There already is a dual education system. It's called Formación Profesional. Includes on the job apprenticeships, plus a "senior" track, or qualification to college.
1,107 karma · joined October 25, 2009
I think assuming that Bitcoin will be (for practical purposes) eternally deflationary is the safest bet that could be made today. The world economy has been growing by triple digits every century. Not even now we're nowhere near a global Star Trek post-scarcity future. So it's misleading to say that Bitcoin is deflationary "based only on a presumption". Somewhat like saying that physics is just "based on the presumption of Newton's laws".
The absolutely most bizarre thing is that, being "Chechnyan separatists", they attacked the US, precisely the one country they shouldn't have. An attack of Russia, while stupid in its unlikelihood to mobilize popular support for their country, would be at least understandable. Russia is, after all, raping their country every fucking hour. An attack of revenge, maybe against the military or police forces, would be what's expected.
Instead, they attacked the country which they should have tried to ally with, the US. With United-Statesian support, at least they could have a shot at independence, or at least some favourable publicity. There are plenty of reasons for that to happen [1]. The ironic thing is that, even though it was a passional, senseless move, the kind that no serious terrorist planner would consider, it could bring a better understanding, and better publicity for Chechnya in the West. I hope. Or maybe they just ripped to shreds the only good card their country had.
Every terror attack that is attempted, the more convinced I am of Bruce Schneier's views on terrorism: terrorist are fundamentally stupid, emotionally fragile, intellectually lazy people [2].
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/04/wha...
No seriously, if you made a bitcoin exchange site with the same copy, that's the one I would use. Well. If I wanted to buy Bitcoin again. You know, a superhardened style, paranoid exchange. Maybe with its paranoid wallet too, dunno'. So do it.
No. We have here a classic case of the submitter not reading the article.
What this article is about is the perfectly boring fact that DoD's funding overseeing is not anal enough to extend to 80% of contracts made in Afghanistan, since they're so piss cheap, and checking for compliance is so difficult. Yeah, it would be cool if those contracts were taken by Taliban shell companies to fund their warfare operations. And I'm sure a few of them are. But that's not what the article is about, and that's largely not what's happening.
Take that away, and what we get is, I'm afraid, a very boring story that could interest some accounting wonks somewhere, but not many more. Not nearly as interesting as the title hints at. Massive dissapointment.
Did you know that prices in Silk Road are pegged to USD? As it should. Either way, that's called argument ad populum. "And yet despite no revenue sources people are buying dotcom stocks"...
> How long do you have to hold on to money before it's hoarding?
This is called moving the goalposts. It's also a stupid argument in many other ways, by the way, and you should know better. "Evolution does not happen because not every single organism gives birth to one of another species"...
facepalm If the "natural tendency" of capitalism is for prices to deflate, and you want time preference to not be defined by the currency, then exactly what you want is for the currency to be inflationary! Otherwise, you now have two compounding forces toward hoarding, or "late" time preference: capitalism, which drives future prices down, and the currency (Bitcoin, gold...) which also drives prices down -- since, when we say a currency is deflationary, like Bitcoin is, we mean it deflates goods' prices over time... Needless to say, that should fuck the economy up pretty badly, by your own admission.
To be fair, it was an interesting argument, until he just freaked out and confused up for down. Or deflation for inflation, whatever. And this is supposed to be one of the founding fathers of the Tea Party, by the way?
> This in turn forces the producers of goods and services to innovate in order to attract your economic surplus from under the mattress and into their cash registers, since not spending your economic surplus is in fact to your advantage.
Yeah, this forces producers to work harder in order to get paid the same. That this means a production glut is left as an (easy!) exercise for the reader. Extra points if you develop your conclusions regarding debt and interest under this currency.
To be fair, I completely agree with his comparison of Bitcoin to a pyramid scheme. It's funny how the dude has such a tenuous grasp over the most basic economics, that he gets it right by pure accident and for all the wrong reasons.
