"In real dollars" means prices adjusted for inflation.
Long-term Inflation affects the value of all dollars the same whether they are in prices or salaries. It is not the reason that cars are more affordable vs. salaries today.
Everything at volume approaches commodity but not everything goes to volume. Why do some products become popular while others do not? A big part of the answer is IP. Some ideas are better than others.
The lower the price of production gets, the more valuable IP gets. Consider cars for instance (this is Slashdot after all). The basics of building a car cost far less today than they did in 1950. Put another way, if you wanted to build a 1950-level car today, you could sell it for a lot less (in real dollars) than you could then. Manufacturing technology and management is just far more efficient now.
But do cars cost a lot less now than they did in 1950? No. The reason is that today's cars are far more complex and capable machines than cars were in the 1950s. A greater percentage of a car's value today is IP than it was in 1950.
Pharmaceuticals are an even better example. It is not that expensive to manufacture pharmaceuticals. What makes them expensive is their design, and the knowledge of how to use them safely. If you pick up any given pharmaceutical pill, a huge portion of its value is the IP is represents.
Finally consider the pure-IP products like software and music. The cost to reproduce a hit game or album is very, very low. But it is no easier to produce the ORIGINAL of a hit game or album now than it was decades ago. It's not like every band blows up like the Beatles today. If anything the cheaper reproduction has made it even harder to create truly stand-out IP that sells widely. In a world where every song is free, we still have only so much time to listen. Without price the only basis for competition is how good or catchy the song is itself--the pure IP. And the Pirate Bay does not help produce that.
A big failing of Anderson and others (he's certainly not the first to play the "free is inevitable" game), is a failure to take into account the role of law in markets. The law places limits within which the free market operates, including with respect to IP. If it is against the law to freely copy IP, with fines or jail at stake, there will be a deterrence to "free" and copies of IP will retain a price within the official, legal market.
The institutions that failed were for the most part not covered at all by FDIC insurance, which is only available to commercial banks for insurance of private consumer deposits. Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG, etc were not commercial banks and their liabilities were not consumer deposits. However they were deeply embedded in the broader credit markets, including the commercial paper markets that many large industrial companies use to smooth their finances.
Lehman was allowed to fail, the reserve fund broke the buck and there was a tremendous run on the money market to the tune of $500 billion in a couple hours--stanched only by the Federal Reserve's open-ended commitment to support the money market funds. In retrospect there is a clear causation between the bankruptcy of Lehman and many very bad things in the financial markets. FDIC could not help at all since it only deals with commercial banks.
One of the problems is that the government support structure simply did not reflect the reality of the modern financial markets. Shortly after WWII, commercial banks provided over 60% of the total credit in the financial markets, funded primarily by private deposits. The FDIC was a strong backstop for the financial system in those times.
By early 2008, commercial banks provided less than 20% of the total credit, so FDIC insurance only covered a small portion of the total system. It's an incredibly important consumer protection, but it long ago ceased to be an important mitigator of broad financial problems. That is one reason you hear calls for a "systemic risk" regulator going forward.
The new Apple trackpads are amazing. You just push down anywhere to click--feels like a touch interface. You can scroll in any direction with two fingers and "right click" by pushing down with two fingers simultaneously.
On laptops like HP or Thinkpad I've always used the nipple because their trackpads were so small and crappy. I don't miss it at all on my MacBook Pro. In fact I miss my Apple trackpad when I use my Dell laptop from work.
Cap and trade will not increase my taxes, it will increase the prices of energy I buy.
Obama is and was playing to his base, who share two attributes--they don't like big corporations and they have a poor grasp of macroeconomics.
You and I know that there is no practical difference in my first sentence--either way I'm paying more money. But there are a lot of people who think we can raise taxes on big companies and the money will just come from "somewhere" to pay them. The rest of us know that higher corporate taxes are passed right on to the consumer as higher prices.
Of course things can be just as bad on the other side, where some people seem to think that all of climate science is a conspiracy led by Al Gore.
- $10.4 Trillion in today's dollars (conservatively).
Which would go to private corporations who are building and installing the turbines--generating jobs, profits, and shareholder value, growing the broader economy.
