http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/04/25/smart-doesnt-...

I'm curious as to the effect on quality of life - measuring wealth in dollars is easier, but a pretty imprecise measure of the overall effect on someone's life of a few IQ points.

I'm even more curious as to the effects on happiness...

Edit: Not much, apparently: http://www.quora.com/Happiness/Is-it-true-that-less-intellig...

This line of thinking is been pushed a lot. Its a one sided view. Why is it so difficult to understand the German point of view, or at least put it across to readers ? Germany insists that covering up the problems by printing money is just treating the symptoms not the root cause. The root cause is the bad monetary policies at some of member nations. They correctly understand than politicians guarantee of fixing the bad monetary issues (once printing is done) is wishful thinking. What they want is either go through painful process of austerity in these nation or tighter political/financial integration where member nations have say on finance budgeting in countries (in which case there could be common bonds).

I am neither a US or EU resident. I am not a finance guy. But the approach taken by Germany seems very sensible to me. What i see over and over again is the US/UK media and economist pushing for the solution that they have taken in their countries (monetary easing), to solve EU problems. Is there a agenda in this or whether its just that they want to make their policies appear right is open question.

I for one think that if Germany gets through this crisis (without blind printing) it will open the new era of EU dominance in the world. EU would come out as the most financially prudent currency and society (a more integrated union, almost like a country). In such a case the high debt, bad finance strategies of US/UK appear foolish.

Keep going Germany ! Long live EU

After all, Germany was among the first batch of countries who violated the 3% deficit-to-GDP rule in the Maastricht treaty.

The German approach is a holier-than-thou approach, believing in blindly following rules that are elevated to moral principles ("Thou shalt not have a deficit.") without regard for the implications that this has for the well-being of their people.

What the Eurozone really needs is functional finance: define your goals for the real economy (e.g. full employment, high real living standards) and then do whatever it takes to achieve that in the financial arena.

... just wish away reality by printing more Euros?

The term "printing more Euros" is rather inaccurate. When people talk about "printing money" it tends to be an indication that they either (a) don't know what they're talking about or (b) are not interested in an honest discussion.

Printing money is irrelevant. Spending money isn't.

As for the reality: The reality is that there is vast under-utilization of resources in the real economy. That's what a recession is all about, after all. I'm not a growth-fanatic, but real people are hurt by that development via the crazy amounts of unemployment, especially youth unemployment.

Furthermore, this under-utilization is an indication that if someone were to massively increase spending in the real economy, the economy would likely react significantly by adjusting the size of its production, and the reaction in terms of price level would be minimal.

So in that sense, if I indulge your misguided metaphor for the moment, it is actually the anti-printing folk who are wishing reality away: in their fantasy world, the recession will just end without any spending involved. Out here in the real world, this is not how it works.

(But note that the type of spending matters. Just throwing more money into the hands of the financial sectors is not going to help. Direct job creation is necessary, and in the case of Europe, there are some very obvious candidate projects, such as installing large amounts of solar energy capacity around the Mediterranean, along with the transmission capacity. That's just one pet idea though, there are plenty of other useful things to do.)

Germany is looking to create a rules-based system that every country follows and is accountable to, like they were supposed to when the Eurozone was created. This isn't a bad thing, but its forcing the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain & Cyprus, if anyone ever notices how had that's getting, but its small anyway) to play chicken with the financial markets and increasing their interest rates to a point that forces them to fix the structural faults in the national budgets.

Germany rightly shouldn't be paying the costs of Greece's, or soon Italy & Spain's, pension obligations and the hundreds of billions in Euros of debt built up over the last decade or more because of poor national policy. Though that is what is happening for now. The current fight, which is being missed by most of the media, is whether Germany will be paying the future costs of the PIIGS+C as well and Angela Merkel is aiming to create a new rules-based system to force these countries to increase productivity, reduce labour regulation and stop spending on wasted projects. Good luck to her...

Right, but they're running up against a very fundamental problem: There isn't any mechanism to enforce the rules. The worse the Greeks (and others) behave the more money the Germans are expected to provide to clean up the mess in return for "This is really the last time I promise" kind of assurances.

