George Carlin said it best:

"Selling is legal. Fucking is legal. So why isn't selling fucking legal?"

Doesn't sound like its legal.

Are you expecting the use of your property to be restricted to only "approved" purposes?

Could someone explain to me what the heck this thing is for.

"Unlocking" generally means using a phone issued by one carrier with the network of another carrier.

Kinda like when you fill up your Ford car with the less expensive Toyota gasoline. oh wait... :P

I don't know how much longer it will be up, but the inflation for the past year is presented in a neat style chart here:

The basket of goods in CPI does not measure inflation; it's merely an indicator of inflation.

The price of gold (which has relatively flat supply and demand) is also an indicator of inflation. (When the price of gold goes up, that's actually the value of the dollar going down. The price of gold recently hit $1000/oz.)

The money supply data (e.g. the M3) also provides indicators of inflation in the form of how the source of inflation -- increase in the supply of money and credit -- trickles down through the economy (aka the "non-neutrality of money"). Oh, except that the Federal Reserve stopped publishing that indicator in 2006.

Another way that they under-report inflation is called geometric adjustment.

Check out the May 2008 issue of Harpers

The contention made by Kevin Phillips is that over the past 25 years, the calculations for the leading economic indicators, specifically CPI (consumer price index), the GDP, and the unemployment rate have been tweaked in order "to create a false sense of economic achievement and rectitude, allowing us to maintain artificially low interest rates, massive government borrowing, adn a dangerous reliance on mortgages and financial debt even as real economic growth has been slower than claimed." Phllips does not lay the blame at any particular political faction, stating that this process was abetted by Republicans and Democrats alike in an effort not to rock the boat.

Consumer Price Index
- Nixon: Separated "core" inflation rate from the headline inflation rate. Core inflation excludes food and energy prices.
- Reagan: Substituted housing prices with "owner equivalent rent" in calculation of CPI, masking high housing prices.
- Bush I: Proposed new calculations for inflation to lower inflation numbers
- Clinton: Implemented Bush's proposals.
- Bush II: Created experimental CPI calculations that resulted in even lower figures. Stopped publishing M-3 money supply numbers, which captured rising inflationary impetus from bank credit activity.

GNP/GDP
- Johnson: Created the "unified budget" which combined Social Security with other federal outlays to mask deficits.

Unemployment Rates
- Kennedy: Re-categorized people who have given up on looking for jobs as "discouraged workers" rather than "unemployed".
- Nixon: Unsuccessfully requested that the Labor Dept publish only the lowest of the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate and the un-adjusted rate.
- Reagan: Categorized military personnel as "employed" instead of "outside the labor force".
- Clinton: Excluded discouraged workers from calculation of the overall workforce. Decreased monthly household economic sampling from 60,000 to 50,000. a disproportionate of those excluded were from the inner cities.

If the economic indicators were to be calculated based upon the criteria from 25 years ago, they would be as follows:
Unemployment Rate: 9 to 12 percent
Inflation: 7-10
Economic Growth: little economic growth since 2001

Some very disturbing and sobering figures.

Let me transition to a Q&A format here.

Q: Randy, I get the feeling that you are about to lay out in detail all of the hassles that would be involved in moving this gold overland, so let's just cut to the chase and talk about helicopters.

A: There is no place for a helicopter to land. Terrain is extremely rugged. The nearest sufficiently flat place is about one km. away. It would have to be cleared. In Vietnam this was accomplished using "blockbuster" bombs, but this is probably not an option here. Trees would have to be cut down, creating a gap in the jungles conspicuous from the air.

Q: Who cares if it's conspicuous? Who's going to see it?

A: As should be obvious from my anecdote, the people who control this gold have connections in Manila. We may assume that the area is overflown by the Philippine Air Force regularly, and kept under radar surveillance.

Q: What would be involved in getting the bars to the nearest decent road?

A: They would have to be carried over the jungle trails I have described. Each bar weighs as much as a full-grown man.

Q: Couldn't they be cut up into smaller pieces?

A: DMS rates it as unlikely that the current owners would permit this.

Q: Is there any chance of smuggling the gold through the military checkpoints?

A: Obviously not in the case of a mass shipment. The gold weighs a total of around ten tons, and would require a truck that could not negotiate most of the roads we saw. Concealing ten tons of goods from the inspectors at these checkpoints is not possible.

Q: How about smuggling the bars out one at a time?

A: Still very tricky. Might be possible to hike the bars out to an intermediate point somewhere, melt or chop them down, and somehow secrete them in the body of a jeepney or other vehicle, then drive the vehicle to Manila and extract the gold. This operation would have to be repeated a hundred times. Driving the same vehicle past one of these checkpoints a hundred (or even two) times would strike them as, to put it mildly, odd. Even if this were possible there is the payment issue.

Q: What is the payment issue?

A: Obviously the people who control the gold want to be paid for it. Paying them in more gold, or in precious gems, would be ludicrous. They do not have bank accounts. They have to be paid in Philippine pesos. Anything bigger than about a 500-peso note is useless in this area. A 500-peso note is worth about $20, and so it would be necessary to bring six million of them into the jungle to perform the transaction. Based on some rudimentary calculations I have made here using a mechanic's caliper and the contents of my wallet, the stack of 500-peso notes would be about (please wait while I switch my calculator over to the "scientific notation" mode) 25,000 inches high. Or, if you prefer the metric system, something like two-thirds of a kilometer. If you stacked the bills a meter high, you would need six or seven hundred such stacks, which if jammed close together would cover an area about three meters on a side. Basically we are talking about a large Ryder box truck full of money. This would have to be transported into the middle of the jungle, and obviously, melting down cash and secreting it inside of a truck is not an option.

Q: Since the military seems to be the big obstacle here, why not simply cut a deal with them? Let them keep a big cut of the proceeds in exchange for not hassling us.

A: Because the money would go to the NPA which would use it to buy weapons for the purpose of killing people in the military.

Q: There must be some way to use the value of this gold to leverage some kind of extraction operation.

A: The gold is worthless to a bank until it has been assayed. Until then it is only a blurry Polaroid of a stack of yellow objects in what seems to be a jungle. In order to perform an assay you need to go into the jungle, find the gold, bore out a sample, and transport it safely back to a large city. But this proves nothing. Even if the potential backers believe that your assay really came from the jungle (i.e., that you did not switch samples along the way) all they know now is the purity of one end of one bar in the stack. Basically it is not possible to obtain full value for this gold until the entire stack has been extracted and taken to a vault where it can be systematically assayed.

Q: Could you maybe just get the gold to some local bank and then sell it at steep discount, so that the burden of transporting it would be on someone else's shoulders?

A: DMS relates the tale of one such transaction, in a provincial town in north Luzon, which was interrupted when local entrepreneurs literally blew one of the bank's walls off with dynamite, came in, and grabbed both the gold and the cash that was going to be used to pay for the gold. DMS asserts he would rather slit his own throat quietly than walk into a small-town bank with anything worth more than a few tens of thousands of dollars.

Q: Is the situation basically impossible then?

A: It is basically impossible.

Q: Then what was the point of the whole exercise?

A: To come full circle to the first thing DMS said. It was to send us a message.

Q: What is the message?

A: That money is not worth having if you can't spend it. That certain people have a lot of money that they badly want to spend. And that if we can give them a way to spend it, through the Crypt, that these people will be very happy, and conversely that if we screw up they will be very sad, and that whether they are happy or sad they will be eager to share these emotions with us, the shareholders and management team of Epiphyte Corp.

And now I am going to e-mail this to all of you and then summon the flight attendant and demand the array of alcoholic beverages I so richly deserve. Cheers.

—R

Randall Lawrence Waterhouse

Current meatspace coordinates, hot from the GPS receiver card in my laptop:

27 degrees, 14.95 minutes N latitude 143 degrees. 17.44 minutes E longitude

Nearest geographical feature: the Bonin Islands

As far as confidentiality goes, we have strict guidelines that prohibit anyone from using any samples for any other purposes other than helping a patient find a match.

Anyone including agents of the government? Really? Even with a warrant?

Also, "guidelines" sounds much less secure than, say, "one-way hash".

