I still don't own a cell phone. I'm like Raymond fucking Reddington - I let my servant, whom I choose to call "SuperKendall", for sentimental reasons, carry one of several dozen burner phones which I use in the event that I want to order some chateaubriand and a nice Richebourg Grand Cru 1949 from my local watering hole.
As for Fed printing, that only accounts for around 5% of the currency in circulation.
You know very well that when we talk about the Fed "printing money" we're not actually talking about paper money. They're just allowing the member banks to increment their balance sheets.
I don't know what shithole you live in but if someone is forcing you to buy their stuff at gunpoint you definitely don't have a capitalist economy.
Ever heard of a monopoly? Ever heard of endlessly-renewing "intellectual property"? These are literally forcing you to pay for something you don't want, or pay more for something you do want, enforced by the power of the government. You want an example of forcing someone to pay more at gunpoint? What do you call it when a pharmaceutical company decides to jack up the price of some life-saving drug by thousands of dollars per dose even though the patent has run out.
If you live in one of the many areas that only have a single ISP, you understand the power of monopoly, and why "agreement" isn't a word you would use to describe the transaction.
The Fed funds rate is 2.25%. That is low by historical standards, but it is not "free".
It is when the interest paid on reserves is more than 2.25%. Since the banks aren't making home loans at anywhere near the rate they're supposed to, all the printed money is going straight into reserves.
Do you really think you live in a world where money isn't being printed and handed to the rich?
We don't. The Fed has not been a net buyer of treasury bonds for years. QE tapered to zero in 2014.
We do. The interest that the Fed is still paying banks for their reserves (which we have them in QE 1 through QE 4), is part of quantitative easing. They're getting money for free and charging, let's see, what is the interest rate on the Visa card in your pocket? 20 percent? 23 percent?
They can say QE is over, but the floodgates are still open and the printing presses are still working, and all those federal diplomas are still going to the same big banks, which are refusing to lend it out or pay interest on your deposits.
I love how all the MAGA chuds who read Zerohedge all of a sudden think they know what's what because they've learned some buzzwords. The swamp continues to get flooded and you're raising your hands in victory.
Why has there not been any inflation in the United States? Because the velocity of money went down at the same time (in other words, the printed money went straight to the banks and the banks kept it).
Since the Fed is currently trying to nudge inflation up, then wouldn't it have been much better if that money had gone into the pockets of people who would spend it?
You're arguing from a perspective of a mythological economy based upon a theory that has been empirically proven wrong. We don't have the economy you wish we had, we have what we have. Qualitative easing 10 years after a financial crisis, 700,000 working-age people leaving the labor market since July, the Fed bumping up interest rates and still not being able to keep a lid on the money supply or get wages up. Think about that: supposedly "full employement" (although we know that's just bullshit) and wages still falling. The entire theory of monetary theory has been turned on it's head, and MV=PQ isn't even taught in Econ schools any more once you get past the introductory class. You believe your Intro to Econ gave you "knowledge" worth dropping on people, but it just made you less capable of assessing the current situation. The "laws" of economics are not laws. They have never been laws. They're nothing more than a political agenda expressed algebraically.
And further, if what you say was true (it's not), then the Fed raising interest rates should always be accompanied by the money supply shrinking (supply and demand). Instead, we have interest rates going up and the money supply following, simply to keep a bubble market inflated.
Capitalism requires two parties to agree on some transfer of property.
That's not how it worked out though, is it?
Theft requires one party to take something from the other without agreement.
Somehow, in our late-stage capitalism, the "agreement" part has become less and less apparent. And the truth is, that you're confusing capitalism with free markets. They're not the same, and therein lies the difficulty.
The problem with capitalism is that eventually you run out of other people's money.
That is a complete nonsese. Let's say everyone will get $1000 UBI. Does this mean, that they will earn $1000 more of value? NO. It will inflate global prices about $1000 so prices will be
As shaky as the the "science" of economics is, any Econ grad student could explain to you why that is simply, and absolutely not true historically. In the United States, we have had a rapidly growing money supply, based entirely on the Fed printing money, and it has not led to inflation.
