Hey, FWIW, how about actually observing the Google Reality Distortion Field[1] before blasting its sure appearance?
There is institutional bias at slashdot, but from what I've seen, the pro-googliness has dropped in the past year or two as Google has started playing hardball with a big stack[2].
At any rate, slashdot is a community of individuals, and any perceived bias among the community just reflects the fact that fanbois exist -- and if you're aware of that fact, you can run the comments through your own internal bias filter when reading them. Sure, it's all well and good to hope that by decrying the bias, you might be able get people to change their minds... but good luck with that. Far better to get some popcorn and watch the spectacle of Google fanbois trying to defend their idol, lest they lose all hope of a giganticorp actually not acting selfishly.
[1] Bonus points for an Apple reference in a Microsoft/Google proto-flamewar? [2] Bonus points for the baseball/poker mixed metaphor?
I was going to mod you troll, but I thought it better to respond instead.
Obvoiusly, people on slashdot want to discuss politics. Since slashdot is more-or-less an open forum, this means that people will discuss politics.
Assuming you don't want to read about politics on slashdot, especially since there are moderators who mod based on idealogy... you should be very happy that there is a discussion dedicated to politics.
Why? It's a honeypot. People who post in this discussion will be less likely to make political posts in other discussions. Moderators who mod based on idealogy will use their limited mod points here.
You can then have a relatively politics-free slashdot for the sections you like (hardware, YRO, whatever floats your boat).
In short, if you don't want to read about politics on slashdot, that's your choice. Be glad there is a specific place for politics, so you have less in the articles your prefer. And did I mention you can choose to not have politics show on your mainpage via preferences? It's really easy.
the internet has actually democratized the media by allowing the public to bypass traditional channels of media distribution which are largely been consolidated and tightly controlled by a handful of media corporations.
Interestingly enough, there was an article on Slashdot sometime in the past two years (not sure when) that referenced a study that showed that the "democratizing effect" the internet has on media has actually led to *less* information being available. All of the traditional sources of media have had to reduce themselves to pop culture news in an effort to maintain viewership, resulting in crappier and less informative news.
I agree that decentralizing media is a good thing, but there are a lot of unintended consequences, not all of which are good for us (in general). Be careful what you wish for.
I didn't read the specs, but it looks heavy enough to do as you suggest.
The question is whether a cardboard box stuffed with newspapers provide sufficient crushing resistance to withstand however many kg/m2 are exerted by each leg when it is walking.
And even better, it's not 30k GBP per person. I'd expect a single one of these units could "resolve" hundreds of homeless problems.
You *do* just stick those things on your balance sheet; the issue is being able to justify them
Not if you want to remain free from investigation of fiscal impropriety (as a catch-all term for the various statutes you'd be violating).
Goodwill is a "soft" number a lot of time, in the sense that it is subjective -- however, there are USGAAP methods required for calculating goodwill based on estimates of future profitability (which is the whole process of valuation). When your balance sheet indicates a value less than an independent valuation, you need to state the difference as goodwill. A subsequent reduction in external valuation, or increase in book valuation, means that you need to reduce the value of your goodwill (this is done because goodwill is no longer amortized in USGAAP).
You're probably aware of all this... but it's mistaken to say that you just plop a goodwill number onto your balance sheet. That number is derived from elsewhere, if you play by the rules.
the 1990's called, we use DNA to figure out who isn't cleaning up their dog poophttp://idle.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/17/160246&from=rss, paternity suits likewise are solved with DNA tests.
Who cares how it's solved? The point is that if the fathers don't remember having sex with the mother, there are likely to be more paternity suits than there are now, since the fathers will deny responsibility... which means more coin for the paternity suit industry.
...and needless to say these guys design everything as a truncated octahedron or a hexagonal prism (on it's side, yet, so there are no vertical walls) and never as a BORING OLD CUBOID. Because having wide flat floors to live on and vertical walls to put doors in would be too boring and traditional and convenient.
And yet, hexagonal prisms are stacked more easily than cubes. You only need to lift 1/2h instead of h in order to attach the next one.
And hexes, when space is a constrain, are more efficient for furnished rooms. If your seats are built on the walls, you lose less space to the seating.