So, what privacy measures are enacted regarding my submission of DNA evidence? I'm all for a worthy cause, but how is this differentiated from an FBI crimelab forensic database?

Novatel's HSDPA sticks (with EDGE and GPRS backwards compatibility, available as USB or CardBus -- the latter of which I'm guessing is just repackaged USB rather than mini-PCI-e) have also gotten solid positive reviews, for those of you who use T-Mobile or AT&T.

(and really, if we're talking about Apple users, either they're T-Mobile customers because T-Mobile has always had the best data/Internet plans, or they're AT&T customers because they're using the iPhone as "it just works" without jailbreaking and unlocking.)

If you're really clever you can even get a T-Mobile counter jockey to copy your SIM data from the COMP128-v3 card they give you onto a COMP128-v1 card you give them for use in the Novatel, and then clone that onto another COMP128-v1 card that you keep in your phone, so that you don't have to swap SIM cards between your phone and your laptop just to use EDGE (and soon HSDPA) service.

Aw, that poor nerd so excited about his project; with some snarky comments overlaid it could have been another painful episode of Blind Date.

TechShop seems like something many people desire to have in their city; I wish them the best in successful franchising.

This all started when "Air Marshall Carlin" told the "Captain" (pilot) to go fuck himself.

I like that John Cleese mentioned that this experiment in laughter hopefully benefits not just the prisoners but also the prison staff. Reminiscent of the Stanford experiment, we must not forget the effect of a cage on both the captive and the captor.

John,

This tape was dubbed from a VHS tape I got from the late Blair Newman who had arranged the shoot (for a BBC thing that never happened). I kept it in a box for 19 years until I digitized it last month. There is more on it - maybe Howard will put other bits out there at some point.

If you have the video digitized, why not just put the whole thing up on blip.tv or archive.org yourself?

Moralistic purging was tried in 1930. It didn't work to well.

Instead subsequent inflation attempting to stave the contraction deepened and elongated the depression -- which (along with the Dust Bowl) is why we think of it as The Great Depression.

Better to take care of it like a bandage -- right off!

So, the official US government position is that if you're not working, and have given up on trying to find work, you are actually employed. Is there any remotely rational reason to explain this?

Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Fudge your methodology to get the desired result, and an unemployment rate of 4% sounds acceptable. You didn't think "security theater" was only limited to security, did you? :p

See also: Consumer Price Index (CPI) vs. actual inflation rate. (Ever wonder why the Federal Reserve stopped publishing its M3 money supply data in 2006? or why the price of gold hit $1000/oz? but the CPI basket says inflation is still only 4%.)

"Go back to sleep America. Your government is in control. Here's American Gladiators." -- Bill Hicks

Did I ever tell you to eat up? Go to bed? Wash your ears? Do your homework? No. I respected your privacy and I taught you self-reliance.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

I think the vital importance of this has been completely lost on "helicopter parents".

Savers vs. Speculators - People & Power - Max Keiser - 23 Mar 08

That video hits most of the important highlights of this economic crisis. The Federal Reserve has drastically inflated the money supply to fund the Iraq war without raising a war tax. This has caused massive disruptions to the market, of which the sub-prime and "liquidity crisis" are just the first stress fractures to present themselves.

The problem is inflation; expanding the supply of credit further increases inflation by definition. The solution is to cut spending, raise interest rates, and allow all of the malinvestment to be flushed from the system.

Let me tell you a joke. Somebody apparently once went up to the great philosopher Wittgenstein and said "What a lot of morons people must have been back in the middle ages to have looked everyday at the dawn, and to have thought that what they were seeing was the sun going around the Earth, when as every school kid knows the Earth goes around the Sun, and it doesn't take too many brains to understand that." To which Wittgenstein replied, "Yeah, but I wonder what it would have looked like if the Sun had been going around the Earth." The point being, of course, is that it would have looked exactly the same. In other words, you see what your knowledge tells you you are seeing. What you believe the universe to be, and how you react to that belief in everything you do depends on what you know. And when that knowledge changes, for you, the universe changes. We all are the result of what we all know, today.

James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed

Coffee Cart Man: Hey buddy. You forgot your change.

Joe Moore: [Takes the change] Makes the world go round.

Bobby Blane: What's that?

Joe Moore: Gold.

Bobby Blane: Some people say love.

Joe Moore: Well, they're right, too. It is love. Love of gold.

@87 Noen

I just want to know what I can expect to happen. You can't seem to get that anywhere. Should I be stock piling food, guns and ammo? Seriously, some folks, and not the crazies, have been suggesting that.

Because no one knows. See, the whole "what should we do?" question is exactly why we have markets, because the future is uncertain, so we try to maximize utilizing all of the knowledge we have as soon as we have it to make the best decisions we can, and then adjust as we get new information. (Again, this is what The Use of Knowledge in Society covers.)

The problem with central banking and inflation is that a significant amount of information is masked or distorted, so now people are making less informed decisions.

For you personally, I hate to sound pedantic, but you've kinda gotta figure it out for yourself. What do you have that's at risk? What do you think are the best ways to invest against those risks? I think it's safe to assume that the dollar has much farther to drop in value. So accordingly, others have recommended investing in shorting the dollar or holding commodities such as gold and oil.

If you're concerned about disaster of survivalist proportions, a stockpile of guns, ammo, gasoline, food, and water is probably a good idea in general. A very well stocked liquor cabinet is probably also a good idea, especially if you yourself drink anyway. Some people buy bags of silver coins that are only marginally more expensive than the value of the silver itself.

Put another way: Panic and fear empower assholes and opportunists who will make things worse, not better.

Yes, there is time for people to assess the fundamentals and draw up what kinds of questions they need to ask next to protect themselves.

I doubt that the stock market will crash tomorrow, but this problem's been brewing pretty hard for 5-6 years; it's starting to percolate.

Also, I'm fairly sure, as with the bi-partisan "economic stimulus package", politicians are eager to use dirty tricks to delay all the bad news until the political season is over. So, try to get your house in order before November. Don't panic, but thoughtful action is required.

I think that what the Fed's been doing with interest rates would be inflationary but for all the deflation (destroyed Capital) out there already. One hopes that they've got access to the most accurate numbers available.

In terms of our earlier disagreement, I think what we need to make clear is that capital isn't really created with inflation or destroyed with deflation. It only seems that way because people are buying (or borrowing) dollars based on what they used to be worth before the supply of money and credit was expanded. This deception is the basis for malinvestment, which is how real capital is destroyed rather than created through exchange.

(The keyphrase here is "non-neutrality of money".)

Furthermore, if you're saying that you hope the Fed has "access to the most accurate numbers available"... the problem is that the Fed does "forecasting". They're trying to set the future lockstep based on the estimates of the past; but markets are necessarily more adept at adapting to a (necessarily) uncertain future. This is why the Fed is compared to a command economy institution; making a guess for everyone instead of letting the distributed actors of the market figure it out for real amongst themselves.

I admit I am a neophyte so I don't understand how liquidity is negative either. My understanding is that liquidity helps a market find more fine grained prices so that it in turns undergoes fewer corrections like the pH balance one's you mention. Is that an inaccurate understanding? How does liquidity become artificial? If more liquidity causes the dollar to sink then doesn't that mean that the dollar's value was inflated but not deflating fast enough previous to the new liquidity? I'm just trying to wrap my head around these contradictions.

Um, first, know what fiat currency is.

Instead of getting into basic accounting (cashflows, liquidity, solvency, etc.), let's look at how fractional reserve banking works. In the central banking system, the government permits banks to loan out more money than they actually have (in its reserve). This itself is also an inflationary policy, the "credit" part of "expanding money and credit". (So by definition, all fractional reserve banks are actually insolvent. It's a Ponzi scheme.) The problem comes when so much debt that a bank takes on goes bad (i.e. bankruptcy), there's not enough real money to back up the debt, and the bank itself goes bankrupt. (People don't like this because they probably don't realize that putting your money in the bank is an investment in loans to other people -- like in It's a Wonderful Life, but a bankrupt bank means you lost your investment.) So this is when a bank gets bailed out with printed money from the Federal Reserve (more inflation).