If you're using a fixed (or relatively fixed) commodity like gold as the basis for your currency then you might have an argument. Since we went off the gold standard, you do not see any correlation between the number of dollars in the system and inflation. The simplest way to express it is this: if the growth in monetary supply outpaces the growth in output, then there might be some inflation, but since we've had decades of increased output and virtually no increase in money in the pockets of working people, there is a lot of ground to make up before we start seeing any impact. So, if the Fed printing money to put in the pockets of rich people (aka, quantitative easing) has not caused monetary inflation, then certainly putting money in the hands of people at the other end of the spectrum won't either. In fact, the increase in demand would probably trigger greater output.
UBI is theft, plain and simple. You should not reward people just because they are able to fog a mirror.
Capitalism is theft, plain and simple. Profit is a tax on the labor of others. You should not reward people just because they can fog a mirror while being rich.
It's important that we get all the kinks out these planes before we ship the ones Saudi Arabia ordered. The customer comes first, especially when they're brutal dictators who own a lot of Manhattan real estate.
Ap News, Reuters, Washington Post(they offer truth, but hate Trump), CNN, cbsnews, abcnews, usatoday, la times.
I am conservative, and find I find something of reference in all those sites
Would it surprise you to learn that all of the outlets you mention, including the WashPo and CNN, present mainly a center-right point of view? When there is a war to be had, they will all support the war, even if it's plainly foreign interventionism and "nation-building". They all support the surveillance state and will gladly post far-right claims without fact-checking. We had some rather amazing evidence of that just this week when USA Today posted an op-ed, without comment, by Donald Trump, that was so full of untruths and fantasy that they eventually had to be shamed into recognizing the lies. But by then, they had dutifully posted each false statement individually across social media (again, without any context or indication that the statements were total fabrications. When USA Today finally ran a fact-check on Trump's op-ed, it took over five times as many words as the op-ed just to unpack the lies and refute them. That's how densely-packed with horseshit his editorial was. The problem is not that the op-ed was published without comment and eventually debunked, but that it took a days-long outcry for USA Today to do what journalists are supposed to do in the first place. What you have are not unbiased media, but media that are biased toward power. And that's the most dangerous bias of all.
I don't know about you guys, but I totally trust the Senate to investigate google in an ethical and unbiased way and not try to use this to gain political advantage or punish perceived enemies.
Not all media is biased, there are some main media that offer both sides.
Whenever I hear this assertion, I always want to know, which do you believe are the unbiased media? Give us names, please. Tell us so we too can partake of the Solomonic wisdom of these unbaised sources.
My guess is that your list of unbiased media would simply reflect your own bias.
You want to promote same sex marriages. You are free as in freedom. You want to prove that having same sex parents isn't any worse than having parents with different sex. You are free as in beer.
If you even glance at the article or summary for a moment, even just the first sentence, you will learn that Chinese researchers in this experiment were trying to do neither of these things.
Sometimes, a Slashdot article is like a Rorschach test. Peoples' reactions are much more informative (and sometimes unintentionally so) than anything in the article.
Wonder what happens online when a citizen attempts to petition the government using a computer?
How exactly is spamming Facebook using fake accounts a way of "petitioning the government"? I'm not being flip, I'm sincerely trying to understand the connection as you see it.
There might be bags of good used video cards tossed after this all goes bust.
You laugh, but I bought a pair of nice GeForce 1080 Ti's from a day trader who thought he was going to mine bitcoin and then decided that there was no such thing as free money. I see him sitting at the Starbucks with his Macbook, wheeling and dealing. Meanwhile, I've got a nice gaming card in my rig and a second one sitting here in case the other one blows up.
I wonder how his move back to the stock market is going.
Meanwhile, daily transaction values were down from more than $3.7 billion to less than $670 million in the same period, Juniper said in the study, The Future of Cryptocurrency: Bitcoin & Altcoin Trends & Challenges 2018-2023. The market as a whole has contracted quickly as well. In the first quarter, cryptocurrency transactions totaled just over $1.4 trillion, compared with less than $1.7 trillion for 2017 as a whole, Juniper said. However, by the second quarter, transaction values had plummeted by 75 percent, with total market capitalization falling to just under $355 billion.