Hexes also allow greater variability in stacking arrangements -- some people prefer more options, and six walls are greater than four in this regard.
Hexes require less flat ground in order to "park" them, since the area of the bottom facet is smaller.
Maybe the attachment points for the legs are better on a hex than on a cube; if you attach the legs to the bottom vertice of a cube, you will be top-heave and more likely to topple, I believe. If you attach them to the faces of the cube, maye it's more expensive (both in weight and in cost) to provide the necessary support.
These are just some reasons off the top of my head, for why hexes *might* be preferable to cubes, I'm sure there are others.
The biggest one being, IMO, the preference of early adopters for things that look cool. The wow factor is a big draw for frivolous luxury goods like this.
I'm betting it was done for SEO to drive ad impressions. Not direct advertising (from Dell etc), but still was done to increase ad revenue from pagehits, clickthroughs, etc.
It sounds like science fiction, but scientists say it might one day be possible to erase undesirable memories from the brain, selectively and safely.
Screw that. I want to erase desirable memories from people's brains. Think how easy it would be to make office workers stay later when they can't remember any of the good stuff that happens when they leave the office?
Or for shits and giggles, how about removing all traces of memories of sex for the unwed father of a child? Would make the paternity suit industry tons of coin, I bet.
But enough of the super-villain type stuff.
How abvout erasing the memory of the first time you had warm apple pie? Then, you get to try it for the first time every night.
On the other hand I suppose it's good that people got a chance to pay down credit card bills and take some debt out of the system.
Which is the entire point of the "stimulus" checks. This is not to stimulate the economy by increased consumer spending (which, by the way, has a reduced impact due to so few consumer goods being made in the US -- though some people do use the checks to purchase services).
This is about further bailout of the banks. Many people who have insufficient income to pay back their debt will use their "stimulus" payment to pay down their debt, which would otherwise become bad debt, and need to be written down by the banks.
In the end, the "stimulus" checks will have some of the desired effects. It will increase the capital available to the banks, thus enabling them to meet the minimal fractional reserve requirements, thus freeing up capital for lending. This, in theory, should stimulate the economy.
But those of us who are not in the banking industry should know that these checks aren;t about putting money in our pocket, they are about putting money in the banks' pockets.
discovered that the game used colour-checking to do collision detection and gave the gorillas armoured helmets
Color? Noob.:)
The first commercial game I bought was Telengard for the PET2001. Must have been in '82 or '83, I think. It was several thousand lines of Basic... and the only way to access the code was to interrupt the read-from-tape process.
Once you had access to the code, it was trivial to hack up variables for monsters or the character, or for items. Maps were much tougher, we never figured them out (maybe if I revisited now... but it was a stretch for an 8 or 9-yo).
At any rate, we must have made at least 30 modded versions that we saved on new cassettes, I recall going to college and finding the box of cassettes with the different versions on them. We did everything from changing the genre to post-apocalyptic, to super-buffing the PC to be able to descend to level 50 right away (purely for mapping purposes, of course), to changing the results of "(S)it on Throne" and "(R)ead the Runes", to adding in minigames.
I have to say that changing the genre of Telengard was probably the simplest genre change ever... that was the one positive to the simple "graphics" of the time. Just needed to change the names of monsters, items, action descriptions, and special locations. With more work, we probably could have made more significant changes (that really affected gameplay).
Anyway, thanks for the walk down memory lane. Wish I could still load up Telengard, and the mods we made... The PET still works, but the cassettes don't, and I'm not going to spend the money to have them fixed.
Just wanted to note that I wasn't concerned about the timescale for beneficial impact on atmospheric CO2... I'm concerned about the long timescale to find out about possible negative effects.
I 100% agree that it is more sensoble than the glitter tactic, and testing on a small scale is already underway.
This idea (ocean fertilization with iron and/or urea) has been bandied about for some time, and it has its own problems... which, IMO, require further study in limited deployment. These problems include:
Surface blooms that create low-oxygen zones Toxic algae blooms Starvation of coral beds Disporportional stimulation of diatom growth (diatoms are not as good a food source for copepods as algae, and in high concetrations cause gill problems in fish)
Some of these issues can probably be resolved (e.g., blooms limited by the amount of iron (or urea) used to fertilize the surface), but if you limit the fertilization, you in turn limit its effectiveness.
