Why the hell companies keep on overcharging on higher resolution screens?!
They don't. It's simple supply and demand. Not many people want a 24" LCD, as opposed to a 15-17" LCD, so the prices differentials are going to high. Yah there is probably a higher premium on anything above 20" but that's probably because only maybe 7-10 LCD manufacters make decent LCD's above 20". I can only think of Samsung, Apple, HP, and Sony for people who make 23-24" widescreen LCD's (btw, HP's is only around $1600). Froogle search alone turned up at least 14 17" LCD makers that I counted, and we all know that more competition means lower prices.
If they want people to buy new technology, they should just make stand alone monitors with extra resolutions on smaller screens, instead of forcing consumers to buy 20/23/30-inch monitors just to get the same damn resolutions!
Speaking of that, I have a Dell Inspiron 9200, and let me tell you the only reason it can have WUXGA is because my head is never farther than around 2.5 ft. from the screen. My arms pretty much enforce that limit. Any farther than 3" and the text is unreadable because it's so small. Don't believe me, to the local COMPUSA and try to view one of the 17" laptops from 3-4 ft. It might be alright for the first 5 minutes but after 30 you'll find yourself creeping closer to the monitor. Sure you could increase the font size or dpi, but that would defeat the purpose of having such a high resolution. Trust me, to comfortably view WUXGA at the average distance a desktop user has between his or her eyes and the monitor, you would need around 23-24" of monitor space.
Gore "might have won." The Times is by no means saying Gore won. They aren't even suggesting there is a greater than 50% chance (denoted by "probably") that Gore won. That statement is logically useless. It's like trying to claim that "Most people own giraffes" from a given statement that "Some people own giraffes."
So no, you cannot say that this NYT article declares Gore the winner nor even say that it insinuates such.
No offense to Jello--I'm a great Jello fan (see sig)--but what exactly is the point of having him speak at a hacking convention? He'd be great on a number of issues, but I fail to see what he adds here.
It's Representative Bono. She represent's California 45th District which includes parts of East LA County, the Palm Springs area, and Riverside County. California is represented by Senators Boxer and Feinstien, who if I remember correctly are also in the pocket of the entertainment industry.
The show is not live, or live-to-tape, meaning it is probably edited (heavily at that) to excentuate whatever Comedy Central feels would hit their target audience. This would have a similar affect to that of editing in most reality TV shows like The Apprenctice, Survior, whatever, where the little tiffs or asides are often blown out of proportion for drama and entertainment value. One need only look at Bowling for Columbine to see what clever editing and manipulation of video can produce.
First of all get your facts straight, the US has one of the highest per capita teen pregancy rates in the DEVELOPED world. I'm pretty sure if I wanted I could dig up some stat on some Sub-Saharan country in Africa to prove my point. Second its not like we aren't educated or that there is a lack of condoms. Every dorm in my college and every college I have been to has free condoms. At my highschool you could get free condoms at the nurses office. At the Planned Parenthood down the street you could get free condoms also. We have enough condoms and considering I and everyone I know has been indoctrinated in the virtues of condoms I don't think education is the problem. The problem is irresponsibility and I'll admit it there are just a lot of irresponsible people in this country. The fact that a decent amount of teenagers in this country are sexually active by the age of 14 should tell you something. I think short of welding a condom to the man's penis there is little you could do to encourage condom use. Personally I think it would be a better deterant if we stopped giving women welfare checks for having kids out of wedlock, but it seems that Americans also seem to hate the idea of a person taking responsibility for their own actions as well
I mean come one who here has condoms and does not intend the use them. I mean most of the US is rational I assume and knows that outside of a monogamous relationship, abstinence or safe sex in that order are the two best ways to avoid STDs. Condoms are among the best forms of protection and thus it is stupid to conclude that people who use condoms won't have sex with more partners or sex in general. I mean who out there buys condoms without the intent to use them? I know when I have a condom with me I'm far more likely to have sex with a girl than when I don't have a condom. I mean come on get a clue, condoms leads to increased sexual activity? No it must be a right wing conspiracy to suggest that idea. Everyone knows that if there were no condoms the same amount of people would be having promiscuous sex. (end sarcasm)
(It'd be a sad day for the American people if that were true.)