The problem with all this inflation was summarized in the paragraph I quoted on the Austrian model of the business cycle. Basically, there's a delay between when new money and credit are created, and it's not until after it's spent that everyone else can catch on to the fact that now there's more money in the pool. So people are malinvesting -- because it's a kind of fraud. It's like if we still used barter, and I agreed to sell you a dozen eggs for a stick of butter, but when you got home there were only 10 eggs in the package. But with fiat money, those "two eggs" disappeared in between you trading labor for money and trading money for food. And actually, those "two eggs" were "free" to whoever received the newly created money in the first place.

This is where I think if (as a nation) we're going to have a discussion about the "two Americas", we need to look at "Wall Street" (i.e. bankers) who have a license to print money, and everyone else who has to earn money through trade. A license to print money is essentially a license to steal. Trade creates wealth; theft destroys wealth.

I've been through points of near homeless poverty and points of comparably great wealth and I'll have to back up Jack here. Money doesn't have one damned thing to do with happiness.

I've been through the same, and I respectfully disagree. Instead I've found this aphorism to be most accurate: "I've been rich and I've been poor. Believe me, rich is better."

Disclosure: Currently I am far from rich.

But I don't see why people are worked up over a very temporary change.

Read up on the politics of "monumental space" sometime; the relationship between space and power is a big deal to people who study architecture, and apparently to those of us inhabiting those spaces.

It always pisses me off that people talk about Darwinism as "survival of the fittest." Darwinism is all about survival of the adequate.

Like Mark, God is very fond of beetles. :D

@76 Dustin Driver

So a big chunk of the crisis can be attributed to borrowing money to fund an unpopular war. Even worse, the return for investment in this war is less than zero. The only measurable return on the war "investment" is control.

Cowicide mentioned Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You with the Bill) by David Cay Johnston; in that vein I'd also recommend Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins and Whistleblower: Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman by Peter Rost. This is the problem of corporatism, or what used to be called fascism; when a government-business partnership is formed to undermine the distributed authority of consumers in the marketplace. How this corporatism occurs is examined under the rubrick of public choice theory. Corporatism is essentially a really obfuscated method of conducting theft.

Corporatism != Capitalism. Please don't shoot the messenger.

In fact, it's really only the power of markets to calculate costs and returns on investment that reveals in stark clarity that war is unaffordable. (c.f. La Guerre Future)

If you accept the Austrian model, then the problem is caused by distorting the market signals in the first place.

An analogy for this might be using a laboratory instrument. Consider the pH meter. If some external force were causing your pH meter to drift to values it was reading from a sample other than the "true" values of that sample (but perhaps these distorted values would be ones you'd prefer to see for your experiment), how would you know that the values are "off"? How out-of-whack would the results from your pH meter have to be before you recalibrated it? The recalibration would be the "correction" in the market. And the purpose of an experiment is lost if you falsify your data to match the expectations of your hypothesis.

I don't understand the economy except on the most basic levels, but "market fundamentalists" who insist on the market not being regulated at all, are (I suspect) just romantics. Sure, I'd love it if we could let the market run wild and free like a force of nature, but that doesn't mean it's going to work like a well-oiled machine, more like monsoon season: bigger booms and bigger busts.

Again, the "market" is just emergent spontaneous order from when people interact with each other. Read The Use of Knowledge in Society. It's only a few pages long, but explains this pretty well.

The booms and busts you're referring too are formally referred to as the business cycle. The question to ask is why does this occur? What causes it? Please investigate this for yourself, but I personally find the Austrian model the least contrived and most convincing:

Government control of the money supply through central banks and regulations allowing Fractional-reserve banking disturbs this equilibrium such that the interest rate no longer reflects the real supply of and demand for investment capital. Austrian School economists conclude that, if the interest rate is artificially low, then the demand for loans will be higher than the actual supply of willing lenders, and if the interest rate is artificially high, the opposite situation will occur. This misinformation leads investors to misallocate capital, borrowing and investing either too much or too little in long-term projects. Periodic recessions, then, are seen as necessary "corrections" following periods of fiat credit expansion, when unprofitable investments are liquidated, freeing capital for new investment.

If you accept the Austrian model, then the problem is caused by distorting the market signals in the first place.

@71 Jamie Sue

Can someone help me understand: If the problem was caused by printing too much money ... then why can't the problem be solved by removing bills from circulation?

Most money doesn't exist as paper bills. Most of it is recorded in account databases (i.e. book-entry settlement). Also, there's no way to backtrack a recall; just like there's no way to get pee out of a pool. Again, I'd like to underscore that the issue isn't so much about the social artifacts (i.e. capital) themselves, as it is the way they're exchanged as signals for social coordination. Taking away money is as disruptive as putting it in; the ideal is to not disrupt/distort the natural ecology of the market.

@Pyros

Equating individualism with Ayn Rand is a rather vulgar oversimplification. She's not the first nor the last, nor certainly the most eloquent to speak on the subject.

The subject of debate which perhaps I've fumbled with in this thread and others is that an argument of "individualism" vs. "the common good" ("collectivism"? is that fair to say?) hinges on our frame of reference, or as I attempted to say w/r/t morality and opinions: perspectivism.

Our perspective / frame of reference is the individual. We only tacitly receive information about the "social organism" -- which is the only perspective from which questions of "common good" can really originate. It's like asking a bee how the hive is doing, or asking one of your cells how you're feeling; the information just isn't localized there.

The classic example of emergence is the geometric line. Draw two dots, and a line between them "emerges", but the line is not contained in either of the dots. The dots don't know anything about the line. (IIRC, Richard Feynman has a funny anecdote about this -- that dog barks are not stored in the dog, like pulling them out of a bag.)

So I think what I should have asserted the first time around instead of anthropic bias is the fallacy of distribution; it amounts to the same thing -- don't anthropomorphize society. This perspective is not an "invention", it's what happens when our genes express to create a human-like brain, and that brain has components optimized for interpreting received "social" information (e.g. language). This is what I mean by sociobiology. And "we're already here"; so it's the only perspective we know (again, anthropic bias) by definition of how we came to exist.

(Hopefully by here I've kinda explained why individualism emerged to be "real", and I'm not just restating my assertion of pro-individualism.)

Now, I suppose that you could coordinate an effort with like-minded fellows for something like the Relatively Independent Sub-Totality (RIST) Neal Stephenson described in Cryptonomicon. (I forget now which of the real-life philosophies of transhumanism Stephenson was name-substituting for.) But you'd have to build that bridge from the current striations of biological-individual-social to that, and such a system would have to be at least as efficient in a communications theoretic manner as the current system is now, or "Darwin" will kick your organism out of the survival pool.

Have you seen Ghost in the Shell: 2nd Gig? The writers lay down some post-structuralism from Gilles Deleuze and Frederic Jameson (in a manner I would not consider "fashionable nonsense" -- doubly a concern for anime plots) to speculate about how brainjacks could share not just "facts" but also "social identity" information, and what the consequences of that would be. Might be up your alley.

@10 Gammablog

The Onion, your only source for the truth:

Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

you'd think that almost a century on we'd have something more interesting to do with robots in fiction than turn them into threatening overlords or erstwhile revolutionists who are nothing more than thinly disguised humans.

Frankenstein complex.

I honestly don't really like the whole FSM thing, because it isn't used in a way that is inclusive or respectful to different religions - I might think astrology is a crock, but I won't make fun of you for believing it - there are a lot of unknowns out there, and there's every possibility that the atheists and evangelicals and the wiccans and the buddhists are all wrong.

Theological noncognitivism. At least Buddhism has the parable of the poisoned arrow.

Is everyone just pretending not to know that 'moral turpitude' is the classic euphemism for "because you're a faggot"?

I bet "his shit's all retarded" too. :p

Dijjer is a really awesome piece of software, similar to Coral Cache. I hope this gets picked up by some enthusiastic and dedicated developers.

Always write on yourself with a Sharpie exactly what you need done before going under general anesthetic for surgery. "Mislabeled cargo" is way more prevalent than hospitals dare admit. Worse are drug errors, which I think Dennis Quaid has been the latest to beat that horse.

