No, printing money (QE, inflation, what have you) is absolutely NOT a capitalist tenet. Quite the opposite.
We do not live in a true capitalist society anymore, although we still use the term, and so disparage it. Creditism would be better, since the government and federal reserve push debt/credit like its the way the world aught to work, instead of production, saving, and intelligent reinvestment.
This is what bothers me so much about the new anti-capitalist push. Sanders is right about the banks and Wall Street and the like, but he's dead wrong that capitalism is the problem. The problem is this perverse crony capitalist centrally planned insanity we've been living in.
And this is not a republican or democrat thing. Its basically just the way things have worked for a long time, highly accelerating when Nixon stuck the final nail in the gold standards coffin.
> No, printing money (QE, inflation, what have you) is absolutely NOT a capitalist tenet. Quite the opposite.
It may not be a capitalist tenet, but it's an unavoidable result of capitalism. Capitalism works great for a little while, but then some people amass too much wealth and pull the ladder up behind them.
This is the only logical conclusion. Money and power allow you to change the playing field. So even if somehow we could start everyone off with equal opportunity and let them compete in a fair capitalist system, the ones who gain money and power early on will simply follow incentives and change the playing field in their favor. You can call this unfair playing field "perverse crony capitalism" and argue that it's not capitalism, and you're right, but so what? "True capitalism" will always turn into "perverse crony capitalism" so returning things to capitalism is at best a temporary measure.
These ideas are more than just clever, they are exactly what is happening due to money printing and zero to near-zero interest rates. You restated the facts well.
As to those who claim QE ended, and other nonsensical ignorant claims, that is irrelevant. The money went to reliquify the broke banks' balance sheets, and so of course did not immediately leave their digital vaults. That takes time, and we are slowly (technically not at all slowely) watching the destruction of the dollar's purchasing power via mass inflation, beginning with the assets closest to the money printing spigot: real estate, stocks, fine art, and other elite assets.
Inflation is the rise in overall price level, not the increase in a few select asset classes. We aren't seeing inflation. The people who have been making that claim for 5+ years have been wrong. Period.
Does it matter if there's fine art inflation? The real estate inflation boom seems more linked to housing policy than QE too...
Declaring mass inflation for the dollar doesn't seem to align with how CPI is evolving though, and it's not like the dollar is losing much ground to foreign currencies. If standard purchases haven't changed much, and purchasing abroad hasn't changed much, could we say that things have changed much?
Though you're saying slowly, maybe I'll ride the bubble til it bursts just like the rest of 'em.
and yet the dollar is not substantially weakened vs other currencies, it is quite strong. This isn't a dollar specific phenomenon at all.
It seems a more appropriate statement would be destruction of all currencies purchasing power. Which leads me to wonder - what is the impact of that exactly?
Should the dollar be allowed to strengthen greatly (relatively to basket of all other currencies), is that what people are proposing? Can we guess at what the dollar based economy might do in that instance?
My point is that other currencies are not static. All the world economies are jockeying to have relatively weak currencies, in order to attempt to spur inflation and ease their debt loads. It's all relative. The US is not in some particularly bad spot, certainly Japan and Europe finance ministers would trade places with ours any day of the week. We have a remarkably strong economy (and everything else, really) in comparison (which is all that matters).
This is simply not an accurate response, and you are comparing apples to napalm.
Apple/FB/etc do in fact make it difficult to switch - by adding value to their offerings. Users become more and more entrenched as they enjoy the benefits of new features. Oppressive governments, such as China, or any group committing espionage, promote specific paths by degrading opposing services. These are not related, and should not be confused.
One adds value (promoting healthy competition), the other uses coercive force.
Well, I get the the idea of what you're trying to say but really healthy competition is not something that gets turned on and off in an instant. I've noticed, for example, osx "seems" less reliable than what it was say with snow leopard and I don't see any healthy competition that tries to address this. It will take ages before a lot of people realize this and shift away causing healthy competition. At least with an ideal democratic government this cycle is some four long and can be quantitatively measured.
Not sure who downvoted that. I've seen lots of Apple folks carrying these expensive DP to HDMI or VGA dongles when Apple went DP-only before DP even became common. Think Different, I suppose.
Define expensive, I guess. At my work and in my personal life, always just ordered whatever display port adapters are on sale at various tech stores. Even early on in the era of Apple with mini display ports, the form factor attainable via the mini display port is worth the extra $30 (from apple) or $10 (from else where).
