It's amazing how much that picture on the right looks like Weird Al in the "White and Nerdy" music video.
87 karma · joined October 18, 2008
To merely give in and not continue to speak out would be to assent to their policies.
I agree that we should not look to stop him now but looking three chess moves down the road still requires playing in the present. If we stop proclaiming the truth, we won't even be able to say "I told you so" because we wouldn't have.
However, I think that individual rants will not help much for these other goals anyway. We need a stronger, rational argument for why his plans won't work, and what we can do better.
In response to socialism, Mises did not merely try and say "See, it isn't working" because that kind of response is easily defused by statements such as "it wasn't pure enough". Instead, he wrote a rational argument from first principles about why it wouldn't work. Granted, not everyone has read his book or agrees with it, but it's better than just using evidence of previous failure. It's amazing how good humans are at rationalizing away flaws in their belief systems.
We should do the same thing with the current financial crises. Make clear statements about why it happened and what the best way to fix it is, and then try and get as many people to read them as possible.
As incorrect and irrelevant as academia often is, it has an amazing effect on future beliefs. If we can get the ideas out there, I'm sure that we can make a difference. Maybe not in time to stop the current president, but possibly in time to stop the next one.
Basically, the way I understand it is that while the students do attend lectures, the focus of their education is in "tutorials". In these tutorials, the students are assigned reading, which they then write a paper on, and debate about with their tutor and maybe one other student. Now I never thought this would scale that well, but that seems to be what the article is about. Obviously the large class discussions are less personal, but more doable in a university without the bottomless endowments of Oxford and Cambridge.
Capitalism really is a bad term anyway. Marx invented it so he could use it for his straw-man arguments. But really it should be called free markets, or freedom, or opportunity, or the American Dream or something.
Of course, it is true that hyper-inflation, if it happens, will happen quickly. People will be, as you say, hoarding their cash because of uncertainty. But when they become confident enough to borrow from the banks again, and the large reserves they have been stockpiling hit the fan, it is quite possible that people will quickly notice the change in money supply, and react by trying to get rid of their money too. Which would set off hyper-inflation. But this hyper-inflation is not caused by deflation, but rather by inflation, which people may not notice because of their presently high hoarding rate.
1) That purchasing power went somewhere. Instead of going to what people wanted, though, it will have gone to what the politicians want, which is most likely a waste of resources. At the very best, the investments will be mostly harmless.
2) It doesn't just cause the exodus of capital, it practically is the exodus of capital: by printing money, they devalue all of the cash investments in the United States, thus reducing the amount of investable funds. While the foreign capital may be able to buy more dollars worth of goods per euro, there would be far less local capital to be invested.
3) While in theory the lower value of the dollar would make purchasing American goods more attractive to foreigners, that is often not the case. Just because a currency is cheap doesn't mean that items denominated in that currency are cheap. One example of this which I have experienced recently is the East Carribean Union dollar, which is worth much less than a US$, but where all of the items cost as much or more than they do here. Just because the currency is low in value doesn't mean that goods are actually cheap. Prices can rise to make up the difference, and often do.
However, if the dollar becomes cheaper not due to inflation, but because of our continued trade imbalance then yes, your description of increased exports would be quite accurate. Trade imbalances aren't bad, and they can't last forever. What goes in must come out or accumulate. And in the case of dollars, accumulation causes a relative change in value. Supply and demand and whatnot.
4) Extreme inflation can cause instability, and reduce investor interest. No one wants to invest in Zimbabwe, because they are financially (and in other ways as well) unstable. Inflation is bad because it throws the future into question, and makes people less likely to lend money. If they do it is often at a higher interest rate.
Also, deflation is not nearly as bad as many people think. Yes, dramatic and sudden deflation is just as bad for an economy as dramatic and sudden inflation. But an economy can get used to deflation just as well as it can adjust to inflation. In fact, it is almost a bonus, because it encourages saving, and thus investment and growth. I'm not saying that we should intentionally cause deflation, just that it's not a guaranteed cause of a death-spiral. The United States had a long deflationary period in the 1800s, and it was also one of the longer periods of high sustained growth. This will not always be the case, but there is little reason to be more afraid of deflation than inflation.
And it is much more accessible than almost anything else when it comes to web programming. Compared to rails even, php is a snap to set up and use. Rails has the disadvantage of being a framework, which means more learning up front. Php has the disadvantage of being (until v5) almost impossible to organize coherently, and so becomes hard to upgrade later.
Php is easy; until you've gone too far to turn back. :(
That's why it's dangerous.
Unless the donator is aware of the fact that you are paying your employees with the donations, and choose to give anyway. In fact, most large charities have employees who get paid, usually out of donations :). But you don't make your decision based on their management process, but based on the service they provide you; namely aiding some cause on your behalf.
You don't decide whether or not to buy a burger at McDonald's based on what percentage of your dollar goes to the CEO, but based on the quality of the service they may provide. Same with charities. If a charity can get away with paying exorbitant amounts to their CEO and still be the best value per dollar, people will donate, and it won't be wrong. Maybe the reason they do so well is that they were able to hire great high level management.