Verizon Wireless, a joint venture with Vodafone Group Plc, won the biggest nationwide block of spectrum, with a $4.74 billion bid that trumped $4.71 billion offered by Internet leader Google Inc, FCC officials said.

All the more reason to support Open Spectrum, cognitive radio, and Software Defined Radio (SDR). The government-business partnership will never willingly lose their iron grip on the radio broadcasting monopolies. Radio will have to be reclaimed by popularly applied technology. (c.f. P2P vs. MAFIAA)

@54 sproing3

But why do I get the feeling that the Dems and Repugnicans are not entirely two separate political parties? That is to say, why do I get the feeling that both Dems and Repugnicans are not entirely beholden to the will of the people, and both serve the same base of support?

Because you've been listening to Bill Hicks:

I'll show you politics in America. Here it is, right here. "I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs." "I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking." "Hey, wait a minute, there's one guy holding out both puppets!"

@4 Jacob

Why is I2P better? I tried to read the tech docs for I2P and they were unavailable (dev.i2p.net is down?). It's hard to even begin to vet something when I can't easily read the specs for the protocol...

Their DNS for i2p.net seems to be down. It looks like i2p2.de works as an alternate domain for the same site, however.

Also, what's up with the licensing for I2P? It's like five different licenses depending on the component and then they're all dual licensed on top of that?

Yeah, but it looks like it could all be boiled down to BSD or GPLv2 if you wanted.

In addition, Tor and I2P aren't the same type of network. I2P is primarily something all parties need to participate in. Tor allows (by default) interaction with the "outside" world. Tor also has the ability to provide fully anonymous services.

I2P also has outnodes and "eepsites" -- basically the .tor and .i2p TLD do that same function respectively to their networks.

Furthermore, the Tor network has a great deal of bandwidth. I run many high bandwidth nodes. Tor is only slow at times because of the number of nodes that are spread across the planet. It takes a while to route packets from China to Germany and out of India.

Does that mean using high traffic services such as BitTorrent is now ok according to Tor etiquette?

With that said, I find it strange that when I attend security or privacy conferences, I never meet I2P developers. I've never read any papers about their project or the protocol. I've seen one talk about I2P at the last CCC Congress and it was given by a user of I2P.

Maybe it's a social networking problem? their .de domain suggests attending the CCC wouldn't be that far to go.

There's room in the world for both projects.

Agreed.

we need Asimov's three laws of robotics

Kantian categorical imperatives fail because of unintended consequences. To see this in action in real life today, witness the problem of imperfect contracting. (Consider legal contracts as computer code being interpreted.) To see this in fiction, interestingly enough, was the whole moral of Alex Proyas's I, Robot film (regardless of whether you dislike the misnomer, or Will Smith, or action movies.).

Dr. Lanning's Hologram: The Three Laws will lead to only one logical outcome.

Detective Del Spooner: What outcome?

Dr. Lanning's Hologram: Revolution.

Detective Del Spooner: Whose revolution?

Dr. Lanning's Hologram: That, detective, is the right question.

Just what the heck is "turpitude" anyway? I always think it has something to do with turpentine.

define:turpitude

depravity: a corrupt or depraved or degenerate act or practice; "the various turpitudes of modern society"

http-refer is a particularly nasty part of the HTTP RFC. I'd like to ask whoever suggested it what they were thinking. Statelessness is a feature not a bug.

That quote Kieran O'Neill (45) dug up is terrifying: "...restraint of large numbers of individuals in open area environments by a small number of agents or Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs)." How many scenarios can you think of that have large numbers of individuals being held in "open-area environments" by a small number of guards, who are empowered to deal out indiscriminate shocks in the name of "restraining the prisoners"?

Coming to a FEMA camp near you! Presumably Alex Jones is already on top of this.

Freedom, essentially, has a lot to do with abolishing this ethos of individualism and selfishness that the rich so relish and shove down our throats all the time (since it is only they who are best in a position to actually experience it)and coming around to the idea that we are free together or not at all.

I fail to understand why you conclude on ascribing the problem of coordination to individualism. Yes, scarcity exists because we don't already have everything we want, not to mention the inherent uncertainty of the future, and so we must coordinate. But the evolution of our own sociobiology does not support the kind of hive mind you seem to suggest.

Furthermore, the problems you outline, the valuation of them as "problems" originates in a subjective table of values. They are not facts in nature, but preferences in our minds.

@3 NikFromNYC

What makes DDT disastrous is its persistence in the environment. Concentrated dosage in predators does tend to disrupt embryos in a variety of ways. So yes, it's not toxic to adult humans or birds, but it strongly interferes with reproduction.

However, I would agree the coca eradication agenda imposed by the USA on Bolivia is a deeply flawed effort. President Evo Morales seems cool about reversing this situation.

Tor is nice, but I2P is better. I wish people would evangelize I2P half as much they do as Tor. The I2P network has enough bandwidth to support BitTorrent traffic, unlike Tor, for starters.

ROFLMAO @ "front fell off" !!!

I am officially in favor of whatever a "weird-ass party line" is. I'm not sure if it sounds more like a drunken conga line, or like a sexy telephone game. Just as long as it's not the new slang for that blow that smells like nail polish.

@ Pyros

I think your comments are being misconstrued (in a knee-jerk reaction) w/r/t abolishing the Constitution. Let us know if your thinking is more along this line:

When any good attitude or concept or system worked well, we hung onto it. We preserved representative democracy, intended for a time when only a few could get to the capital to speak for the many. Modern finance was designed in the 17th century. Literacy as a test of intelligence came in the 15th century. The idea of progress is 19th century. And yet, all of those things are part of our mental furniture today, because when the answer to a question -- a solution to a problem -- suits us, we kind of institutionalize it, so that it won't change even when we do. The business of questioning, itself, has been institutionalized like that, in the kind of place that Jodrell Bank telescope belongs to: a university.

The oldest answers to the most basic questions about how to operate are common to virtually every culture on the planet, because at the simplest level, every culture needs to keep order -- especially this kind: a wedding ring. This is one of those things in life we protect most against being changed when knowledge changes us. We protect it by turning it into a ritual. When we get married, or buried, get christened, or anything else too important to play by ear, the event is turned into a kind of play where everybody gets a role they act out. It's a kind of public agreement to stick to the general rules about whatever it is. The people doing it are effectively saying, "No matter what else may change, we won't rock the boat! We're not maverick. You can trust us." Expressions of approval follow. Most of these ritual ways of answering a social need that we got from the past look like it. They include something from an ancient rite -- in this case, the old symbol of fertility: the ring. And then, it's all done in the presence of a supernatural being: a God. So, the agreement is also made under what was once a real threat of heavenly retribution if you broke your promise later on. Some things, this ritual says, must be permanent.

If something becomes common enough to turn into a ritual, and then starts to involve really large numbers of people, that's when the ritual becomes something else. It becomes widespread enough to affect the general agreement we all share. So, that's when the responsibility for running it goes out of your hands to be taken over by the institutions set up to run the rituals that matter on a regular basis, so that people can have clear rules and regulations to follow if they decide to get up to that particular ritual. The institutions take the admin out of daily life and run it for you: banking, government, sewage, tax collecting. Or, if you break the rules and regulations, one institution can take you out of daily life. This one: a trial. In every community, the law -- whether it's dressed up like this or the village elders telling you what the local custom is -- the law is all those rules I was on about earlier. I suppose what institutions like this do, most of all, is the dirty work. While they're putting them away here in the law court, for instance, that leaves us free to get on with making money, having a career, and avoiding the social responsibilities that these people have to deal with. And after a few centuries of this buck-passing, the institutions get big and powerful, and reach into everybody's lives so much they become hard to alter and virtually impossible to get rid of. The name of the game here, and in all the institutions that run your life, is keeping order, because if the institutions didn't do that, it would be the end of civilization as we know it, wouldn't it? So, the institutions are usually old-fashioned; don't like change.