One other thing I'd like to note is that ocean fertilization also has the potential to greatly increase local oceanic biomass, including food species -- this could be a real boon to areas with nutrient deficiencies in their waters (equatorial Pacific, mostly). Interestingly, this was the original purpose of ocean fertilization research, the carbon sequestration is a nice side effect (though, of course, we don't yet know if the carbon would actually be sequestered at the ocean floor, or if it would be converted into methane in a low-oxygen environment, which is a worst-case scenario for the carbon impact).
At any rate, ocean fertilization holds a lot of potential for both food production and carbon impact, but there are significant questions to be answered before we should roll out on a widescale basis... and some of those questions may take decades to understand enough to be confident in large-scale deployment.(like impact on ecosystems/food webs due to differentials in growth stimulation of different species).
We already have to deal with grammar nazis, now we're dealing with standards nazis? When will it end!?
What do you think a grammar nazi is. They are trying to enforce language usage standards.
I'm actually now very curious as to whether your typical website-standard-nazi uses correct grammar. And whether the average grammar nazi is also a web standards Nazi.
I guess the only reason for a theoretical difference between the two is that the human brain is more capable of interpreting non-standard usage than a web-browser is.
Oh well. Another of life's trivial unanswered questions that will keep me up at night.
You mean to tell me that a government program meant to keep wages artificially inflated is being abused? I'm shocked! Corruption in government? Impossible!
You should be shocked, if that's what the H1B program was about. Outside of the minimum wage, when was the last time legislation was passed to keep wages artificially inflated? The H1B program is meant to keep wages deflated by increasing supply of skilled labor in the short term, until there are enough American workers to fulfill the demand.
It fails, though, because it removes the incentive (high pay) for American workers to develop the skillsets actually needed... although theoretically, it allows some smaller American companies to continue existence by keeping labor costs down.
I see your graph. But my point still holds about legislative impact. During the 90s, the growth of the debt was not exponential, it was logarithmic. In the current decade, the debt growth is pretty much straight-line. The reason I bring up these decades is because extrapolating historic data to apply to present times makes sense only if we do not expect legislative action and short-term trends to affect the debt.
At any rate, what really matters is the debt as a percentage of GDP. Once you normalize for GDP, the debt is not as scary as you make it out to be... though it is still frightening. The simple fact of the matter is that our economy has grown only a little bit slower than the debt over the past 40 years. There was a nice reversal trend in the 90s, when the economy grew faster than the debt. And this brings us to one of your original points, which is that funding our debt is dependent on continued growth. While growth is not assured in the short term, it's a safe bet in the long run*. It's completely normal for human economies to grow in times of peace, throughout history, that has been the trend (catastrohpes excluded).
*Of course, we don't yet know the extent to which environmental damage is a limiting factor on growth, nor population thresholds. But technology continues to drive the "population ceiling" higher and higher, while providing for growth in new areas, and environmental policies continue to evolve.
Anyway, my main point still stands. Fractional reserve lending does not impact the national debt, other than by driving inflation. And if you're concerned about the national debt, you should welcome inflation with open arms. It devalues the debt we hold. One of the ways we can reduce spending is to hold absolute (not inflation-adjusted) outlays to current levels, while allowing for moderate inflation over the next 5-10 years. This is what I expect to happen, and even if the economy is completely stagnant, with no growth (or even a small decline), this will reduce debt growth, and will reduce debt as a portion of GDP. The only fear with this policy is runaway inflation, which we are at risk for because of other economies in the world.
If your money is created from nothing at the point of a loan and you want to inflate the money supply then you also have to increase the (exponentially growing) debt at the same time.
What? This is not true at all.
The national debt is the federal government balance. Bank-issued FR loans have no direct impact on the national debt -- but they do directly increase the money supply. This will inflate the currency unless there is corresponding growth in the economy.
But I'm not sure what you're trying to say... one cannot "inflate the money supply"... unless you are not using the word "inflate" as the standard term in economics. One inflates a currency by increasing the money supply relative to production. The debt is not growing exponentially... You claim it is a predictable exponential function and has a doubling time, would you like to share the math? This graph suggests otherwise. The national debt cannot be a predictable exponential function, since it is dependent on legislation. Any non-nominal change to budgetary or appropriation legislation changes the rate of growth of the national debt. How can you claim it is predictable, or that it is exponential?