That sounds like it passed the "brink of an implosion" about 65 percent ago.
I have AdBlock turned on, so why am I seeing this story?
Maybe this is the Slashdot equivalent of the Presidential Emergency Alert and the Manchurian Cantaloupe gets to push stories right to the top if he thinks it's something positive.
Don't anyone tell him that this is a terrible new law that pretty much puts the last nail in anything like public domain. After this, we'll never see another video game with music like that in the Fallout series. Trump is "making music great again", as evidenced by today's free-style session with a severely brain-damaged Kanye West impersonator (it might have been Andy Kaufman or Sasha Baron Cohen in a Kanye mask, though). We'll be paying royalties for music when every single human being involved in the creation of that music has died, and now for longer.
Uhhh...have you seen the way US colleges are being run lately?
Every working day. I would venture to say I have more experience with how "US colleges are being run lately" than you do.
You get your understanding of what's happening on college campuses from Breitbart and Fox News, who have a vested interest and an ax to grind against higher education (and in fact, education generally). You've been taken in by the basest propaganda, and the cruelest twist is that the same propaganda has convinced you that the disinformation has made you somehow smarter.
I'm pretty sure a lot of people won't accept my ethical values.
A minute ago, you couldn't identify ethical values, and all of a sudden you can judge what people will and will not accept?
It is much easier to scream about Racism, Sexism, Homophobia, Bigotry than it is to form a coherent code of ethics that has deliberative rational thought behind it (even if you disagree with my rationale).
Yep, as I thought, you don't really know what ethics are.
I don't mind when people are ignorant, but when they're willfully, even gleefully ignorant, I'm offended. It is best not to be proud of not knowing, which is a hallmark of those who share your political beliefs.
Funny that the same people who made such a big deal about "ethics in journalism" are suddenly infuriated by the very notion of ethics.
See, if you'd taken a few Humanities courses when you were working on your degree from DeVry, you wouldn't have to ask such a stupid question.
The answer, of course, is everyone's. Ethics are not some list of rules or laws, it is moral philosophy. In other words, when they teach ethics as part of a STEM curriculum, it means, "requiring students to actually think about ethics and moral philosophy, so they can develop their own coherent moral code". You study how people have wrestled with ethics throughout history, and what conclusions they came to. Usually, you start with Socrates and the stoics and work forward, but you can go back even further if you'd like.
This isn't hard (except, apparently, for people who resist the entire concept of morality, and certain techies of course). If we require lawyers, doctors, researchers, biologists, military leaders and even architects to study ethics, why shouldn't we expect the same of people who are going to exert such outsized influence over all our lives?
Don't worry, Michael. Learning ethics won't hurt. You might come to some interesting conclusions on the other side.
Slashdot Mirror
I still don't own a cell phone. I'm like Raymond fucking Reddington - I let my servant, whom I choose to call "SuperKendall", for sentimental reasons, carry one of several dozen burner phones which I use in the event that I want to order some chateaubriand and a nice Richebourg Grand Cru 1949 from my local watering hole.
It's almost as if bad guys have become emboldened to attack the US. I wonder why that could be?
You know very well that when we talk about the Fed "printing money" we're not actually talking about paper money. They're just allowing the member banks to increment their balance sheets.
Don't be so bloody-minded.
Ever heard of a monopoly? Ever heard of endlessly-renewing "intellectual property"? These are literally forcing you to pay for something you don't want, or pay more for something you do want, enforced by the power of the government. You want an example of forcing someone to pay more at gunpoint? What do you call it when a pharmaceutical company decides to jack up the price of some life-saving drug by thousands of dollars per dose even though the patent has run out.
If you live in one of the many areas that only have a single ISP, you understand the power of monopoly, and why "agreement" isn't a word you would use to describe the transaction.
It is when the interest paid on reserves is more than 2.25%. Since the banks aren't making home loans at anywhere near the rate they're supposed to, all the printed money is going straight into reserves.
Do you really think you live in a world where money isn't being printed and handed to the rich?
We do. The interest that the Fed is still paying banks for their reserves (which we have them in QE 1 through QE 4), is part of quantitative easing. They're getting money for free and charging, let's see, what is the interest rate on the Visa card in your pocket? 20 percent? 23 percent?
They can say QE is over, but the floodgates are still open and the printing presses are still working, and all those federal diplomas are still going to the same big banks, which are refusing to lend it out or pay interest on your deposits.
I love how all the MAGA chuds who read Zerohedge all of a sudden think they know what's what because they've learned some buzzwords. The swamp continues to get flooded and you're raising your hands in victory.
Since the Fed is currently trying to nudge inflation up, then wouldn't it have been much better if that money had gone into the pockets of people who would spend it?
You're arguing from a perspective of a mythological economy based upon a theory that has been empirically proven wrong. We don't have the economy you wish we had, we have what we have. Qualitative easing 10 years after a financial crisis, 700,000 working-age people leaving the labor market since July, the Fed bumping up interest rates and still not being able to keep a lid on the money supply or get wages up. Think about that: supposedly "full employement" (although we know that's just bullshit) and wages still falling. The entire theory of monetary theory has been turned on it's head, and MV=PQ isn't even taught in Econ schools any more once you get past the introductory class. You believe your Intro to Econ gave you "knowledge" worth dropping on people, but it just made you less capable of assessing the current situation. The "laws" of economics are not laws. They have never been laws. They're nothing more than a political agenda expressed algebraically.
And further, if what you say was true (it's not), then the Fed raising interest rates should always be accompanied by the money supply shrinking (supply and demand). Instead, we have interest rates going up and the money supply following, simply to keep a bubble market inflated.
So, why do we still have quantitative easing? It's been a decade since the financial crisis.
That's not how it worked out though, is it?
Somehow, in our late-stage capitalism, the "agreement" part has become less and less apparent. And the truth is, that you're confusing capitalism with free markets. They're not the same, and therein lies the difficulty.
The problem with capitalism is that eventually you run out of other people's money.
As shaky as the the "science" of economics is, any Econ grad student could explain to you why that is simply, and absolutely not true historically. In the United States, we have had a rapidly growing money supply, based entirely on the Fed printing money, and it has not led to inflation.
If you're using a fixed (or relatively fixed) commodity like gold as the basis for your currency then you might have an argument. Since we went off the gold standard, you do not see any correlation between the number of dollars in the system and inflation. The simplest way to express it is this: if the growth in monetary supply outpaces the growth in output, then there might be some inflation, but since we've had decades of increased output and virtually no increase in money in the pockets of working people, there is a lot of ground to make up before we start seeing any impact. So, if the Fed printing money to put in the pockets of rich people (aka, quantitative easing) has not caused monetary inflation, then certainly putting money in the hands of people at the other end of the spectrum won't either. In fact, the increase in demand would probably trigger greater output.
Capitalism is theft, plain and simple. Profit is a tax on the labor of others. You should not reward people just because they can fog a mirror while being rich.
It's important that we get all the kinks out these planes before we ship the ones Saudi Arabia ordered. The customer comes first, especially when they're brutal dictators who own a lot of Manhattan real estate.
Would it surprise you to learn that all of the outlets you mention, including the WashPo and CNN, present mainly a center-right point of view? When there is a war to be had, they will all support the war, even if it's plainly foreign interventionism and "nation-building". They all support the surveillance state and will gladly post far-right claims without fact-checking. We had some rather amazing evidence of that just this week when USA Today posted an op-ed, without comment, by Donald Trump, that was so full of untruths and fantasy that they eventually had to be shamed into recognizing the lies. But by then, they had dutifully posted each false statement individually across social media (again, without any context or indication that the statements were total fabrications. When USA Today finally ran a fact-check on Trump's op-ed, it took over five times as many words as the op-ed just to unpack the lies and refute them. That's how densely-packed with horseshit his editorial was. The problem is not that the op-ed was published without comment and eventually debunked, but that it took a days-long outcry for USA Today to do what journalists are supposed to do in the first place. What you have are not unbiased media, but media that are biased toward power. And that's the most dangerous bias of all.
https://www.commondreams.org/n...
