That pesky atmosphere getting in the way won't make it easy, especially with high altitude winds in the 250mph highly likely. Heck, 253mph is the known record for a storm near the ground.
Alright, so let's build this space elevator on the moon, then. Problem solved, once and for all.
Do a Google search. While we have strong enough material to build it, it would have to be much, much longer than a Earth elevator. Earth rotates once ever 24 hours, the Moon once every 28 days. IIRC it would reach beyond the first Lagrange point.
Most buyers who purchase fixed income securities do it for the "fixed" part. i.e. you get a steady, lower-risk stream of income. A new unknown, potentially highly fluctuating instrument (based on the variability and fraud rates for cryptocurrencies) is the opposite of that.
I don't think this is true. The bond pays in Australian Dollars, a nice stable currency. I believe the point of the bond is that it can be traded off the exchanges and be self settling, without the need for a transfer agent. .
I think a NEWCOMER would have trouble with Sandman. I found it to be rather dense material with some crazy subject matter that jumps around in time and character perspective a fair bit.
It is adult material, in the sense of not only therms but in complexity of material. It does have the virtue of being mostly self contained - expect maybe for the first 8 issues. You don't need to know much in the way of comic lore to read it.
Gaiman's 1602 has a good take on the Marvel Universe. Also the illustrated Stardust is not technically a comic book but a very good hybrid.
I would second this. The comic books are not a genre, it is many genre. Superheros are common. Self published black & white biographies are good, for example, Maus, Ghost World, and Persepolis. Japaneses manga coves robot warriors to brewing sake to the swim team.
Squire Girl has good humor. Saga has great visuals. etc.
If the first does not grab you attention move on to the next. It is like going to a librarian and asking for a good book.
It encourages savings in financial instruments like bonds. Bonds get a little extra boast from deflation. Who holds bonds? Those people who are already wealth.
It discourages investing in equity. The hurdle rate for the Equity Risk Premium just jumps up by a little. Equities are better at weathering inflation than bonds.
So, deflation helps those who are already wealthy and encourages low risk low reward projects. It discourages the young hungry people from making big transformation projects. The general consensus is that low steady inflation is the best choice among the various options out there.
The Fed is a hybrid system, both public and private.
The Fed is owned by its member banks. They get to elect board members to the regional boards. Profits accrue the banks, kind of. The Fed doesn't pay a dividend so those profits never get monetized. So de facto profits go the Treasury.
However the Board of Governors is appointed by the president. This limits the amount of control the banks have over the institution. So what is ownership without access to profits or control?
A analogy would be the local co-op grocery store. The more you buy the more of the store you own. However this comes back as store rebates and the insiders still have control.
We are wandering a bit off topic, but... It is not a Middle Age thing. For most of history the best guess is that investments have returned around 1 to 2%. It may not even be a stagnation thing. Remember that returns are set by supply and demand. One could have a high growth rate and a high savings rate which would result in a low return on investments. A good example here would be the 19th century Europe. High wealth inequities probably pushed down investment returns here.
Perhaps the market is expecting the low-yield regime to last that long... no major expansions or growth opportunities in sight---unless something really great comes along (e.g. fusion power, self driving cars, automation, etc.,) the next 40 years will be pretty much like the last decade as far as growth is concerned.
Maybe. The rate is determined by supply and demand. There is surplus savings sloshing around the market right now. Pension and banking regulations, surplus savings from Asia, demographic imbalances. etc.
Even if there is a great leap forward this may not solve the imbalance. Take self driving cars. We could see a huge fleet of personally owned cars replaced by a smaller fleet of self driving taxis. Car production could fall by 70% in 20 years. So less investments would be needed. Most of the technological advancement over the past 20 years has reduced the amount of capital needed. No magic bullet here.
In short, there is a fire sale of debt going on and Microsoft is selling. This has more to do with the debt market than with MSFT.
I will slightly disagree with this. I see Microsoft more of a "Value" company (steady profits) instead of a "Growth" company (skyrocketing sales). However the issuing of new debt says little. To oversimplify, debt is good. If equity is expected to yield 10% and debt is expected to yield 2% then one should issue debt and do a stock buy back. A little financial leverage, a little debt shield. All is good as long as the company can support the debt.
