I can't guess the tone of the letter. Could have used some love.
748 karma · joined September 28, 2011
"The various currencies, which were all maintained on a stable basis in relation to gold and to one another, facilitated the easy flow of capital and of trade to an extent the full value of which we only realize now, when we are deprived of its advantages. Over this great area there was an almost absolute security of property and of person."
Jobs were not created in the sense that people were previously doing nothing. Jobs were transferred from low skilled occupations such as tending to farms, to higher skilled occupations which more closely resembled the salaried jobs of today.
The industrial revolution was the same as other technological revolutions and not distinct from them in that it reduced the exertion and strain put on workers. The industrial revolution gets a really bad rap, but compared to the work and life expectancy that preceded it, the condition of workers improved dramatically in the 19th century.
The tendency in all technological revolutions is to reduce the amount of exertion performed by workers and increase the wealth available for consumption (and correspondingly reduce its price). So today "work" often means sitting at a desk, while occasionally checking facebook. Whereas to our forebears just 5-6 generations ago, this would have seemed extremely leisurable, if not entirely magical. Not to mention the average worker can now quite easily afford to keep a device in her pocket which lets her access all the world's information and connect with almost anyone else on earth for less than a day's salary.
Firstly Prof. Krugman writes: "Why is deleveraging a problem? Because my spending is your income, and your spending is my income, so if everyone slashes spending at the same time, incomes go down around the world."
This model entirely ignores capital theory. It creates a simple closed system where if spending goes up, everyone is better off, and if spending goes down, everyone is worse off (because they have less income). But this has almost no relation to whether more or less wealth is being created. Are there more cars, iphones, loaves of bread, new medical technologies? It is the creation of new capital that makes everyone better off, and increases the standard of living, not more spending (although more spending often follows the creation of new goods)
Secondly Prof Krugman writes:
"You can see that misunderstanding at work every time someone rails against deficits with slogans like “Stop stealing from our kids.” It sounds right, if you don’t think about it: Families who run up debts make themselves poorer, so isn’t that true when we look at overall national debt?
No, it isn’t. An indebted family owes money to other people; the world economy as a whole owes money to itself. And while it’s true that countries can borrow from other countries, America has actually been borrowing less from abroad since 2008 than it did before, and Europe is a net lender to the rest of the world.
Because debt is money we owe to ourselves, it does not directly make the economy poorer (and paying it off doesn’t make us richer)"
The problem isn't who the debt is owed to, the problem is whether the debt is serviceable or not and is used to create new wealth. This all gets confused by the introduction of money into the discussion. But imagine a situation where person A loans person B a shovel with the understanding they will receive the shovel back in a week, along with 10 potatoes. This is a loan that is likely to be serviceable. Now instead imagine a loan where person A loans person B a shovel with the understanding that person B will return the shovel along with some produce. Now instead of digging up vegetables, person B uses his shovel to excavate some rocks on his property to create a nice looking rock garden. Person B is now going to get into trouble paying back his loan. The debt he has incurred has been used to work on a project that is unlikely to be profitable. This is akin to people going into debt during the housing bubble to fund their consumption (big house, fast cars, big TV etc) rather than fund more production. That is the kind of debt that is not going to be serviceable and will eventually need to be written down, or in the case of the US, handed over to the taxpayer.
We ARE better off writing down that debt because, in general, we want people to use debt to work on projects that generate new wealth and capital over time, and if we do not write that debt down, people will continue to work on unproductive, unprofitable projects.
But for the primary growers/dealers, having a way of storing their profits without the risk of robbery would be a huge benefit (and probably lower storage costs substantially)
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/12/04/166514067/episode-...
and I remember hearing another Planet Money podcast on bitcoin around the same time:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/08/24/138673630/what-is-...
and thinking "why don't the marijuana growers just store their money in bitcoin?" Of course volatility is a big issue, but that can go both ways. Marijuana dealers saving profits in bitcoin in 2012 and before would have made even more in appreciation. Dealers doing so from 2014 would have lost some of their profits (in dollar terms)
The losses must be acknowledged. The only question is by whom? By the people who made the loans? Or will the taxpayers of Europe be called upon, as the taxpayers of America were, to eat the losses?
