All of your points explain why a (limited term) copyright is good for society, but not why people should have an expectation that others can't share, use and enjoy the results of their work.
I'd love to get paid for my creative work, but I'd rather people just enjoyed it than keep it artificially hidden from them. I'm also keen that people (including companies) don't commercially exploit it without my permission, but there's no DRM equivalent preventing them.
However, given how much I've benefited from the cultural contributions from society at large, it feels petty to expect society to pay for my own contribution, particularly indefinitely. People should be able to benefit, and if they're able to pay (and someone asks them to) then at a population level, they do - hence the continued market for triple-A games. Individually people may not pay, but at a cost of reproduction approximating zero that can be tolerated with minimal pain.
He hasn't done any less work. His price should be lower because his costs are lower, but you're paying for his ability to write good software that does the job that needs to get done.
His price should be whatever he thinks the market can bear. For easily reproduced work that may be a lower price, so that people prefer to buy than to pirate.
It may be a higher price, as the number of people willing to pay may be relatively constant at a broad price range.
Cliffski (an independent games developer) wrote an interesting blog exploring his total revenue at lower vs higher price points (based on selling at both), and priced his next game nearer the top end.
Similarly, Adobe charge an astonishing amount for its Creative Suite, and as a result suffer an astonishing amount of piracy. Their distribution costs are primarily bandwidth (and annoyingly, authentication servers) but they've determined that the market will bear a high price even though they subsequently lose out on sales to individuals. (This calculation will probably include the costs of support, etc).
My creative work is available to individuals for free, because I perceive insufficient value from it to charge them. My cost of distribution is non-zero (i.e. I pay for a server and its attached network link) but I treat that as a cost of my hobby. I don't demand that people pay me.
If someone offered me $1m for the stuff I created last week then as proud of it as I am, I'd have to turn them down. It's just not worth that. If they ask me if they can have it for free then I'll tell them to enjoy it, and if they subsequently buy me a large box of high quality chocolate then I'll be stunned and delighted. I just wont ask for it.
Why do you persist on interpreting my point about his time being a sunk cost that can not ever be returned as meaning that everything should be free?
That's not the case. I support reasonable copyright and patent terms, and perceive them to have value. I spend much of my income on rewarding people that create things I like or need. I still can't give him his time back, sorry.
As I said, payment may give him incentive to continue writing software. It may not, if it's too low a sum. He may write software for the mere pleasure, or because it adds value to him.
Investing time now to acquire future income is a gamble. The decision on whether to invest time must be made on an assessment of the future income, and past performance is a useful indicator to factor into that assessment. But the time is lost whether that income occurs or not.
what exactly gives YOU the right to STEAL MY hard work?
What exactly gives you the right to stop him? There are artificial laws that give you legal rights, but why do you own his copy?
I don't understand this "I made it therefore you can't use it" attitude. (Ironically and hypocritically I do put copyright and rights usage instructions on my photographs).
If you don't want people to use it, don't create it. If you don't want people to use it, don't make it available. If you don't want people to use it, don't make it useful, attractive, entertaining or pleasing.
If you just want cash from it, then put it up for sale and if people like it, they'll reward you. Some people wont, but I don't understand why you should arbitrarily be able to stop them.
Artificial monopolies may add value to society, but the current state of artificial monopolies does not.
Then you're an idiot. There are a lot of companies making a lot of money by producing content and then selling it at the same that that it is available across the world for free.
People are willing to pay. People do pay. People also consume content for free.
I pay for BBC television. I watch Channel 4 for free. I pay LoveFilm to stream movies to me. I watch videos on Youtube for free.
It's possible to allocate a sizeable portion of your income to paying content creators and still have the desire to encounter additional content. Are you really going to tell me that I shouldn't have bookmarked a website serving a jpeg of one of my favourite photographs instead of paying Magnum tens of dollars to get a larger copy for myself?
Is the photographer losing out? Would I actually give him $150 for that photo? Is it worth that much to me to be able to take a peek every few months and go, "yeah, that _is_ a good photo"?
I know the answer to that. My answer may be different to yours. I sure as shit can't afford to pay $150 to visit every site I've bookmarked, let alone $150 for only ten minutes of my web browsing each year.
Given the estimates in the UK are that more music is downloaded for free than bought, I'm guessing your estimate of 3% is as bullshit as your other arguments.
I refer you to the success of musicians that offer their music on a 'pay what you want' basis. I refer you to the success of Kickstarter. I refer you to the success of the Humble Bundle.
People are willing to pay for content. They're not able to pay for as much as they'd like, they'd prefer to test it before they buy and some of them just wont pay for it. Some of them feel that paying for content merely perpetuates the abuses of the large media companies, but you'll find that most of those people support independent content producers.
Some people give their work away for free. Some people buy content they don't want, just to reward the content producer.
The evidence from academic studies is that the people that 'pirate' the most music are among the highest spenders on music. Who'd have thought it, music lovers acquiring music.
I find most piracy arguments are complex and take into account far more factors than your idiotic and false simplification.
So I'm not going to say 'Fuck em', I'm going to say 'Fuck you'.
Theft of my time. Time I could have spent earning extra income helping someone with an odd job or time I could have spent going out with friends or even getting a couple extra hours of sleep.
No. Your time has already been used. You wont get it back if someone pays you a dollar for your app.
You may be incentivised to invest more time into trying to earn another dollar in the same way, but that time you spent? It's gone. It wont come back. It can't be stolen, for it no longer exists.
You've made the assumption that the additional government spending made possible by borrowing doesn't cause the economy to grow (and hence increase government revenue in future years). That can more than cover the interest - it's a similar concept to a business going into debt to buy some factory machine which increases their production/reduces their costs and generates more additional revenue than the loan payments.
Yeah, it was an implicit assumption. However that investment could occur without the borrowing, so allocating a portion of economic growth to government revenue would've been too complicated for a simple model created to answer someone on Slashdot:)
Gold is convenient if you have a lot and can benefit from economies of scale on the storage and security overheads. For individuals it's hard to get enough gold to justify the expense of securing it, once you have enough gold to attract nasty people looking to help you dispose of it again.
I'd prefer the government backed security of my bank deposits. Other people prefer to buy gold bullion and sit at home stroking it, going "isn't it pretty!" I'm fine with that, but I'm still not seeing why people get so hung up on it, and on using it as some sort of standard measure of currency.
How did Adam Smith handle the problems of insufficient gold (e.g. the US couldn't feasibly cover its current money supply with gold) or too much gold (e.g through generation of gold in nuclear reactors).
Tying the dollar to gold is pointless unless gold has a fixed value. If it doesn't have a fixed value then governments can merely restate the amount of gold you can exchange your dollars for, and print more money. If it does have a fixed value then you've just seriously constrained the size of your economy.
No offence to Adam Smith but the world's changed a little in the last two centuries.
Prudent fiscal management is needed whatever you pin your currency to. Instability on the supply side can lead to rampant inflation or deflation and severe problems as a result. Stability on the supply side leads to Greeks rummaging through garbage for food.
If that fiat money belonged to the government, and not to the banks, we could go about playing the same sort of banking games that the Federal Reserve does today, without paying the Federal Reserve for doing it.
You do realise that any profit it makes goes to the US Treasury anyway. Hardly ripping off the government.
Note that's not the only central bank model. The Bank of England is an independent institution, but it's wholly owned by the British treasury.
The all-important "faith" in the dollar is not faith in our government, but faith in the ability of the central bank to back those bills up with something. And, they have nothing.
The central bank wouldn't have gold either. It can't afford it.
The fed acts on behalf of the government, with a degree of autonomy deemed necessary across the world. Faith in the dollar is indeed faith in the US, including its government.
And I still can't see how gold is worth more than a US Dollar. If China decided it didn't want US gold then a gold standard based dollar would be worthless in China. If China wanted US goods and services then it can pay in US dollars whether there's a gold standard or not.
Worse? The Federal Reserve engages in fractional lending to it's member banks, then the member banks engage in fractional lending. The Fed lends ten million dollars for every million it prints, then each member bank lends ten more million for every million that they receive.
Oh dear. This may take a while. Central banks do not engage in fractional lending. The federal reserve may increase the money supply, but it's also beholden to provide any money it adds to the economy. The Fed may lend ten million dollars for every million it prints, but physical currency isn't the entire money supply. A central bank can for instance increase the amount of money in existence by buying bonds on the market. It doesn't have to hand over a suitcase full of cash to do this, it merely alters the central balance of the financial institution holding the funds for whoever sold the bonds. Other banks do engage in fractional reserve banking, but you haven't explained why this is a bad thing. Do please share, and also offer viable alternatives that provide the same capabilities. I'm not sure I want to revert back to bartering for donkeys.
Actually, just tell me how a bank works if it doesn't engage in fractional reserve banking. A bank is an intermediary between someone that has money, and someone that needs money. If I start a bank and put $100 of my own money into it, the bank can't lend you $100 if it has to keep in its vaults all $100 of my money. That's not a bank, that's a vault.
If I put in $100 and the bank lends you $200, it hasn't magically made $200 come from nowhere. It's loaned you $80 of my money and $120 of someone else's money that it's had to borrow.
Tell me that isn't a pyramid scheme.
That isn't a pyramid scheme. A pyramid scheme forces late joiners to lose out, as their equity is distributed among earlier joiners. Central banking and fractional reserve banking are nothing like that. If I put $100 into a bank, I can get $100 back out.
The dollar has no value. Gold has value. Oil has value. Oil and gold are stable, the dollar is not. Collecting dollars is a fool's mission, but we're all forced to do it.
I'm not sure how the relative values of gold and oil matter, and I don't think gold prices are stable at all, given the annual fluctuations in price of up to 180%. That's more volatile than the US dollar.
(btw, comparing figures for 75 years to figures for 5 years is fairly pointless)
But, back to my point. If gold has value, what do you buy it with? Collecting gold is a fool's mission, it's fucking hard to store and piss easy to steal. Gold has no inherent value. Gold is merely a fucking metal.
I still don't understand what's so fucking special
Given you replied to my post, I'll respond. I'm sure Bubba will reply if he has anything to say too.
Theoretically, a nation on a gold standard has gold in a vault somewhere that is equal in value to all the currency it has in circulation.
The US would have to buy around 45% of the gold ever mined to cover its issued currency at current prices. Forgive me for finding that laughable.
If we weren't paying private banking for the privilege of using their fiat money, the government wouldn't be in debt.
When the UK came off the gold standard, it's because they couldn't borrow enough money to buy the gold needed to meet the demands of people wanting the gold.
Governments borrow money. They don't have to borrow it from banks, they could borrow it from other countries. This is one reason you have sovereign wealth funds.
Not to mention that the fiat money merely exists, it doesn't belong to bankers any more than it belongs to you or me (specific quantities aside). The government doesn't have to pay the bankers a penny to use it, although they may deem the bankers' services to be valuable, in which case payment is the traditional mechanism for acquiring those services.
A gold standard has it's own strengths, one of which, you can remove some from your pocket, or your vault, and give it to a creditor, who can carry it home with him. Standards. Today, we have none.
I still don't understand. Why gold? Why not platinum? Why not pieces of slate? I like slate, I'd rather have a slate bed to my snooker table than a gold one.
Why not whatever commodity you happen to have hanging around at the time? Where minerals, elements (including but not limited to gold), labour (yes, labour) and frankly anything that can be sold and re-sold can be a commodity.
And why not a piece of paper that can be used to acquire those commodities? Why not an electronic record that allows instantaneous, convenient and efficient exchange of value?
Please, I'm still confused. What's so fucking special about gold?
What you've described is the way in which countries can mitigate getting into debt. It's still better to balance the books. The costs go up with inflation too.
Shit, run a small surplus. You can then see through any 'bad' years without incurring debt. You can fund capital investments without incurring debt.
Anyway, your plan is flawed. Year 0, borrow X at fixed interest rate Y for term Z. Assume Y is the rate of inflation and that it never changes. (Without that predictability your plan is flawed anyway).
Each year, borrow X+inflation (to keep real spending the same, so it's compounded) at the same rate Y for the same term Z. Even though you're borrowing the same amount (in real terms) because you're now having to use some of that money to pay the interest payments on the previous borrowings, your spending power isn't go up with inflation at all.
E.g. with Z at 40 years and Y at 2%, the year before you pay off the first gilt your spending power with the borrowed money (i.e. how much you can buy with what's left after paying interest) is half of what it was in year 0. The year after (and each subsequent year) your spending power is 0. You're now using the whole of the new debt to pay the interest of all previous loans, and the principle of the oldest one. With Z at 40 years and Y at 5%, you're down to 15% the year before paying off the first gilt, and again at 0 forever after.
Actually, now I've done the maths, Z is irrelevant. Unless you adopt a strategy of recycling your debt: At year Z, borrow an additional X to pay off the original principle. That strategy yields an increase in spending power at year Z, but at year Z*2 you start paying more in interest than you're borrowing. (That amount tends towards zero over a long period).
Of course, there's a massively flawed assumption in my calculations: Y is very rarely going to be both the interest rate, and the rate of inflation. Occasionally the interest rate will be below inflation (e.g. in the UK at the moment) but often it will be higher.
Unless I misread the numbers (which is very possible, I'm not an economist) the Bank of England shows yields higher than inflation for 14 of the last 15 years. (It also shows yields lower than inflation for the next 7ish, then higher again for the subsequent 13ish - they only forecast 20 years).
