71 karma · joined October 11, 2010
Typically win-win situations don't involve threatening force (government) to get one side to comply. If Yahoo wants to deprecate the Flickr API, they are doing so because it is not a win for them.
Are developers willing to pay to keep the service running? If not, why should Yahoo be forced to?
This is a perfect example. Instead of consumers voting with their dollars, a portion of their vote is confiscated by politicians. The money is then put towards the interests of politicians, not those of consumers.
Best-case scenario: politicians choose exactly what serves consumers best.
Worst-case scenario: politicians serve special interests and don't choose what's best for consumers.
Not only is the best-case scenario extremely unlikely, it is exactly what would have happened absent any government subsidies.
The Super Myth of Keynes as a Great Stock Market Investor: http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2012/03/super-myth-of-k...
He was 83% long going into the downturn that resulted in the 1929 crash (p. 21)So how could Keynes be a great investor with such a bad performance? Because Keynes, the evil bastard, along with Bernard Baruch, talked FDR into confiscating the gold owned by all Americans. He then loaded up his portfolio with gold mining stocks and then urged FDR to prop up the price of gold.
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Bottom line, as far as I'm concerned, Keynes was a terrible investor, as shown by his pre-gold mining stock losses. The only time he made real money in the markets was when he traded on inside information about FDR's plan to drive the gold price up, and loaded up on gold mining stocks. Got that? The man who called gold a "barbarous relic" in his 1924 book, Monetary Reform, had 66% of his portfolio in gold mining stocks in the 1930s.
I fit that description and agree that private currencies such as Bitcoin would be awesome, but aren't there laws in place to secure the government's monopoly on money? ( http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul619.html )
Does Bitcoin circumvent these laws by being completely virtual?
Low transaction fees are nice but why not use something like Dwolla which is dollar denominated?
The "mining" concept also confuses me. Is the currency backed by CPU cycles? If so, what are the CPU cycles being used for?
If someone makes money it is because they provided the rest of us with something that we value. It isn't our business to tell them exactly how to spend that money, it is theirs.
I may have different priorities than other people, but it is wrong to tax away their money that they could have spent on what they value, and to spend it on what I value.
I agree a lot of the companies VC's invest in are pretty stupid. However, the reason they are investing in a lot of these companies is because companies like Google are willing to pay large sums of money for them. Given this, it makes sense for them to invest in these companies.
Most of these acquisitions of web companies for millions of dollars are by most standards a complete waste of money. But it is not my place to tell Google or anyone else that they should not be offering to buy companies like Path for a rumored $100m because I have a better use for their money.
Google can afford to make these acquisitions at a loss though because they provide people with other things that are of value.
I'm not saying I disagree with your priorities, but I think it is wrong to tax others to pursue them.
If the general public wants Hot or Not apps that is what they will get. Who are you to decide that their money/resources should instead be used on something that you want?
And public works such as roads and bridges also apply to my argument. For example the infamous "bridge to nowhere". A lot of these projects are a waste of resources. If the private sector were in charge of building roads/bridges they would be much more inclined to make sure they were actually needed and good investments.
Unfortunately the government can't magically create resources. The only thing the government can do is reallocate funds from one area to another which is inefficient. The most efficient form of allocating resources is the market, not central planning.
When the market allocates resources there is a much greater chance of the resources being put to good use because they are seeking to generate a profit. In order to generate a profit people must not only want something, but find the price reasonable.
When the government allocates funds it takes money away from entrepreneurs. More often than not what the government invests in would not be bought by citizens for how much resources they actually put into it. This is completely inefficient, as we are putting in let's say 100,000$ to get something that is worth 10,000$ to the people using it. If this were a business, they would be operating at a huge loss and go out of business. But since it is the government they don't go out of business and continue to misallocate resources.
In the off chance that the government uses these resources efficiently, it is certainly not because of any magical "gift" the government has. In this case, the same exact thing could have been accomplished by entrepreneurs. In fact, entrepreneurs are incentivized to seek out these opportunities because there is profit involved.
The only investments we need the "gift" of government to pursue are those that we get less value out of than we put into. It's hard to argue that these are good investments.
If printing money is so good for the economy why don't they give us all printing presses?
Fraud is and always has been illegal, so why we would need a regulatory institution to tell businesses how to treat their customers is beyond me.
If anything, regulations just protect bigger companies from smaller competition because smaller companies can't afford to bear the cost of complying with regulations.