However, to convince people that you were going to spend their money one way and then actually spend it another is fraud. If you paid McDonald's for your burger, and they didn't give it to you, you would be within your rights to sue. At the very least you wouldn't go back. So it is with charities.
It is perfectly fine if you feel that a particular charity spends too much on management, and therefore decide not to donate your money to them. I realize that you may have been stating your personal opinion as to how you decide which charities you donate to, and that's fine. But to then claim in newspapers or other places that because they don't match your standards they are objectively evil and should be shut down/boycotted is a completely different thing. I think that is more what the article is about.
Hopefully this could be used to make an alternate, resource-less, internet. If the gpg signing can ensure enough security, web developers won't need host servers (to an extent) any more. Certainly not if they are just serving static pages.
FYI: Reconfigurable computing is like parallel computing, but instead of running all of the threads on commodity hardware, they are each dynamically implemented on a FPGA. This makes a super computer with thousands of simultaneous processes much cheaper, and take far less space, if you can program the system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconfigurable_computing
Wikipedia says that reconfigurable computing systems commonly increase speed 4 orders of magnitude and decrease power consumption by one order of magnitude. (that's right, order of magnitude) However, this is in spite of the fact that FPGAs are behind commodity hardware by almost the same amount. If memristors make a decent dent in the hardware disparities, then reconfigurable computing could be huge.
It's pretty neat that the technology not only handles pans, zooms, and rotation, but also shadows and people walking in front of the 'screen'. It seems like a much more advanced version of the first down line for football on tv. I wonder in what other interesting ways it will be used when this can be done in real time.
If a particular religion were seriously applied to its fullest, should it make a person better or not? This method helps separate individual variability from the actual effects of religion.
Note that many religions include evangelism or actual belief as part of application, which many may not consider "nice". If you believe your religion, it often means that you don't believe another person's, and that could be construed as intolerant, and thus un-nice.
Therefore, you may consider it to be impossible for religion to make a person "nice", since it often comes with these nasty side effects. In that case, you are probably also being intolerant and un-nice yourself.
From what I can tell, there are several religions (such as Christianity) that require you to be a "better" person if you actually apply it. In that sense, then yes, religion can make you a better person. Does that mean that you can't be a "good" person without religion? Of course not.
At the same time, Christianity states that it is impossible to apply Christianity without divine intervention, which brings into question whether "religion" itself makes you better, or God. Again, that doesn't mean that you can't be nice without God, only that it is (purportedly) impossible to reach the standards required by Christianity without His help.
There are also religions that arguably neither improve nor hurt someone's "goodness." Atheism is probably one of these. Nothing about atheism says that you need to be nicer than you are, but it doesn't make you more evil either.
And finally, there are some "religions" that have (according to everyone else, of course) entirely bad or evil effects when applied. The human sacrificial tendencies of the Aztecs were arguably in this category.
So, "religion" in general neither makes one nice or bad. Only specific religions, applied in a specific way have that result. And even then, who defines "good" or "bad"?
None of this belongs on HN though; religion is too close to the base of one's entire thought structure and world view, and thus debates concerning it are almost entirely inflammatory and unlikely to positively change either side's opinions.
If someone decided to believe something completely wacko (like scientology) and then called it a religion; does that reflect meaningfully on the other religions? If someone called themselves a "Christian" or "Buddhist", but then did something obviously un-Christian, un-Buddhist, and un-nice, does it mean that Christianity or Buddhism are necessarily evil or un-nice? The same can be said for atheism. Hitler was not nice; if he had applied Christianity or Scientology, would he have turned out better? No way to tell.
I would say that you have to evaluate each person individually, and how they apply their religion, and then see whether it made a positive or negative difference in that one case. Whether supposedly "religious" people either do or do not behave better or worse than their neighbors doesn't have much significance beyond their specific case. Even then, it is hard to know how they would have turned out otherwise.
No one ever hears about the religious people who didn't become serial killers because of their religion, precisely because they didn't, and there is no way to know that they would have.
Every generalization is wrong.
The label "religion" poisons (or at least confuses) everything.
Here's some pictures of stuff they made a few months ago (large): (jar and lid) http://tinyurl.com/6z2ha8 (coat hook) http://tinyurl.com/5lkhcz (x carriage pieces) http://tinyurl.com/5uq88g
They obviously aren't injection-mold quality, but very usable.
The main problem that the reprap has is dribbling when they are moving the extruder head from place to place. This has become less of a problem lately, as they've made some better valves. Also, getting the right settings for temperature, extrusion rate, and lateral speed have taken time.
At least the reprap community is vibrant, and interested in improving the tool, as compared with the stagnant fab@home.
It will probably never reach "self-replication." You can always come up with another level of "self-sufficiency" that it will not meet. It will however, become a useful tool capable of making some of it's own parts cheaply, and assisting in bootstrapping slightly better versions of itself.
Obviously, since all they are doing is melting a thermoplastic and extruding it, it is trivial to recycle the product: just grind it up and make something else.
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