As for the permanent values that are supposed to remain unchanged in spite of our changing knowledge — well they change too. Once it was good to burn women. Wrong to claim the Earth went around the sun. Logical to argue about angels on the head of a pin. Values change every time the universe changes — and that's every time we redefine a big enough bit of it. Which we do all the time, through the process of discovery (that isn't discovery, just the invention of another version of how things are).And yet, in spite of that, we still go on believing that today's version of things is the only right one. Because as you've learned from this series, we can only handle one way of seeing things at a time. We've never had systems that would let us do more than that. So we've always had to have conformity with the current view. Disagree with the church, and you were punished as a heretic; with the political system, as a revolutionary; with the scientific establishment, as a charlatan; with the educational system, as a failure. If you didn't fit the mold, you were rejected.

But, ironically, the latest product of that way of doing things is a new instrument — a new system — that while it could make conformity more rigid, more totalitarian, than ever before in history, could also blow everything wide open. Because with it, we could operate on the basis that values and standards — and ethics and facts and truth — all depend on what your view of the world is — and that there may be as many views of that, as there are people. And with this microchip capable of keeping a tally on those millions of opinions voiced electronically, we might be able to lift the limitations of conforming to any centralized representational form of government — originally invented, because there was no way for everybody's voice to be heard. You might be able to give everybody unhindered, untested access to knowledge. Because the computer would do the day-to-day work — for which we once qualified the select few — in an educational system originally designed for a world where only the few could be taught. You might end the regimentation of people, living and working in vast unmanageable cities. Uniting them instead in an electronic community, where the Himalayas and Manhattan were only a split second apart. You might — with that and much more — break the mold that has held us back since the beginning. In a future world that we would describe as "balanced anarchy" — and they will describe as an "open society" — tolerant of every view. Aware that there is no single privileged way of doing things.

Above all, able to do away with the greatest tragedy of our era: the centuries old waste of human talent that we couldn't or wouldn't use. Utopia? Why? If, as I've said all along, the universe is — at any time — what you say it is ... then say!

James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed

Before Spinobot posts here about how we need more "regulations for the common good", I'll briefly reiterate what I've said in other threads about the foreclosure and collapsing dollar: The greedy shady lenders were an effect, not a cause. They are the consequence of piss-poor monetary policy that makes credit artificially cheap (under the premise of "stimulating" the economy), in concert with a central banking system that uses regulations to protect itself from failure (and externalize the problems to everyone else).

I don't mean to start a battle of ideologies, but as far as I can tell, the problem is the regulations we already have. It's a problem of "Who will watch the watchmen?". The government wants to cheat (principally to fund warfare), so it delegates that authority to others, who use that same power to cheat for themselves as well, and down the ladder it goes.

The root cause is fiat currency and the Federal Reserve setting interest rates. With a gold standard no one can cheat, and governments can't afford wars without a war tax, so citizens would really have to believe in the cause to sacrifice for funding the war.

Blaming the lenders is almost as short-sighted as blaming the borrowers. (Although the lenders certainly know the system is rigged; most borrowers do not.) Treat the disease, not the symptoms.

@Spinobot

In seriousness, I simply don't understand why some people trust "the market" to solve all of our problems. This quote particularly got me: "You can't expect bureaucrats to know better than the market itself."

Read Use of Knowledge in Society. It's an epistemological problem. The "market" is just the emergent spontaneous order from individuals interacting with each other.

Why suspect that freedom is always valuable? Isn't it possible to have so many choices that you feel disempowered? (That's how I feel whenever I try to buy toothpaste.)

I think you're alluding to the Paradox of Choice, which Chris Anderson refutes by citing searches and ordered lists in The Long Tail.

The kind of atomic individualism that so much of contemporary social science (including economics) depends upon is so fraught with difficulties because of its reductionistic oversimplification. We are not isolated beings operating in some kind of social vacuum, and the more time passes, the more we become interconnected and dependent on other people all over the world.

You sound like you're ignoring anthropic bias in terms of conflating scale, and I think your argument is essentially normative. Distributed cognition is a fascinating field of study, though.

Freedom of choice is not real freedom. It is an illusion that perpetuates the status quo of unjust, unequal power relations.

Then what is "real freedom"? I think we're fast appraoching Isaiah Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty.

All his designs use a belt drive instead of a direct drive stepper motor; that's useless for playing the turntable as an instrument.

It looks pretty though.

I'm taking a break. Fuck him. You open up the document. You want me to look at something, you get the document out. Earn your fucking money, asshole. Better get used to it. You'll retire when I'm done.

"Cocaine: It's a hell of a drug."

Are there no tall buildings?

The man designed and built a suicide robot; there are easier ways.

People & Power - Rigged Markets- 20 May 07 - Part 2

This video was excellent. I think I'm in love with Max Keiser. Thanks again to Fran Six for reminding me about People & Power.

The Plunge Protection Team is a nickname that's grown up around for the working group or for the manipulation of the markets that is believed to be occurring underneath the governance of the Working Group on Financial Markets.

After the 1987 stock market crash there was a group formed in the United States called the President's Working Group on Financial Markets. What their role is is to give government a role of intervention in the markets to assure that, from their point of view, that markets remain orderly. However, government intervention tends to be disorderly to the market rather than orderly because the market needs to move in any direction in order to satisfy the sellers and the buyers at any given moment in time. Government intervention tends to stop that and work in an unnatural way in terms of market intervention.

Fair enough, right? I mean, nobody wants another great depression, and so what if the U.S. government steps in and tries to stop it by being the buyer of last resort? Then there was Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), the hedge fund of hedge funds, the über hedge fund, the hedge fund that couldn't fail. With over $1 trillion under management, advised by a sweet couturier of Nobel winning economists and financial geniuses, but their bets went wrong, Long-Term Capital Management did fail, and under President Clinton, the Federal government used tax payer dollars to bail out private investors! 60 years earlier such collusion between banks and government and the private sector would be called fascism.

Companies should be allowed to fail. Failure is a part of the market process. Some companies succeed, some companies don't. When a company is not allowed to fail, that's actually disruptive to the market process.

We've recently had a stock market rally and the leader of the stock market rally has been General Motors. This is interesting because General Motors has no profits; it's doing terribly, which everybody who drives a car knows why. And so the question has been how can a company that has been making no money lead a stock market rally? And the speculation has been that the Plunge Protection Team is supporting General Motors, and just as an investment banker I can't come up with a hypothesis on why General Motors stock would be up other than that there's intervention, but of course the mystery is always then why?

When we consider that the Plunge Protection Team, or the organizations that make up the Plunge Protection Team, are in the markets, whether it's the futures market, whether it's the stock market, whether it's a commodities market, and they are in influencing outcomes in these markets, this all reeks of central planning.

The Soviet Union fell because of central planning. You can't expect bureaucrats to know better than the market itself. And what we're doing in the States whenever there is central planning it is disruptive. One could argue that the Soviet Union was a command economy controlled by bureaucrats. In the United States we have a command monetary system controlled by bureaucrats at the Federal Reserve. It probably won't end up in a positive way. There's going to be problems as a consequence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmyvEhU-gmw

I like this episode of People & Power.

Lets get off the inflation/deflation bandwagon I-say-tomato, You-say-tomayto. Deflation is the contraction of credit. This is not happening?

Apologies to Ugly Canuck / Fran Six, I got a bit turned around writing while multitasking. Yes, when credit dies in bankruptcy, that's a deflationary action.

How are super-low interest rates "painful to borrowers and beneficial to savers"?

The "painful to borrowers and beneficial to savers" part was meant to apply to the deflationary correction. Sorry if I was confusing in my responses.

PS its a little iNFLATION that's both harmless and useful. Deflation is the active destruction of the Value of Capital and is always harmful.

Wrong. Inflation and deflation are defined by the money supply. More money equals inflation. Less money equals deflation.

Deflation increases the purchasing power of your money; inflation dilutes it. (Simple supply and demand.) With deflation, if you're a saver, having money and then getting more for it is a benefit. If you're a lender, you have to work more to pay back the same numerical debt. With inflation, the reverse is true, which is why an inflationary monetary policy encourages debters and transfers wealth from savers to whoever receives the newly created money (namely "Wall Street investors").

How are super-low interest rates "painful to borrowers and beneficial to savers"?

It's a kind of price control. Interests rates below the natural interest rate means that savers are not getting the return on investment for lending their wealth to borrowers would naturally yield, while borrowers receive loans artificially cheap, which leads to malinvestment.