> That means that if you were one of the early adopters you get paid through the difficulty of those who attempt to mine coins later! That is, your value increases because the later person's expenditure of energy increases rather than through your own expenditure of energy. If that sounds kind of like a pyramid scheme, it's because it is very similar to to how the "early adopters" in all pyramid schemes get a return -- your later and ever-increasing effort for each subsequent unit of return accrues far more to the early adopter than it does to you!
You know what? This is exactly the definition of a deflationary currency. He just admitted BTC is a pyramidal scheme because it's deflationary! But, of course, he's a right-wing pundit, he can't admit that! What to do? No matter, some pseudo-cryptography, pseudo-physics bullshit (entropy, of all things!) saves the day... Now I'm just fucking screaming at the screen... Holy shit holy shit holy shit holy shit...
I just can't believe it. The inevitable conclusion is, I must be just too fucking stupid to understand these elaborate libertarian doctrines. Yeah, that must be...
If you think Halo was gritty and serious, you've never played Halo. Grunts are some funny bastards. Multiplayer with vehicles and rocket launchers is damn silly.
Also, complaining about the "excessive competitiveness" of Halo (of all games), compared to that of, say, Counter Strike or damn fucking Quake 3, is pretty fucking disingenuous. Harvest Moon is more suitable to competitive play than Halo.
They made a great attempt, but sometimes one's best try is just not enough.
> Deflation rewards the prudent saver and punishes the profligate borrower. The way a society, like an individual, becomes wealthy is by producing more than it consumes. - Doug Casey
Moralistic pseudo-economical bullshit. Want to know some scandalous borrowers' names? Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, Warren Buffet, I could go on. The last sentence is so wrong it hurts; a pro-capitalist economist should know very well that, in a market economy, production equals consumption. Shame on him.
> Deflation puts a break–at the very least a temporary break–on the further concentration and consolidation of power in the hands of the federal government and in particular in the executive branch. It dampens the growth of the welfare state, if it does not lead to its outright implosion. - Jörg Guido Hülsmann
Holy fucking shit Batman, you just did not make the case for deflation based on your pet political fringe worldview. For the record: one, the "executive branch" is not a monolithic entity, and the central bank is quite independent from say, the president; two, what you call "nanny state" is my "minimum decency and human rights state", so thanks for the monetary coup d'etát; three, what about constant, steep deflation favouring by nature the concentration of power into a oligopoly of capitalists. But I guess, since it's a oligopoly of capitalists, it's all OK.
> George Selgin rightly distinguishes between malign demand-driven deflation which is an unfortunate secondary effect of a central bank-manipulated, inflationary malinvestment phase and benign deflation which is the result of an increase in productivity.
Yeah, dude should also talk about malign deflation that's designed into your currency. Nothing to do with increased productivity, incidentally. One wonders whom these leading thinkers lead, and where...
Really, I'm most sympathetic with the notion that lowering prices will increase demand. True, however, we're interested here in the matter of lending and borrowing, which is, in my opinion, very worrying. Of course, I'm not an economist, so I might very well be wrong. However, these gentlemens' arguments do nothing to persuade me.
My question is, what then will happen when Bitcoin stabilizes, that is, when the time to new coin mined approaches practically infinity? Let's assume the global economy grows at 4% per year. Do Bitcoin's proponents believe a constant 4% deflation rate will be somehow compatible with capitalism? Why lend, why build new companies, when simply storing it is more than enough? Take shocks such as bubbles and demand-side crises. Could a economy based on Bitcoin survive them, and not crash inevitably into a deflationary spiral? I claim it won't.
The party line usually argues for the evils of inflation. What they don't understand, I think, is that capitalism, in its revolutionary (in the sense of production) facet, needs inflation, feeds from it. Inflation might screw lenders, and favor debtors, sure. But deflation is just the inverse: a gift for the leecherous rentier class, and a massive "fuck you" to entrepreneurs.
