50,000 for the first. $2 for the thousandth? This is where the economies of scale really shine.
1,090 karma · joined February 22, 2008
YAML is great for exchanging data but SGML and YAML target different problems.
And yes, a second video showing the actions of the government would be nice.
We may (and in my opinion, definitely will) continue to refine theories of physics in the future but I don't think we will ever achieve perfection. There will always be some minuscule break that will give rise to a new theory.
[UPDATE]: Of course, I have no logical means of proving that except inductive reasoning from history (we haven't come up with a perfect theory yet but we have continued to improve what we have) just as there is no deductive means to prove that a fundamental theory (however complex) does exist.
When we use a language, we should respect its definitions or pretty soon people start saying something and meaning something entirely else. Maybe instead of entrepreneur, we need another word like doer...
The bubble started sometime in the 1980s when it became clear that the US was unlikely to ever run a trade surplus. Its been inflating ever since.
Also, bonds are just a proxy for cash. There is effectively no difference except the bonds get interest. Banks are not an option because any cash over $250,000 will have little guarantee. If China ever wanted to purchase US companies, the US govt. securities market would be more than happy to exchange the bonds for hard cash. Also, why would the chinese avoid buying US companies once their economy stabilizes and goes down from the double digit growth? They will buy whatever is most efficient and with their abundance of capital, that may be mean greater investment in American and European stock-markets.
Also, being able to print more money does not make an investment safe. It makes it crap. Read the last sentence you wrote. The key phrase is "devalue the dollar." What exactly is a devalued dollar worth? you tell me but it's not much and it's certainly low enough to wipe out the investment. US bonds are a safe place keep capital because the US government has a reputation of maintaining currency values and honoring debt. A reputation that is more and more divorced from reality as time goes on. Remember something: money != wealth. Also the Chinese government has a few 100 billion (which by the way is not an insignificant amount, have you ever had even a billion to spend? I wish I did.). The Chinese public also has a lot of capital floating around and when considering the country, that capital must be counted.
Still, once these regulations prove too onerous to maintain (which they will) and once China's economy stabilizes, we will suddenly find that half the US is owned by China and that will cause the labor markets to shift again possibly moving production back to the US and away from China. Still, thats ~20-30 years away and who knows what else might happen in that time.
I would like to point out that this was written in 2002 when it was still valid. PDF is now an ISO approved standard (ISO 32000) and therefore quite open. Also, making PDF files at least for viewing is a breeze. If you use latex (and why wouldn't you?), pdflatex works great and can even handle edge cases like PDF forms using hyperref. If not, PDF printers are still a dime a dozen (quite a few are actually free) which can produce PDFs without any hassle.
In conclusion: PDF owns all.
This is what counts as front-page material? Here is a question for cringely: maybe the chart is only designed to show subjective differences and the people who made the chart concluded the scaling by diameter instead of area was a better option?
And based on this flimsy evidence you denounce the entire fscking industry? Does that make any logical sense to anybody who has spent more than a nanosecond giving any serious thought to this?
How arrogant can you get.
Note: That the best explanation that I could come up with with my very basic knowledge of chemistry. I am sure a chem prof. will be able to give a much better answer.
Way to go on comparing apples and oranges. Bankruptcy does lead to modified contracts but the process of these modifications has been known for decades. It is well known and bankruptcy law has been relatively stable. If Obama et al. decided to change bankruptcy law every month in ill-defined ways then you will see the same cry for the same well-justified reason: the government induced uncertainty is far more harmful as compared to the benefits.
"There's really no good reason for homes to be an exception and it's one of the more direct ways to keep people in homes."