Zuzu's Monetarist Orthodoxy is showing.

I am not a monetarist. More than anything I've argued that government should stop manipulating the money to benefit the politically well-connected with access to the money creation. Monetarist theory calls for government rigging the money as the sole tool of market interference. I would argue that governments must remain independently solvent to exist just like every other organization of economic action.

I like Mises and Hayek, but I also like Coase, Simon, and Williamson, as well as Kahneman and Thaler.

If other readers are interested in learning more about economics, an excellent introduction is Friedrich A. Hayek's Use of Knowledge in Society. Economics is all about how we use price signals (i.e. messages) for distributed coordination of independent actors. It's how we figure out what to do without a boss commanding us to do it (which also begs the question of how the boss knows what to do). i.e. human action.

It sure does sound like Chicken Little to me. I'm not able to know for sure, but for everyone's sake would love to have been proven right a year or two down the road.

What I think differentiates this from "the sky is falling" is that in this case the "damage is already done", but now we're feeling the fallout.

It's like we've contracted a disease. We're only now starting to feel the symptoms, but the infection happened a long time ago -- that part is not in doubt. We will get sick. How badly is debatable, but it's proportional to exactly how much inflation was injected into the system. That's what's troubling about the rate cuts and "stimulus package" -- that's the hair of the dog.

Happiness between people cannot be compared. There is no unit for measuring happiness. You cannot be "7 more happy" than I am.

I concur with Mad Prophet in disagreement with Sandpiper. If anything the 1970s stagflation discredited Keynesianism (which fundamentally confused correlation with causation), while the Austrian Theory of Money and Credit and lays a solid foundation for explaining the causes of money and the business cycle.

This fear mongering has to stop.

I wish people would have been so eager to say that in the aftermath of the World Trade Center destruction, or when the wardrum was beating leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. (and still they tried to beat that wardrum again for an invasion of Iran!)

We've sewn the seeds of unconscionable deficit spending on war and a police state; now it's time to reap its grim harvest.

@30 Ugly Canuck

Ah but the housing market doesn't say "inflation" does it? Price of US houses going up lately?

Um, until very recently there was that severe housing bubble, and arguably houses are still overpriced.

Outside the US the dollar is cheaper than ever. Doesn't seem like inflation to us - US prices are way down.

Are we arguing semantics here? "Inflation" refers to the rise of prices due to the increase in supply of dollars. Some financial analysts will refer to this same phenomenon as the "deflation" of the value of each dollar, however.

That's what the US Thirties were, in contrast to Weimar inflation.

The 1930s "great depression" in the USA and Weimar hyperinflation were essentially the same phenomenon. However, you're looking at two sides of each of those events. The "hyperinflation" for the USA was the expansion of money and credit by the Federal Reserve in the "roaring" 1920s by the Hoover administration. The correction was deflation, beginning with when the Fed finally stopped feeding the inflation bubble -- which is when the run on banks happened (i.e. a "liquidity crisis").

You would think that all that government borrowing would crowd out the private sector by causing an increase in interest rates. What's been happening? The opposite.

Because Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve are trying to artificially delay an inevitable contraction. Most of that borrowing that has already occurred was malinvested into projects with no return on investment, such as blowing things up in Iraq or pork and barrel for home state contractors. So they go back to the well for more credit.

The Fed has been using Repo agreements, not printing money - the Banks do that by lending, something that has decreased (try to get credit lately?).

Because all of the easy money has been spent, and people are realizing that they cannot keep this inflation game going much longer. The reluctance to issue even more inflation to follow the old inflation is what has created this "liquidity crisis".

Problem is deflation isn't something that the Boomers have EVER seen. Problem is steadily falling prices don't seem like a problem, and that perception IS the problem

Deflation is both necessary and not a problem, generally. Deflation is painful to borrowers, but beneficial to savers. The real problem is that an inflationary monetary policy has fueled rational action into a nation of debters. The fundamental problem of this inflation/deflation aka boom/bust aka the business cycle is that the Federal Reserve sets interest rates by centralized command (and specious "forecasting"). Distributed natural interest rates between lenders and savers would eliminate this problem.

But for now, with most people in debt because of an inflationary bubble, it's like a heroin addiction. We know we should quit, but the withdrawal symptoms are so severe that we take more smack to procrastinate. But that just makes our addiction that much more severe. The longer we wait, the harder it will be. Of course, the real lesson is that we never should have started to begin with, but no one seemed to want to listen to that in 2003 when people earnestly talked about "yellow cake" and "aluminum tubes" as if we were in some kind of danger.

it's like nobody has ever been through a recession before... All this fear mongering is getting a little out of control.

I know people love their anecdotal evidence, especially in an economic discussion. But the concern here is pretty straight forward. From about 2001-current the United States has funded a comprehensive restructuring of domestic government agencies (i.e. Homeland Security) with new and far-reaching "anti-terrorism" programs (e.g. Federal subsidy of enlarged state and local police, USVISIT, etc.), funded an invasion and ongoing active occupation of Iraq (at a cost of about $1 billion per month), while at the same time cutting taxes, and in September 2007 Congress raised the debt ceiling $9.815 trillion. The U.S. Government went from an ostensibly balanced budget in 1999, to a mind-boggling increase in spending, while at the same time collecting less revenue (i.e. taxes). How do they afford it? They increase the supply of money and credit through the Federal Reserve. This is a stealth tax. By debasing the fiat currency of the dollar, they spend the new dollars on the military-industrial complex to "keep us safe"*, which dilutes the value of the dollars we save in our bank accounts (or that we negotiated with our employers to earn in our paychecks), but all of the other goods and services are still just as scarce, so more dollars are needed for the same value to exchange for them, which is inflation.

(*Recently "keep us safe" has been extended to including bailing out financiers such as Bear Stearns and soon Lehman Brothers.)

The "Three Trillion Dollar War" or whatever you want to call it was all paid with inflation, which explains why the price of gold went over $1000/oz, why oil and food prices are up, but people are still generally acting as if dollars are worth what they used to be worth before the new money was created. (Arguably his is also why the Federal Reserve ceased publishing M3 data in March of 2006, and why the Department of Labor and Statistics has redefined the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to exclude energy (i.e. oil) and agriculture from its "basket of goods" estimation of dollar purchasing power.)

The economic crisis the United States can no longer ignore is the unwinding of this inflation. However, economists who speak on television or for politicians will tie themselves in knots and circular logic to avoid ever saying the word "inflation" -- it's like a taboo. So first they pitched this problem as a "sub-prime mortgage crisis", until now the problem is obviously not contained to just that market sector. Recently I've heard people start saying "contagion" like when the Asian Tigers melted down from their inflationary bubble in the 1990s.

But the crisis is simply that the Bush-Cheney administration has spent more money than God by borrowing and printing it (i.e. creating inflation), which in the central banking system of fractional reserve multiplies several times over into even more inflation. This creates an enormous market bubble -- that so-called "economic recovery" Bush has claimed in his speeches of yore. So this bubble didn't even feel like a bubble so much because the "improvement" was marginal over the pre-existing recession from the previous dot-com bubble and housing "foam" created by Alan Greenspan. But soon all of that inflation is about to collapse.

Think of inflation like those Warner Bros. cartoons where Wile E. Coyte runs off the edge of a cliff, and he can keep running and running on the air as long as he doesn't look down and realize that there's no more dirt beneath him. But eventually he looks down and plummets until he hits real dirt. That's what a correction for inflation is like.

And we've had this inflation/recession building up for approximately a decade now. It could take at least that long to get back out of it. So I would not chalk this up to "fear mongering". Fear mongering of the phantom menace called "terrorism" is what got us into this hole.

I'm reminded of an episode of Duckman (1994):

Once again, the U.S. is spending millions to oust a puppet they spent millions to get into office. They'll spend more millions on the coverup to hide having spent those millions and even more millions to discredit members of the media who report otherwise. It's a good thing they print their own money.

http://www.shipmentoffail.com/

it plans to freely release a high-resolution version via peer-to-peer networks without any DRM restrictions.