I don't know about you guys, but I totally trust the Senate to investigate google in an ethical and unbiased way and not try to use this to gain political advantage or punish perceived enemies.
Whenever I hear this assertion, I always want to know, which do you believe are the unbiased media? Give us names, please. Tell us so we too can partake of the Solomonic wisdom of these unbaised sources.
My guess is that your list of unbiased media would simply reflect your own bias.
If you even glance at the article or summary for a moment, even just the first sentence, you will learn that Chinese researchers in this experiment were trying to do neither of these things.
Sometimes, a Slashdot article is like a Rorschach test. Peoples' reactions are much more informative (and sometimes unintentionally so) than anything in the article.
Sunscreen? Is that what you tell her it is?
How exactly is spamming Facebook using fake accounts a way of "petitioning the government"? I'm not being flip, I'm sincerely trying to understand the connection as you see it.
You laugh, but I bought a pair of nice GeForce 1080 Ti's from a day trader who thought he was going to mine bitcoin and then decided that there was no such thing as free money. I see him sitting at the Starbucks with his Macbook, wheeling and dealing. Meanwhile, I've got a nice gaming card in my rig and a second one sitting here in case the other one blows up.
I wonder how his move back to the stock market is going.
That sounds like it passed the "brink of an implosion" about 65 percent ago.
I have AdBlock turned on, so why am I seeing this story?
Maybe this is the Slashdot equivalent of the Presidential Emergency Alert and the Manchurian Cantaloupe gets to push stories right to the top if he thinks it's something positive.
Don't anyone tell him that this is a terrible new law that pretty much puts the last nail in anything like public domain. After this, we'll never see another video game with music like that in the Fallout series. Trump is "making music great again", as evidenced by today's free-style session with a severely brain-damaged Kanye West impersonator (it might have been Andy Kaufman or Sasha Baron Cohen in a Kanye mask, though). We'll be paying royalties for music when every single human being involved in the creation of that music has died, and now for longer.
Every working day. I would venture to say I have more experience with how "US colleges are being run lately" than you do.
You get your understanding of what's happening on college campuses from Breitbart and Fox News, who have a vested interest and an ax to grind against higher education (and in fact, education generally). You've been taken in by the basest propaganda, and the cruelest twist is that the same propaganda has convinced you that the disinformation has made you somehow smarter.
A minute ago, you couldn't identify ethical values, and all of a sudden you can judge what people will and will not accept?
Yep, as I thought, you don't really know what ethics are.
I don't mind when people are ignorant, but when they're willfully, even gleefully ignorant, I'm offended. It is best not to be proud of not knowing, which is a hallmark of those who share your political beliefs.
Funny that the same people who made such a big deal about "ethics in journalism" are suddenly infuriated by the very notion of ethics.
See, if you'd taken a few Humanities courses when you were working on your degree from DeVry, you wouldn't have to ask such a stupid question.
The answer, of course, is everyone's. Ethics are not some list of rules or laws, it is moral philosophy. In other words, when they teach ethics as part of a STEM curriculum, it means, "requiring students to actually think about ethics and moral philosophy, so they can develop their own coherent moral code". You study how people have wrestled with ethics throughout history, and what conclusions they came to. Usually, you start with Socrates and the stoics and work forward, but you can go back even further if you'd like.
This isn't hard (except, apparently, for people who resist the entire concept of morality, and certain techies of course). If we require lawyers, doctors, researchers, biologists, military leaders and even architects to study ethics, why shouldn't we expect the same of people who are going to exert such outsized influence over all our lives?
Don't worry, Michael. Learning ethics won't hurt. You might come to some interesting conclusions on the other side.
Dolt 45 said it best:
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/wo...
https://www.newsday.com/long-i...