I agree with you that there is a problem with the pyramid scheme economy that we're stuck with, and I think corrective action should have been taken 5-6 years ago. But railing against a fractional reserve is useless in a discussion of the national debt.
Whether or not I disagree with your idealogy, please stop the demagoguery. It's exceedingly annoying to continue to see posts involving economic theory that don't make sense, but hit all the right buttons to incite the even less informed.
I'm anything but a free-market idealist, but there is a modicum of rational thought in those libertarians who understand economics, and subscribe to the Austrian School of economic thought.
The gist of it is that, sure, natural barriers to entry create uncompetitive markets in the short run. But in the long run, a competing technology will arise. So, if there is a natural monopoly on land-based telephone service, that is not a problem, since eventually, someone will invent telephone service that doesn't depend on landlines.
According to the Austrian School, a monopoly that exists for a few generations is not a problem, since it will eventualy fall under competitive pressure from new technology. Government interference in the market (say, by restricting the actions of a monopoly in exchange for allowing or condoning the monopoly) is inefficient in that mindset, since it prevents market forces from acting properly.
I disagree with this, since there are plenty of things monopolies can do to prevent technologically-new competition (such as buying them out) that don't even involve the purchase of legislation. The important thing that I think most libertarians without an economic education miss, is that a free market idealogy, which espouses non-interference by government, is not the same thing as an ideal free market, which is a fictional construct used for basic economic analysis. No market is an ideal free market, because there is, in addition to natural barriers to entry, incomplete information awareness. Only if all actors in a market have complete and accurate information can a free market become an ideal free market.
So, I'm not sure if I've helped clear up why free market idealists (like some libertarians) think that laissez-faire is the be-all and end-all of economic policy... but this is the best I've been able to come up with after many, many discussions with libertarians, and hundreds of hours of non-curricular study of economic theory (in addition to 60 credit-hours of study of curricular economics).
My personal belief is that we do not get optimal utilization of resources from a pure free market, and allowing a monopoly to exist without regulation is a bad idea due to the business practices of monopolies we've seen.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, FWIW, how about actually observing the Google Reality Distortion Field[1] before blasting its sure appearance?
There is institutional bias at slashdot, but from what I've seen, the pro-googliness has dropped in the past year or two as Google has started playing hardball with a big stack[2].
At any rate, slashdot is a community of individuals, and any perceived bias among the community just reflects the fact that fanbois exist -- and if you're aware of that fact, you can run the comments through your own internal bias filter when reading them. Sure, it's all well and good to hope that by decrying the bias, you might be able get people to change their minds... but good luck with that. Far better to get some popcorn and watch the spectacle of Google fanbois trying to defend their idol, lest they lose all hope of a giganticorp actually not acting selfishly.
[1] Bonus points for an Apple reference in a Microsoft/Google proto-flamewar?
[2] Bonus points for the baseball/poker mixed metaphor?
I was going to mod you troll, but I thought it better to respond instead.
Obvoiusly, people on slashdot want to discuss politics. Since slashdot is more-or-less an open forum, this means that people will discuss politics.
Assuming you don't want to read about politics on slashdot, especially since there are moderators who mod based on idealogy... you should be very happy that there is a discussion dedicated to politics.
Why? It's a honeypot. People who post in this discussion will be less likely to make political posts in other discussions. Moderators who mod based on idealogy will use their limited mod points here.
You can then have a relatively politics-free slashdot for the sections you like (hardware, YRO, whatever floats your boat).
In short, if you don't want to read about politics on slashdot, that's your choice. Be glad there is a specific place for politics, so you have less in the articles your prefer. And did I mention you can choose to not have politics show on your mainpage via preferences? It's really easy.
Interestingly enough, there was an article on Slashdot sometime in the past two years (not sure when) that referenced a study that showed that the "democratizing effect" the internet has on media has actually led to *less* information being available. All of the traditional sources of media have had to reduce themselves to pop culture news in an effort to maintain viewership, resulting in crappier and less informative news.