If you just look at the price side, any large-scale industrial undertaking appears ludicrously expensive.
The issue in your example is just the difference in look between two different photo mediums. Do the same thing with a Velvia 50 slide and it will stand out from the Kodachomes at least as much as the digitally produced slide will.
Ultimately all films and digital photo captures are visually "fake" because they do not accurately match the color, sharpness, or dynamic range that your eye sees. Whatever you are most used to will look "real" but it's just that you're used to it. Kodachrome was a leading slide film for so long that to a certain generation it is the "real" look of photography. But it's just a matter of habit.
You have not done the example right. Depositors have full claim on their deposits, even though the bank has lent out most of the money. The bank handles this by creating an IOU entry in its books for the amount loaned. These IOUs are known as Commercial Bank Money and are honored by the Fed and other banks.
Since the Fed won't honor IOUs that I make, I think it is clear that there is a difference between me and a chartered bank.
My example works just fine even if you and Bob and Jack and Jill maintain full claim on the funds you've deposited. It's just very prone to a catastrophic bank run.
Why is it important that the Fed honors some IOUs but not others? Ask yourself what is special about the Fed that you would want them to honor your IOUs?
Put another way--if private banks can create money, how can there ever be a run on a bank? Why can't the bank just create enough money to cover the run?
The answer is that the Fed is the only bank who can create money from thin air, and thus is the "lender of last resort" for banks facing a run.
The irony is that until the Federal Reserve Act, banking in this country worked exactly like my example, which is why bank runs were such a problem. I think you don't even realize the degree to which you take the money creation role of the Fed for granted.
That series is over several successive banks. But each individual bank always has less money out on loan than the total value of its deposits.
Your series works just as well with people as it does with banks. You give me $100...
I lend $90 to Bob and keep $10. Bob lends $81 to Jack and keeps $9. Jack lends $72 to Jill and keeps $7. etc.
The effect is exactly the same. Private banks hold no special position as money creators.
The point people have trouble with is that the series must have a beginning. In our system, that beginning is the Federal Reserve, which alone among banks can create the money it places on deposit. Every other bank must have a deposit first before it can issue a loan, and then the loan must be less than the value of the deposit. Thus no individual bank is empowered to create money.
Banks benefit because, under our system, all money is created by debt so money and debt are fungible. Using fractional reserve banking, banks can lend over 9 dollars for every 1 that is deposited. In other words, they collect interest on money that they created at the time they loaned the money. You cannot do this because you do not have a banking charter.
This is one of those memes that just refuses to die. It's totally backward. Banks are only allowed (by federal law) to lend out a portion of their deposits. (Hence the term fractional reserve.)
If I deposit $100 into my bank, how much can they lend out? In the post above you make it sound like they could lend $900 out. When in fact the truth is that they can only lend out $90, keeping $10 as a capital reserve.
Banks cannot create money. Only the Federal Reserve--which is an agency of the federal government--can create money. And yes, they destroy money all the time. Please review the tenure of Paul Volcker for instance.
I think your use of the passive voice is cowardly. "There are strong suspicions Bernanke and Paulson intentionally froze up the credit markets" seems like bullshit to me. Either YOU have those suspicions, in which case I would be interested to hear on what evidence they are based. Or, perhaps someone else has those suspicions, and you are just passing them along--in which case please share your source. Otherwise you're just playing a really fun game of strawman.
"Fear the Fed" is just another conspiracy cottage industry that feeds on ignorance. The idea that anyone in the financial markets would want to freeze things up just to get a few hundred billion dollars out of the government is hilarious. The entire TARP kitty is a small fraction of the total assets under management by Wall Street firms in the first half of 2008. It would be like using your life savings to set your house on fire so you can collect the insurance. Totally stupid!
The Fed has been printing money because the economy has needed more of it. When everyone sold out of the stock market and began hoarding cash there was a tremendous shift of wealth from equity assets to money (i.e. currency). The money had to come somewhere to fulfill that shift. If the Fed had not printed money there would have been massive deflation as the value of a dollar soared.
