dpatru

> If the currency under consideration has wide spread adoption, deflation means a system-wide slowdown in investment (_averaged_).

The computer industry is deflationary. All you have to do to be able to buy more computing power is wait. Yet, somehow, investment in computers keeps happening.

Just because money is increasing in value, doesn't mean that demand for money goes away. Just the opposite in fact. A money that increases in value is more valuable and thus more in demand.

Since the only (legitimate) way to get money is to earn it by labor or investment, it seems that either labor or investment or both will increase as money becomes more valuable.

> they seek to maintain a "healthy" amount of inflation.

An ounce of gold was $21 in 1920 and $1410 in 2010. http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-historical-price-of-gold...

The big-picture argument this piece is making is that counterfeiting money is good for society. In this case, a central authority (the Fed) is doing the counterfeiting, but nothing in the article explains why the beneficial effects would not also accrue when individuals do the counterfeiting.

Counterfeiting money is evil not because it hurts the counterfeiter, but because it takes away wealth from everybody else. Whatever the counterfeiter buys that is in limited supply, the rest of the people have to do without.

To the extent that debt resembles counterfeiting, it is evil. Here's an example: suppose you want to buy a prime waterfront property which is offered for auction. You've worked hard, saved your money in the bank, and you finally have enough deposited to make a substantial offer. At the auction, you meet Joe. Joe also wants the property. Joe hasn't saved as much money as you have, but he has a line of credit from the bank, a line of credit made possible because the bank is using your on-deposit money as a reserve against which it can loan out new money. Whether or not you win the auction, the price of the real estate is higher than it would otherwise be because of Joe's ability to bid against you. This seems wrong. Why should the fact that you saved money enable a non-saver to drive up your prices?

Note that without fractional reserve banking, Joe's line of credit would be backed by money deposited for a term. So the saver's prices should not be affected by the borrower, because the while the borrower is using the money, the saver has agreed not to use it. Under 100% reserve banking, a depositor never has to bid against his own deposits.

The bigger the government gets, the more intrusive it becomes and the harder it is to convince a majority of the people that they can use the government to live better at someone else's expense: at some point too many people become the "someone else" who is providing the financing. Therefore, as the government becomes bigger, it has to become less democratic, less responsive to the will of the people. We are seeing this now in the rebellion in the House of Representatives, the most democratic part of government.

> If that isn't a reason to be investing in Space, I don't know what is.

To justify government research, the results need to be compared to the alternative. Had NASA scientists not been working for the government, they would have been working for private companies engaged doing useful work. The Soviet Union had similar resources to the US, yet their research budget was spent wholly by government, whereas a large portion of the US research during that time was directed by private companies. If you want to restrict the comparison just to the US, ask yourself what would the massive wealth that was dedicated to NASA had produced had it been directed by private interests? What would NASA engineers have produced had they been employed by in Y-Combinator-style startups? (or even big private companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc.)

I'm a bit disappointed in the story. It seems to me that businesses of this type represent an opportunity to disrupt the real estate industry, and it's sad to see them end up joining the industry.

It is cheaper to make copies of software than almost anything else. This means that building network or a large customer base is very cheap, almost free. What prevents you from building a large customer base is not costs, but lack of demand and artificial barriers like charging a price. If you can make money by selling access to a large customer base, then it makes sense to go that route and remove every barrier to mass adoption.

Google does not have to work hard to sell its products. People are happy to use its search functions for free. And advertisers are happy to pay to access searchers. If Google charged for search, then it would have to work hard to sell paid search in the face of free alternatives. It would lose users and thus have less to sell to its advertisers. It's just easier from a marketing and business perspective to keep search free, or even pay people to search, and then charge for access to searchers.

Rather than leave, the better solution is to force the rights-violators to stop. They are the ones in the wrong, they should be ashamed and shamed.

This reminds me of the NSA recruitment session at the University of Washington (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVIHvbYYxJo) where the NSA agent tried to tell a skeptical student that she should not keep asking embarrassing questions, because even if an NSA job was not right for her, she should not prevent other students from joining the agency. In other words, it's fine to disagree with turning your country into a police state, you don't have to join the secret police, but don't interfere with your fellow citizens who want to profit from joining the police force.

"when bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." --Edmund Burke

My summary: To become productive, get in the habit of doing things. More specifically, get in the habit of immediately doing what needs doing. Don't spend a lot of time learning in preparation for some future grand work when there is useful work that you could be doing right away. When faced with a new situation, quickly learn enough so that you can start doing useful work. Avoid the temptation to spend a lot of time learning before contributing. Hence the advice: "Acquire as little information as possible."