As a side note, the market is desperate for high quality debt. Regulations favor debt purchases over stock. Think pension funds. Since the 2008 financial crisis things have gotten worse. 40 years at 4.5%? One would have to be desperate to take on 40 years worth of inflation risk at such a miserly rate. Yet pension funds are pilling in.
Nonsense. The US had greater debt obligations as a % of GDP at the end of WWII and dealt with them without printing money. They just raised taxes and lowered spending to an appropriate level rather than pretending that we can borrow endlessly and somehow magically bring in more tax revenue by collecting less taxes.
Nope. The US engaged in "Financial Repression" during the 1950s. Financial repression is when inflation is higher than the yield on a 10 year government bond. IIRC, the 10 years were selling around 2% while inflation was at 4%. 2 take away from this. First, you don't need double digit inflation. Second, the US was able to pull this off in the 1950s because investors had lived through the Great Depression and were very risk adverse. Not sure if the US could pull this off again.
Well, we did see quite a few bankruptcies. We saw back catalogs being traded multiple times, each time at a lower price. Staff fired, fewer releases of new records by the majors, etc. So we saw real impacts, not just accounting tricks.
Their employees (singers, producers, writers) might demand higher salaries, such as getting a bigger cut of the revenue. Marketing expenses might be higher. If I recall, Apple charged a pretty penny to have albums pop up on iTunes front page. I have heard anecdotal evidence on both sides. I know that enough things have changed over the last 10 years and one can't make an easy comparison between the two time periods.
Mashiki, while that is true I don't think that is the case here. Yahoo misrepresented nothing. I am assuming Yahoo did not know about the data breach when they signed the deal.
That being said, most merger agreements have a materiality clause allowing termination of the merger is something significance comes up. It is a bit of a weasel clause and is rarely used but it almost always in the merger agreement. I am not sure I would call this data breach material in the financial sense but it does give Verizon leverage.
Franchise laws exist to balance the power of the large parent company and the small independent owner. If not, the parent company could bully the independent franchise. You can’t have weak puppet proxies. While I don’t think Tesla should be forced to franchise, in order for franchising to work you need decent franchising laws.
At this point I really want to find a film clip from Glengarry Glen Ross about steak knives.
The Constitution clearly states any powers/rights not delegated to the government are thus the powers/rights of the people and/or states. Since the government has the power to mint money granted to it, the people by constitutional decree do not have that right.
What can I say? For over 100 years almost every US bank issued their own bank notes. Even railroads issued their own money. This practice never made it way to the Supreme Court as a issue. Here is a interesting link.
The tax rules around currency trading are complex. Each time you convert your currency you have to calculate your gain / loss from FX rate movements and pay taxes on that. If you are a currency traded you must "mark to market" you currency positions at the end of each year and pay short term capital gains on your unrealized gains. One of the measures of being a currency trader are the number of transaction you do each year, so I could see a casual Bitcoin user falling into this category.
No, it was not put there to avoid that problem. For the first 100 years of the US most of the money issued was private. Bank notes issued by private banks. It was not until the Civil War that the Federal Government got into the money business issuing Greenbacks.
The clause in the Constitution grants the government to right to mint money. It does not precluded anybody else from doing so.
I would like to extend on this - The Justice Department does have rules around this. When stocks (Google, MSFT, etc.) are sized they are sold on a exchange that meets minimum liquidity and transparency. Liquidity should be obvious - you don't want to crush the market by dumping a big block all at once. Transparency because you don't want a inside cartel depressing prices.
"Sold by and shipped by Amazon.com" means that Amazon is the retailer, has purchased the inventory, and they bear the risk and cost of holding that inventory.
Third party sells have 2 options. They can list on Amazon and ship from their warehouse. The other option is that they can rent warehouse space from Amazon. Amazon will then ship the goods for them. The 3rd party has to stock the warehouse and bears the risk and cost of inventory.
Laws have to factor in both actions and intent. If one relied on only one or the other abuses could occur. I suspect that you are having issues with the nebulas nature of intent.