As soon as the interest rate rises above inflation, you start losing money on your borrowings.
In short: Practice fiscal prudence. Don't go into debt (except as a demonstration of your financial health - don't even ask me how that one works). Balance your books and don't rely on inflation to mitigate your old debts.
Modern democracies go into debt because governments spend money that they don't have to try and get re-elected.
In 1975 did you walk around with gold in your pocket? Or did you walk around with arbitrary tokens that you could exchange for gold?
Because right now you can take arbitrary tokens out of your pocket and exchange them for gold. Or platinum. Or titanium. Or food, toys, services.
What's so fucking special about gold anyway? Ooh, it's shiny. Oooh, I can have more than him because I'm rich. How are you rich? Because you have more lumps of metal than he does? Hey, those are called 'coins'. You can still get them.
Anyway, there's a limited amount of gold. What happens when there's more cash than gold that you can buy with it? Does the amount of gold you can buy for each $100 bill fall, or does the government fail to meet its obligations? One negates the gold standard, turning gold back into a mere commodity, the other shatters it.
Now, speaking of idiots - we're the ones who auctioned off all of our gold, remember? When the shit hits the fan, we have nothing to fall back on.
Really? You have oil reserves. You have a hell of a lot of land. You have a good supply of skilled labour. You have strong research and development capability. You have an extensive manufacturing base. You have stocks of multiple commodities.
I come back to, what's so fucking special about gold? What are you going to do with it anyway, when you have to fall back on it? Sell it? Shit, you've already had to do that because you're in so much debt.
Please, tell me, because I'm confused as hell, just what's so fucking special about gold.
Hmm. Private companies co-operating with law enforcement to mitigate criminal behaviour and damage to the economy? Surely not!
The document seems pretty haphazard and it's hard to give credibility to the 'sniper' plot without the context and further information. Shit, it's not even clear who came up with the plan to use snipers, whether they worked for the government, for commercial interests, a political party or a secret global conspiracy intent on keeping down the plebs.
If anything the tone of the document is "shit, you need to know about this idiot" and I couldn't see any support at all for the plan.
I'm also unaware of any Occupy movement leaders being shot to death by suppressed sniper fire.
There were enough issues from both sides without raising entirely pointless conspiracy theories. If this shit matters so much to you, stop giving banks your money and stop voting for the incumbent politicians.
Please, be assured that chips are not fries. Nobody ever goes into a chip shop and asks for fries.
It's a chip shop, or a chippy, or a fish & chip shop. It's never a fry shop, or a fryery, or a fish & fries shop.
Chips are chips. Fries are a bastard perversion sold in places that don't know how to make chips.
There is an uneasy overlap between steak fries and chips; I put it down to the American inability to use proper English, and indeed to properly translate foreign cuisine.
(Note that this has led to the truly marvellous creations collectively referred to as 'Tex-Mex', so it's not all bad)
So I just hit Google, found a car dealership in Australia (selling Holden cars in Perth) and the offers page show _only_ the "drive away" price - which includes taxes, duty, delivery.. shit, even insurance.
There's a different price listed for each spec of car too.
Forget the transient advertisement, looks like the walk-in price is pretty solid.
One bag with some t-shirts, socks and a spare pair of trousers is usually all I need.
Usually I like to take clean underwear too. Saves having to wash the same pair every night and hoping they're sufficiently dry before morning.
Sadly these days I need a bag just for my camera. Clothes wont fit in it, and the camera bag is too big to fit into a standard airline carry-on sized bag. So RyanAir would charge me extra in some form.
What people hate isn't being charged a realistic price. It's being quoted a £1 flight then having to pay £80 for it. If the flight costs £80, quote £80. Shit, that's still bloody good value - a train ticket from Manchester to London will cost that, even off-peak. So don't quote £1, then add on sixteen different surcharges, excesses, taxes, fees and other costs.
Slashdot Mirror
All of your points explain why a (limited term) copyright is good for society, but not why people should have an expectation that others can't share, use and enjoy the results of their work.
I'd love to get paid for my creative work, but I'd rather people just enjoyed it than keep it artificially hidden from them. I'm also keen that people (including companies) don't commercially exploit it without my permission, but there's no DRM equivalent preventing them.
However, given how much I've benefited from the cultural contributions from society at large, it feels petty to expect society to pay for my own contribution, particularly indefinitely. People should be able to benefit, and if they're able to pay (and someone asks them to) then at a population level, they do - hence the continued market for triple-A games. Individually people may not pay, but at a cost of reproduction approximating zero that can be tolerated with minimal pain.