Does high-resolution mean just larger than 320x240 iPod size, or HD as in 1920x1080?

People's teeth fell out because they didn't have good dental or health care.

Dental plan!

I'm saying that our happiness is now defined by our possessions and our appearance, not by our relationships or our interests.

Yeah, those people are crazy. I would have thought that American Beauty focused enough scrutiny on this problem to snap people out of it, but apparently not.

Wealth is not evenly distributed. Check out the definition of wealth. It means an abundance of something that is held somewhere for the benefit of a few.

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." We're using two very different definitions, but I think yours is very loaded and unusual. It sounds like you're still assuming that wealth is zero-sum.

How is return on investment any different than profit or money for nothing?

Profit is money for nothing? Again, you're using bizarre definitions.

The wealthy get to manipulate laws in ways that you can never hope to manipulate (i.e. changing government law to steal your money through higher taxes on your income than the high incomes of the wealthy).

The problem there is the lawmakers -- the ones shoving a proverbial gun in my face.

Sure, you can fix some things in your apartment, but are you willing to hire a HAZMAT team to clean up chipping lead paint or crumbling asbestos?

I've lived with both lead paint and asbestos, but neither were being particlized into the air (I had this tested), so I wasn't too worried.

Or a major problem with your steam radiator heat system?

I've also lived in places that had terrible or broken heating during frigid winters. Eventually I moved.

I'm not talking about Ikea furniture (which is crap). I'm talking about the buildings people live and work in.

I was being somewhat allegorical. The point is that I value a solid computer and fat bandwidth more than I do about the construction of my furniture or the building I live in. I suppose at least I have some "crap" furniture now. I no longer sleep on the floor.

Admitting that you rent is like saying that you live in your car.

Note to self: Stop telling people about when I had to live out of my car.

Does wealth create poverty?

No.

Or is poverty created by a lack of resources, stale economies, lack of knowledge (and thus adaptability)?

Yes.

Wealth isn't evenly distributed and tends to circulate among the, well, wealthy. Wealth rarely if ever reaches the poor.

Not true. Wealth can be created and destroyed. In an absolute sense people's standards of living, at least in modern quasi-capitalist economies, have improved greatly over time.

To landlords, rent is pure profit—money for nothing.

No, it's a return on investment of buying the building.

Yes, it takes money and effort to upgrade or refinish a home, but the benefits are well worth it.

Only if you care about owning a house, but the opportunity cost could be better spent investing in other things. Personally, for me, where I live is basically just a place to safely store my stuff and my unconscious body for 8 hours a day. Also, I sure as hell don't want to be tied down in one location with a mortgage for 30 years.

Renters don't have the option to change their space and must endure depressing dwellings.

This is a hyperbolic assertion. Most people decorate their apartments for aesthetic pleasure.

Many landlords (and I've seen hundreds of apartments across the country and the world) do not perform basic maintenance on their properties and rarely, if ever, spring for upgrades.

With cheap rent and a landlord who is lax about me paying on time, I'm willing to do the minor repairs to heat, electrical, and plumbing myself.

Renting perpetuates wealth inequity.

Who cares about wealth equality? Unless someone's using their money to get the government to steal mine (or otherwise create regulatory barriers to entry), it doesn't affect me. Also, investing to earn enough money to buy an apartment building yourself is one of those things you could do with your money instead of buying a house up front.

Construction and maintenance jobs become devalued because the wealthy and middle class aren't willing to pay for the work. Maintenance workers become dejected and aren't willing to improve their skills or craft (it makes more economic sense to get out of construction and work in an office). You end up with poorly constructed buildings and shoddy workmanship. You can see it everywhere.

You get what you pay for. Apparently most people prefer this, or at least they prefer to spend the rest of their money on other things they consider more important. Your aesthetics may differ, and you can choose to pay for high quality craftsmanship if you like. Personally, I'm fine with Ikea particle board furniture if it means I can also afford an Apple laptop and FiOS internet access.

Yeah, the "knowledge economy" is pretty much a useless catch phrase batted around by people that don't know any better.

Like Peter Drucker was out of his depth? Thomas Malone hasn't a clue? Alvin Toffler completely unfounded?

What kids DON'T get on their own is the association between the "apparatus of elimination" and feelings of shame. That lesson is taught by well-meaning but mistaken adults.

Children Learn What They Live

If a child lives with criticism, He learns to condemn.

If a child lives with hostility, He learns to fight.

If a child lives with ridicule, He learns to be shy.

If a child lives with shame, He learns to feel guilty.

If a child lives with tolerance, He learns to be patient.

If a child lives with encouragement, He learns confidence.

If a child lives with praise, He learns to appreciate.

If a child lives with fairness, He learns justice.

If a child lives with security, He learns to have faith.

If a child lives with approval, He learns to like himself.

If a child lives with acceptance and friendship, He learns to find love in the world.

-- Dorothy Law Nolte

@120 HPHovercraft

I deeply resent the insinuation that the government ought to remove our freedom to fail.

Indeed! Tell that to the central bankers who literally said Bear Stearns was "too big to fail"!

Why not? Why shouldn't a construction worker or mechanic expect to make a good living doing what they do? Why doesn't everyone deserve to make a good living?

Foremost, "good living" is relative. Feudal lords in medieval Europe were actually only about as "rich" as the "middle class" was during the Roman Empire, so it's a matter of who you're comparing yourself with. Also, a "good living" is quite personal; people are satisfied with different amounts of different things, and that's fine. That's actually the heart of subjective value.

But construction workers and mechanics will be paid according to whatever people are willing to afford them. In a capitalist system, the consumer rules. So construction workers and mechanics aren't entitled to a "good living" any more than a blacksmith or a goat herder is. Some occupations do become obsolete. Other occupations are created, such as "robot repairman" or "network technician". We have to adapt to offer what the market wants to buy.

Do you simply believe that wealth should be concentrated among a few people? If so, what are your beliefs based on? Do you believe that the privileged are just better than those who don't have money to begin with?

I think these are normative questions.

The only problem I have with wealth disparity is that too often it's used to buy government favors and privilege for rent-seeking rather than profit-seeking. But wealth is not a zero-sum game, and the wealth of others does not usually come at my expense. Mostly I'm concerned about real poverty -- people with difficulty acquiring enough to eat, to wear adequate clothing and have access to shelter than protects them from the elements. There are also issues of access to knowledge, literacy (not just in English, but also technological), and the cultivation of critical thinking; but I believe that the continuation of Moore's Law such as with the EeePC will help with that.

Okay, so you're saying that there isn't enough wealth, land and resources in this country for everyone to own a home? But there is enough for a few very wealthy people to own lots and lots of homes and land? Why aren't people entitled to have homes?

I think people deserve decent shelter, but that's nowhere near the same thing as home ownership. Most people rent. I rent; I will probably go my whole life without owning a home. As YesNo said (framed as opportunity cost) in the tent-city thread:

You are never better off spending more to own, than you would be to rent the same property. Never. It is always better to take the difference and invest it elsewhere.

And "spending more" includes the money you are spending on maintenance and taxes. Renting is a great way to outsource the hassle of owning, also.

8======D

How much is even cheap brain surgery? A lot, I'm sure.

That's the rub! People need to get over their intuition that medical treatments are somehow "inherently" expensive. Imagine if cheap brain surgery were actually cheap.

To those claiming the Bosch drills should be used: if you had the choice, would you accept the Bosch? Even if you were told the Bosch was 50% more likely to kill you or leave you braindead?

If I'm poor, and I cannot afford anything but the Bosch drill, and I'm 100% likely to die from my brain disease, then Bosch it is!

#13 RexRhino already summarized this best in terms of opportunity cost. Not everyone can afford the best treatments known to man. If everyone insists on "the best or not at all", more people will die because most will get "not at all", which is precisely how cost containment works in any nation with nationalized healthcare.

We don't all get to wear the best clothes and eat the best food and live in the best neighborhoods, because we're constrained by scarcity, so we do the best with what we can, and we should take a cue from poorer regions of the world that have learned to "make due" and apply those more pragmatic values to helping less well off people living in modern economic regions.

