The amount of "printed currency" in circulation has almost nothing to do with the size of the money supply. It's amazing how many gold/bitcoin fans don't understand this. Heck, the US recently concluded "QE", in which a couple of trillion dollars were created by the Fed without any of it being physically printed.*

When you deposit $US with a US bank, in a savings account or CD, it can loan out 100% of your deposit. If banks offered BTC-denominated savings accounts, they'd work the same way. If you're thinking "but wait, that means there wouldn't be enough bitcoins in existence to allow everyone to withdraw their deposits", then congratulations, you understand how banking works.

There's only ~$1.3 T in physical US currency, but there is ~$10 T in total bank deposits (of various kinds). That wouldn't change if we adopted gold or bitcoins as the national currency.

*To further complicate things, the money supply actually didn't grow during that time, as bank deposits with the Fed grew at about the same rate. When the banks start finding investments better than the rate the Fed pays, we'll start seeing the inflationary effects - it's a very new idea by the Fed, and time will tell how crazy it was.

So, you're telling me that Magic the Gathering Online Exchange stored its assets by printing them on paper cards? I never saw that coming. I hope they were at least kept in protective sleeves!

The actual spec is behind a paywall, as with most tech specs, but Wikipedia says.

You may be right, and this is just the physical consequence of the spec, but 28 AWG is quite thin wire. (One poster said his long cable has a booster, so maybe that's another way, but that's not "cheapest" either).

Hey, now, this isn't Sony we're talking about. ("Sony timer" was a common phrase in Japan for a few years, with a strong urban legend that actual timers were built in to pop the day the warrantee expired. My favorite urban legend was that Sony employees carried a remote that could expire all your Sony timers early if you annoyed them.)

Wouldn't bother me any, but then I shattered the glass on my phone about 3 years ago, and it has many seams. Still works fine for me.

I hope you don't work with technology in any way. Sure, buy the cheapest cable that meets spec, but remember the first rule of engineering: the vendor is a lying bastard. There's a reason the cheapest cable is the cheapest cable. Paying $45 for a 6-foot HDMI cable is silly. Paying $45 for a 50-foot HDMI cable isn't.

Also, for HDMI specifically, the different numbered specs matter depending on use case. If your doing "4K" video, you'll want the HDMI 1.4 (or above) cable. If you want high color depth for a specific application, you'll want at least 1.3.

Sure, cheap is good, but as always in life, avoid the cheapest crap in the store.

I've had cheap longer mini-jack cables fail - just break inside the insulation. I've had cheap RCA cables break, short, and most annoyingly have the center-pins break off and get stuck in my equipment.

Yeah, avoid the $40 job with the weird connectors, but a $4 patch cable can save a lot of headache over a $1 cable.

This comes up whenever audiophile cables are discussed, but it's worth repeating: don't buy the cheapest cable.

There may be no useful difference between a $10 cable and a $1000 cable, but very often there's a real difference between a $10 cable and a $1 cable. Even for digital data, really cheap cables often don't meet spec, and can cause frustrating intermittent problems. You don't need anything exotic to avoid that, just avoid the bottom tier.

An example from my living room: I use a 45 foot HDMI cable to plug my TV directly into my HTPC (for reasons of convenience that aren't that interesting). The spec calls for thicker-gauge wiring for HDMI cables over 30 feet (IIRC), and you'll quickly see the price jump between cables that meet that spec and cables that don't. Don't buy the cheapest junk possible, that's all it takes.

It used to be that Dayton Audio was the only "solidly built, not too expensive" brand I knew about for cables, but Amazon changed that - now there are a bunch of options, including some sort of Amazon store brand that seems to be fine.

It's worth paying a bit more for solidly-built cables that meet spec (and especially for Ethernet cables, for some guard on the cable that keeps the clip from snagging or breaking off it you need to pull it through a tangle). Anything beyond that is a bit silly.

France did try building a Grand mur de la France once, of course, but then the Germans just went around it. Google search results are already filtered in France as needed to comply with French law, but France seems to be upset here that the Germans (or French with a VPN) are getting around it. Somehow, I don't think they'll learn this time, either.

I'm pretty sure this was arrogance, but not malice, on MS's part: they really want to shift the IE userbase to Edge and drop IE support in some future release. Can you blame them? But in their arrogance they didn't remember (or didn't care) that quite a large portion of Windows users don't run IE in the first place.

The Chrome UI has annoted me from the start, and I trust Google about as far as I can throw their corporate HQ, but Chrome still has some neat tech.

Anyone know? Is there a chromium fork with a different UI, as Pale Moon is to FF?

I'm actually a huge fan of the idea of an electric car with an external-combustion range extender under the hood. High-efficiency turbines (of the sort they use in industrial power generation, not the sort in aircraft and the M1 Abrams) are very durable, but also quite heavy. However, if we're talking about a 40 HP generator in a 400 HP car, it can afford to be 3x as heavy per HP as a normal car engine. Doubling the efficiency is worth something.

Not, dealers don't charge you for recalls - ever. That's why they're recalls. They charge the manufacturer, and usually make a bit of money in the process. Some things they won't fix unless you complain, but there's a list of things they'll fix the next time they see your car, if it needs them (because they're fast and the dealer makes a little money doing them). There's often a non-descriptive line buried in the invoice somewhere that lists some recall numbers or just mentions them obliquely, with no charge associated, so most people never notice.

How much this varies by brand, I don't know, but certainly the luxury dealers do this, and for safety-related recall everyone does (for the safety ones you'll probably get a postcard about the recall, but the dealer will still just do it automatically). It's not like they hide all this, they just don't call attention to it.

Except that an S-class is actually good, while Whole Foods is explicitly a sort of scam designed by a conservative to separate foolish hippies from their money (this isn't a secret or anything). While WF didn't invent the "call it organic and charge twice as much" idea, they sure did capitalize on it.

They've really nailed the presentation of goods to fool hippies (well, more accurately, middle-class, middle-aged people who still think hippies are cool) into paying more for food. The model doesn't work so well for young hipsters though, which is why the corporation is creating a new chain of stores just to have a different presentation to target hipster suckers separately.

You live in a city, don't you. And anyhow: