Along with what you're saying, the lowest-population states have the best broadband competition because no ISP wants a regional monopoly in those areas. link
If you had a dozen ISPs from small to large to choose from (with reasonable rates and bandwidth thrown in as a bonus), net neutrality would be a moot point. I never thought I would ever say this, but we either need the FCC to regulate net neutrality or start looking to Arkansas as a model for internet access.
In fact we all know that even competing corporations will refuse to do battle on certain turf, thus resulting in maladies such as price-fixing and/or a lack of competitive choice.
Except those companies would be, by definition, not competing.
Yahoo's stock price raised when Microsoft wanted to purchase them, and tanked after Yahoo's refusal to sell;
This affected stock price of Yahoo even though they still earned the same profit annually...
How is that irrational? In a perfectly rational world, a stock's price reflects the value of owning that tiny share of the company - and Microsoft just announced that entirely company was $billions of valuable to it. That has a few effects:
Microsoft needs a majority of shares to buy Yahoo. This represents a huge increase in the demand for Yahoo shares. Everything else equal ("ceteris paribus"), the price for Yahoo stock will go up. This was reflected in the market.
Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo, and for a ton of money. The trading price of Yahoo stock was set without that information. Microsoft's valuation of Yahoo suggests its true price is higher. Stock market adjusts to reflect this.
People "know" stocks rise after an announcement like that. Even if the reason for that rise is irrational - that is to say, the market is irrational - a rational actor would still take advantage of that.
There you go - three ways in which a rise in Yahoo stock price is perfectly rational. A company's quarterly profits are only a single aspect of its value, and any kind of model assuming a rational market will assume the stock price takes into account all aspects of a stock's value.
That said, the "rational actor" model is just that - a model. It's not supposed to be a perfectly accurate simulation of all human behavior. Saying that every school of thought on economics is simultaneously wrong because individuals don't behave exactly like the model is like saying all of science is wrong because not everything behaves like an ideal gas!
FWIW, the education program at my college required you to have a newer-model Mac laptop. I still don't understand why an elementary ed. major needs Garage Band proficiency, but evidently audio weblogs are the future of education, and only Macs are capable of that.
This despite the fact we have large, woefully underutilized Apple labs - they actually cut some student positions because nobody was in them. I guess the dual quad-core Xeons with 8 GB of RAM aren't as good at Garage Band as 13" Macbooks.
Deflation did not "work out quite well." It absolutely sucked for farmers (which, when we had deflation, was basically everyone.) You had to take out a bank loan to purchase seed up front; you would pay your loan back with interest after harvest.
Deflation makes those loans a raw deal - you might pay $1200 on a $1000 loan, but each of those dollars is worth more after a growing season's worth of deflation. Because of deflation, you pay the bank much more in constant dollars.
I'm also not sure why massive deflation is a solution to people not knowing how to save or invest money.
When has anything a company has done been for your benefit?
Well, AT&T let me cancel.
But only after I spent a week calling their cancellation line that was, inexplicably, always "closed." And then, only after I pointed out that it was entirely within my power to cancel myself by not paying them (and keeping their modem.)
"Elasticity" is only one part of the picture. It's true that "demand for food" is rather inelastic - everyone has to eat. But, nobody has a monopoly on food - consumers can eat whatever the heck they want. If beef becomes expensive, one can eat chicken; if rice is expensive, one can eat grain, or anything else.
Everyone needs to eat, but demand for any particular set of food products is generally not inelastic - there's no cartel keeping people from substituting butter for margarine.
In fact, food is a particularly bad example. Agriculture and food processing markets are the best real-world examples of Free markets.
Well, my college's math department had a really cute girl who talked excitedly about doing brain surgery on birds and stitching them back up again. I'm not much of a bio nerd, but that was cool.
As for the department where they don't "know yet," what she did know about scalpels would have probably made up for it.
Absolutely! But it'll take some hacking. I ran it on a first-gen Acer netbook with an 8 GB SSD that liked to hardlock the system on ever write.