I agree that decentralizing media is a good thing, but there are a lot of unintended consequences, not all of which are good for us (in general). Be careful what you wish for.
No. No additional wight, he's not dead yet.
Plus I don't think he has enough violence and hatred in his system to qualify for wighthood. Better check with your DM.
>What time is it?
>I don't know, I can't calibrate my crystal oscillator, since I only have one atom to excite.
You're going to need more than a single cesium atom, there bub.
I didn't read the specs, but it looks heavy enough to do as you suggest.
The question is whether a cardboard box stuffed with newspapers provide sufficient crushing resistance to withstand however many kg/m2 are exerted by each leg when it is walking.
And even better, it's not 30k GBP per person. I'd expect a single one of these units could "resolve" hundreds of homeless problems.
Not if you want to remain free from investigation of fiscal impropriety (as a catch-all term for the various statutes you'd be violating).
Goodwill is a "soft" number a lot of time, in the sense that it is subjective -- however, there are USGAAP methods required for calculating goodwill based on estimates of future profitability (which is the whole process of valuation). When your balance sheet indicates a value less than an independent valuation, you need to state the difference as goodwill. A subsequent reduction in external valuation, or increase in book valuation, means that you need to reduce the value of your goodwill (this is done because goodwill is no longer amortized in USGAAP).
You're probably aware of all this... but it's mistaken to say that you just plop a goodwill number onto your balance sheet. That number is derived from elsewhere, if you play by the rules.
No arguments there. It's a pretty stupid good regardless of the shape, IMO.
For early adopters?
This is a luxury good for the time being. It's a novelty item.
Later on, maybe a different story.
Ah, so you caught the allegory. It wasn't unintended.
Who cares how it's solved? The point is that if the fathers don't remember having sex with the mother, there are likely to be more paternity suits than there are now, since the fathers will deny responsibility... which means more coin for the paternity suit industry.
And yet, hexagonal prisms are stacked more easily than cubes. You only need to lift 1/2h instead of h in order to attach the next one.
And hexes, when space is a constrain, are more efficient for furnished rooms. If your seats are built on the walls, you lose less space to the seating.
Hexes also allow greater variability in stacking arrangements -- some people prefer more options, and six walls are greater than four in this regard.
Hexes require less flat ground in order to "park" them, since the area of the bottom facet is smaller.
Maybe the attachment points for the legs are better on a hex than on a cube; if you attach the legs to the bottom vertice of a cube, you will be top-heave and more likely to topple, I believe. If you attach them to the faces of the cube, maye it's more expensive (both in weight and in cost) to provide the necessary support.
These are just some reasons off the top of my head, for why hexes *might* be preferable to cubes, I'm sure there are others.
The biggest one being, IMO, the preference of early adopters for things that look cool. The wow factor is a big draw for frivolous luxury goods like this.
I'm betting it was done for SEO to drive ad impressions. Not direct advertising (from Dell etc), but still was done to increase ad revenue from pagehits, clickthroughs, etc.
Screw that. I want to erase desirable memories from people's brains. Think how easy it would be to make office workers stay later when they can't remember any of the good stuff that happens when they leave the office?
Or for shits and giggles, how about removing all traces of memories of sex for the unwed father of a child? Would make the paternity suit industry tons of coin, I bet.
But enough of the super-villain type stuff.
How abvout erasing the memory of the first time you had warm apple pie? Then, you get to try it for the first time every night.
Which is the entire point of the "stimulus" checks. This is not to stimulate the economy by increased consumer spending (which, by the way, has a reduced impact due to so few consumer goods being made in the US -- though some people do use the checks to purchase services).
This is about further bailout of the banks. Many people who have insufficient income to pay back their debt will use their "stimulus" payment to pay down their debt, which would otherwise become bad debt, and need to be written down by the banks.
In the end, the "stimulus" checks will have some of the desired effects. It will increase the capital available to the banks, thus enabling them to meet the minimal fractional reserve requirements, thus freeing up capital for lending. This, in theory, should stimulate the economy.
But those of us who are not in the banking industry should know that these checks aren;t about putting money in our pocket, they are about putting money in the banks' pockets.