Oh come on I hardly think Hulk Hogan, Vince McMahon, and The Rock, et al can predict the fate of humanity.
Seriously though, for us "crass" Americans, to whom WWF is an acronym for World Wrestling Federation, I think it would have helped if for someone to point out(especially an editor, you listening timothy?) that in this post refers to the World Wildlife Fund. In fact, I think in general it would be a good idea to clarify any algorithm which might not be popular in the Slashdot lexicon. That way, stupid comments like that above will not be made by the many of us (including myself) who prefer to spout our mouth off before reading the story.
Call me a cynic, but it sounds like this guy is just out to plug his class to help with future enrollment and/or generating press for the CS community at Brown. I mean I go to USC and our intro to robotics class, CSCI 445, had to create Mindstorms that played soccer, yet I didn't go plugging it. Oops guess I did.
get caught on camera fucking a guy, have it get sent out to the entire college because she didn't disable file sharing on her comp, and ruin her life. Believe me this shit happens I've had friends send me videos from UC Berkeley and San Jose State with this kind of shit happening. I also heard about something like this happening UC Davis where a friend's roomate got charged with rape and kicked out because he taped him and a girl then accidently shared the video on Kazzaa. I'm serious about this shit, if you get her a webcam tell her to disconnect it when she brings boys in!
Honestly, who cares, Bertlesman is probably just buying Napster to put it out of its misery. Napster's new (and old) business model was fundamentally flawed from the start. Yes, of course lets charge people $9.95 a month to pirate^H^H^H^H^H^H "share" songs with each other. First thing, pirates, warez dudes, whatever they're called don't, dare I say won't, pay for the right to pirate stuff. That totally defeats the purpose of pirating material-i.e. not having to pay for it. Second, not to beat on a dead bush, but look at the fifty bazillion other file sharing programs online right now. Sure none of them have duplicated the ease and reliablity of Napster, but they get the job done, and other than spyware (which has its own problems), they do not cost you a thing. Napster, can be bought out for all I care cause regardless of when or if it comes back no one is going to pay for a service they can get free.
..that Empire the only really good Star Wars movie was the only one not directed by Lucas.
With this it is official, Lucas does indeed want this series to indeed be a fantastical world of wonder for ages 3-11(tm). I'm sorry, but that is the lamest title I have ever heard for a movie. Even Battlefield Earth, the worst sci-fi movie ever at least had a cool name. Name one sci-fi movie with a title like that that has suceeded. Lucasfilm has officially done it. I can tolerate Jar Jar, I can even put up with that whole Metachlorian bullshit, but when you name a movie Attack of the Clones... I absolutley refuse to watch this movie on the basis of that title, and I suggest you people follow. If this movie was meant for 11 year-olds, let them line Lucas' pockets
but what does this have to do with roasting cows?
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Re:Fight your techno-geek addiction...
on
The Joys of HDTV
·
· Score: 1
I love my non-DOCSIS cable modem! True I didn't buy it, rather just rented it from the cable company but it's great, especially since the non-DOCSIS system runs off of seperate shared bandwidth connection then the DOCSIS system in my area according to the cable guy. And since only 20 people signed up in my node under the the non-DOCSIS service (most of whom have moved away) I pretty much have all that bandwidth all to my self. Man I love 300 k/sec 24/7! Now if i could only get more then 40 k/sec upstream.
One of the basic notions of free trade is that of comparative advantage, which simply states that if barriers to trade do not exist then it is mutally beneficial for nations to produce goods at the level which they are maximizing thier allocative efficiency. In plain old English, that simply means that each country will specialize and produce in the areas which they are better at. This also has the pleasent side effect of tieing nations closer together, making war less likley. Just look at what free trade has done for Europe since the last World War, you don't see Germans killing the French or vice versa.