There's a fair tutorial here. The parts about Vista aren't really relevant, but the gist of it is
Download an evaluation copy of Microsoft Embedded here. You'll need to download the whole thing to get a copy of EWF.
Extract the EWF files to the appropriate places on your Windows install.
Make your disk effectively "read only" by setting the appropriate registry keys. Writes to that volume are cached in memory and discarded unless you explicitly have them committed to disk with ewfmgr. (Note that you can fill this cache and exhaust available memory by writing too much to disk.)
Turn off your swap file. When a piece of memory is no longer in use it will be swapped out to disk... Except that EWF will cache that write into memory. You swap from memory into memory, "losing" that memory until the cache is manually written out or the system rebooted.
Hope that helps. The biggest problem you have is that if, say, you only have 2 GB of memory your protected disk can only endure a MAXIMUM of ~2GB of writes. After that, all free memory is filled with the cached writes. You'll have to periodically commit the writes to disk with ewfmgr to ensure memory stays free or reboot or otherwise discard the changes.
As others mentioned, if the goal is just to keep an embedded system in its original pristine state, Microsoft SteadyState (free) or Faronics DeepFreeze (costly) are better options. However, EWF will make a machine *fly*, especially one that was previously writing to a slow disk.
Try going under settings, voicemail & text, and seeing if the "Transcribe Voicemails" box got unchecked. If it's checked and you don't see your inbox being transcribed for you, there's definitely something weird going on.
Google Voice does a lot more than just call-forwarding, although having one call ring any or all of your phones is pretty nifty. You get voicemail with adequate transcription (you can get your voicemail messages e-mailed to you), free text messaging, blacklists, incoming call recording, call routing (these people automatically get my cell, these automatically go to voicemail), free US+Canada long distance, cheap international calling, and a "call me" widget you can throw on a website that lets people call you without ever knowing your telephone number.
Probably a lot of other stuff that I missed. But, you can't argue with the price. If you haven't tried it, go waste ten or so minutes to set it up. I applied for the beta on a whim not knowing what I would do if I got it. Now, I would cry if I had to go back to handing out my actual phone numbers.
It doesn't sound quite that sinister. Quoting from your link:
You should follow these steps only, if you get a security warning message upon viewing Jacobs University's web services.
Sounds like they're doing what my college did, and what a lot of other schools do - issue self-signed certs for their webmail server. (Or use the wrong cert on the wrong server, or get one for their intranet domain only, or any other number of stupid things you can do with SSL certs.)
They just upped the logo requirements - to get logo certification, you have to have 64 bit versions of drivers as well. Which is great, because 32bit blows chunks.
As for having to get them signed, that is kind of a pain. On the plus side, it means your signed driver went over some basic "are you likely to freeze the computer" tests and it discourages companies with shitty programmers from doing unnecessary stuff in kernelspace.
I for one applaud this tiny effort to improve Windows stability.
Except that "wage inflation," whatever you meant by that, has no bearing on the calculation of inflation.
The US calculates inflation by constructing a basket of goods that represents what a typical consumer purchases - e.g., x loaves of bread, y new cars. They then find out how much the basket costs this month rather than last month - e.g., prices for bread went up, so now the basket costs x+1 instead of x.
If you buy the same things you always did, but this month they cost you more, that's inflation. Wages can affect that, but low inflation means we're all richer rather than poorer.
You don't have to occupy a country to benefit from its resources. We did a very good job mangling Latin American economies without maintaining an occupying force. We'll benefit by doing nothing; I'd imagine deposits that large would drive down the global price for those minerals.
Bigger problems are what the summary mentions: Lack of heavy industry and corruption. Corruption increases with the square of the distance from Kabul. Bureaucratic processes are intentionally long and complicated; bribes at each step are expected and practically required. The central government has little reach outside of the capitol and inability to effectively tax. This means incredibly low salaries for government employees, encouraging graft.