Color? Noob. :)
The first commercial game I bought was Telengard for the PET2001. Must have been in '82 or '83, I think. It was several thousand lines of Basic... and the only way to access the code was to interrupt the read-from-tape process.
Once you had access to the code, it was trivial to hack up variables for monsters or the character, or for items. Maps were much tougher, we never figured them out (maybe if I revisited now... but it was a stretch for an 8 or 9-yo).
At any rate, we must have made at least 30 modded versions that we saved on new cassettes, I recall going to college and finding the box of cassettes with the different versions on them. We did everything from changing the genre to post-apocalyptic, to super-buffing the PC to be able to descend to level 50 right away (purely for mapping purposes, of course), to changing the results of "(S)it on Throne" and "(R)ead the Runes", to adding in minigames.
I have to say that changing the genre of Telengard was probably the simplest genre change ever... that was the one positive to the simple "graphics" of the time. Just needed to change the names of monsters, items, action descriptions, and special locations. With more work, we probably could have made more significant changes (that really affected gameplay).
Anyway, thanks for the walk down memory lane. Wish I could still load up Telengard, and the mods we made... The PET still works, but the cassettes don't, and I'm not going to spend the money to have them fixed.
Just wanted to note that I wasn't concerned about the timescale for beneficial impact on atmospheric CO2... I'm concerned about the long timescale to find out about possible negative effects.
I 100% agree that it is more sensoble than the glitter tactic, and testing on a small scale is already underway.
This idea (ocean fertilization with iron and/or urea) has been bandied about for some time, and it has its own problems... which, IMO, require further study in limited deployment. These problems include:
Surface blooms that create low-oxygen zones
Toxic algae blooms
Starvation of coral beds
Disporportional stimulation of diatom growth (diatoms are not as good a food source for copepods as algae, and in high concetrations cause gill problems in fish)
Some of these issues can probably be resolved (e.g., blooms limited by the amount of iron (or urea) used to fertilize the surface), but if you limit the fertilization, you in turn limit its effectiveness.
One other thing I'd like to note is that ocean fertilization also has the potential to greatly increase local oceanic biomass, including food species -- this could be a real boon to areas with nutrient deficiencies in their waters (equatorial Pacific, mostly). Interestingly, this was the original purpose of ocean fertilization research, the carbon sequestration is a nice side effect (though, of course, we don't yet know if the carbon would actually be sequestered at the ocean floor, or if it would be converted into methane in a low-oxygen environment, which is a worst-case scenario for the carbon impact).
At any rate, ocean fertilization holds a lot of potential for both food production and carbon impact, but there are significant questions to be answered before we should roll out on a widescale basis... and some of those questions may take decades to understand enough to be confident in large-scale deployment.(like impact on ecosystems/food webs due to differentials in growth stimulation of different species).
What do you think a grammar nazi is. They are trying to enforce language usage standards.
I'm actually now very curious as to whether your typical website-standard-nazi uses correct grammar. And whether the average grammar nazi is also a web standards Nazi.
I guess the only reason for a theoretical difference between the two is that the human brain is more capable of interpreting non-standard usage than a web-browser is.
Oh well. Another of life's trivial unanswered questions that will keep me up at night.
You should be shocked, if that's what the H1B program was about. Outside of the minimum wage, when was the last time legislation was passed to keep wages artificially inflated? The H1B program is meant to keep wages deflated by increasing supply of skilled labor in the short term, until there are enough American workers to fulfill the demand.
It fails, though, because it removes the incentive (high pay) for American workers to develop the skillsets actually needed... although theoretically, it allows some smaller American companies to continue existence by keeping labor costs down.
Last time I did that, I got slapped with a harassment suit.
Never mind the old IT adage I heard somewhere, "Where there's an itch, there's a communicable disease or infestation".
YMMV, but an itchy IT worker is the *last* place I'd want to put my hands.
I see your graph. But my point still holds about legislative impact. During the 90s, the growth of the debt was not exponential, it was logarithmic. In the current decade, the debt growth is pretty much straight-line. The reason I bring up these decades is because extrapolating historic data to apply to present times makes sense only if we do not expect legislative action and short-term trends to affect the debt.