Most fraud and white collar rely more highly on this than other crimes. Partly this is because criminals are more inventive and imaginative then legislators. Partly this is because the western legal system is designed to ban actions, not proscribe actions. i.e., if a law says you can't do something than you can do it.
I share some of your unease on overreaching laws but I think intent has to a important factor.
If I have time I will try to dig up more. I don't think we are that far off from each other. I think their tech is better than "early promising research" even if it is not up to production quality.
From what I have been reading, it looks like they rolled out their processes too quickly and promised too much. A buggy beta release of the latest FPS will cause the wroth of fan boys. But that is o.k. because the fan boys knew they were downloading a buggy beta release. Medical testing is a different ball of wax.
That being said, we know the lab has been able to do some pretty nifty things in terms of amount of work that could be done with a drop of blood. So there has to be something there.
I highly divisible universal currency being tested by banks. Might not be a horrible idea. Remove the necessity for currency exchange markets. If you economy is tanking, the price of goods increase but based off of a universally monitored and controlled currency with a specific market value. I don't necessarily like the idea of the value of the currency fluctuating independently of a given nations inflation, but the idea still would have merit to investigate.
I personally think it is a horrible idea. On the plus side I don't know of any banks that are interested in doing something like that.
If you are confused, the banks are only testing the "ledger" ability of block chains, not the "currency" aspect. The idea is that a block chain would be associated with asset (stocks, bonds, gold, whatever) and this asset could be traded directly between institutions and people without a trusted intermediary (a.k.a. the middle man). One interesting application, which boarder on science fiction, is the self-owning driverless car.
And whose fault is it that they are not comfy or pretty enough? I mean I am sure your wife, like mine, knitted her own socks from fiber that she has harvested, processed, spun, dyed? (It always surprises me how expensive DIY socks costs. I would have thought and some yarn and needles would be sufficient. But one has to have multiple spinning wheels, combs, etc. Then there are the conventions which are as weird as the science fiction conventions that I go to. The list goes on.)
Slashdot Mirror
Alright, so let's build this space elevator on the moon, then. Problem solved, once and for all.
Do a Google search. While we have strong enough material to build it, it would have to be much, much longer than a Earth elevator. Earth rotates once ever 24 hours, the Moon once every 28 days. IIRC it would reach beyond the first Lagrange point.
Most buyers who purchase fixed income securities do it for the "fixed" part. i.e. you get a steady, lower-risk stream of income. A new unknown, potentially highly fluctuating instrument (based on the variability and fraud rates for cryptocurrencies) is the opposite of that.
I don't think this is true. The bond pays in Australian Dollars, a nice stable currency. I believe the point of the bond is that it can be traded off the exchanges and be self settling, without the need for a transfer agent. .
I think a NEWCOMER would have trouble with Sandman. I found it to be rather dense material with some crazy subject matter that jumps around in time and character perspective a fair bit.
It is adult material, in the sense of not only therms but in complexity of material. It does have the virtue of being mostly self contained - expect maybe for the first 8 issues. You don't need to know much in the way of comic lore to read it.
Gaiman's 1602 has a good take on the Marvel Universe. Also the illustrated Stardust is not technically a comic book but a very good hybrid.
I would second this. The comic books are not a genre, it is many genre. Superheros are common. Self published black & white biographies are good, for example, Maus, Ghost World, and Persepolis. Japaneses manga coves robot warriors to brewing sake to the swim team.
Squire Girl has good humor. Saga has great visuals. etc.
If the first does not grab you attention move on to the next. It is like going to a librarian and asking for a good book.
It encourages savings in financial instruments like bonds. Bonds get a little extra boast from deflation. Who holds bonds? Those people who are already wealth.
It discourages investing in equity. The hurdle rate for the Equity Risk Premium just jumps up by a little. Equities are better at weathering inflation than bonds.
So, deflation helps those who are already wealthy and encourages low risk low reward projects. It discourages the young hungry people from making big transformation projects. The general consensus is that low steady inflation is the best choice among the various options out there.
They did test it out first. It worked. So yes, they were stupid but not that stupid.