Of course what Merkel wants is a kind of United States of Europe, where everybody surrenders enough sovereignty this sort of thing can't happen. But will the other countries go along? Paint me very skeptical.

Printing is also a fiscal policy that happens to be implemented by central banks.

Without a fiscal backing for unlimited asset purchases or printing money, no central bank is able to act. A central bank implements monetary policy transmission by controlling liquidity. They cannot provide funds to insolvent institutions or be exposed to risk of default/credit risk without backing.

To put it in Mervyn King's (head of Bank of England) words: too many people misunderstand the concept of "lender of last resort". Central banks have access to this facility or are able to print because governments back their own solvency by perpetual state existence and unlimited taxation.

Without a fiscal union, the Eurozone/EMU has no meaningful guarantee of perpetuity nor taxation. The market would recognise this sooner rather than later and nothing structural or fiscal would have been fixed.

Printing can only come after fiscal union. If you have a fiscal union, then you should not have needed to print in the first place since you should have set strict rules on leverage! But if for some reason you did need to use lender-of-last resort, it would meaningfully exist due to the fiscal backstop.

Perception is important here, either the markets (in terms of buying debt) or the populations (a run on banks) could bring things crashing down.

Meanwhile, Germany is booming on the back of a (for Germany) weak Euro, and this crisis has already claimed the governments of Greece and Italy. Fiscal rules should have been sorted when times where good (IIRC Germany were one of the first to break the rules on borrowing, years ago). As is, if someone breaks the rules others are powerless to act.

I can't say I share your optimism for a 'new era of EU dominance'.. austerity and no growth everywhere.

But it is not really Germany's fault that Italy's and Greece's leadership decided to push their heads into the sand for so long.

These issues were known for decades, the core of EU spent a lot of effort trying to bring up the subject and the usual response from the fringe was that: "We are sovereign nations, this is strictly our business and you can kindly fuck off!"

It is not Germans fault that people across south decided to vote for populist governments, while they were busy reforming their economy.

The way Germans see it probably is that if they succumb to pleas for unconditional help from south - the EU is certainly doomed in the long run. If they do not, the Euro might be doomed, but the EU has a chance of rebirth in the long run.

Europe is on a sort of crossroads the Yugoslavia was on in the late 70's, early 80's - when the Yugoslav leadership decided, that we can borrow our way out of this, the aftermath is well documented I believe.

A lot of the "virtue" of Germany is actually a vice when extrapolated globally. The current position of power of Germany can be traced back to its net exports. Quite often in the last two or three years, you could hear commentators proclaim that if everybody followed the path of net exports, the crisis would be over. There are only two problems with that:

1. It is simply impossible for everybody to be a net exporter. That's the fallacy of composition.

2. The way Germany became a net exporter was by savaging real income of the majority of the population. If you look at data for how the quotient of (real income / labor productivity) developed in the Eurozone, you will see that while the majority of countries had a reasonable development (the quotient is around 1), Germany's quotient for this development is much lower. German workers are being cheated out of their share, which means Germany is essentially price dumping in the global market.

Right now, Germany is essentially sending presents (real goods) into the rest of the world in exchange for promises (financial claims on the ROW). The majority of Germans are working their ass off and not getting anything in return, just so the top 0.01% of the population can increase its power base by accumulating financial assets.

To say that other European countries should follow this path is deeply cynical, and probably comes from not seeing the whole picture.

The point is that the exchange rate with which countries adopted the Euro was more or less appropriate when it was set. Since then, the different development of the countries has changed the level of the exchange rate that would be appropriate if the countries still used different currencies.

So the question is: has the picture of corruption in Germany vs. Greece changed significantly in the last 10 years? Has the unit labor cost (which is real income / labor productivity) changed significantly between Germany and Greece?

Those are the questions you need to ask to understand where the differential is coming from.

They managed to secure a consensus and everyone (labor, capital and the state) is reaping the rewards.