He hasn't done any less work. His price should be lower because his costs are lower, but you're paying for his ability to write good software that does the job that needs to get done.
His price should be whatever he thinks the market can bear. For easily reproduced work that may be a lower price, so that people prefer to buy than to pirate.
It may be a higher price, as the number of people willing to pay may be relatively constant at a broad price range.
Cliffski (an independent games developer) wrote an interesting blog exploring his total revenue at lower vs higher price points (based on selling at both), and priced his next game nearer the top end.
Similarly, Adobe charge an astonishing amount for its Creative Suite, and as a result suffer an astonishing amount of piracy. Their distribution costs are primarily bandwidth (and annoyingly, authentication servers) but they've determined that the market will bear a high price even though they subsequently lose out on sales to individuals. (This calculation will probably include the costs of support, etc).
My creative work is available to individuals for free, because I perceive insufficient value from it to charge them. My cost of distribution is non-zero (i.e. I pay for a server and its attached network link) but I treat that as a cost of my hobby. I don't demand that people pay me.
If someone offered me $1m for the stuff I created last week then as proud of it as I am, I'd have to turn them down. It's just not worth that. If they ask me if they can have it for free then I'll tell them to enjoy it, and if they subsequently buy me a large box of high quality chocolate then I'll be stunned and delighted. I just wont ask for it.
Why do you persist on interpreting my point about his time being a sunk cost that can not ever be returned as meaning that everything should be free?
That's not the case. I support reasonable copyright and patent terms, and perceive them to have value. I spend much of my income on rewarding people that create things I like or need. I still can't give him his time back, sorry.
No, I wasn't suggesting it was morally ok. I was challenging the argument that not paying for the app constituted a theft of his time. It doesn't.
Without a credit card, how did they buy the computers and tablets?
Every parent with children over the age of seven that I know has bought their child a computer and/or tablet.
The child hasn't needed a credit card to acquire that device.
As I said, payment may give him incentive to continue writing software. It may not, if it's too low a sum. He may write software for the mere pleasure, or because it adds value to him.
Investing time now to acquire future income is a gamble. The decision on whether to invest time must be made on an assessment of the future income, and past performance is a useful indicator to factor into that assessment. But the time is lost whether that income occurs or not.
what exactly gives YOU the right to STEAL MY hard work?
What exactly gives you the right to stop him? There are artificial laws that give you legal rights, but why do you own his copy?
I don't understand this "I made it therefore you can't use it" attitude. (Ironically and hypocritically I do put copyright and rights usage instructions on my photographs).
If you don't want people to use it, don't create it.
If you don't want people to use it, don't make it available.
If you don't want people to use it, don't make it useful, attractive, entertaining or pleasing.
If you just want cash from it, then put it up for sale and if people like it, they'll reward you. Some people wont, but I don't understand why you should arbitrarily be able to stop them.
Artificial monopolies may add value to society, but the current state of artificial monopolies does not.
Then you're an idiot. There are a lot of companies making a lot of money by producing content and then selling it at the same that that it is available across the world for free.
People are willing to pay. People do pay. People also consume content for free.
I pay for BBC television. I watch Channel 4 for free.
I pay LoveFilm to stream movies to me. I watch videos on Youtube for free.
It's possible to allocate a sizeable portion of your income to paying content creators and still have the desire to encounter additional content. Are you really going to tell me that I shouldn't have bookmarked a website serving a jpeg of one of my favourite photographs instead of paying Magnum tens of dollars to get a larger copy for myself?
Is the photographer losing out? Would I actually give him $150 for that photo? Is it worth that much to me to be able to take a peek every few months and go, "yeah, that _is_ a good photo"?
I know the answer to that. My answer may be different to yours. I sure as shit can't afford to pay $150 to visit every site I've bookmarked, let alone $150 for only ten minutes of my web browsing each year.
Given the estimates in the UK are that more music is downloaded for free than bought, I'm guessing your estimate of 3% is as bullshit as your other arguments.
I refer you to the success of musicians that offer their music on a 'pay what you want' basis.
I refer you to the success of Kickstarter.
I refer you to the success of the Humble Bundle.
People are willing to pay for content. They're not able to pay for as much as they'd like, they'd prefer to test it before they buy and some of them just wont pay for it. Some of them feel that paying for content merely perpetuates the abuses of the large media companies, but you'll find that most of those people support independent content producers.
Some people give their work away for free. Some people buy content they don't want, just to reward the content producer.
The evidence from academic studies is that the people that 'pirate' the most music are among the highest spenders on music. Who'd have thought it, music lovers acquiring music.