But then, what about HFT arbitrage, low P/E ratios, choosing underperforming companies to take advantage of regression to the mean, Piotroski's F-Score, Graham-style value investing, bait and switch dumping, swing trading, the very real problem of pricing goodwill and non-material resources...? If not undermining weak EMH, at least they cast doubts over the strong forms. Or they should. Do also read John Carter's Mastering the Trade for some examples on how market inefficiencies can be exploited reliably.
Supposedly (seen in Wikipedia, so I'm not that confident) market crashes are interpreted to be impossible under strong EMH (and yeah, the bubbles would definitely falsify them), but are allowed in weak EMH to be statistical events of a random process. Now, I've heard an interesting and convincing argument by Steve Keen[1] that the market is not Gaussian noise; it's a fractal process with dimension ~ 1.7 (Gaussian's dimension is 2) whose crashes obey a power law distribution, very different from what a random walk would generate. That falsifies the weak form.
> Prove this wrong -- identify a surefire winning stock picking strategy that is immune to the announcement effect and insider trading, that reliably puts its practitioners ahead of market indices.
Falsifying EMH does not require such a thing, no more than proving relativity requires observing time dilation at all velocities. This is an onerous, diabolical burden of proof.
> Anyone can misbehave in spectacular ways, but those misbehaviors don't falsify the EMH, any more than an airplane crash falsifies theories of aerodynamics.
If you had periodic epidemics of plane crashes that were more frequent than expected, sure, you should definitely suspect something's wrong.
[1] Yeah, some things he says are somewhat crackpotty, but he's definitely not to be completely dismissed beforehand. I refer to his Behavioural Finance Lectures, published in Youtube.
To put it plainly, this plane is made for intimidation. If the USA is to support its standard of living on it, then it's not worth supporting.
The requirement of total competitivity in the market is needed for this to happen, so that no agent can win persistently through competitive advantage. Then, any lowering of prices is futile; it becomes a game of musical chairs, in which the telcos are constantly lowering prices until loss of profit, and costumers are just swapping between one and the others. So it's not done. Basic micro. Of course, if the market can tolerate growth, then you lower prices just enough to get the largest market share.
I guess this is yet another reminder that markets do not care for global optima, just for Nash equilibria. Right now, I'm thanking those individuals, specially R Telecomunicaciones, that disrupted the Spanish telecom market with a cavalier disregard for massive profits.
That said, this being butt-hurt about lack of adoption for your pet framework is just fucking overreacting. Yeah, I know, it's your shit, you made it, you're very proud, now it's personal. Bluntly: emulating a recognizable desktop interface in the browser is a shit idea. Your Mac OS emulation on a web browser over my Windows is the web equivalent of James Bond in pajamas. Not to mention that it completely destroys brand identification, and makes legal departments cry.
You wrote some cool stuff, it got you some fame and a job at Google. Stop whining.
But this analysis misses the time dimension of money: lending, borrowing and interest [1]. Keynes knew that, and before him Marx, and I bet someone before him too. And in this aspect, I find Bitcoin to be an irreversibly brain-damaged, if interesting, experiment. I look at it and see a massively deflationary currency, dependant on a empirical rule of thumb (Moore's Law), that is even today failing to accommodate the mildest exponential growth. When your currency gains value by the hour, actually borrowing and trading and doing capitalist things are losers' propositions.
Don't get me wrong, I see value in an automated currency that can provide at least an amount of anonymity [2]. In my opinion, Bitcoin is just not it. When your economic theory is still getting an erection over the gold standard, like some 19th century robber baron, you know you just don't have the economic chops to do it. No sane modern-capitalist economy can be given birth by faulty economics.
[1] Unless of course you belong to the school of the Austrians, like whomever wrote the "deflationary currency" joke of an entry in Bitcoin's Wikipedia. For you all evil's root is either the government or fractional reserve banking, so I'm obviously wrong.
[2] Maybe with a fixed 4% inflation rate, like Milton Friedman suggested. It could also be a fiat currency, and simultaneously decentralized and anonymous, if we could take the principles of the free-banking era, see why they failed (because they failed by themselves, no amount of austrian self-bullshitting will change that) and fix them. Who knows, I'm not an economist.