So yeah, I guess there is value in spending $10-$30 for an adapter you use as occasionally as you might use a full DVI or HDMI port.
HDMI is not much bigger than mDP and doesn't add thickness over USB ports which already exist on those laptops. OTOH, it was more commonly supported by non-Apple monitors in that time and very easily adapted to the ubiquitous DVI-D (same protocol and cabling, different plug).
If Apple cared about interoperability and user convenience (no silly dongles, yay) they would have used that.
If anything I build over the next year gets any traction, then I was planning to take advantage of Act 20/22. The idea of having a corporation based in the US, but not in a state, is attractive because of Puerto Rico's big push for startups to relocate to the island. 10 years of pretty much no corporate taxes is very appealing.
Plus, the personal benefit of not having to pay any Federal Income Taxes, nor taxes on capital gains... It's really a great opportunity.
I've been with them for two years or so and in the beginning I had a streak of problems but actually the last year has been rock solid. Today's problem did take two of our large sites offline for ten to twenty minutes, though others were fine.
I use a secret scheme that only I know. It works like this - I have one single long complex "base" password, which is no problem for me to remember, which has letters, numbers, caps, and symbols so all password checkers are happy. Then, for every site I change that password using my secret scheme. I won't say what mine is, but an example is that I change the 3rd character to match the 3rd character of the URL, and I add a character to the end equal to the URL's first character, but shifted right one column on the keyboard (V becomes B for example).
Basically it's one base password and one repeating scheme, that gives me a unique complex password on every site, that's easy to remember, and doesn't require any special software to maintain!
An attacker who can get two of your passwords will basically have all of your passwords, because by knowing which characters can change, they only have to attack those changes (your effective password length becomes the number of those changes). Additionally the pattern may be discernable with only two passwords, and even if not, each additional brute forced password provides additional information.
Put another way, every time you sign up for a website with a derived password, you are giving out information about your base password.
Special software doesn't reveal any information about your base password and even if the base password is acquired, the attacker still needs access to your vault to do anything about it.
This is how I do it. The only problem is that I thought of doing this only a few years ago, so when I go access things I haven't been on in a few years, I have to try to remember if i already changed my password or not.
I do something very similar - a base password made unique by the URL. The pain in the behind is when you're on a site that requires a password change every X days, and you have to make up something else.
For passwords that change I use something similar to the Dominic mnemonic system to add a suffix to the password, this is for passwords that I really need to remember myself.
I want to back this up. Just shut it down, and move on. You learned a lot, and maybe next time you will make something that can actually make money and work full time on. Probably not. You'll most likely make something else that fails. That's ok. After that, maybe you'll make something else that can actually make money. Probably not. Rinse and repeat. Eventually, you may or may not succeed. But each time will be more successful, less confusing, and more enjoyable. I know because I've been there, and now I'm very successful. It's worth it.
You are 100% correct, and I've thought so since the day it was announced. I believe this extends to all wearables, such as watches. Apple intelligently chose to leave the camera off, which might be the most distinguishing feature, from a potential for success angle. I love the idea of both watch and glass, but would never wear glass purely due to the awkwardness it would cause to those around me. I can deal with a little nerdy. Afterall what's nerdy today can be fully acceptable in no time.
Thank you! This is the one point I very much disagreed with from this talk. His argument is that our logical brain, which is new, is first to interpret our environment but am pretty sure that premise is flawed. Our irrational, fast, animal side is first given sensory input and a chance to act on it... Fight, flee, flinch, do nothing... At which point the slower, newer, better evolved logical side begins to work through it and make rational decisions. This newer side is what truly separates us from the rest of the animals out there, and is what creates everything.. Society, self-awareness, inventions, everything.
Not to say instinct is bad. It's extremely valuable, and as Blink Theory pointed out so famously, has it's place as well.
But as you said, I agree it's bad advice to let one simply trump the other.
We do not live in a true capitalist society anymore, although we still use the term, and so disparage it. Creditism would be better, since the government and federal reserve push debt/credit like its the way the world aught to work, instead of production, saving, and intelligent reinvestment.
This is what bothers me so much about the new anti-capitalist push. Sanders is right about the banks and Wall Street and the like, but he's dead wrong that capitalism is the problem. The problem is this perverse crony capitalist centrally planned insanity we've been living in.
And this is not a republican or democrat thing. Its basically just the way things have worked for a long time, highly accelerating when Nixon stuck the final nail in the gold standards coffin.