Pure bullshit. There is an excellent reason to have special rules regarding housing when it comes to bankruptcy and mortgages. Namely, if lenders are assured that their claim to the property will not be removed during a bankruptcy, the loan is a lower risk loan and will therefore result in lower interest payments. Historically, this has been correct. The current housing glut is partly due to the over-exuberance of bankers (for which they should be allowed to go bankrupt) and partly due to government action like Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac which subsidized housing for years, excessively loose monetary policy which reduced the price of debt in general (and since housing is already is nice market for debt due to bankruptcy law, this hit housing very hard), community-reinvestment act and friends, etc...
"Frankly, this is probably better for all of us considering the massive overallocation of resources to housing investment and the current existence of too much housing stock."
So houses are overvalued. Yeah, but the problem lies with the other congressional regulation which indeed needs to go down the drain but now we are dreaming.
"Either we help people stay in them and they cover a percent of the mortgage or we kick them out and sell the house to... oh wait. Yeah. I'm more scared of the knockon effects of allowing a massive devaluation in housing than the potential knockon effects of judges modifying mortgages in bankruptcy just like they modify all other obligations in bankruptcy."
Um... either way, the value of houses decline. Just that one way, home owners are still stuck under what is possibly crushing debt and we have just established a precedent that Irresponsible debt = GOOD and by implication Responsibility and financial planning = BAD and in a society which already has too much debt, do you really want to do that? In contrast, with the other path, we allow the banks to do what they do best: deal with mortgages.
"Further, Phil was talking to people with $2 TRILLION to invest? Um, maybe, but that's 15 percent of US GDP. Pretty rare air there, and the idea that all these people (and perhaps Phil, too) weren't simply talking their book is nonsense."
Um... the US economy has ~$150 trillion of capital (by some reliable counts. This is a difficult variable to determine). GDP is how much that increases. You do realize that $2 Trillion is nowhere close to what these people will earn. Furthermore, the second part is ad hominem (which is not complete unjustified as these people rely heavily on their reputation in the article). Still their basic point that investors are scared shitless of an overly active (and in this case, confused) government. This has actually been demonstrated in the past. In particular, it is very interesting to look at investor confidence surveys during ~1938 (when FDR was Mr. Anti-Business) and ~1942-3 (when FDR was Mr. Win-The-War). Investment and gdp numbers also closely follow.
Lastly, this is not the first time that I have heard this sentiment.
Look here: http://www.smartmoney.com/investing/stocks/government-interv... . Whats really interesting about this article is that it was written in September 2008. The article predicts that as long as government keeps meddling in the markets, prices will remain low and uncertain. Lo-and-behold, a forward looking prediction that came to be true. Admittedly, this could be coincidence but then again this is the most plausible thing that I have seen in the last 6 months of this entire affair.
MySQL GA release with known crashing bugs: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=380092
Comparison of MySQL and PostgreSQL releases: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=381899
US 2008 real GDP growth rate: 1.4%*
Whats the point of not having bank failures when you earn less? Or another way to put it: whats the point of not loosing money if you don't have any to begin with.
A more extreme example: During the 1930s, there was one notable country which did not experience an economic depression. That country was the USSR. As it had a command economy, the planners decided against a depression and that was it. However, they could not allocate agricultural resources effectively and had a famine instead. So, back then, it was very easy to say the the USSR is great as it has no depression but whats the point when they have no food.
* Source: CIA world factbook (search google).
Is it just me or is it that most progress nowadays seems to be just rediscovering features that old specialized apps like emacs have had for decades now?
Seriously, conversations... GNUS has had that for ages and it is a very nice feature.
If one wants to start regulating parts of technology, they must ask the question of whether the expected gains from said regulation would outweigh the costs. With narcotics, its easy: addiction is very expensive, especially for the addicts and productive and non-productive uses are generally easy to tell apart (medical use of morphine v. junkies for example). OTOH, technology is difficult to separate and the side-effects from flash games, irc, et al. are not that significant.
On a more serious note: It would be nice if some finance education was mandatory. Ex: there is no good reason for having any credit card debt and yet people still have tons. It shows that they don't know how to manage their income even if they have lots to go around.