In southern and eastern Europe, the unions an "leftist forces" managed to blow a hole in any attempt to reform pension and labor markets.

The key argument is that Germany giving in to these forces would mean a perpetuation of the root problem.

The way I see it this is a family issue, where father refuses to support one of his crack addicted kids, while the mother pleads "Please, you are breaking the family apart." Forgetting that there were previous confrontations in which she sided with the kid and didn't support the fathers demand that the kid goes on a rehab.

Keep in mind that "reforming their pension system and labor market" is neoliberal code for "reducing the share of national income that goes towards workers and employees". So it is disingenuous to claim that labor is reaping the rewards these days. [1]

I mean sure, if you cut social safety nets and retirement systems, and pass the savings on to foreigners who are buying your export goods, then that will boost your exports. That doesn't make it good policy.

As for your metaphor, two can play that game.

Germany is more like the father who doesn't give a damn about the kid, thinks it's the kid's own damn fault - despite him regularly beating him/her (that's metaphor for Germany undercutting everybody else in the market, in case it's not clear), and is happy to see the kid end up unemployed, homeless, and with an abysmal life expectancy (all of these things are already literally reality or are starting to become so in Greece).

The rehab route would be to stop the insane domestic policies in Germany, install a bureaucracy that can do proper tax collections and fight corruption in Greece, and simultaneously stimulate the hell out of their economy.

Hey, nobody said rehab is easy - it requires both discipline and compassion.

[1] In terms of real income this is obvious from even a very cursory glance at the data. In terms of unemployment, the picture is admittedly not quite so obvious. Unemployment rates are lower than in the southern countries, but even the official numbers are still very high by any reasonable standard. It gets worse when you consider marginal work (part time etc.).

We were talking about economy as a whole, while you only fixate on labor market and capital market.

Greece had a plenty of raise in wages - see how well it worked out for them.

Beware of the Marxist fallacy. Nowadays in Europe anyone can join the ranks of "Evil capitalist" and secure a "bigger piece of pie" for themselves.

It doesn't work that way anymore. Google, fb , twitter etc operates across the world. Assuming the worst case, US residents will face the some error page like "This website is blocked" etc .. but rest of the world will be OK.

If even that is restricted, then this will raise a opportunity for clone solutions across the world. Like china has its own search, social software, blogs etc , now rest of the world will have a new opportunity. Many in HN would mint gold if this happens!

All in all this looks like the familiar path to take for US politician. (remember how the created the platform for screwing up the economy.

> Non-US sites can get cut off from US-based payment processors and advertisers. This will push sites you use into bankruptcy, and discourage others from starting.

Its the competition from US sites that is restricting clone solutions in local markets. US is not the target market for many-many businesses !( is it so difficult to understand)

The problem is you need a critical mass of customers with cards handled by someone other than Visa and Mastercard. This is not currently the case in most countries.

Doesn't help if you're not targeting US consumers if a large portion of your customer base will go elsewhere if they can't use their existing credit cards.

If you are a starter at HN, then do not get misguided by the quote above. If you are aiming for using blog writing as SEO for product marketing and reaching out to new customers then it is good effort. But if you are looking to get eyeballs for adv revenue then stop right there. There are better things you can do with your time.

If you don't have a product, the benefits are more along the lines of finding your voice, learning what resonates with the people you care about, and getting comfortable putting content out where people will see it.

I mentioned the numbers in the sense that I used to think traffic and on-site behaviour was a magical thing that "happened". It was more about having that "aha moment" of how it all works than about doing anything particularly profitable.

Given all that, I think new & future founders would do well to try blogging for a while, reaching out to whoever your future customers would be. It lays a bunch of strong foundational skills that are tough to internalize through reading case studies.

I know this sounds like a "you can too" commercial but I actually did. I posted it on text-link-ads.com and sold a load of text-link ads (i.e. google juice) at the bottom of the page. From that more marketers discovered me and then bought ads direct on a year upfront basis.

The amount paid ranged from about $20/month (of which I'd see half) with TLA to $100/month (I kid you not) for direct sales. It's whittled down to nothing now but it worked out about $10k or so of revenue over the two or three years after I finished blogging which wasn't too shabby.