The Fed is a hybrid system, both public and private.
The Fed is owned by its member banks. They get to elect board members to the regional boards. Profits accrue the banks, kind of. The Fed doesn't pay a dividend so those profits never get monetized. So de facto profits go the Treasury.
However the Board of Governors is appointed by the president. This limits the amount of control the banks have over the institution. So what is ownership without access to profits or control?
A analogy would be the local co-op grocery store. The more you buy the more of the store you own. However this comes back as store rebates and the insiders still have control.
We are wandering a bit off topic, but... It is not a Middle Age thing. For most of history the best guess is that investments have returned around 1 to 2%. It may not even be a stagnation thing. Remember that returns are set by supply and demand. One could have a high growth rate and a high savings rate which would result in a low return on investments. A good example here would be the 19th century Europe. High wealth inequities probably pushed down investment returns here.
Perhaps the market is expecting the low-yield regime to last that long... no major expansions or growth opportunities in sight---unless something really great comes along (e.g. fusion power, self driving cars, automation, etc.,) the next 40 years will be pretty much like the last decade as far as growth is concerned.
Maybe. The rate is determined by supply and demand. There is surplus savings sloshing around the market right now. Pension and banking regulations, surplus savings from Asia, demographic imbalances. etc.
Even if there is a great leap forward this may not solve the imbalance. Take self driving cars. We could see a huge fleet of personally owned cars replaced by a smaller fleet of self driving taxis. Car production could fall by 70% in 20 years. So less investments would be needed. Most of the technological advancement over the past 20 years has reduced the amount of capital needed. No magic bullet here.
In short, there is a fire sale of debt going on and Microsoft is selling. This has more to do with the debt market than with MSFT.
I will slightly disagree with this. I see Microsoft more of a "Value" company (steady profits) instead of a "Growth" company (skyrocketing sales). However the issuing of new debt says little. To oversimplify, debt is good. If equity is expected to yield 10% and debt is expected to yield 2% then one should issue debt and do a stock buy back. A little financial leverage, a little debt shield. All is good as long as the company can support the debt.
As a side note, the market is desperate for high quality debt. Regulations favor debt purchases over stock. Think pension funds. Since the 2008 financial crisis things have gotten worse. 40 years at 4.5%? One would have to be desperate to take on 40 years worth of inflation risk at such a miserly rate. Yet pension funds are pilling in.
Nonsense. The US had greater debt obligations as a % of GDP at the end of WWII and dealt with them without printing money. They just raised taxes and lowered spending to an appropriate level rather than pretending that we can borrow endlessly and somehow magically bring in more tax revenue by collecting less taxes.
Nope. The US engaged in "Financial Repression" during the 1950s. Financial repression is when inflation is higher than the yield on a 10 year government bond. IIRC, the 10 years were selling around 2% while inflation was at 4%. 2 take away from this. First, you don't need double digit inflation. Second, the US was able to pull this off in the 1950s because investors had lived through the Great Depression and were very risk adverse. Not sure if the US could pull this off again.
Well, we did see quite a few bankruptcies. We saw back catalogs being traded multiple times, each time at a lower price. Staff fired, fewer releases of new records by the majors, etc. So we saw real impacts, not just accounting tricks.
I can think of quite a few.
Their employees (singers, producers, writers) might demand higher salaries, such as getting a bigger cut of the revenue. Marketing expenses might be higher. If I recall, Apple charged a pretty penny to have albums pop up on iTunes front page. I have heard anecdotal evidence on both sides. I know that enough things have changed over the last 10 years and one can't make an easy comparison between the two time periods.
Mashiki, while that is true I don't think that is the case here. Yahoo misrepresented nothing. I am assuming Yahoo did not know about the data breach when they signed the deal.
That being said, most merger agreements have a materiality clause allowing termination of the merger is something significance comes up. It is a bit of a weasel clause and is rarely used but it almost always in the merger agreement. I am not sure I would call this data breach material in the financial sense but it does give Verizon leverage.
You can’t do it that way.
Franchise laws exist to balance the power of the large parent company and the small independent owner. If not, the parent company could bully the independent franchise. You can’t have weak puppet proxies. While I don’t think Tesla should be forced to franchise, in order for franchising to work you need decent franchising laws.