This meshes well with Sam Altman's advice to: "Have a good operational cadence where projects are short and you’re releasing something new on a regular basis." (http://blog.samaltman.com/startup-advice)

> Because I don't think people should be upset about their privacy when they know a company like Facebook already knows everything about you.

The fact that a private company like Facebook knows a lot about you is not a problem as long as the company has a privacy policy and can be held accountable. The problem specifically is government access to the data. Unlike governments, companies like Facebook have never morphed into tyrannies. Facebook does not tax people, it does not prosecute, it does not put people in prison or fine them, it does not drone people, it does not go to war. Unlike Edward Snowden, an ex-Facebook employee who reveals Facebook's secret illegal activities does not have to fear for his life and take refuge in Russia.

The best way to ensure good content is to ensure smart teachers, which is what these metrics are designed for.

Fractions and decimals are not difficult. I doubt that kids who have been learning math with Khan have problems understanding them. But ìf Khan has been a little unclear for some percentage of students, the addition of a few exercises should solve the problem. The lacunae of a smart teacher are easily fixed, unlike the confusion caused by a teacher who doesn't understand the material.

> Students cannot possibly evaluate which of the teaching methods are better because they do not yet know what they are supposed to be taught. . . . it is pretty absurd to think that students could ever be objective in evaluating the teaching methods they are subjected to.

It's easy to recognize good teachers. They are first, understandable and second, motivating. If a teacher is not readily understood, or if they do not motivate the student to learn, then they are not very good. Children as well adults naturally use these metrics to evaluate not just teachers, but communicators in general.

There's a big difference between government and corporations. Corporations are, at bottom, simply groups of ordinary people with whom you deal with on a voluntary basis. A corporation cannot rob (tax, fine), kidnap (arrest), imprison, or drone you. A corporation has to be very bad indeed before it sinks to the level of even an ordinary government.

sum the 0th field: perl -lane '$a += $F[0]; END{ print $a; }'

This is just not true. See http://mises.org/daily/5266/

For example:

"Six electric light companies were organized in the one year of 1887 in New York City. Forty-five electric light enterprises had the legal right to operate in Chicago in 1907. Prior to 1895, Duluth, Minnesota, was served by five electric lighting companies, and Scranton, Pennsylvania, had four in 1906. … During the latter part of the 19th century, competition was the usual situation in the gas industry in this country. Before 1884, six competing companies were operating in New York City … competition was common and especially persistent in the telephone industry … Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis, among the larger cities, had at least two telephone services in 1905.

Snowden could release information showing that the intelligence agencies have used their information to blackmail/coerce specific people like judges, congressmen, senators, members of the press, civic leaders, etc. They regularly do this against criminal defendants. This is just applying the known techniques to new targets.

In Hedges v Obama [1], the trial court blocked the government's power to indefinitely detain. The ruling was immediately appealed and the trial court's decision was stayed. I take it from the government's rush to appeal that there are people are being detained right now that would have had to be released had the ban been upheld.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedges_v._Obama

> Someone who truly cares about their security will learn how to use them.

Needs are relative. People have a lot of cares in this world and for most people, online anonymity and confidentiality don't rank very high. That's why convenient, cheap solutions are important. Solutions that require people too much won't be used. Think of digital cameras. Most people will use them if they're included free on a phone, but they're not willing to pay $3000 for "quality."

Think

The article argues that as long as Stalin was neutral, the Japanese had some hope of negotiating a better surrender. After Stalin declared war, Japan was out of options and was forced to surrender. Therefore Stalin was the deciding factor in surrender.

The atomic bomb was not the deciding factor for two reasons: 1) the decision to surrender happened before the impact of the atomic bombs was fully assessed, and 2) the effect of the bombs was no worse than the massive conventional bombing that Japan had already experienced. The vast majority of Japan's large cities had already been pretty much destroyed by the time the atomic bomb was used: it was a "raindrop in a hurricane."

Profit simply means that an activity is worth it: that the result will be worth more than the costs to reach the result. Profit is the aim not just of corporations, but also of government.

For example, a government should not build a road unless the people using the road will collectively save more in transportation costs than the costs to build the road.

The problem is that for many projects, the net benefit is unknown at the start. In the road example, before a road is built, it may not be clear how much it will cost to build a road nor how much people will save from using the road. The best we can do is try to estimate.

But just because we have to estimate doesn't mean that we ignore profit. Before a project is undertaken, we should still try to figure out if its worth doing. We just can't be sure.