So, mindlessly following the fad du jour is what passes for bold nowadays? Bullshit. Let's think it through. Imagine we suddenly decided to give up control over Nintendo's whole product. Instead, we put our ass on a plate for Apple and Samsung, primadonnas par excellance. All that for the privilege of becoming suppliers for a market of undiscriminating, volatile buyers, very reticent to part ways with their money. Of course, we would give Apple & Samsung at the very least a 15% cut, and completely alienate a devote user base that has very deep pockets. Not to mention our first-rate talent [1], who would either be pissed off and go to Sony/Microsoft, or just be easily acquired by any other insipid mobile development gaming startup with deep pockets. Add to that your product being trivial to copy, now.
Sounds familiar? This is just the Wii, recasting Apple/Samsung in the role of Nintendo, and Nintendo in the role of those shitty third-party developers no-one gives a fuck for today, desperately begging for a Rovio-style massive luck out. Congratulations, we just made millions for our competitors, while simultaneously blowing the fucking Mariana's Trench on our feet. Even Emperor Hiro Hito would think it too much kamikaze.
[1] This would be the finisher. Like Sony shitting over Square-Enix. Lose Miyamoto, Kondo, Aonuma... and you're done.
So yeah, you could make the case that it's not "an accurate stack trace", because it isn't. But, you don't want that. You want TCO. Trust me on this.
Preemptive strike for the bikeshedder crowd in the back :) : if you think you can deduce some useful fact from a recursive function that's stacktraced, like for example where in the loop the function gave an error, then you're wrong. Go learn to use a debugger.
Incidentally, all you have shown in this thread is some bullshit about "processed foods" and "mitochondria", plus some TEDx talk "based on personal narrative" that shows all signs of being made by a fucking crank, about how your mitochondrial bullshit will, in fact, cure cancer. Well, not really. Just multiple sclerosis. (... are you fucking kidding me...? To think I had upvoted you at first... )
Imagine panspermia is true. Some kind of life exists in space. and some of it fell down to earth. Then life on earth would evolve down here, adapting to the particular circumstances of our planet, and the species in space would evolve, separately, to adapt to living in space. The result is that both strands would inevitably become very different.
If you brought down life from space, compared it to actual life on earth, and found they turned out to be the same, then necessarily it would mean that both strands, in completely different environments, evolved to become the same. This is not only improbable, but emphatically impossible.
The idea is that, presumably, this list of times "looks" very random and can't be expressed by a much shorter, compressed, set of data, not even by providing the pendulum equation, and initial conditions with finite precision. (You could, if it weren't chaotic, just a single pendulum.) This would mean it has high entropy content, in the information theory sense. (I don't actually know, since I haven't done the experiment nor read about it being done, but it's a reasonable guess.)
What he should have done, the second quote says, is to "arrive[s] at its conclusion by considering on an overall assessment of the evidence". Instead of considering what happened before, he should have taken his priors from the evidence. So, in the end, it's a sentence that supports a Bayesian methodology, in this case. Or maybe the Court of Appeal just was confused at the time, who knows.
Practice is everything. Damn, the (letter of the) constitution of the Soviet Union actually gave their citizens the right to form political parties and run from office. You were provided by the government a party newspaper, headquarters... of course, if you tried to, you were hanged for treason.
I've never understood the logic behind Republicans of the 20th century [2]. AFAICT, they think the 2nd gives them "the right to defend ourselves from a tyrannical government". That's clearly bullshit. First, because what constitutes tyranny changes a lot from person to person, and only legislation can define it clearly and "democratically". Second, because the former means you're legitimizing political violence in a democracy, precisely the system where that kind of shit should not be allowed. So in fact you're just making terrorism, or at least the kinds of terrorism you like, legal, with all the contradictions that would bring. Timothy-McVeigh-like bullshit ensues.
[1] Of course, back then they were considered to be respectable persons that followed the law.
[2] They're not the only ones, of course (cf. Black Panthers, which I personally am more sympathetic to, since IMO there was clearly oppression there), but they're the loudest.