Obviously Google could wake up one day and kill you for it but since I didn't have any audience I also wasn't bothered by that.

(Great button btw Rob :)

And yes, they've also realized that all those subscribers are good for more than just ads, so they're upselling them books and videos and seminars and whatever else.

Certain blog posts of mine have made several hundred dollars. I refuse to believe that I'm the only one.

Edit: I'm talking about blog posts written in the last five or six months, just to clarify.

EDIT: in fact, I find the those fictional theoretical physicists' grasp of physics appalling — and I don't even pretend to know that much physics!

The times they touch on topics I have actual experience in makes me cringe yes but its in the name of entertainment where it has to be fluffed to actually be interesting.

Take it this way.... the episodes where they play paintball there is so much unnecessarily wrong with the scenarios that it makes me facepalm almost every time. But when I look at it in the sense that doing the "real" thing would make it mind-numbingly boring I realize that I prefer it as it is.

They're exposing a lot of people to a world that most would have no interaction with (the sciences) and I personally feel that half-baked representation is better than nothing. (See: Argument people have for/against Mythbuster's contribution to the science community)

My point being: we were geek before it was cool.

(Come to think of it, that might not be totally acurate either. The "proud geek" generations of the 80s and 90s, though slightly marginal to mainstream culture, at least were proud to wear the moniker. Before that there were the labeled geek generations, to whom the word was indeed a very uncool slur. Maybe I'm closer to the Seth Cohen generation than I'd care to admit.)

That said, i still feel that there is something i don't understand of this device. Something which old-guards like steve and gates, who have seen it happening once, feel about it and how its going to bring in some big changes in future. Hat's off to Ballmer to call in the right person for task.

Hallmark of a good leadership is often about understanding the gravity of situation, know your limitations and find the best person for task. No-wonder companies with leaders like that lead the industry for decades.

Instead of charity, if the billionaires or super smarts like gates, larry/sergey, bezos,pg etc can live in ordinary people situations for 2-3 days a year, their imagination will fuel creations that benefit all. Is this not tried already ?

And there are a lot of ways that rich people can't actually get anything more special than anyone else, at least not easily. It's not feasible to build hospitals just for rich people, so a billionaire goes to the same hospitals as ordinary people. Consumer electronics don't generally cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, so a billionaire has the same kind of stuff ordinary people have.

Indeed. I've run into Steve three times. Twice we were both shopping for produce at a natural food store (Country Sun in Palo Alto, and the old Richard's Natural Foods in Los Gatos).

The last time was just a year ago. I sat down for dinner on the patio at La Strada, a nice Italian restaurant on University Avenue a few doors down from the Palo Alto Apple store, and there were Steve and his daughter at the next table. After dinner they took a stroll down University Avenue, just the two of them. I imagine they were probably going to get some frozen yogurt. I thought to myself, "Doesn't he have some security? A bodyguard? Something?"

There are a lot of Silicon Valley executives who I'd recognize if I saw them. But Steve is the only one who I've ever run into doing ordinary things like produce shopping.

He redesigned things around his hospital room because he had a pad and pencil, and he was bored. There's no reason to believe that the X-ray machine he drew was better than the X-ray machines designed by X-ray machine designers with a better idea of the details and tradeoffs involved with designing X-ray machines. And that's no insult to Steve, because I'm sure he knew that too -- he was just drawing for the sake of drawing.

(Yes if they scrap someone's else phone and your phone number happens to be there then ya there is some issue. Is there any precedent of google scraping phones through any means ?)

Head to http://pmarchive.com

1.8 Billion Minutes of Video calls (All people minutes on skype for year); 916 hours of movies made per year (movies made by production house); 9 years of average time spent on watching TV (Time spent by a single consumer)

How these things are related are beyond my understanding. It looks like somehow the 1.8 Billion had to be made appear bigger , so they put some filler data along with it.

I did a quick look for some statistics on cellphone/landline usage, but I'd expect it's a few added 0's on the end of Skype usage still.