If devloping African nations can produce level quality software cheaper than us, let them. I personally wouldn't mind bieng able to get Photoshop or Dreamweaver for ten bucks as opposed to a couple hundred. Sure we can all go and make free software as many of the people on the board would argue, but then again working for free isn't exactly better then working for a bowl of rice a day is it? Besides can you imagine the increase in the standard of living that would result from cheaper computers and software. We saw in the 70s how cheaper Japanese electronics and cars helped more people buy TVs and better cars.
Competition is good, isn't that one of the unanimous verdicts on Slashdot. It doesn't matter whether it's a bunch of geeks concocting a free OS because they aren't happy with what the corporations of America have to offer or another country bieng able to out produce us, competition will always result in cheaper better products. If sub-Saharan Africa can produce computer hardware and software better then us for a bowl of rice, let them.
You miss read it. I was meaning to imply Napster was doomed. A clearer sentance would have been, "When getting stuff off Gnutella became easier then getting the same stuff off Napster, you know Napster is a doomed service." Sorry for any confusion.
Let's just face it, your grandaddy's Napster is long gone. Even though most of you refuse to acknowledge it or worse even try to justify it, we all know that most of what we downloaded off of Napster was stuff that we hadn't bought and didn't own the rights to. Now I know some of you went out and bought whatever your downloaded, or were meerly "sampling" the music (whatever the hell that means), but personally I gave up any hope of finding anything once I started having to type in "1337" phrases like "|24d10h34d", "J1/\/\/\/\y h3ndr1X" and "0utk4$t" to get past the filtering software. It was a good while it lasted but I think we can finally declare Napster dead! Actually we could have done when the report about it only having 5000 users sharing 18 gigs of music came out, but the prophecy of Napster being the sacrificial lamb that many of us secretly new it would has come true. I say just cut your losses, and move on to programs like AudioGalaxy, Morpheus, whatever soots your needs. When getting stuff off of the Gnuetella is easier then getting the same stuff off of Napster, you know the program is doomed.
Just my 2 cents, sorry for the cyncism, but we need to face the truth here.
On the first account your right I was trying to get the point across that you explained.
In reality, inflation has been virtually non existent through history with gold based currencies.
However, I would like to point out that the primary reason why there was really no statistical inflation prior to the end of World War II was primarily because the Fedral Reserve, indeed other central banks took it upon themselves not to intervene much in the economic affairs of their nation. That is to say they let the currency float and sink according to economic conditions. Long periods of economic growth and inflation were often followed by periods of severe deflation since, instead of relying only on cutting employment, buisnesses would often cut wages of employees to bring down the cost of their products. Needless to say that paycuts now, espcially in union dominated industries are not as common as they were in the late 1800s - early 1900s. Instead we people just get fired, and even then most of the work force has unemployment insurance that will kick in to insure that people always have money. If you can find a graph of inflation in the US from 1840-present, you'll notice that there were huge spikes and dips (meaning inflation and deflation) prior to the adoption of Keynsian economic theory.
Also on the subject, since you have read Freidman, you should know that one of the primary goals of a moniterist is to match money supply to the economic growth. This was very hard to do when the economy's money supply was fixed (essentially) as it was under the gold standard. The lifting of the standard allowed better control of the money supply so that it would be easier to as Friedman, Volker and other moniterists wanted to do, contract and expand the monetary supply according to growth. True this policy din't last long, but still the lifting of the gold standard, allowed for greater shifts and fluctuations in the supply of money then would be possible with fixed supply.
There also is the matter of fixed money supply causing balance of payments surpluses and deficits in international markets, since with a fixed currency value (as the US dollar had when it was the benchmark during the days of Brentonwoods), it makes it very hard for the currency to maintain a value indicative of the economies strength when it was pinned to the value of gold. This most effected developing nations who were often subject to runs on their currency since revaluations had to be announced in advance, thus leading to currency speculation. (Well it's something like that, please correct me if I'm off a little... or a lot).
Hope this corrects my mistakes and doesn't create new ones, feel free to respond!
Slashdot Mirror
Why the hell companies keep on overcharging on higher resolution screens?!