At the end of the day few people understand macroeconomic concepts and so do not understand what the Fed is or why it is needed. For instance I bet some people read the above paragraph and thought that it would actually be great if the value of a dollar would soar. (It's not great, because rising currency values discourage all forms of economic activity...why spend or invest a dollar today when it might be worth more tomorrow?) A bill in Congress is not going to change that. Only better education in this country is going to change that.
I think your statements are contradicted by the history of technology in markets, which shows a consistent march toward lower costs and greater efficiencies. This makes sense since from a business standpoint anything less than 100% efficiency shows up as waste, which contributes directly to expense. Even a slight gain in efficiency can confer a competitive advantage which can drive increased business. Natural resources may be zero-sum but economic growth is not!
Graph out the watts per megaflop since 1950. A Core 2 Duo is far more complex than ENIAC was, but uses far less energy in operation. Sure, we use a lot more total electricity for computing now than we did in 1950, but that is because there are more people doing more computing. And they are doing so because it is so much less expensive now than it used to be.
I don't know if you've tried any of the new laser mice, but they should work more reliably on glossy, glassy, patterned, or uneven surfaces. They use the laser speckle effect, which occurs on almost any reflective surface, to provide positioning information. A typical optical mouse calculates position by simply taking high-speed photos of the surface it's sitting on, so it can have problems with clear, very featureless, or some patterned surfaces.
I could be worried about an elevator car falling 20 stories and killing me in the fall
If you worked in a building in which 2 elevators HAD recently fallen 20 stories, killing people, I'm willing to bet you'd be more likely to consider the stairs than in a building where the elevators have always worked perfectly.
The independent may actually have a stronger base of support, but that isn't reflected by our current system.
What proof do you have that your scenario is even close to the truth? I have never seen any polling data that reflects a situation like the one you mention.
IMO most of these discussions are driven by fantasy. People want to believe that their ideas (and their importance) are shared by a secret silent majority, just waiting to be freed by the right electoral structure. Personally I would want more proof of that before we blow up a system that has helped the U.S. become one of the strongest and oldest democracies in the world.
We do have two rounds in our presidential voting. Compare Hillary Clinton to Dennis Kucinich--very different candidates, and both had an equal shot at the Democratic nomination. On the GOP side, compare John McCain to Ron Paul.
Outsiders don't stand a chance in elections because they are outsiders. If they were wildly popular they wouldn't be outsiders would they? I would say that a political system that keeps outsiders on the outside is not broken. Democracy does not mean lottery--not every candidate has an equal chance in elections. Failure of your (or my) favorite candidate to carry the day does not mean that the system is broken. It might just mean we don't have popular ideas.
I think you're arguing mostly about language. A scientist, speaking scientifically, uses constrained definitions of words. "Life" in the scientific sense is only what we know on Earth, since science requires evidence and all our evidence of life is here on Earth. And everything we know to be alive on Earth does in fact require water. Thus it is a scientifically supportable statement to say that "life requires water."
That does not make it true...science is not so much concerned with "truth," but with what it can prove. It might be "true" that God exists and hides his existence perfectly. We can imagine it and it is not logically prohibited. But it is not scientifically supportable to say so at this time, since there is no repeatable evidence to support that statement. Likewise it might be true that life does not require water elsewhere in the universe. But without supporting evidence that is not a scientific statement.
If you're hung up on the word "life," consider that it might be true that gravity works differently elsewhere in the universe than it does here in the Sol system. But to speak scientifically about that, we would need evidence to support it. (I think some people believe that inflation does in fact provide that evidence.)
Many scientists have fantastic imaginations and very open minds. However when speaking scientifically they need to reign in their language and speak carefully. It's not intellectual laziness, it's discipline in communication. It does not preclude them from imagining new things to look for. It's just that until there is evidence, you can't speak scientifically about something.
Further, this practice was common in all merchant fleets right up to and through the 40s.
But it's not common practice anymore, which sort of implies that maybe someone has published at least one believable argument against it. Otherwise it''s a pretty significant change to happen for absolutely no reason at all.
It's never a good idea to trick a customer into signing up for an e-mail list. You end up building a nice big list that performs horribly. What's the point? It's better to entice people onto the list with open eyes. A "deal of the day" e-mail--that people affirmatively opt-into--is a good example.