I find most piracy arguments are complex and take into account far more factors than your idiotic and false simplification.
So I'm not going to say 'Fuck em', I'm going to say 'Fuck you'.
If content is not available in your region then don't consume it.
It is available. It's not his fault that someone doesn't want his money, and I don't think it's immoral to consume it.
Theft of my time. Time I could have spent earning extra income helping someone with an odd job or time I could have spent going out with friends or even getting a couple extra hours of sleep.
No. Your time has already been used. You wont get it back if someone pays you a dollar for your app.
You may be incentivised to invest more time into trying to earn another dollar in the same way, but that time you spent? It's gone. It wont come back. It can't be stolen, for it no longer exists.
Sorry.
You've made the assumption that the additional government spending made possible by borrowing doesn't cause the economy to grow (and hence increase government revenue in future years). That can more than cover the interest - it's a similar concept to a business going into debt to buy some factory machine which increases their production/reduces their costs and generates more additional revenue than the loan payments.
Yeah, it was an implicit assumption. However that investment could occur without the borrowing, so allocating a portion of economic growth to government revenue would've been too complicated for a simple model created to answer someone on Slashdot :)
Yeah, I'd let the banks fail myself.
Gold is convenient if you have a lot and can benefit from economies of scale on the storage and security overheads. For individuals it's hard to get enough gold to justify the expense of securing it, once you have enough gold to attract nasty people looking to help you dispose of it again.
I'd prefer the government backed security of my bank deposits. Other people prefer to buy gold bullion and sit at home stroking it, going "isn't it pretty!" I'm fine with that, but I'm still not seeing why people get so hung up on it, and on using it as some sort of standard measure of currency.
How did Adam Smith handle the problems of insufficient gold (e.g. the US couldn't feasibly cover its current money supply with gold) or too much gold (e.g through generation of gold in nuclear reactors).
Tying the dollar to gold is pointless unless gold has a fixed value. If it doesn't have a fixed value then governments can merely restate the amount of gold you can exchange your dollars for, and print more money. If it does have a fixed value then you've just seriously constrained the size of your economy.
No offence to Adam Smith but the world's changed a little in the last two centuries.
Prudent fiscal management is needed whatever you pin your currency to. Instability on the supply side can lead to rampant inflation or deflation and severe problems as a result. Stability on the supply side leads to Greeks rummaging through garbage for food.
I'm not sure that's better.
Thanks, it's good to get robust and grounded critique.
British bank notes are even rarer. While gold has many useful properties, its rarity isn't a reasonable basis for currency.
Not to mention that its rarity is time limited at best. You can already create gold artificially, and we haven't even started off-planet mining.
If everyone had slate money, you could just make money out of the rocks around your house.
Sadly not where I live, but Wales would become incredibly wealthy :)
If that fiat money belonged to the government, and not to the banks, we could go about playing the same sort of banking games that the Federal Reserve does today, without paying the Federal Reserve for doing it.
You do realise that any profit it makes goes to the US Treasury anyway. Hardly ripping off the government.
Note that's not the only central bank model. The Bank of England is an independent institution, but it's wholly owned by the British treasury.
The all-important "faith" in the dollar is not faith in our government, but faith in the ability of the central bank to back those bills up with something. And, they have nothing.
The central bank wouldn't have gold either. It can't afford it.
The fed acts on behalf of the government, with a degree of autonomy deemed necessary across the world. Faith in the dollar is indeed faith in the US, including its government.
And I still can't see how gold is worth more than a US Dollar. If China decided it didn't want US gold then a gold standard based dollar would be worthless in China. If China wanted US goods and services then it can pay in US dollars whether there's a gold standard or not.
Worse? The Federal Reserve engages in fractional lending to it's member banks, then the member banks engage in fractional lending. The Fed lends ten million dollars for every million it prints, then each member bank lends ten more million for every million that they receive.
Oh dear. This may take a while.
Central banks do not engage in fractional lending. The federal reserve may increase the money supply, but it's also beholden to provide any money it adds to the economy.
The Fed may lend ten million dollars for every million it prints, but physical currency isn't the entire money supply. A central bank can for instance increase the amount of money in existence by buying bonds on the market. It doesn't have to hand over a suitcase full of cash to do this, it merely alters the central balance of the financial institution holding the funds for whoever sold the bonds.
Other banks do engage in fractional reserve banking, but you haven't explained why this is a bad thing. Do please share, and also offer viable alternatives that provide the same capabilities. I'm not sure I want to revert back to bartering for donkeys.