They don't. It's simple supply and demand. Not many people want a 24" LCD, as opposed to a 15-17" LCD, so the prices differentials are going to high. Yah there is probably a higher premium on anything above 20" but that's probably because only maybe 7-10 LCD manufacters make decent LCD's above 20". I can only think of Samsung, Apple, HP, and Sony for people who make 23-24" widescreen LCD's (btw, HP's is only around $1600). Froogle search alone turned up at least 14 17" LCD makers that I counted, and we all know that more competition means lower prices.
If they want people to buy new technology, they should just make stand alone monitors with extra resolutions on smaller screens, instead of forcing consumers to buy 20/23/30-inch monitors just to get the same damn resolutions!
Speaking of that, I have a Dell Inspiron 9200, and let me tell you the only reason it can have WUXGA is because my head is never farther than around 2.5 ft. from the screen. My arms pretty much enforce that limit. Any farther than 3" and the text is unreadable because it's so small. Don't believe me, to the local COMPUSA and try to view one of the 17" laptops from 3-4 ft. It might be alright for the first 5 minutes but after 30 you'll find yourself creeping closer to the monitor. Sure you could increase the font size or dpi, but that would defeat the purpose of having such a high resolution. Trust me, to comfortably view WUXGA at the average distance a desktop user has between his or her eyes and the monitor, you would need around 23-24" of monitor space.
Gore "might have won." The Times is by no means saying Gore won. They aren't even suggesting there is a greater than 50% chance (denoted by "probably") that Gore won. That statement is logically useless. It's like trying to claim that "Most people own giraffes" from a given statement that "Some people own giraffes."
So no, you cannot say that this NYT article declares Gore the winner nor even say that it insinuates such.
And I'm a man that likes his taffy!
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No offense to Jello--I'm a great Jello fan (see sig)--but what exactly is the point of having him speak at a hacking convention? He'd be great on a number of issues, but I fail to see what he adds here.
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It's Representative Bono. She represent's California 45th District which includes parts of East LA County, the Palm Springs area, and Riverside County. California is represented by Senators Boxer and Feinstien, who if I remember correctly are also in the pocket of the entertainment industry.
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The show is not live, or live-to-tape, meaning it is probably edited (heavily at that) to excentuate whatever Comedy Central feels would hit their target audience. This would have a similar affect to that of editing in most reality TV shows like The Apprenctice, Survior, whatever, where the little tiffs or asides are often blown out of proportion for drama and entertainment value. One need only look at Bowling for Columbine to see what clever editing and manipulation of video can produce.
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How different is this from what they do now in Europe? I remember the last time I was there seeing government cameras around every corner.
First of all get your facts straight, the US has one of the highest per capita teen pregancy rates in the DEVELOPED world. I'm pretty sure if I wanted I could dig up some stat on some Sub-Saharan country in Africa to prove my point.
Second its not like we aren't educated or that there is a lack of condoms. Every dorm in my college and every college I have been to has free condoms. At my highschool you could get free condoms at the nurses office. At the Planned Parenthood down the street you could get free condoms also. We have enough condoms and considering I and everyone I know has been indoctrinated in the virtues of condoms I don't think education is the problem. The problem is irresponsibility and I'll admit it there are just a lot of irresponsible people in this country. The fact that a decent amount of teenagers in this country are sexually active by the age of 14 should tell you something. I think short of welding a condom to the man's penis there is little you could do to encourage condom use. Personally I think it would be a better deterant if we stopped giving women welfare checks for having kids out of wedlock, but it seems that Americans also seem to hate the idea of a person taking responsibility for their own actions as well
I mean come one who here has condoms and does not intend the use them. I mean most of the US is rational I assume and knows that outside of a monogamous relationship, abstinence or safe sex in that order are the two best ways to avoid STDs. Condoms are among the best forms of protection and thus it is stupid to conclude that people who use condoms won't have sex with more partners or sex in general. I mean who out there buys condoms without the intent to use them? I know when I have a condom with me I'm far more likely to have sex with a girl than when I don't have a condom. I mean come on get a clue, condoms leads to increased sexual activity? No it must be a right wing conspiracy to suggest that idea. Everyone knows that if there were no condoms the same amount of people would be having promiscuous sex. (end sarcasm)
(It'd be a sad day for the American people if that were true.)