Here's a specific example from my own life. I love to watch ski racing so I was psyched when I started getting Universal Sports on my over-the-air DTV signal this winter. They advertised raffles for ski equipment so I went on their site to enter. The page said clearly that by entering the raffle I was signing onto their mailing list for upcoming broadcasts. No problem, IMO. I get a chance to win, they get to try to market to me, and the exchange is clear up front. I sign up. I don't win but I get show update e-mails for the rest of the winter and they're sometimes really helpful in catching race coverage.
Well now ski racing season is over and Universal Sports is into marathon coverage. UGH. I thought about unsubscribing but I want to see what they're going to cover this summer (it's a new channel), so I just delete them for now.
I'm just saying it would not be fair of me to mark those e-mails as spam. I know exactly why I'm getting them and they provide an opt-out link as required by law. But I know from my own statistics that in similar situations, some people still hit the spam button.
Responsible e-mail marketing starts with an opt-in. What if you specifically request to get e-mails from a company, and then later mark it as spam because you don't want to get it anymore? (Yes, it happens quite a bit.) Whose fault is that? Why should a company's online reputation suffer because of that?
People are told over and over "never click on an opt-out link" so they just use the spam button even when they know they requested the e-mail in the first place. I hope you can understand why that can be frustrating for a company trying to do the right thing.
But people often use the spam button to try to end e-mails that they requested in the first place. I work for a non-profit and do mostly member communications. People pay hundreds of dollars every year to join or renew their membership with us. And yet they sometimes mark an e-mail from us as spam. When we call them to follow up, they say they just weren't reading it.
I think some people have been conditioned (by discussions like this one) to treat the "spam" and "delete" buttons as the exact same thing, and to never ever use the opt-out link...even when they know they requested the e-mails in the first place.
Responsible e-mail marketing starts with a real opt-in. That's a big distinction between it and spam.
Slashdot Mirror
"In real dollars" means prices adjusted for inflation.
Long-term Inflation affects the value of all dollars the same whether they are in prices or salaries. It is not the reason that cars are more affordable vs. salaries today.
Everything at volume approaches commodity but not everything goes to volume. Why do some products become popular while others do not? A big part of the answer is IP. Some ideas are better than others.
The lower the price of production gets, the more valuable IP gets. Consider cars for instance (this is Slashdot after all). The basics of building a car cost far less today than they did in 1950. Put another way, if you wanted to build a 1950-level car today, you could sell it for a lot less (in real dollars) than you could then. Manufacturing technology and management is just far more efficient now.
But do cars cost a lot less now than they did in 1950? No. The reason is that today's cars are far more complex and capable machines than cars were in the 1950s. A greater percentage of a car's value today is IP than it was in 1950.
Pharmaceuticals are an even better example. It is not that expensive to manufacture pharmaceuticals. What makes them expensive is their design, and the knowledge of how to use them safely. If you pick up any given pharmaceutical pill, a huge portion of its value is the IP is represents.
Finally consider the pure-IP products like software and music. The cost to reproduce a hit game or album is very, very low. But it is no easier to produce the ORIGINAL of a hit game or album now than it was decades ago. It's not like every band blows up like the Beatles today. If anything the cheaper reproduction has made it even harder to create truly stand-out IP that sells widely. In a world where every song is free, we still have only so much time to listen. Without price the only basis for competition is how good or catchy the song is itself--the pure IP. And the Pirate Bay does not help produce that.
A big failing of Anderson and others (he's certainly not the first to play the "free is inevitable" game), is a failure to take into account the role of law in markets. The law places limits within which the free market operates, including with respect to IP. If it is against the law to freely copy IP, with fines or jail at stake, there will be a deterrence to "free" and copies of IP will retain a price within the official, legal market.
The institutions that failed were for the most part not covered at all by FDIC insurance, which is only available to commercial banks for insurance of private consumer deposits. Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG, etc were not commercial banks and their liabilities were not consumer deposits. However they were deeply embedded in the broader credit markets, including the commercial paper markets that many large industrial companies use to smooth their finances.
Lehman was allowed to fail, the reserve fund broke the buck and there was a tremendous run on the money market to the tune of $500 billion in a couple hours--stanched only by the Federal Reserve's open-ended commitment to support the money market funds. In retrospect there is a clear causation between the bankruptcy of Lehman and many very bad things in the financial markets. FDIC could not help at all since it only deals with commercial banks.