"Lack of heavy industry" is another reason even a hardcore realpolitik would avoid "taking another [military] look at the Afghanistan situation." This means they'll need our contractors to realize any return on their $trillion in mineral rights.
Trade between countries is generally beneficial for both because of something called comparative advantage. Even if China produces everything faster, better, and cheaper than we do (and they don't!), trade with them would still let us focus on producing the things we produce best. Rather than try to make everything domestically, we can produce the things we are most efficient at domestically and import the rest.
Taking advantage of your comparative advantage boosts consumption - everyone has more stuff - but that requires scaling back industries that we suck at. Japan decimated a lot of our industries post-World War II as they industrialized, starting with textiles and moving on to automobiles and computers. Although I think GM blows chunks, they benefited from a good kick in the pants and other Japanese innovations, such as zero-inventory just-in-time production.
I'd argue trade with Japan is an example of successful, mutually-beneficial trade. It obviously hasn't destroyed us - I don't think we can blame the Japanese entirely for the utter suckage of the domestic auto industry, for example - and our GDP has continued increasing since the 1950s. It also benefited Japan - just 50 years ago they went from zero domestic production (everything had been bombed flat) and dependent on American grain handouts to a fully industrialized nation.
I believe trade with China also has the potential to be mutually beneficial. They can out-manufacture us because they have millions of underutilized peasants waiting to be abused. While in the short term tragic for our own manufacturing, it has the side-effect of moving their peasants further towards the middle class. When a middle class crystalizes, that's when we will see little "innovations" like employee rights, organized labor, and the like.
In other words, all the things that give China a trade advantage will work themselves out. Their trinkets are cheaper not because they have some magic factory tech that we're somehow incapable of replicating, but because they're still in the process of lifting a billion people out of poverty. Give it time - completely locking China out of our market with tariffs won't hurt them at all, is unlikely to help us, and would be a great boon to Europe.
It literally means "rice." You're seeing Mickey Mouse pop up because, evidently, America is known colloquially as the land of rice and is abbreviated by that kanji.
A government cannot get "unlimited funding through inflation." Our government can run budget deficits because people will keep loaning us money - i.e., buying Treasury securities. Post-WWII Germany, Zimbabwe, Argentina, and a bunch of other countries serve as good examples of why a government's budget is not helped by running the presses.
If fiat currencies suck because of inflation, representative currencies suck because of deflation. With representative currency there is by definition a fixed amount in circulation, but that does nothing to stop the never-ending rise in demand for currency. Higher demand with a fixed supply of currency causes deflation.
Deflation sucks almost as much as inflation because it hurts those who borrow money. If you owe someone $1000 and the currency appreciates, you now have to pay back $2000 in constant dollars.
You don't get rid of inflation by using a representative currency; instead, you get negative inflation. Except that you now have no mechanism for controlling inflation.
People who don't have liquid assets* aren't affected by inflation
"Those people" constitute an empty set. You are vulnerable to inflation if you have any of the following "liquid" assets:
Cash in your wallet.
A checking or savings account.
A retirement fund.
An employer with any of the above or a payroll.
"The rich" don't care as much about inflation because they can move their investments to a more stable currency. This "capital flight" devastated Latin America when much of the country's wealth left its financial system overnight.
The poor and middle classes, however, are devastated. We generally have:
Wages and salary paid in cash or check.
Savings and checking accounts, also denominated in local currency.
All of those are wiped out by inflation.
Inflation also affects interest rates. A bank might lend $1000 today for $2000 a year from now, but the bank can lose money if inflation makes $2000 of next year's dollars worth less than $1000 of this year's dollars. Movements in interest rates directly affect "the rich" but also make it harder for everyone else to get loans, interest on a savings account, and the like. It slows job growth as financing to expand becomes more costly.
In short, inflation sucks. For everyone, but especially the poor and middle classes. That's why every country's central bank works to keep inflation reasonable.
Or for opening a door for a lady. Depending on which day it is
Very true. I err on the side of caution when it comes to holding the door open for people, but some manage to be offended by such a gesture.