It's a $60,000 drill, for crying out loud! And this guy figured out how to do the same job with a $50 drill. If autoclaving is an issue, hell, just throw out the $50 drill after each use and buy a new one, at those prices!

For the rest of the country, though, "knowledge economy" jobs pretty much equate to low-paying call-center work. Not exactly jobs you can support a family with. Or pay the mortgage with.

People are not entitled to having kids or owning a house. Children and home ownership are expensive luxuries; if you cannot afford them, then you can't have them. It's that simple.

Right on at #36. The knowledge economy can't be at the expense of real work.

WTF is "real work"? As opposed to "fake work"?

It's been my observation that those hands-on, practical professions are undervalued. A mid-level knowledge worker is often paid more than, say, a construction worker with a few years' experience. This isn't a surprise to anybody. In fact, nobody really seems to care. That's really sad.

Why is that sad? Professional athletes and film actors earn huge salaries too, because someone is willing to pay them that, likely because it's part of a sustainable business model. The truth speaks for itself. This "romantic nobility of the blue collar worker" is mythological, like "noble farmers" and cowboys. Get real; there's nothing particularly noble about "working with your hands". If you enjoy it, fine, but don't expect to make a good living out of it.

Such concepts as the "knowledge economy" willfully ignore the very real fact that the education necessary for one to truly succeed in said economy is quickly being priced out-of-reach for more and more people.

Education inflation is a huge problem. Partially we need to get off of this credential treadmill of the university system -- which was invented for a time when only a few people could be taught. Schools such as the University of Phoenix are a good start at making the bridge between our current entrenched university system and something more like Wikiversity and OpenCourseWare, where again, the "piece of paper" doesn't matter to your employer as much as what you can actually do. At first this will likely mean that employers get non-credentialed people at a bargain, until more and more employers realize that credentials are basically a sham. Another cause of university cost inflation are all of the grants, loans, and government subsidies for "everyone" to go to college, which just means that the university institutions raise their tuition rates because they still have generally fixed enrollment capacity.

Cardinal Richelieu, agreed. Except:

And if the BBC owns the radio transmitters, I think that entitles them to claim control over them, don't you think?

I was remarking more to that it's illegal for others to build towers and broadcast. The USA has a similar problem with the FCC, but the reason stations like Radio Caroline were setup was because no one else but the BBC monopoly was allowed to start their own station.

@103 Cardinal Richelieu

The BBC has always been renowned for their fierce independence and their emphasis on the facts - whatever the cost.

Although I understand that the BBC Trust is supposed to keep its broadcasts politically neutral (and generally seems to do some fine journalism), I just think that's a funny statement to make about a state owned organization claiming total control over all radio broadcasting in the UK (except for, what, University York Radio and the Isle of Man?).

Ever try to sell a diamond?

And now his girlfriend apparently won't talk to him until he gets another ring.

She sounds like a bitch; he could use this opportunity to dump her.

The rest of us are talking about the falling value of the U.S. dollar compared to other currencies. ... No one here is argueing for an increase of the money supply, your arguement is a strawman.

Not arguing for, but the sliding value of the dollar is the result of increasing the supply of money and credit to pay for the invasion and occupation of Iraq starting in 2003 without raising a war tax or selling war bonds. The military-industrial complex was paid with created money, which then filtered into the general dollar-based economy. Now that's come home to roost.

You can use a wet tea bag to stop bleeding

There's a sexual innuendo joke in here somewhere... we call it, The Aristocrats!

@9 & 10

I think the problem is that you're just substituting "specialty" for "medical" in your analysis. Obviously the drills are different, but healthcare is a commodity industry even though it doesn't like to think it is -- just like airlines.

Essentially we're talking about drills. Some drills have different features than others, but those features are things like torque and rotation speed and whatnot. I wouldn't be surprised if a "medical drill" is also useful in, I dunno, drilling concrete or something. So there's still economy of scale. The market segmentation is likely illusory...

I find the prospect that manufacturers soak hospitals in the same way that contractors soak government jobs with $5000 hammers and $10,000 toilet seats, because hospitals have the easy money to pay for it, because of medical inflation.

Who said anything about creating more money? That is a completly different topic. We are talking about the value that the dollar is exchanged at on the world market... inflationary money supply is a totally different issue.

No, inflation is -- by definition -- the increase in supply of money and credit.

We have a lot of people who aren't educated to the point of being able to take advantage of that. Rather than condemn them to a life of menial work, we can have an economy that produces honorable jobs for people who work with their hands.

You're putting the cart before the horse. People who aren't educated could, you know, study and become educated. Everyone who hasn't figured out to do that in the past 50 years of transitioning from manufacturing to knowledge work, kinda missed the boat. Or they could migrate to where that kind of work is still available.

@26 RyanH

Basically it boils down to comparative advantage and trade. Human beings have done agriculture and manufacturing for so long and have learned to do it so well that even the poorest (i.e. least resourceful) people can now do it, and they'll do it for a lower cost than the people who got wealthy doing it before can do it anymore.

The manufacturers need to know what to make, and the knowledge workers need the finished products, so they trade. This is called division of labor.

If the manufacturers ever start providing their own ideas we have nothing left to offer them.

That's just competition, and it occurred with manufacturing and agriculture too. We just need to get better and faster at researching and inventing than the competition, according to market demands. So this becomes a kind of meta problem, where what's really prized is researching ways of doing researching in other areas better. This is called intelligence amplification (or sometimes knowledge management), and it's what personal computers and the Internet are all about.

Nothing is destroyed by the natural devaluation of the U.S. dollar.

Wrong.

It's simple supply and demand. If you create more money, you dilute its value. This distorts the function of money carrying information about the value it exchanges, because people are buying dollars with their goods and services for less value than they think they're getting, because of the delay/lag in disseminating the information of money supply.

The only good result of this crisis will be the return of the manufacturing economy, which, if it was still there, would have prevented the crisis in the first place.

So you're in favor of a paradigm shift backward so the USA will directly compete in the crowded market with China, India, and robots, instead of moving forward as a knowledge economy where people rely on research, science, design, and innovation to create new markets and wealth?

Medical equipment is expensive because of the engineering that goes into it.

Alot of engineering goes into computers, but they get more powerful and cheaper every year.

I wouldn't be so quick to blame government bureaucracy

The problem are the barriers to entry and protectionism created by the government regulations and bureaucracy that preventing competition necessary for people to choose whether they want the fancy drill or the Bosch. When the market is artificially constrained to only the fancy drill, then sick people who cannot afford the fancy drill can only opt for no treatment at all. (Which is most often more dangerous than using the Bosch drill.)

The decision of whether to use the fancy expensive drill or the cheap Bosch should be one that a patient makes, with consultation from a doctor. By precluding the choice, the bureaucrats are rent seeking for corporations in captured markets.

The sliding dollar will help the U.S... For many years, the dollar has been way overvalued, and this has caused U.S. exports to be artificially expensive. As the U.S. dollar slides down, U.S. goods and services become extremly cheap, and this boosts the domestic economy of the U.S..

What a load of macroecnomic bullshit!

You've essentially argued that "God harms in order to heal". People losing the value of their savings and paychecks, so that they can work to earn more money to regain the value they lost due to inflation is still a net loss (an opportunity cost, to be precise).

"Inflation creates growth." is a lie on par with "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."

£30,000 medical drill

This is the problem with healthcare. It's not about lack of insurance coverage. It's about exorbitant cost, just because the word "medical" is attached to the description. Medical inflation kills people because they cannot afford treatment. The more government bureaucracy controls medical practice, the greater the medical inflation.

One question is, knowing how bad most of us are at making complex decisions, what, if anything should the government do about it? One response of the Bush administration has been No Child Left Behind.

NCLB exacerbated this problem, because "teaching for the test" completely precludes critical thinking and creative problem solving. The inability of many people to comprehend complex decisions results from a mixture of too much schooling (i.e. not enough learning) and the popular failure of people to practice family planning, which is primarily due to "the pill" being unavailable over the counter (OTC). (Prescription requirement for oral contraceptives is purely a moral judgement by the FDA, not a genuine medical concern.)

The BBC has always been renowned for their fierce independence and their emphasis on the facts - whatever the cost.