Actually, just tell me how a bank works if it doesn't engage in fractional reserve banking. A bank is an intermediary between someone that has money, and someone that needs money. If I start a bank and put $100 of my own money into it, the bank can't lend you $100 if it has to keep in its vaults all $100 of my money. That's not a bank, that's a vault.
If I put in $100 and the bank lends you $200, it hasn't magically made $200 come from nowhere. It's loaned you $80 of my money and $120 of someone else's money that it's had to borrow.
Tell me that isn't a pyramid scheme.
That isn't a pyramid scheme. A pyramid scheme forces late joiners to lose out, as their equity is distributed among earlier joiners. Central banking and fractional reserve banking are nothing like that. If I put $100 into a bank, I can get $100 back out.
The dollar has no value. Gold has value. Oil has value. Oil and gold are stable, the dollar is not. Collecting dollars is a fool's mission, but we're all forced to do it.
I'm not sure how the relative values of gold and oil matter, and I don't think gold prices are stable at all, given the annual fluctuations in price of up to 180%. That's more volatile than the US dollar.
(btw, comparing figures for 75 years to figures for 5 years is fairly pointless)
But, back to my point. If gold has value, what do you buy it with? Collecting gold is a fool's mission, it's fucking hard to store and piss easy to steal. Gold has no inherent value. Gold is merely a fucking metal.
I still don't understand what's so fucking special
Given you replied to my post, I'll respond. I'm sure Bubba will reply if he has anything to say too.
Theoretically, a nation on a gold standard has gold in a vault somewhere that is equal in value to all the currency it has in circulation.
The US would have to buy around 45% of the gold ever mined to cover its issued currency at current prices. Forgive me for finding that laughable.
If we weren't paying private banking for the privilege of using their fiat money, the government wouldn't be in debt.
When the UK came off the gold standard, it's because they couldn't borrow enough money to buy the gold needed to meet the demands of people wanting the gold.
Governments borrow money. They don't have to borrow it from banks, they could borrow it from other countries. This is one reason you have sovereign wealth funds.
Not to mention that the fiat money merely exists, it doesn't belong to bankers any more than it belongs to you or me (specific quantities aside). The government doesn't have to pay the bankers a penny to use it, although they may deem the bankers' services to be valuable, in which case payment is the traditional mechanism for acquiring those services.
A gold standard has it's own strengths, one of which, you can remove some from your pocket, or your vault, and give it to a creditor, who can carry it home with him. Standards. Today, we have none.
I still don't understand. Why gold? Why not platinum? Why not pieces of slate? I like slate, I'd rather have a slate bed to my snooker table than a gold one.
Why not whatever commodity you happen to have hanging around at the time? Where minerals, elements (including but not limited to gold), labour (yes, labour) and frankly anything that can be sold and re-sold can be a commodity.
And why not a piece of paper that can be used to acquire those commodities? Why not an electronic record that allows instantaneous, convenient and efficient exchange of value?
Please, I'm still confused. What's so fucking special about gold?
What you've described is the way in which countries can mitigate getting into debt. It's still better to balance the books. The costs go up with inflation too.
Shit, run a small surplus. You can then see through any 'bad' years without incurring debt. You can fund capital investments without incurring debt.
Anyway, your plan is flawed.
Year 0, borrow X at fixed interest rate Y for term Z.
Assume Y is the rate of inflation and that it never changes. (Without that predictability your plan is flawed anyway).
Each year, borrow X+inflation (to keep real spending the same, so it's compounded) at the same rate Y for the same term Z.
Even though you're borrowing the same amount (in real terms) because you're now having to use some of that money to pay the interest payments on the previous borrowings, your spending power isn't go up with inflation at all.
E.g. with Z at 40 years and Y at 2%, the year before you pay off the first gilt your spending power with the borrowed money (i.e. how much you can buy with what's left after paying interest) is half of what it was in year 0. The year after (and each subsequent year) your spending power is 0. You're now using the whole of the new debt to pay the interest of all previous loans, and the principle of the oldest one.
With Z at 40 years and Y at 5%, you're down to 15% the year before paying off the first gilt, and again at 0 forever after.
Actually, now I've done the maths, Z is irrelevant. Unless you adopt a strategy of recycling your debt: At year Z, borrow an additional X to pay off the original principle. That strategy yields an increase in spending power at year Z, but at year Z*2 you start paying more in interest than you're borrowing. (That amount tends towards zero over a long period).
Of course, there's a massively flawed assumption in my calculations: Y is very rarely going to be both the interest rate, and the rate of inflation. Occasionally the interest rate will be below inflation (e.g. in the UK at the moment) but often it will be higher.