One of the problems is that the government support structure simply did not reflect the reality of the modern financial markets. Shortly after WWII, commercial banks provided over 60% of the total credit in the financial markets, funded primarily by private deposits. The FDIC was a strong backstop for the financial system in those times.
By early 2008, commercial banks provided less than 20% of the total credit, so FDIC insurance only covered a small portion of the total system. It's an incredibly important consumer protection, but it long ago ceased to be an important mitigator of broad financial problems. That is one reason you hear calls for a "systemic risk" regulator going forward.
The new Apple trackpads are amazing. You just push down anywhere to click--feels like a touch interface. You can scroll in any direction with two fingers and "right click" by pushing down with two fingers simultaneously.
On laptops like HP or Thinkpad I've always used the nipple because their trackpads were so small and crappy. I don't miss it at all on my MacBook Pro. In fact I miss my Apple trackpad when I use my Dell laptop from work.
So how exactly has this helped him or the economy?
Who did he buy the new oven, windows, and air conditioning equipment from?
Cap and trade will not increase my taxes, it will increase the prices of energy I buy.
Obama is and was playing to his base, who share two attributes--they don't like big corporations and they have a poor grasp of macroeconomics.
You and I know that there is no practical difference in my first sentence--either way I'm paying more money. But there are a lot of people who think we can raise taxes on big companies and the money will just come from "somewhere" to pay them. The rest of us know that higher corporate taxes are passed right on to the consumer as higher prices.
Of course things can be just as bad on the other side, where some people seem to think that all of climate science is a conspiracy led by Al Gore.
- $10.4 Trillion in today's dollars (conservatively).
Which would go to private corporations who are building and installing the turbines--generating jobs, profits, and shareholder value, growing the broader economy.
If you just look at the price side, any large-scale industrial undertaking appears ludicrously expensive.
The issue in your example is just the difference in look between two different photo mediums. Do the same thing with a Velvia 50 slide and it will stand out from the Kodachomes at least as much as the digitally produced slide will.
Ultimately all films and digital photo captures are visually "fake" because they do not accurately match the color, sharpness, or dynamic range that your eye sees. Whatever you are most used to will look "real" but it's just that you're used to it. Kodachrome was a leading slide film for so long that to a certain generation it is the "real" look of photography. But it's just a matter of habit.
You have not done the example right. Depositors have full claim on their deposits, even though the bank has lent out most of the money. The bank handles this by creating an IOU entry in its books for the amount loaned. These IOUs are known as Commercial Bank Money and are honored by the Fed and other banks.
Since the Fed won't honor IOUs that I make, I think it is clear that there is a difference between me and a chartered bank.
My example works just fine even if you and Bob and Jack and Jill maintain full claim on the funds you've deposited. It's just very prone to a catastrophic bank run.
Why is it important that the Fed honors some IOUs but not others? Ask yourself what is special about the Fed that you would want them to honor your IOUs?
Put another way--if private banks can create money, how can there ever be a run on a bank? Why can't the bank just create enough money to cover the run?
The answer is that the Fed is the only bank who can create money from thin air, and thus is the "lender of last resort" for banks facing a run.
The irony is that until the Federal Reserve Act, banking in this country worked exactly like my example, which is why bank runs were such a problem. I think you don't even realize the degree to which you take the money creation role of the Fed for granted.
That series is over several successive banks. But each individual bank always has less money out on loan than the total value of its deposits.
Your series works just as well with people as it does with banks. You give me $100...
I lend $90 to Bob and keep $10.
Bob lends $81 to Jack and keeps $9.
Jack lends $72 to Jill and keeps $7.
etc.
The effect is exactly the same. Private banks hold no special position as money creators.
The point people have trouble with is that the series must have a beginning. In our system, that beginning is the Federal Reserve, which alone among banks can create the money it places on deposit. Every other bank must have a deposit first before it can issue a loan, and then the loan must be less than the value of the deposit. Thus no individual bank is empowered to create money.