When we say that government funds "risky" projects, this can mean that the projects have a high probability of failure but are still worth funding because the probabilistic expected payout is positive, or that the projects are really not worth funding because we really expect that there will be no net benefit. If we're talking about the first, then the private sector will fund it without government. For example, YCombinator routinely funds companies that have a high probability of failure. But overall it expects a positive payout. So startups get funded.

But if we're talking talking about the second type of risky, as in no expected return, then really no one should be funding these projects. Why should the taxpayers take risks collectively that no one is willing to take individually?

It doesn't make sense for an individual to try to fund retirement by buying lottery tickets, no matter how much money they spend. Therefore, government should not be trying to fund government pensions by buying lottery tickets.

In practice, governments seldom openly advocate investing in projects with negative returns like a lottery. They propose funding projects that the private sector won't fund. But even if a project is expected to be profitable, it still should not be funded at the expense of projects with higher expected profit. And because we have limited resources, the funding of low-expected-profit projects means that other higher-profit projects can't be funded.

Again, I refer you to Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, chapter 6 this time: http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/chap06p1.html.

The assumption you're making is that if government hadn't funded network research, then all of the engineers who worked on the Internet would have been hoeing turnips in the fields. As if only the government can create technology, and that without a government bureaucrat to direct research, we all would still be communicating via smoke signals.

The fact is, that if government hadn't been employing these engineers to create war technologies, our technology would probably be much more advanced and the world would have less war and be a much better place.

Whenever government employs people to do something, it necessarily keeps them from doing something else. This is well explained in chapter 4 of Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson (http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/chap04p1.html) in taking the example of government spending for a bridge:

"The bridge exists. It is, let us suppose, a beautiful and not an ugly bridge. It has come into being through the magic of government spending. Where would it have been if the obstructionists and the reactionaries had had their way? There would have been no bridge. The country would have been just that much poorer. Here again the government spenders have the better of the argument with all those who cannot see beyond the immediate range of their physical eyes. They can see the bridge. But if they have taught themselves to look for indirect as well as direct consequences they can once more see in the eye of imagination the possibilities that have never been allowed to come into existence. They can see the unbuilt homes, the unmade cars and washing machines, the unmade dresses and coats, perhaps the ungrown and unsold foodstuffs. To see these uncreated things requires a kind of imagination that not many people have. We can think of these nonexistent objects once, perhaps, but we cannot keep them before our minds as we can the bridge that we pass every working day. What has happened is merely that one thing has been created instead of others.

Government is a parasite on society. Corporations and other private enterprises are what create good societies through mutually advantageous exchanges. In contrast, governments extract wealth by force or the printing of money (fraud) and use it to pay for things that no private person or corporation would pay for (war, prisons, bureaucracy, fat pensions, welfare for people who could work but don't want to, etc.)

Rights are not arbitrary. Like the laws of physics, the gory details of what rights are may be hard to pin down exactly, but this doesn't mean that they don't exist. In the examples you gave, it's had to imagine a just society in which it would be OK to burn down another's house (violating physical property) or to be forced to hire someone or keep them employed (violating the right to contract.)

The error in the reasoning of this excerpt is the assumption that the government can justly create any law that it wants, short of taking away a person's bare necessities. By this logic, slavery is fine as long as the slave has food, water, and shelter. The slave has no right to complain as long as he's better off than he would be in the most primitive state of nature.

The declaration of independence expresses a better view: we are endowed with liberty by our Creator and it is the role of government to protect that liberty. Under this view, government's actions can be judged.

Taxes are theft precisely because we don't tax ourselves. In America, taxes are set by the majority choosing to not tax themselves very much and instead to tax a rich minority. It's two foxes and a chicken voting on what to have for dinner.

What you earn depends on the market, the bargain you strike with other free people. It's not arbitrary.

In practice, you'd focus on factories, powerplants, the road owners, auto-makers, etc. This is similar to how regulations already work. The regulators tend to ignore the rogue backyard barbecuer and instead focus on the big polluters.

Also, aggregation techniques could be used for both defendants (polluters) and plaintiffs (landowners and other people being poisoned.)

Murray Rothbard thought that the first users should be the owners. http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard157.html So under his scheme, the downstream owners would have to buy the river from the upstream owners to prevent them from polluting.

I think that there's something wrong with an upstream owner polluting the river and causing damage to people downstream. The situation is analogous to burning poisonous chemicals on land and letting the wind currents carry the chemicals onto neighboring property. In this case the burner would be liable.

The overall point is that pollution can and should be handled as a property-rights matter and that the state need not and should not "regulate" pollution.