Right there. Psychology is as much a science as Astrology and Tarot cards. It's all based on what the observer thinks is normal.

Or perhaps he understood more than you, and those spending spikes reflect idiot speculators trying to unload bitcoins before they fall too far? Kind of like the spike in unloading any speculated currency or commodity when it starts to crash?

Also - honest question - you keep referring to "disinflationary." That's not a term I have heard before, can you explain where this term came from and how it differs from deflation?

The CEO deserves all the cookies! He is being generous in giving the Tea Party guy a chance to look at the cookie.

All hail the holy CEO's .... for they are our salvation!

"Corporations don't hold guns to their customer's heads."

AS in a physical gun? no not yet. But they hold financial guns to peoples' heads all the time. and many times try to do financial assassinations.

Why kill a person when you can make them suffer for the rest of their lives financially.

Yep, and Carnegie was a horrific evil man.

the things he did to people makes the worlds most notorious criminals seem like saints.

All it takes is time for a honest person to turn into a bought and paid for Politician.

And that is the solution. TAX Intellectual Property.

Sony bitches about $200 million lost in piracy? Let the IRS tax them on their new made up bullshit number. Suddenly IP "losses" go to sane levels.

I want IP taxed at 15% of the value claimed, and any claim in court asking for more due to piracy, is charged RETROACTIVELY by the IRS.

Fair enough point. But the rationale for the gold standard I have heard from most proponents was that paper money "isn't real" and only has value as a more convenient way of, in effect, carrying gold around since it has "real value." (I also find more than a little irony in having met a few of these folks who are also major proponents of BitCoin and manage to swallow the cognitive dissonance nicely.)

If your rationale for supporting a return to the gold standard is keeping governments honest about their spending, then I find that much more rational. It just seems from historical example to be incompatible with promoting real economic growth, or dealing with expediencies (for example, financing World War I was the reason most countries got off the gold standard in the first place).

The Surface to Air missiles are programmed via a web interface using Active X controls written in Visual Basic 6.

Companies like Dematic have been doing that for decades. Welcome to the 1990's FETCH!

That's not how it's supposed to work under the old "gold standard" that tinfoil hatters worldwide espouse a return to. Under the old method, you would peg your currency at "$4.75 = 1 ounce of gold" and that was expected to never change. Ever. Otherwise, what's the point if I can say a dollar is worth .00075 oz of gold today and .0008 oz. of gold tomorrow? Because that's pretty much how it works in the open exchange market today. Currency values fluctuate, the price of gold fluctuates - who cares if you can't force the government to give you gold for that dollar bill when you can always find someone to sell some gold to you in exchange for those dollars at the market price?

And the thing that caused everyone to get off the darn gold standard in the first place was not only that you could have inflation or deflation, but if you had deflation or inflation, there was nothing your country could do about it. And if you are deflating and you can't do anything to stop it, your economy is f$%&*ed.

Aside: For those wondering why economists are so scared of deflation, it's because it destroys the rationale for people to save and invest. If it costs $1 to buy a Big Mac today and will cost $1.10 next year, instead of just sitting on my leftover lunch money I should put it in a bank or invest it so that it makes money and I have enough cash for next year's Big Mac. If next year's Big Mac only costs $0.90, then why risk investing it? I will just keep it under my mattress and I have "made" money (more purchasing power) by doing so. Money in mattresses = banks have no money to lend to people who want to buy houses or start businesses = fewer jobs = vicious cycle of economic misery. This, by the way, was what clobbered the world economy during the Great Depression (along with all the banks that collapsed and ate everyone's savings account, making everyone very nervous about putting their money in the bank).

Even that doesn't really work though. In Rand Paul's Good Old Days of the Gold Standard, when the world economy was probably 1/50th(?) of today's size but the supply of gold wasn't all that much smaller, you could walk into a Federal Reserve Bank with a non-ridiculous amount of bank notes and walk out with enough US-minted gold coins that you could trade it or do something meaningful with it. If we tied the world economy back to the gold standard at its current size, it might cost you $10,000 to get a big enough slice of gold that it wouldn't just disappear if you sneezed. And if gold is only useful in gigantic transactions far above the amount of cash most people can afford, what's the point?

Not freak weather, that is tropospheric ducting. It actually happens a lot more often than you think.

Check target. my local one has them $80 on the clearance table in the electronics section.

They started to backpedal on promises before the end of the crowdfunding, it is overpriced for what it was, and they had severe quality issues. 4 controllers with very little use in 1 year... Xbox controllers abused to hell work fine 4 years later. Yeah, it's dead, nobody cares, they cant even sell them in the clearance bin at Target.