Banks benefit because, under our system, all money is created by debt so money and debt are fungible. Using fractional reserve banking, banks can lend over 9 dollars for every 1 that is deposited. In other words, they collect interest on money that they created at the time they loaned the money. You cannot do this because you do not have a banking charter.
This is one of those memes that just refuses to die. It's totally backward. Banks are only allowed (by federal law) to lend out a portion of their deposits. (Hence the term fractional reserve.)
If I deposit $100 into my bank, how much can they lend out? In the post above you make it sound like they could lend $900 out. When in fact the truth is that they can only lend out $90, keeping $10 as a capital reserve.
Banks cannot create money. Only the Federal Reserve--which is an agency of the federal government--can create money. And yes, they destroy money all the time. Please review the tenure of Paul Volcker for instance.
I think your use of the passive voice is cowardly. "There are strong suspicions Bernanke and Paulson intentionally froze up the credit markets" seems like bullshit to me. Either YOU have those suspicions, in which case I would be interested to hear on what evidence they are based. Or, perhaps someone else has those suspicions, and you are just passing them along--in which case please share your source. Otherwise you're just playing a really fun game of strawman.
"Fear the Fed" is just another conspiracy cottage industry that feeds on ignorance. The idea that anyone in the financial markets would want to freeze things up just to get a few hundred billion dollars out of the government is hilarious. The entire TARP kitty is a small fraction of the total assets under management by Wall Street firms in the first half of 2008. It would be like using your life savings to set your house on fire so you can collect the insurance. Totally stupid!
The Fed has been printing money because the economy has needed more of it. When everyone sold out of the stock market and began hoarding cash there was a tremendous shift of wealth from equity assets to money (i.e. currency). The money had to come somewhere to fulfill that shift. If the Fed had not printed money there would have been massive deflation as the value of a dollar soared.
At the end of the day few people understand macroeconomic concepts and so do not understand what the Fed is or why it is needed. For instance I bet some people read the above paragraph and thought that it would actually be great if the value of a dollar would soar. (It's not great, because rising currency values discourage all forms of economic activity...why spend or invest a dollar today when it might be worth more tomorrow?) A bill in Congress is not going to change that. Only better education in this country is going to change that.
I think your statements are contradicted by the history of technology in markets, which shows a consistent march toward lower costs and greater efficiencies. This makes sense since from a business standpoint anything less than 100% efficiency shows up as waste, which contributes directly to expense. Even a slight gain in efficiency can confer a competitive advantage which can drive increased business. Natural resources may be zero-sum but economic growth is not!
Graph out the watts per megaflop since 1950. A Core 2 Duo is far more complex than ENIAC was, but uses far less energy in operation. Sure, we use a lot more total electricity for computing now than we did in 1950, but that is because there are more people doing more computing. And they are doing so because it is so much less expensive now than it used to be.
Damn. Now I have to find a way to make my inner pedant smile again.
You could find some little kid to molest.
I don't know if you've tried any of the new laser mice, but they should work more reliably on glossy, glassy, patterned, or uneven surfaces. They use the laser speckle effect, which occurs on almost any reflective surface, to provide positioning information. A typical optical mouse calculates position by simply taking high-speed photos of the surface it's sitting on, so it can have problems with clear, very featureless, or some patterned surfaces.
I could be worried about an elevator car falling 20 stories and killing me in the fall
If you worked in a building in which 2 elevators HAD recently fallen 20 stories, killing people, I'm willing to bet you'd be more likely to consider the stairs than in a building where the elevators have always worked perfectly.
The independent may actually have a stronger base of support, but that isn't reflected by our current system.
What proof do you have that your scenario is even close to the truth? I have never seen any polling data that reflects a situation like the one you mention.
IMO most of these discussions are driven by fantasy. People want to believe that their ideas (and their importance) are shared by a secret silent majority, just waiting to be freed by the right electoral structure. Personally I would want more proof of that before we blow up a system that has helped the U.S. become one of the strongest and oldest democracies in the world.
We do have two rounds in our presidential voting. Compare Hillary Clinton to Dennis Kucinich--very different candidates, and both had an equal shot at the Democratic nomination. On the GOP side, compare John McCain to Ron Paul.
