunami that's quietly barreling towards us. Interest rates are not going to be 15%; they're going to be 0.01%, but still no one will be willing to borrow, because deflation will cause the money they will have to pay back to be worth more than the money they borrowed by an unpredictable amount.
You can say that new money gets its value by diluting the rest of the money. But the reason it is necessary to expand the money supply in the first place is because the underlying value represented by the money (the GDP) is growing. The Fed does not expand or contract the money supply to take value away from your dollars. It does so to keep the value of your dollars as constant as possible without deflating. The Federal Reserve system is ingenious in the way that it tends towards maintaining this equilibrium automatically... That is, new money is generally only created as asset-backed loans. That is, a big chunk of new value is added to the GDP as a new home or a new factory, and new money is created to balance with it in the form of the loan that the homeowner or the corporation takes out to pay for it.
All money IS backed by a valuable commodity -- the GDP of the issuing country. That's what money exists for. It does not exist to represent a single commodity within the GDP and the whole GDP simultaneously. When you try to make money do that, all it does is artificially inflate the value of the commodity to the value of the GDP, and put a cap on the ability of the GDP, to grow in value, and ultimately set the country up for a deflation spiral. That's the best case. The worst case is if a whole lot of countries are all doing that, and, stupidly, all using the same underlying commodity, and at the same time trading with each other. Then you have the insanity that was the global economy of the 1930s, with market-driven flows of gold into and out of countries out of control of everyone, and decimating the economy of every single country on the gold-standard.
I realize there is a rampant cultish belief out there that money that is not a promissory note for shiny metal is not really money. But if that belief is identified with Libertarianism, I have to be more careful not to associate myself with that term.
"There are few things that anger me more than the privatization of social responsibility."
What does this mean? Is social responsibility not an inherently private matter to begin with? If social responsibility is collectivized, it's no longer social responsibility, but something else.
Still, the conditions there have a perhaps unconscious effect on the way they do things. Take for example this picture of the astronauts on the rocket, before it was tilted up into the vertical position.
I think the US, more than India, is developing India's scientists and engineers, at least at the higher education level.
I agree that we are increasingly discouraging rational thought. That discouragement comes from people on both sides of religion. It is polarization and animosity between ideologies, whether political, religious, philosophical, or anything else, that discourages rationality. I don't know how you intended what you said, but the implication is that you consider thought about God, or attributing causes to God, to be irrational, a priori.
Knowledge and rationality comes in in many forms and by many paths. For people with a knowledge of God to be confronted with a statement like the above, is simply to encourage them to respond, "if that's what rational thought is, then I want nothing to do with it." In other words, you're doing the thing you're complaining about.
Newton was horribly wrong for writing extensively on theology???
Not sure what you mean by that. Socrates tried to show, probably more than anything else, that knowledges were innate. And that in the most fundamental things, learning is not really learning, but in some sense "remembering" what we already know.
I don't see WP having anything whatsoever to do with the scientific method. Peer-review is NOT part of the scientific method. The scientific method is specifically excluded from wikipedia as "original research". The idea of an encyclopedia is to trust the vetting process of well-established and respectable secondary sources (hence "verifiability"), not to vet primary sources directly, or conduct actual experiments to try to determine truth.
An Encyclopedia is a tertiary reference source, based on secondary sources. Hence, verifiability is the key. This is nothing particular to wikipedia. It is general to every encyclopedia. This is not Truth. It is not a revelation from God. Truth has nothing to do with it. If wikipedia -- or any other encyclopedia -- is successful in its endeavor, then it will be as accurate as its secondary sources; no more, no less.
The concept of truth is reserved for the domains of philosophy and theology.
Um, disregard that. I thought we were still taking about... nevermind.
And Clinton still defends it, and says it has nothing to do with the current crisis:
And though I despise Bill Clinton with every fiber of my being, I have to admit he makes an excellent point about the bill allowing some of the mergers that are now saving banks without the need for government to step in and help.
So if something benefits the public, it should be nationalized??? Great, we just need to put everything into two buckets: If it's beneficial, nationalize it. If it's not, outlaw it. Enjoy your worker's paradise.
Exactly, private companies tend to discriminate. And the government is utterly incapable of performing any task which requires discrimination... like insurance. Take fire insurance. The more of your house is engulfed in flames, the more you need fire insurance. Yet these greedy, rich, corporate, evil, insurance companies will deny you fire insurance if your house has a pre-existing condition of being ablaze at the time you're applying for coverage. You'll get no such bigotry from the government!
That is correct. That's why our higher education system is the envy of the rest of the world, and our secondary education system is the joke of the rest of the world.
Here you're wrong. While diversity makes almost all types of things thrive, including insurance and education, the opposite is true for an army to provide a common defense of a country. That's why it's one of the only roles, along with supplying a uniform currency, which is entrusted to the federal government by the Constitution.