How ironic, I got an ad for Visual Studio .Net when I opened up this page.
Oh come on I hardly think Hulk Hogan, Vince McMahon, and The Rock, et al can predict the fate of humanity.
Seriously though, for us "crass" Americans, to whom WWF is an acronym for World Wrestling Federation, I think it would have helped if for someone to point out(especially an editor, you listening timothy?) that in this post refers to the World Wildlife Fund. In fact, I think in general it would be a good idea to clarify any algorithm which might not be popular in the Slashdot lexicon. That way, stupid comments like that above will not be made by the many of us (including myself) who prefer to spout our mouth off before reading the story.
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Call me a cynic, but it sounds like this guy is just out to plug his class to help with future enrollment and/or generating press for the CS community at Brown. I mean I go to USC and our intro to robotics class, CSCI 445, had to create Mindstorms that played soccer, yet I didn't go plugging it. Oops guess I did.
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get caught on camera fucking a guy, have it get sent out to the entire college because she didn't disable file sharing on her comp, and ruin her life. Believe me this shit happens I've had friends send me videos from UC Berkeley and San Jose State with this kind of shit happening. I also heard about something like this happening UC Davis where a friend's roomate got charged with rape and kicked out because he taped him and a girl then accidently shared the video on Kazzaa. I'm serious about this shit, if you get her a webcam tell her to disconnect it when she brings boys in!
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Now the Brits can enjoy our love of heroinware and Evercrack too!
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Honestly, who cares, Bertlesman is probably just buying Napster to put it out of its misery. Napster's new (and old) business model was fundamentally flawed from the start. Yes, of course lets charge people $9.95 a month to pirate^H^H^H^H^H^H "share" songs with each other. First thing, pirates, warez dudes, whatever they're called don't, dare I say won't, pay for the right to pirate stuff. That totally defeats the purpose of pirating material-i.e. not having to pay for it. Second, not to beat on a dead bush, but look at the fifty bazillion other file sharing programs online right now. Sure none of them have duplicated the ease and reliablity of Napster, but they get the job done, and other than spyware (which has its own problems), they do not cost you a thing. Napster, can be bought out for all I care cause regardless of when or if it comes back no one is going to pay for a service they can get free.
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Is it me or does this seem more like a commerical for Sony products than an actual wishlist?
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But the fact that half the country still hasn't seen it might preclude people to wait on passing judgement until we have!!!!
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And I've got karma to burn baby so here goes!
How about a Beowulf Cluster of those. You could light up a city block!
-1 Troll, I await you!
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..that Empire the only really good Star Wars movie was the only one not directed by Lucas.
With this it is official, Lucas does indeed want this series to indeed be a fantastical world of wonder for ages 3-11(tm). I'm sorry, but that is the lamest title I have ever heard for a movie. Even Battlefield Earth, the worst sci-fi movie ever at least had a cool name. Name one sci-fi movie with a title like that that has suceeded. Lucasfilm has officially done it. I can tolerate Jar Jar, I can even put up with that whole Metachlorian bullshit, but when you name a movie Attack of the Clones... I absolutley refuse to watch this movie on the basis of that title, and I suggest you people follow. If this movie was meant for 11 year-olds, let them line Lucas' pockets
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but what does this have to do with roasting cows?
______________________
I love my non-DOCSIS cable modem! True I didn't buy it, rather just rented it from the cable company but it's great, especially since the non-DOCSIS system runs off of seperate shared bandwidth connection then the DOCSIS system in my area according to the cable guy. And since only 20 people signed up in my node under the the non-DOCSIS service (most of whom have moved away) I pretty much have all that bandwidth all to my self. Man I love 300 k/sec 24/7! Now if i could only get more then 40 k/sec upstream.
_______________________
One of the basic notions of free trade is that of comparative advantage, which simply states that if barriers to trade do not exist then it is mutally beneficial for nations to produce goods at the level which they are maximizing thier allocative efficiency. In plain old English, that simply means that each country will specialize and produce in the areas which they are better at. This also has the pleasent side effect of tieing nations closer together, making war less likley. Just look at what free trade has done for Europe since the last World War, you don't see Germans killing the French or vice versa.