At this point I really want to find a film clip from Glengarry Glen Ross about steak knives.
The Constitution clearly states any powers/rights not delegated to the government are thus the powers/rights of the people and/or states. Since the government has the power to mint money granted to it, the people by constitutional decree do not have that right.
What can I say? For over 100 years almost every US bank issued their own bank notes. Even railroads issued their own money. This practice never made it way to the Supreme Court as a issue. Here is a interesting link.
http://www.npr.org/sections/mo...
The tax rules around currency trading are complex. Each time you convert your currency you have to calculate your gain / loss from FX rate movements and pay taxes on that. If you are a currency traded you must "mark to market" you currency positions at the end of each year and pay short term capital gains on your unrealized gains. One of the measures of being a currency trader are the number of transaction you do each year, so I could see a casual Bitcoin user falling into this category.
No, it was not put there to avoid that problem. For the first 100 years of the US most of the money issued was private. Bank notes issued by private banks. It was not until the Civil War that the Federal Government got into the money business issuing Greenbacks.
The clause in the Constitution grants the government to right to mint money. It does not precluded anybody else from doing so.
I would like to extend on this - The Justice Department does have rules around this. When stocks (Google, MSFT, etc.) are sized they are sold on a exchange that meets minimum liquidity and transparency. Liquidity should be obvious - you don't want to crush the market by dumping a big block all at once. Transparency because you don't want a inside cartel depressing prices.
"Sold by and shipped by Amazon.com" means that Amazon is the retailer, has purchased the inventory, and they bear the risk and cost of holding that inventory.
Third party sells have 2 options. They can list on Amazon and ship from their warehouse. The other option is that they can rent warehouse space from Amazon. Amazon will then ship the goods for them. The 3rd party has to stock the warehouse and bears the risk and cost of inventory.
Laws have to factor in both actions and intent. If one relied on only one or the other abuses could occur. I suspect that you are having issues with the nebulas nature of intent.
Most fraud and white collar rely more highly on this than other crimes. Partly this is because criminals are more inventive and imaginative then legislators. Partly this is because the western legal system is designed to ban actions, not proscribe actions. i.e., if a law says you can't do something than you can do it.
I share some of your unease on overreaching laws but I think intent has to a important factor.
Here is one article that should not be behind a pay wall. : http://www.economist.com/news/...
If I have time I will try to dig up more. I don't think we are that far off from each other. I think their tech is better than "early promising research" even if it is not up to production quality.
Yes, sort off.
From what I have been reading, it looks like they rolled out their processes too quickly and promised too much. A buggy beta release of the latest FPS will cause the wroth of fan boys. But that is o.k. because the fan boys knew they were downloading a buggy beta release. Medical testing is a different ball of wax.
That being said, we know the lab has been able to do some pretty nifty things in terms of amount of work that could be done with a drop of blood. So there has to be something there.
I highly divisible universal currency being tested by banks. Might not be a horrible idea. Remove the necessity for currency exchange markets. If you economy is tanking, the price of goods increase but based off of a universally monitored and controlled currency with a specific market value. I don't necessarily like the idea of the value of the currency fluctuating independently of a given nations inflation, but the idea still would have merit to investigate.
I personally think it is a horrible idea. On the plus side I don't know of any banks that are interested in doing something like that.
If you are confused, the banks are only testing the "ledger" ability of block chains, not the "currency" aspect. The idea is that a block chain would be associated with asset (stocks, bonds, gold, whatever) and this asset could be traded directly between institutions and people without a trusted intermediary (a.k.a. the middle man). One interesting application, which boarder on science fiction, is the self-owning driverless car.
And whose fault is it that they are not comfy or pretty enough? I mean I am sure your wife, like mine, knitted her own socks from fiber that she has harvested, processed, spun, dyed? (It always surprises me how expensive DIY socks costs. I would have thought and some yarn and needles would be sufficient. But one has to have multiple spinning wheels, combs, etc. Then there are the conventions which are as weird as the science fiction conventions that I go to. The list goes on.)