aggronn

> In fact, most of consumerism seems to be built on getting people to buy things that in turn does not help them to create even more value.

In this context, "creating wealth" is not about accumulating resources to create 'even more value' a la Capital. It seems like you're confounding wealth and capital, and they're very different things here. Here we're talking about wealth as meaning economic welfare. Society has more economic welfare--Wealth--when economic exchange happens because resources are allocated in a way that increases utility for everyone.

Life wouldn't be worth living if we worked for the sole purpose of creating lasting capital, in order to build more capital. Consumerism is necessary, so

>In fact, most of consumerism seems to be built on getting people to buy things that in turn does not help them to create even more value.

isn't really a bad thing.

So your first idea and your second idea are only marginally related, and combining them probably hurts your argument overall.

(1) The Federal Reserve has 12 member banks, none of which are private--they're really just branches of the central bank. Those member banks have shareholders consisting of local private banks. These 12 banks don't pick monetary policy. The Federal Reserve board does. Only 1 of the 7 members of the Federal Reserve Board can be picked from the leadership of the 12 member banks. Since the Federal Reserve Board is what actually decides monetary policy, its nonsensical to think of the Federal Reserve as a federation. Because its not. Its a central bank, and has very centralized power.

(2) While banks are part shareholders in the central bank's member banks, IT IS NOT ORGANIZED LIKE AN ACTUAL CORPORATION. They do not 'own' federal reserve banks. They cannot sell their shares, and make no money from them (well, they might earn meager interest). Its literally just a deposit that they make with the Fed that entitles them to send representatives to their regional bank. Even if each member bank was totally dominated by the will of their member banks (which there is no incentive for this to be the case), the sum of their influence on monetary policy is their single representative in the board of governors (who was confirmed by congress!)

(3) The federal government does not borrow directly from the Fed. It issues bonds to the general bond market through weekly auctions directly from the Treasury, and the Fed buys those in the aftermarket to manipulate interest rates. Doing this requires them to add or subtract cash from the money supply. Obama doesn't call Bernake, say "Hey Ben, we need some money for the kitchen we're remodeling", and get the response "Check your bank account, already wired the money! LOL!".

There is plenty of information on the the federal reserve's website describing exactly how its organized.

At the end of the day, if there is ANY chance of the US dollar being replaced by another currency as the dominant currency in the US economy, the central bank will get involved. Moreover, if bitcoin ever gets big enough to have an actual economy that isn't just people converting to US dollar (ie, rent, bills, and wages are paid with bitcoin), we'll have a grand opportunity to test whether having monetary policy is actually a good thing, or if its bad. Because if its bad, and we discover that having a central bank control the money supply is actually a Good Idea, then consumers WILL NOT choose bitcoin.

Hopefully by then there will be some implementation by some central bank somewhere that makes sense, so that we get all the benefits of a digital currency without all the inflexibility of bitcoin's built in monetary policy.

edit: actually i shouldn't have ignored the pictures, thats my bad... one ad per page, 480k page views. 201k uniques. still curious about performance on that ad unit.

this is an old theory and has been refined over time, but its still the basic model taught in economics courses.

have you ever tried to outsource your ad operations? that kind of inventory could be worth worth enough to live on comfortably.

with the exception of the touch screen, which you can pretend isn't a touchscreen.

I don't think many Rails developers are abandoning the platform though, so dying probably isn't the right word for it.

if a carrier runs an ad mentioning a phone, this is the end result.

Thats not to say that if they started from scratch there wouldn't be some unforeseen bugs down the road.

So its interesting to see this here.

> It’s about values and mindset.

What if your mission statement is "We value a fun work environemnt", or "We value our employees"? Is that /not/ an acceptable culture value? If you don't think it is, then the rest of my post won't be of interest to you, but I'd be interested to know why "we value winning" is, but "we value a fun workplace" isn't.

If it is, then how would you convey it to prospective employees? Do you just tell them that and hope they understand what that means?

I think a much more compelling (dare I say, meaningful?) way to convey those kinds of values is to say how they're implemented. If you say you value constant learning/professional development, people have to take it on faith that you are on the cutting edge, or that you give them freedom. A more meaningful thing to say, I think, would be to give specific examples. The extends to human values, like "we value a fun, casual workplace--we have a video game room, no dress code, and flexible hours".

So, to make an analogy: I think that ping pong tables are to "we value a playful office environment" as "we don't have team leaders" is to OP's inspiration section.

"Of the 30 person cohort they take in every year, only about 4 or 5 of them were domestic. I don't understand why that seems so odd to people--isn't it presumptuous to assume that every year, more than 20% of the top 30 students in the world are american?"

In other words, it really shouldn't surprise people that for universities that compete on an international level, a majority of students are international.

so I'm curious, how is she earning income from it? it does she know she'll find people to licence it?

Most significantly, there is this quote:

>"For banks, crowdfunding poses a challenge ... However, banks should be prepared for this trend and make it work to their advantage."

Making crowdsourcing 'work to their advantage' is very different than making crowdsourcing illegal. It would be much more profitable for them to start up their own crowdsourcing platforms. That way, people deposit money into the banks interest earning accounts, AND they get a cut. Instead of 7% interest with a non-trivial chance of default (which, if you account for ~3% inflation, means their true benefit is only 4%), they get a clean 5% fee right off the top. With no risk. At all. Its free money.

This is a no-brainer for me. Banks are built to help people get the money they need to do what they would like to do. They would only stand to gain money by doing this on their own. Shutting down the whole system would be stupid, and I think the economists at BBVA would agree.

Doesn't matter that the person who submitted it had just googled 'San Francisco BMW dealership'

I think the movement away from cursive is relatively recent, and entirely associated with the fact that virtually no teacher or professor will accept work that isn't typed up. You learn cursive in 3rd grade, then from there on all of your work is done on computers so you never reinforce it.