chiaro

No, instead no one controls inflation and you return to the boom and bust of pre-fiat currency

https://media.ycharts.com/charts/2dd4f9a7b087a1eb6f763d81a97...

Which, of course, is a very difficult environment to conduct stable business in.

All this is by the by, of course. The chance bitcoin supplants USD is approaching zero.

1) is hilariously off base. S&P500 has averaged about 10% nominal return, annual, since 1928. Gold returned a little under 5% nominal over the same period.

The yield is a pretty big thing to miss. Also gold and stock prices are anti-correlated, with gains in the former chasing weakness in the latter. This makes cherrypicking dates pretty easy to do.

And yet, banks and financial institutions are vastly preferring blockchains that have been uniquely developed for their needs. There's very little appeal in simply accepting the transaction costs and times in bitcoin when you can spin up a version with whatever spec and interoperability you desire.

If by 'return of capital' you mean a propensity for an asset to retain its value, bitcoin is utterly inappropriate. Even gold is far too volatile and is only rationalised on those grounds against (very) long tail risk.

Nope. For one, gold has intrinsic value and can actually be used as a manufacturing input.

Nah. Banks and big financial companies interested in the blockchain will spin up their own version without tying it to the unstable mess of bitcoin. e.g. https://ripple.com/

And people do by treasury bonds for their rate of return, when the investment must be as riskless as possible.

Just because everyone in the US is accustomed to larger companies being able to negotiate a lower tax burden doesn't mean that a transparent, regulated system of breaks and incentives is vastly more equitable and less vulnerable to corruption and capture. Individual states shouldn't be undercutting each other either and bidding away their revenue.

Yes, the "else" implies a singleton, not a null set.

The vast majority of US corporations are far too small to get tailored breaks and incentives. TARP/lending of last result is another thing entirely.

It's very clear that Tesla benefits from excessive subsidies. They even had states compete on how many tax cuts and other benefits they could provide:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_1#State_competitio...

By even bringing up SpaceX you're trying to narrow the goalposts to something no one else is talking about.

And budgets have exploded 200x from the 1-3M N64 game days. It's utterly disproportionate. If you look at the most profitable games (Blizzard, Valve, Riot) they're moving away from sticker prices altogether.

The sticker price for games has stayed rock steady for decades now while budgets have only exploded (not to mention inflation). AAA budgets, $60 titles, and no microtransactions or subscriptions is absolutely a 'pick two' scenario, and will continue to be.

There is no escaping it played a significant role, when it's where a significant portion of people got their news.

http://www.journalism.org/2016/02/04/the-2016-presidential-c...

The article is fair. Wilful indifference has been the status quo for how social networks have been run for most of their existence, under a kind of techno-libertarian idealist vision of free speech. Child pornography was the first hard check against that, but it's still taken a long time for these companies to realise that they are in control of the narrative through their recommendation engines and filters and content policies and that they need to actively engage with the social responsibility that entails.

I'm not sure what you intend on accomplishing by noting that doctor's salaries here are still more expensive than one of the most generally expensive western countries in the world.

Conspiracy theories about 'big pharma' on something from CEPR helps no one.

> _“Good to have Google on record as defying all logic and reason: facts aren’t allowed if they come from RT, ‘because Russia’ – even if we have Google on Congressional record saying they've found no manipulation of their platform or policy violations by RT,”_ Sputnik and RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan said in a statement.

Funny, the official PR rings like a thousand troll posts I've read.

Good on Alphabet, some CSR in this area is long overdue.

Tangential to your point, but if you look at a waveform of normal speech, it's very hard to see individual words. It's really one continuous sound that our brain preprocesses into seperate, discrete words. If you've ever felt like people speaking languages you don't understand never stop for breath, you're getting a picture of what English would also sound like without preprocessing.

Increased investment in early education is remarkably uncontroversial among economists. There's few better ways to even out outcomes.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-effects-of-investing-...

Nah, you just have to regulate that line owners must lend access at a set rate to any ISP that wants it.

Nah it's got pretty broad support. It does a good job at making appropriate carveouts.

The text of the Dean Smith bill, which is the likely form of how it will be legislated:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4204045-Marriage-Ame...

Idk, there's a few with pretty strong laxative effects.

The typical argument in that favour is that a product comes with certain intangible benefits, be it social signalling or personal actualisation that helps explain why firms with strong brand identity can push higher margins in otherwise competitive markets. This is a partial explanation to the extent that it doesn't play nicely with another prevailing theory that mindshare and niche dominance enables market power through greater information asymmetry. The presence of a larger car market curtails how market power can be exercised, to the extent that your hydrocarbon cars are substitute goods for electric ones.

I have no real issue with Tesla from a competitive perspective. I'm simply making two fairly seperate points, that monopolies are always bad, and Tesla has accrued many more benefits from the state than penalties, on account of its size.

They are leading in the niche, but that's besides the point: market power refers to the ability to raise prices above what is truly competitive, which they certainly have to some extent while not being a monopoly.

It's neither? It has more market power than, say, Chevrolet, but less than AT&T. Receiving ~1.25Bn from the taxpayer where smaller companies wouldn't get anything is more a function of its size and institutional failure on behalf of the individual states.

Monopolies are inherently bad because not being subject to competitive forces means they can charge what the market can bear, rather than the rate set by competition. This is bad for the consumer, bad for competition, and bad for the economy (fewer people are making transactions than at the market clearing price, slowing down economic growth). If that makes you sound like a libertarian it speaks poorly to their general economic literacy.

On the flip side, Tesla is also treated a lot better than smaller competitors, because its size enables it to play states off against each other:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_1#State_competitio...

Cooperative military operations will be great for shoring up European unity and validating more integration in due course. The UK being out of the picture should help (as does the existential threat that Brexit has painted) but the system of half-measures too well suits Germany to make it easy. This has all been true with a fiscal union too.

Or more perniciously, to stoke up anti-immigrant sentiments.

That they are approximately the same size. There was an assumption that you know how populous these cities are, but to to be clear, roughly the same administrative area (Geneva Ave or so North vs everything within the Périphérique) has a population of 865k for SF and 2,244k for Paris.