If devloping African nations can produce level quality software cheaper than us, let them. I personally wouldn't mind bieng able to get Photoshop or Dreamweaver for ten bucks as opposed to a couple hundred. Sure we can all go and make free software as many of the people on the board would argue, but then again working for free isn't exactly better then working for a bowl of rice a day is it? Besides can you imagine the increase in the standard of living that would result from cheaper computers and software. We saw in the 70s how cheaper Japanese electronics and cars helped more people buy TVs and better cars.
Competition is good, isn't that one of the unanimous verdicts on Slashdot. It doesn't matter whether it's a bunch of geeks concocting a free OS because they aren't happy with what the corporations of America have to offer or another country bieng able to out produce us, competition will always result in cheaper better products. If sub-Saharan Africa can produce computer hardware and software better then us for a bowl of rice, let them.
You miss read it. I was meaning to imply Napster was doomed. A clearer sentance would have been, "When getting stuff off Gnutella became easier then getting the same stuff off Napster, you know Napster is a doomed service." Sorry for any confusion.
____________________________
Let's just face it, your grandaddy's Napster is long gone. Even though most of you refuse to acknowledge it or worse even try to justify it, we all know that most of what we downloaded off of Napster was stuff that we hadn't bought and didn't own the rights to. Now I know some of you went out and bought whatever your downloaded, or were meerly "sampling" the music (whatever the hell that means), but personally I gave up any hope of finding anything once I started having to type in "1337" phrases like "|24d10h34d", "J1/\/\/\/\y h3ndr1X" and "0utk4$t" to get past the filtering software. It was a good while it lasted but I think we can finally declare Napster dead! Actually we could have done when the report about it only having 5000 users sharing 18 gigs of music came out, but the prophecy of Napster being the sacrificial lamb that many of us secretly new it would has come true. I say just cut your losses, and move on to programs like AudioGalaxy, Morpheus, whatever soots your needs. When getting stuff off of the Gnuetella is easier then getting the same stuff off of Napster, you know the program is doomed.
Just my 2 cents, sorry for the cyncism, but we need to face the truth here.
___________________________
On the first account your right I was trying to get the point across that you explained.
In reality, inflation has been virtually non existent through history with gold based currencies.
However, I would like to point out that the primary reason why there was really no statistical inflation prior to the end of World War II was primarily because the Fedral Reserve, indeed other central banks took it upon themselves not to intervene much in the economic affairs of their nation. That is to say they let the currency float and sink according to economic conditions. Long periods of economic growth and inflation were often followed by periods of severe deflation since, instead of relying only on cutting employment, buisnesses would often cut wages of employees to bring down the cost of their products. Needless to say that paycuts now, espcially in union dominated industries are not as common as they were in the late 1800s - early 1900s. Instead we people just get fired, and even then most of the work force has unemployment insurance that will kick in to insure that people always have money. If you can find a graph of inflation in the US from 1840-present, you'll notice that there were huge spikes and dips (meaning inflation and deflation) prior to the adoption of Keynsian economic theory.
Also on the subject, since you have read Freidman, you should know that one of the primary goals of a moniterist is to match money supply to the economic growth. This was very hard to do when the economy's money supply was fixed (essentially) as it was under the gold standard. The lifting of the standard allowed better control of the money supply so that it would be easier to as Friedman, Volker and other moniterists wanted to do, contract and expand the monetary supply according to growth. True this policy din't last long, but still the lifting of the gold standard, allowed for greater shifts and fluctuations in the supply of money then would be possible with fixed supply.
There also is the matter of fixed money supply causing balance of payments surpluses and deficits in international markets, since with a fixed currency value (as the US dollar had when it was the benchmark during the days of Brentonwoods), it makes it very hard for the currency to maintain a value indicative of the economies strength when it was pinned to the value of gold. This most effected developing nations who were often subject to runs on their currency since revaluations had to be announced in advance, thus leading to currency speculation. (Well it's something like that, please correct me if I'm off a little... or a lot).
Hope this corrects my mistakes and doesn't create new ones, feel free to respond!
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