I held the door to my dorm for some chick late one night. After hours the doors require you to swipe your student ID to get in. It's a pain, so decent folk don't let the door swing shut after getting the reader to take their ID.
She yelled something about "I can get it myself!" but she was kind of drunk, so I couldn't really understand her. She was angry, though, so I shut the door, and it locked.
Turns out she forgot her ID. I have no idea how long she was standing outside. I think there's a moral in there somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Along with what you're saying, the lowest-population states have the best broadband competition because no ISP wants a regional monopoly in those areas. link
If you had a dozen ISPs from small to large to choose from (with reasonable rates and bandwidth thrown in as a bonus), net neutrality would be a moot point. I never thought I would ever say this, but we either need the FCC to regulate net neutrality or start looking to Arkansas as a model for internet access.
In fact we all know that even competing corporations will refuse to do battle on certain turf, thus resulting in maladies such as price-fixing and/or a lack of competitive choice.
Except those companies would be, by definition, not competing.
Yahoo's stock price raised when Microsoft wanted to purchase them, and tanked after Yahoo's refusal to sell; This affected stock price of Yahoo even though they still earned the same profit annually...
How is that irrational? In a perfectly rational world, a stock's price reflects the value of owning that tiny share of the company - and Microsoft just announced that entirely company was $billions of valuable to it. That has a few effects:
There you go - three ways in which a rise in Yahoo stock price is perfectly rational. A company's quarterly profits are only a single aspect of its value, and any kind of model assuming a rational market will assume the stock price takes into account all aspects of a stock's value.
That said, the "rational actor" model is just that - a model. It's not supposed to be a perfectly accurate simulation of all human behavior. Saying that every school of thought on economics is simultaneously wrong because individuals don't behave exactly like the model is like saying all of science is wrong because not everything behaves like an ideal gas!
FWIW, the education program at my college required you to have a newer-model Mac laptop. I still don't understand why an elementary ed. major needs Garage Band proficiency, but evidently audio weblogs are the future of education, and only Macs are capable of that.
This despite the fact we have large, woefully underutilized Apple labs - they actually cut some student positions because nobody was in them. I guess the dual quad-core Xeons with 8 GB of RAM aren't as good at Garage Band as 13" Macbooks.
You are aware that there are many more issuers of bonds than the federal government, aren't you?
Deflation did not "work out quite well." It absolutely sucked for farmers (which, when we had deflation, was basically everyone.) You had to take out a bank loan to purchase seed up front; you would pay your loan back with interest after harvest.
Deflation makes those loans a raw deal - you might pay $1200 on a $1000 loan, but each of those dollars is worth more after a growing season's worth of deflation. Because of deflation, you pay the bank much more in constant dollars.
I'm also not sure why massive deflation is a solution to people not knowing how to save or invest money.
The more you know. Evidently too much oxygen can cause cell death, burst alveoli in your lungs, and retinal detachment.
When has anything a company has done been for your benefit?
Well, AT&T let me cancel.
But only after I spent a week calling their cancellation line that was, inexplicably, always "closed." And then, only after I pointed out that it was entirely within my power to cancel myself by not paying them (and keeping their modem.)
So, I guess it's a wash.
"Elasticity" is only one part of the picture. It's true that "demand for food" is rather inelastic - everyone has to eat. But, nobody has a monopoly on food - consumers can eat whatever the heck they want. If beef becomes expensive, one can eat chicken; if rice is expensive, one can eat grain, or anything else.
Everyone needs to eat, but demand for any particular set of food products is generally not inelastic - there's no cartel keeping people from substituting butter for margarine.
In fact, food is a particularly bad example. Agriculture and food processing markets are the best real-world examples of Free markets.
Well, my college's math department had a really cute girl who talked excitedly about doing brain surgery on birds and stitching them back up again. I'm not much of a bio nerd, but that was cool.
As for the department where they don't "know yet," what she did know about scalpels would have probably made up for it.
Which kind of makes them the perfect sample for evaluating a TLD.
