Sorry, what? Android isn't a productivity solution yet. Not even close. No manufacturer is trying with Android to build what Microsoft is building with 8.1+ - a coherent, unified, cross-device productivity and computing ecosystem.
198 karma · joined October 30, 2013
But most people have a hard time saying no to a fancier car, house, and more holidays.
Alternatively, if you can get as much money out of your rich students/the government as possible, that's more money for grants for superstars from poor backgrounds.
As always with such schemes, there is an ongoing push to implement them in as complicated and opaque a fashion as possible, to try and hide the naked fact of what is going on. So no one will admit "we take money from taxpayers and make loans no sane private investor would ever consider," they'll just talk about FDCRP-approved rates this and Fannie Mae-that and fiduciary-backed iron bond multiplexing high-yield 7.5% rederived blahblahblah.
Same bullshit that happens when bank deposits are federally insured.
First I argued that the government was making bad loans. The respondent replied that they were making profit (implying they were good loans.) Then I noted that that doesn't necessarily mean the government made the most profit possible with the loans - I didn't say that was definite, just possible.
And then I showed how political pressure is mounting for even this meagre profit to be slashed to cost price. Because that's the great thing about borrowing from the government. If enough people do it, you can bank on political pressure to hamstring any honest attempt to get a market return. So you wind up with a distorted allocation of capital to this market (student loans.)
PS. If anyone remembers, this is exact same mistake which drove the 2008 recession - the American government's junk home loan program. Exact same high ideals - help people get into homes! - exact same result - people went for bigger homes than they would have otherwise - savvy hedge fund managers smelled the free money and pounced. And we all know how that turned out.
PPS. If you're interested, check out: http://mises.org/books/economics_in_one_lesson_hazlitt.pdf (pages 25-32).
1) Is that the most money they could have made with these loans? Are they getting a market return on investment? If not, then they're wasting the country's money. It doesn't matter if it's still "profitable." A lot of shit investments still make money - just less than they could have if they were better invested.
2) Are the loans profitable at market rates? Then why have students taken on seemingly such high debtloads? Ah, because everyone knows that with governments, unlike private lendors, you get this:
>"I think they should break even, but it's just wrong that they are making money on it."
>"This is obscene. The government should not be making $66 billion in profits off the backs of our students,"
>Warren and eight other U.S. senators committed to wring government profits out of student loans and address the $1.2 trillion in outstanding student loan debt they say is crushing families and putting a strain on the economy.
>"It's time to end the practice of profiting from young people who are trying to get an education and refinance existing loans."
Great, look forward to any at-market performance of your loans being shredded through political pressure. Another way of saying that your government just threw away your money.
You (America) have a government that offers discount loans - i.e. loans with poor prospects/low interests rates - in the hope of driving a higher allocation of capital to education than would occur in a pure private lending market (i.e. the government takes risks with the taxpayers' money that private lendors would not take with their own.) (Also, might be worth noting the psychological effect of borrowing from the government - I think people tend to feel safer doing this than borrowing from an obviously competitive private firm. If you read the article, the casual attitude of student debtors to defaulting on their loans shows this - the government has no teeth. The private firm goes bankrupt if it doesn't get a return on investment. The government just devalues the dollar if it gets in a tight spot.)
The justification here would be that the positive externalities of education are high, and an equilibrium capital allocation following purely upfront costs would be suboptimal.
However because humans are humans, the availability of below-market price loans means that people are willing to spend more on education than they would if they were forced to pay a market price. And again, because humans and humans, colleges, which in America have little government oversight as to pricing, raise their pricing. Why? Because people will still pay it. For whatever reason, colleges are able to bank on their prestige and identity, on the promise of access to important social circles, and so pure pressure for price is diluted.
Forget all the shit about increasing salaries for professors, or construction frenzies. Basically the final equilibrium price for a college is the price that they can get away with charging. And this price happens to be far higher than it would be in a purely private education market. Because students can gamble with taxpayers' money. And the universities can sense that there's cash on the ground - and if they don't rush for it, another will just take it. This is why your institutions glorify the most profligate administrators - the ones with the most grandiose investment schemes, the ones who can create an appearance of money well spent - because the best administrators help draw in as much cash as possible.
So the result is that what started as an incentive to encourage education actually creates a toxic market with widespread debt defaults. Instead of more education, you just wind up enriching university administrators (definitely) and professors (maybe) and creating way more university facilities than private demand would have ever warranted. So congratulations: as a country, you've just spent XX billion building a shitload of luxurious dubiously-useful education infrastructure. Because as a country, you shoulder the cost - through your government's wasteful allocation of capital.
Congratulations. The whole country just gave a shitload of money for nothing to university administrators and contractors. You wanted to push capital into educations, but instead you got rich universities. Well done eh?
See, this is why America's model of mixed-capitalism is so poisonous. If you want to give cheap loans for education, you need to control prices at the institutions where they're valid. Though even that doesn't work - you'll find state-controlled institutions in countries that practice this still constantly pushing for the maximum tuition increase every single year, using every excuse they can.
The better solution is probably no public loans or grants whatsoever. Though that doesn't address the positive externality of education (which I do believe in.)