Unless I misread the numbers (which is very possible, I'm not an economist) the Bank of England shows yields higher than inflation for 14 of the last 15 years. (It also shows yields lower than inflation for the next 7ish, then higher again for the subsequent 13ish - they only forecast 20 years).
As soon as the interest rate rises above inflation, you start losing money on your borrowings.
In short: Practice fiscal prudence. Don't go into debt (except as a demonstration of your financial health - don't even ask me how that one works). Balance your books and don't rely on inflation to mitigate your old debts.
Modern democracies go into debt because governments spend money that they don't have to try and get re-elected.
Gold standard? What the fuck's that all about?
In 1975 did you walk around with gold in your pocket? Or did you walk around with arbitrary tokens that you could exchange for gold?
Because right now you can take arbitrary tokens out of your pocket and exchange them for gold. Or platinum. Or titanium. Or food, toys, services.
What's so fucking special about gold anyway? Ooh, it's shiny. Oooh, I can have more than him because I'm rich. How are you rich? Because you have more lumps of metal than he does? Hey, those are called 'coins'. You can still get them.
Anyway, there's a limited amount of gold. What happens when there's more cash than gold that you can buy with it? Does the amount of gold you can buy for each $100 bill fall, or does the government fail to meet its obligations? One negates the gold standard, turning gold back into a mere commodity, the other shatters it.
Now, speaking of idiots - we're the ones who auctioned off all of our gold, remember? When the shit hits the fan, we have nothing to fall back on.
Really? You have oil reserves. You have a hell of a lot of land. You have a good supply of skilled labour. You have strong research and development capability. You have an extensive manufacturing base. You have stocks of multiple commodities.
I come back to, what's so fucking special about gold? What are you going to do with it anyway, when you have to fall back on it? Sell it? Shit, you've already had to do that because you're in so much debt.
Please, tell me, because I'm confused as hell, just what's so fucking special about gold.
And yet the actions of law enforcement to quell those actions of a few are deemed to be the only response to the many?
It's false equivalence.
Hmm. Private companies co-operating with law enforcement to mitigate criminal behaviour and damage to the economy? Surely not!
The document seems pretty haphazard and it's hard to give credibility to the 'sniper' plot without the context and further information. Shit, it's not even clear who came up with the plan to use snipers, whether they worked for the government, for commercial interests, a political party or a secret global conspiracy intent on keeping down the plebs.
If anything the tone of the document is "shit, you need to know about this idiot" and I couldn't see any support at all for the plan.
I'm also unaware of any Occupy movement leaders being shot to death by suppressed sniper fire.
There were enough issues from both sides without raising entirely pointless conspiracy theories. If this shit matters so much to you, stop giving banks your money and stop voting for the incumbent politicians.
Ooh, aren't you the big hard man.
Tell you what, build up to it. Start on his wife.
No, what we're seeing here is a company lying about its prices.
Shit, it took the OFT to step in and stop them quoting a price you could never actually get, due to surcharges for actually paying them.
They're abusive and make a profit by fucking over their customers.
Please, be assured that chips are not fries. Nobody ever goes into a chip shop and asks for fries.
It's a chip shop, or a chippy, or a fish & chip shop. It's never a fry shop, or a fryery, or a fish & fries shop.
Chips are chips. Fries are a bastard perversion sold in places that don't know how to make chips.
There is an uneasy overlap between steak fries and chips; I put it down to the American inability to use proper English, and indeed to properly translate foreign cuisine.
(Note that this has led to the truly marvellous creations collectively referred to as 'Tex-Mex', so it's not all bad)
So I just hit Google, found a car dealership in Australia (selling Holden cars in Perth) and the offers page show _only_ the "drive away" price - which includes taxes, duty, delivery.. shit, even insurance.
There's a different price listed for each spec of car too.
Forget the transient advertisement, looks like the walk-in price is pretty solid.
One bag with some t-shirts, socks and a spare pair of trousers is usually all I need.
Usually I like to take clean underwear too. Saves having to wash the same pair every night and hoping they're sufficiently dry before morning.
Sadly these days I need a bag just for my camera. Clothes wont fit in it, and the camera bag is too big to fit into a standard airline carry-on sized bag. So RyanAir would charge me extra in some form.
What people hate isn't being charged a realistic price. It's being quoted a £1 flight then having to pay £80 for it. If the flight costs £80, quote £80. Shit, that's still bloody good value - a train ticket from Manchester to London will cost that, even off-peak. So don't quote £1, then add on sixteen different surcharges, excesses, taxes, fees and other costs.