Absolutely! But it'll take some hacking. I ran it on a first-gen Acer netbook with an 8 GB SSD that liked to hardlock the system on ever write.
There's a fair tutorial here. The parts about Vista aren't really relevant, but the gist of it is
Hope that helps. The biggest problem you have is that if, say, you only have 2 GB of memory your protected disk can only endure a MAXIMUM of ~2GB of writes. After that, all free memory is filled with the cached writes. You'll have to periodically commit the writes to disk with ewfmgr to ensure memory stays free or reboot or otherwise discard the changes.
As others mentioned, if the goal is just to keep an embedded system in its original pristine state, Microsoft SteadyState (free) or Faronics DeepFreeze (costly) are better options. However, EWF will make a machine *fly*, especially one that was previously writing to a slow disk.
Try going under settings, voicemail & text, and seeing if the "Transcribe Voicemails" box got unchecked. If it's checked and you don't see your inbox being transcribed for you, there's definitely something weird going on.
Google Voice does a lot more than just call-forwarding, although having one call ring any or all of your phones is pretty nifty. You get voicemail with adequate transcription (you can get your voicemail messages e-mailed to you), free text messaging, blacklists, incoming call recording, call routing (these people automatically get my cell, these automatically go to voicemail), free US+Canada long distance, cheap international calling, and a "call me" widget you can throw on a website that lets people call you without ever knowing your telephone number.
Probably a lot of other stuff that I missed. But, you can't argue with the price. If you haven't tried it, go waste ten or so minutes to set it up. I applied for the beta on a whim not knowing what I would do if I got it. Now, I would cry if I had to go back to handing out my actual phone numbers.
It doesn't sound quite that sinister. Quoting from your link:
You should follow these steps only, if you get a security warning message upon viewing Jacobs University's web services.
Sounds like they're doing what my college did, and what a lot of other schools do - issue self-signed certs for their webmail server. (Or use the wrong cert on the wrong server, or get one for their intranet domain only, or any other number of stupid things you can do with SSL certs.)
Wouldn't it be more effective to measure tools by task effectiveness?
Like, say, if a tool can only do a single task at a time?
They just upped the logo requirements - to get logo certification, you have to have 64 bit versions of drivers as well. Which is great, because 32bit blows chunks.
As for having to get them signed, that is kind of a pain. On the plus side, it means your signed driver went over some basic "are you likely to freeze the computer" tests and it discourages companies with shitty programmers from doing unnecessary stuff in kernelspace.
I for one applaud this tiny effort to improve Windows stability.
Except that "wage inflation," whatever you meant by that, has no bearing on the calculation of inflation.
The US calculates inflation by constructing a basket of goods that represents what a typical consumer purchases - e.g., x loaves of bread, y new cars. They then find out how much the basket costs this month rather than last month - e.g., prices for bread went up, so now the basket costs x+1 instead of x.
If you buy the same things you always did, but this month they cost you more, that's inflation. Wages can affect that, but low inflation means we're all richer rather than poorer.
You don't have to occupy a country to benefit from its resources. We did a very good job mangling Latin American economies without maintaining an occupying force. We'll benefit by doing nothing; I'd imagine deposits that large would drive down the global price for those minerals.
Bigger problems are what the summary mentions: Lack of heavy industry and corruption. Corruption increases with the square of the distance from Kabul. Bureaucratic processes are intentionally long and complicated; bribes at each step are expected and practically required. The central government has little reach outside of the capitol and inability to effectively tax. This means incredibly low salaries for government employees, encouraging graft.
"Lack of heavy industry" is another reason even a hardcore realpolitik would avoid "taking another [military] look at the Afghanistan situation." This means they'll need our contractors to realize any return on their $trillion in mineral rights.
Trade between countries is generally beneficial for both because of something called comparative advantage. Even if China produces everything faster, better, and cheaper than we do (and they don't!), trade with them would still let us focus on producing the things we produce best. Rather than try to make everything domestically, we can produce the things we are most efficient at domestically and import the rest.