Secondly, all of these characteristics are red flags in a screening operation. No, they don't necessarily mean that he is a threat. But they do warrant closer inspection. Inspection that, from his account, seemed to provoke him to further erratic behaviour. And it's the job of security apparatuses to pay attention to people who act strangely.
This anti-TSA shit is ridiculous. So much of it revolves around ridiculing ordinary people without that much education working a fairly poorly-paid job. Like mocking people for not understanding how Bitcoin works.
America asked for better protection after 9/11, and they got it. Now they're bitching because they don't like it? Why is this so hard to understand? Do you want a security apparatus that tries its best to make sure dangerous people don't board planes, or do you want a security apparatus that waves any old person onboard?
1) The man is an anarchism/zero-government advocate. 2) He was wearing a provocative t-shirt featuring B52s and a slogan "Bitcoin not bombs." 3) He was nervous, difficult and antagonistic throughout the entire security process. 4) His backpack was full of metal lapel pins emblazoned with the Bitcoin logo.
This could be titled instead as: "TSA scrutinises erratic, apparently mentally-unstable anarchism activist to ensure he is not going to blow up a plane." The bitcoin thing is just a red herring, they suspected him and were casting around for different leads to see if they could get something out of him.
Honestly, there's no point in getting so upset and hostile going through airport security. Fixating on how your freedom is being desecrated or something like that is just going to get your back up and make everything worse.
Honestly, there's no need whatsoever to regulate this whatsoever. The market will evolve of its own accord until it's "good enough." Regulation will be impotent at best and destructive at worst.
This is the exact same thing that happened with banks. People got angry because banks went bust, and the government stepped in to insure them with public dollars (i.e. take risks that no private citizen would take with their own money.) How did that turn out eh? 100 years down the track and people still fail to do their homework because they can trust the government will pay. And everyone loses.
This isn't to say that governments aren't providers of certain goods (national and personal security, protection of property, legal systems, systems for pricing and controlling externalities) that are critical for growth.
As cryptocurrencies grow the power of governments to tax will diminish. I think it'll be similar to music and movie piracy - they will be simply used so widely that it will be impossible to fight. Embattled governments will turn to deflation and increase the tax burden on those who continue to use state currencies, increasing even further the incentive to switch to cryptocurrencies. With only worthless fiat to pay armies and bureaucrats, governments may well collapse.
What comes next I have no idea.
Old dinosaurs.
Or are you implying we make babies in factories?
As long as all the growing takes place within the legalisation territory (i.e. nothing is sourced from illicit operations in foreign nations) then I see no reason why violent organisations would dominate legal trade of psychoactive substances.
2. I don't know why either, because I wouldn't.
1) It eliminates legal risk, so drug production becomes instantly a much more lucrative activity, enticing more people to do it.
2) Profits are reduced as the market becomes more competitive.
3) The cartels are unable to pursue their "normal" extralegal means of suppressing competition, because the parties they might seek to suppress now have legal access to state protection.
4) In a competitive, legal market, the successful firms will be the ones which offer the best product - the firms with the best drugs, the highest standards of quality and ethics, the nicest stores, and the best customer service. Why buy from dodgy drug-dealers when you can walk into a beautiful store and get great customer service?
In short term yes, cartels may attempt to protect their monopoly, but in the long term, legalisation dooms them as cultural dinosaurs unable to compete in the new legal, open market.
Edit: This analysis depends upon low taxation. High taxation will still incentivise extralegal selling, but it probably makes the black market a bit safer regardless.
I do wonder how this will work though. Will people want to use it if their allocation of Auroracoin doesn't reflect their pre-existing share of wealth. So the appeal of this coin should be in negative proportion to a citizen's relative wealth... so poor people will want to use it most, and rich people least... so the only people incentivised to use it will be the people with the least to trade.
Hmm.
I have visited several European countries and met and interacted with many young and old Europeans, and I hope to live there permanently in the future, and so find add more depth to my admittedly incomplete data. I do know that every part of Europe is different - some parts are in my experience much worse than even than the picture I painted (Hungary for instance). I guess I was exaggerating for dramatic effect. Still, I think there are serious emotional problems in modern Europe, and I'm not satisfied that people are really acknowledging or facing up to them.
I really do have a lot of love and hope for Europe. It just frustrates me I suppose. Perhaps a corollary of meeting primarily younger, party-oriented Europeans?
Hope this explains my views a little better.
Ultimately what you want in a country is happy, confident, well-adjusted people. Until someone finds a way to heal Europe's soul, arguments about impediments to the European Silicon Valley are academic.
The only reason I can see to view this is as negative is a) sentimentality about "naturalness," b) aesthetic distaste for hyper-successful species, c) concerns that, in the short-term, rapid homogenisation of ecosystems may degrade their utility to humans (e.g. loss of ecosystem services such as water and air purification, or loss of organisms with useful novel biological properties - frogs with special antibodies and so forth. a) is silly, because what is less natural than a world overrun with hairless apes devouring every resource they can find? b) is again silly - anyone who feels like this really hasn't come to terms with being human, and should be worrying about what they see when they look in the mirror. c) is valid, though of course completely self-centered.
So as far as I can see this problem comes down to self-interest and self-disgust.
Climate change of course is a rather more serious issue - though it does come down to similar feelings of self-interest and self-disgust