At any rate, what really matters is the debt as a percentage of GDP. Once you normalize for GDP, the debt is not as scary as you make it out to be... though it is still frightening. The simple fact of the matter is that our economy has grown only a little bit slower than the debt over the past 40 years. There was a nice reversal trend in the 90s, when the economy grew faster than the debt. And this brings us to one of your original points, which is that funding our debt is dependent on continued growth. While growth is not assured in the short term, it's a safe bet in the long run*. It's completely normal for human economies to grow in times of peace, throughout history, that has been the trend (catastrohpes excluded).
*Of course, we don't yet know the extent to which environmental damage is a limiting factor on growth, nor population thresholds. But technology continues to drive the "population ceiling" higher and higher, while providing for growth in new areas, and environmental policies continue to evolve.
Anyway, my main point still stands. Fractional reserve lending does not impact the national debt, other than by driving inflation. And if you're concerned about the national debt, you should welcome inflation with open arms. It devalues the debt we hold. One of the ways we can reduce spending is to hold absolute (not inflation-adjusted) outlays to current levels, while allowing for moderate inflation over the next 5-10 years. This is what I expect to happen, and even if the economy is completely stagnant, with no growth (or even a small decline), this will reduce debt growth, and will reduce debt as a portion of GDP. The only fear with this policy is runaway inflation, which we are at risk for because of other economies in the world.
What? This is not true at all.
The national debt is the federal government balance. Bank-issued FR loans have no direct impact on the national debt -- but they do directly increase the money supply. This will inflate the currency unless there is corresponding growth in the economy.
But I'm not sure what you're trying to say... one cannot "inflate the money supply"... unless you are not using the word "inflate" as the standard term in economics. One inflates a currency by increasing the money supply relative to production. The debt is not growing exponentially... You claim it is a predictable exponential function and has a doubling time, would you like to share the math? This graph suggests otherwise. The national debt cannot be a predictable exponential function, since it is dependent on legislation. Any non-nominal change to budgetary or appropriation legislation changes the rate of growth of the national debt. How can you claim it is predictable, or that it is exponential?
I agree with you that there is a problem with the pyramid scheme economy that we're stuck with, and I think corrective action should have been taken 5-6 years ago. But railing against a fractional reserve is useless in a discussion of the national debt.
Whether or not I disagree with your idealogy, please stop the demagoguery. It's exceedingly annoying to continue to see posts involving economic theory that don't make sense, but hit all the right buttons to incite the even less informed.
I'm anything but a free-market idealist, but there is a modicum of rational thought in those libertarians who understand economics, and subscribe to the Austrian School of economic thought.
The gist of it is that, sure, natural barriers to entry create uncompetitive markets in the short run. But in the long run, a competing technology will arise. So, if there is a natural monopoly on land-based telephone service, that is not a problem, since eventually, someone will invent telephone service that doesn't depend on landlines.
According to the Austrian School, a monopoly that exists for a few generations is not a problem, since it will eventualy fall under competitive pressure from new technology. Government interference in the market (say, by restricting the actions of a monopoly in exchange for allowing or condoning the monopoly) is inefficient in that mindset, since it prevents market forces from acting properly.
I disagree with this, since there are plenty of things monopolies can do to prevent technologically-new competition (such as buying them out) that don't even involve the purchase of legislation. The important thing that I think most libertarians without an economic education miss, is that a free market idealogy, which espouses non-interference by government, is not the same thing as an ideal free market, which is a fictional construct used for basic economic analysis. No market is an ideal free market, because there is, in addition to natural barriers to entry, incomplete information awareness. Only if all actors in a market have complete and accurate information can a free market become an ideal free market.
So, I'm not sure if I've helped clear up why free market idealists (like some libertarians) think that laissez-faire is the be-all and end-all of economic policy... but this is the best I've been able to come up with after many, many discussions with libertarians, and hundreds of hours of non-curricular study of economic theory (in addition to 60 credit-hours of study of curricular economics).
My personal belief is that we do not get optimal utilization of resources from a pure free market, and allowing a monopoly to exist without regulation is a bad idea due to the business practices of monopolies we've seen.
Score:
MosesJones: 1
Troll victims: 0
Classic trolling style, make one glaring error and then write a seemingly serious post based on the error. Fairly well done, MJ, I give it an 8/10.