Taking advantage of your comparative advantage boosts consumption - everyone has more stuff - but that requires scaling back industries that we suck at. Japan decimated a lot of our industries post-World War II as they industrialized, starting with textiles and moving on to automobiles and computers. Although I think GM blows chunks, they benefited from a good kick in the pants and other Japanese innovations, such as zero-inventory just-in-time production.
I'd argue trade with Japan is an example of successful, mutually-beneficial trade. It obviously hasn't destroyed us - I don't think we can blame the Japanese entirely for the utter suckage of the domestic auto industry, for example - and our GDP has continued increasing since the 1950s. It also benefited Japan - just 50 years ago they went from zero domestic production (everything had been bombed flat) and dependent on American grain handouts to a fully industrialized nation.
I believe trade with China also has the potential to be mutually beneficial. They can out-manufacture us because they have millions of underutilized peasants waiting to be abused. While in the short term tragic for our own manufacturing, it has the side-effect of moving their peasants further towards the middle class. When a middle class crystalizes, that's when we will see little "innovations" like employee rights, organized labor, and the like.
In other words, all the things that give China a trade advantage will work themselves out. Their trinkets are cheaper not because they have some magic factory tech that we're somehow incapable of replicating, but because they're still in the process of lifting a billion people out of poverty. Give it time - completely locking China out of our market with tariffs won't hurt them at all, is unlikely to help us, and would be a great boon to Europe.
There you go, assuming Japanese has to make sense.
Punch "America" into Google translate, English to Japanese. Look at the second result. It's written with the kanji for "rice" and "country."
It literally means "rice." You're seeing Mickey Mouse pop up because, evidently, America is known colloquially as the land of rice and is abbreviated by that kanji.
See my favorite kanji dictionary.
A government cannot get "unlimited funding through inflation." Our government can run budget deficits because people will keep loaning us money - i.e., buying Treasury securities. Post-WWII Germany, Zimbabwe, Argentina, and a bunch of other countries serve as good examples of why a government's budget is not helped by running the presses.
If fiat currencies suck because of inflation, representative currencies suck because of deflation. With representative currency there is by definition a fixed amount in circulation, but that does nothing to stop the never-ending rise in demand for currency. Higher demand with a fixed supply of currency causes deflation.
Deflation sucks almost as much as inflation because it hurts those who borrow money. If you owe someone $1000 and the currency appreciates, you now have to pay back $2000 in constant dollars.
You don't get rid of inflation by using a representative currency; instead, you get negative inflation. Except that you now have no mechanism for controlling inflation.
People who don't have liquid assets* aren't affected by inflation
"Those people" constitute an empty set. You are vulnerable to inflation if you have any of the following "liquid" assets:
"The rich" don't care as much about inflation because they can move their investments to a more stable currency. This "capital flight" devastated Latin America when much of the country's wealth left its financial system overnight.
The poor and middle classes, however, are devastated. We generally have:
All of those are wiped out by inflation.
Inflation also affects interest rates. A bank might lend $1000 today for $2000 a year from now, but the bank can lose money if inflation makes $2000 of next year's dollars worth less than $1000 of this year's dollars. Movements in interest rates directly affect "the rich" but also make it harder for everyone else to get loans, interest on a savings account, and the like. It slows job growth as financing to expand becomes more costly.
In short, inflation sucks. For everyone, but especially the poor and middle classes. That's why every country's central bank works to keep inflation reasonable.
Or for opening a door for a lady. Depending on which day it is
Very true. I err on the side of caution when it comes to holding the door open for people, but some manage to be offended by such a gesture.
I held the door to my dorm for some chick late one night. After hours the doors require you to swipe your student ID to get in. It's a pain, so decent folk don't let the door swing shut after getting the reader to take their ID.
She yelled something about "I can get it myself!" but she was kind of drunk, so I couldn't really understand her. She was angry, though, so I shut the door, and it locked.
Turns out she forgot her ID. I have no idea how long she was standing outside. I think there's a moral in there somewhere.