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/09/technol...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/16/health/leukemia-patients-c...
A number of companies are working on commercializing these treatments today. I'm particularly excited that these treatments seem to be quite effective in putting childhood leukemia into near complete remission. The future looks bright for the human battle against cancer.
During an inflationary credit expansion, wealth is transferred from the public in general to the earliest recipients of the newly created credit money. In practice, the earliest recipients are interest groups with the strongest political connections to the state and, in particular, the state institutions that control monetary policy (i.e., the Federal Reserve in the United States). Importantly, the wealth transfer that takes place during an inflation is hidden and largely unrecognized by the majority of the population. The population is unaware that the supply of money is increasing and the attendant rise in prices, ostensibly beneficial to business, initially
"produces [a] general state of euphoria, a false sense of wellbeing, in which everybody seems to prosper. Those who without inflation would have made high profits make still higher ones. Those who would have made normal profits make unusually high ones. And not only businesses which were near failure but even some which ought to fail are kept above water by the unexpected boom. There is a general excess of demand over supply — all is saleable and everybody can continue what he had been doing." In an inflationary environment, wealth transfer proceeds insidiously and is masked by a perceived prosperity. The unmasking finally occurs at the end of the credit boom when the market's tendency to clear prior losses takes hold. Failed businesses are liquidated and their capital is transferred, usually through bankruptcy, to creditors who must acknowledge losses on these misguided investments. Unemployment soars and social unrest replaces the former sense of euphoria attending the credit boom. Professor Hülsmann summarizes the differences between the transfers of wealth occurring under inflation and deflation as such:
"In short, the true crux of deflation is that it does not hide the redistribution going hand in hand with changes in the quantity of money. It entails visible misery for many people, to the benefit of equally visible winners. This starkly contrasts with inflation, which creates anonymous winners at the expense of anonymous losers. … [Inflation] is a secret rip-off and thus the perfect vehicle for the exploitation of a population through its (false) elites, whereas deflation means open redistribution through bankruptcy according to the law."
And here lies the answer to why the state prefers a policy of controlled inflation. Only in an inflationary environment can state largesse be conferred to the politically well-connected without raising public ire. The widespread and visible transfers of property through bankruptcy that must take place during a deflation are often politically destabilizing and thus highly unappealing to any regime. A sense of injustice grows within the population as banks are saved from the folly of their misguided investments with taxpayer-funded bailouts, while debtors with no political clout have property seized in bankruptcy.
* Size: 4.9" screen
* Resolution: 1080p (it's really hard to find any phones this size with this resolution, which is disappointing because the PPI is possible, especially given the quad HD resolutions being slapped on phones now).
* SD expansion slot: One thing I really liked about the Note 2 that the Nexus phones don't have. I could upgrade with a 64G SD card which didn't cost much. 32G can fill up pretty quickly with videos and photos and it's annoying Google has a philosophy which shuns SD cards.
* Battery: At least 2600mAmp (should last at least one day).
* Stock android: No bloatware and no touch-wiz. This isn't as important as the other considerations though.
* CPU: This doesn't matter too much to me. 99% of what I do doesn't need a latest generation processor
* Memory: 2G is fine. Memory again isn't the main thing that's bothering me about the current android offerings.
What really bothers me is no-one is catering to this market segment and the trend is increasingly into the phablet market.
"In particular, Boldrin and Levine devote a chapter of their book, Against Intellectual Monopoly, to the pharmaceutical industry. They argue that the actual cost of bringing drugs to market is substantially lower than the estimates produced by the pharmaceutical industry — a group with a vested interest in lobbying for strong patent protections. They also provide evidence that in many instances the existence of patents hinders research in drug production."
The long term presence of these "four horsemen" is a strong predictor of divorce, and the recognition of their presence is a good sign that a marriage needs help.
That made my day.