Outsiders don't stand a chance in elections because they are outsiders. If they were wildly popular they wouldn't be outsiders would they? I would say that a political system that keeps outsiders on the outside is not broken. Democracy does not mean lottery--not every candidate has an equal chance in elections. Failure of your (or my) favorite candidate to carry the day does not mean that the system is broken. It might just mean we don't have popular ideas.
I think you're arguing mostly about language. A scientist, speaking scientifically, uses constrained definitions of words. "Life" in the scientific sense is only what we know on Earth, since science requires evidence and all our evidence of life is here on Earth. And everything we know to be alive on Earth does in fact require water. Thus it is a scientifically supportable statement to say that "life requires water."
That does not make it true...science is not so much concerned with "truth," but with what it can prove. It might be "true" that God exists and hides his existence perfectly. We can imagine it and it is not logically prohibited. But it is not scientifically supportable to say so at this time, since there is no repeatable evidence to support that statement. Likewise it might be true that life does not require water elsewhere in the universe. But without supporting evidence that is not a scientific statement.
If you're hung up on the word "life," consider that it might be true that gravity works differently elsewhere in the universe than it does here in the Sol system. But to speak scientifically about that, we would need evidence to support it. (I think some people believe that inflation does in fact provide that evidence.)
Many scientists have fantastic imaginations and very open minds. However when speaking scientifically they need to reign in their language and speak carefully. It's not intellectual laziness, it's discipline in communication. It does not preclude them from imagining new things to look for. It's just that until there is evidence, you can't speak scientifically about something.
Right, because piracy was non-existent until recently when CNN started covering it.
"Pirates are only one of the challenges facing the Stella Lykes." - http://www.johnmcphee.com/looking.htm
A great book about the merchant marines BTW.
Further, this practice was common in all merchant fleets right up to and through the 40s.
But it's not common practice anymore, which sort of implies that maybe someone has published at least one believable argument against it. Otherwise it''s a pretty significant change to happen for absolutely no reason at all.
It's never a good idea to trick a customer into signing up for an e-mail list. You end up building a nice big list that performs horribly. What's the point? It's better to entice people onto the list with open eyes. A "deal of the day" e-mail--that people affirmatively opt-into--is a good example.
Here's a specific example from my own life. I love to watch ski racing so I was psyched when I started getting Universal Sports on my over-the-air DTV signal this winter. They advertised raffles for ski equipment so I went on their site to enter. The page said clearly that by entering the raffle I was signing onto their mailing list for upcoming broadcasts. No problem, IMO. I get a chance to win, they get to try to market to me, and the exchange is clear up front. I sign up. I don't win but I get show update e-mails for the rest of the winter and they're sometimes really helpful in catching race coverage.
Well now ski racing season is over and Universal Sports is into marathon coverage. UGH. I thought about unsubscribing but I want to see what they're going to cover this summer (it's a new channel), so I just delete them for now.
I'm just saying it would not be fair of me to mark those e-mails as spam. I know exactly why I'm getting them and they provide an opt-out link as required by law. But I know from my own statistics that in similar situations, some people still hit the spam button.
Responsible e-mail marketing starts with an opt-in. What if you specifically request to get e-mails from a company, and then later mark it as spam because you don't want to get it anymore? (Yes, it happens quite a bit.) Whose fault is that? Why should a company's online reputation suffer because of that?
People are told over and over "never click on an opt-out link" so they just use the spam button even when they know they requested the e-mail in the first place. I hope you can understand why that can be frustrating for a company trying to do the right thing.
But people often use the spam button to try to end e-mails that they requested in the first place. I work for a non-profit and do mostly member communications. People pay hundreds of dollars every year to join or renew their membership with us. And yet they sometimes mark an e-mail from us as spam. When we call them to follow up, they say they just weren't reading it.
I think some people have been conditioned (by discussions like this one) to treat the "spam" and "delete" buttons as the exact same thing, and to never ever use the opt-out link...even when they know they requested the e-mails in the first place.
Responsible e-mail marketing starts with a real opt-in. That's a big distinction between it and spam.
Thanks, that is plenty reasonable of course. A lot of people use the spam button for all situations, including your #2.
#3 is willful violation of federal law. You can report it here:
http://www.ftc.gov/ftc/cmplanding.shtm