Okay, mod parent troll. I had my fun. Yes, I suspect astroturfing no, I don't know it's true.

Yes, I cannot use the betas or the mobile site with my phone.

No, I loathe JS.

Yes, it appears dice is going to take a massive hit because no, they won't back down, and no, they don't understand the concepts in the book "the tipping point".

No, I suspect nothing can replace it, but it appears slashdot is dead. No, there's really nothing else I want to see discussed here, which means soon I'll get tired of this and leave.

Bye.

Wow! He really is right! His user iD --actually is no UID. My hat's off to you. I had thought that someday I might see a three-digit UID, but never suspected that I'd see the one who can take credit for more of what slashdot is, than anyone else.

Okay, trolling done.

That said, I like classic, and especially NO JAVASCRIPT. Let me tell you what thingr I'm thinking about buying when I first log in, and then serve up the best related ads you can --but put the work on your servers' programming, not on my bandwidth.

What would help is for some php coders to get together and come up with a website that has the look and feel of classic,and is scalable. Register a domain name, and have it waiting in the wings.

Or better yet, approach the guy who runs xkcd with it, and take it from there. He's shown that he can do well enough with what he had.

In the minds of our country's citizens, theories about our constitution trump reality. But I live in the USA. I have no idea where the parent and grandparent posters live.

Unless, of course, they live in our country.

I'll likely drop out of slashdot, too, if it's all you say it is. I've seen what has happened to formerly great magazines like "Boys' Life" (scouting mag), when advertisers got their claws in it.

Think ads. Think advertorials. Think page-at-a-glance, and light on pages. All the articles, gone. All the features, gutted. All the stories, made vapid. oh, and now in digitized 3-D cartoons.

Or how about this, the Government charges taxes on a graduated scale. If you increase your earnings, the government gets more and hire more high-dollar public employees who will be incredibly resentful if they ever lose their job of producing little for much compensation.

But you can live better. And for everyone who does increase their earnings, everyone else lives worse.

If enough people do it, then the standard of living goes WAY down on an exponentially sliding scale.

So does that mean he is playing the prisoner's dilemma to win, as well? It should work as long as nobody else does it. But if someone else does it, just enough to knock him off, and then returns to a gentleman's agreement to allow the show's designers the desired entertainment... wellg he may be more susceptible than many to his own poison.

Then again, maybe not.

So now we're getting somewhere. Back before the last post, I went over to Wikipedia, and reviewed what they had to say about MMT, and I suppose it wasn't representative of what you are saying. Japan's been both printing and borrowing money to "stimulate the economy", and it has kept their economy doing badly for a long time now.

Nonetheless, let me address your concept of MMT here (which is probably more accurate than my understanding of Wiki's description).

I suspect that government creation of debt free money is an improbability, because either money represents a transfer of wealth from one person to another -- in which case, it is either theft or promised to be repaid -- or else it represents the creation of wealth. Now, if it is theft, then it is interrupting the economic chain of someone else, and that actually is a destruction of wealth. If it is a destruction of wealth, then it cannot continue -- the one whose wealth is being destroyed is either going to stop the flow, or is going to dry up.

So it remains for the government to create wealth. But creation of wealth is not what governments do well. Governments regulate well. It is just the same as saying that as a manager I create wealth -- it ain't typically so. I regulate the wealth creation.

Now, there are moments when I actually catch a hiccup, and stop it -- and that is a wealth creating event. But it isn't an accountable wealth creating event: all I did was prevent a disaster. Others are actually laboring to create it. In the same way, the government can prevent disasters, and is thus not without value. But you can't say that it is really creating wealth.

Thus, I still don't think MMT works.

Nor is Japan a good example for advertising anything, because Japan has been doing badly for so long, with no growth.

Money is a COMMODITY that is used as a medium of exchange. You do realize that hand-sized pieces of paper are a valuable commodity, don't you? The day you run out, you will eat with only your right hand.

Hello, I am Janet Yeltzin, the current director of the federal reserve. I require to enact quantitative Easingwhich means placing several hundred million dollars in your bank account, with a negative real interest rate, and no specific date of repayment. In exchange for this, you must make comforting noises about loaning it out to others, to stimulate the economy.please forward your bank serial numbers, and the accoount IDs into which you wish each tranche to be placed.
In case you are wondering about the urgency of our offer, the director of Bank of America can acquaint you with his recommendations, of a most serious nature, having dealt personally with my predecessors.

Do not forget to sign the accompanying documentation. If you wish to opt out of this most generous offer, a meeting can be arranged to convince you otherwise.

Mod parent up, +1 Funny: Japan's qualitative Easing works?!?!??

A lost decade, with no growth, now being stretched to TWO decades with no growth, and you call that working?

That quantitative Easing, those bailouts, are exactly what causes the disasters. So of course they need more of it, because it is clear that they never learned their lesson.

And yes, it appears we need another round of Tarp too. The Fed's holding of worthless promisory notes, never again to be marked to market, with no date of repayment, is now up to 4 trillion dollars.

Okay, I tend to go with Mike Shedlock's blog.

His criticism of MMT is that

a) practically speaking, it isn't working for any of the governments that use it
b) theoretically speaking, if you print a billion dollars and bury it in the back yard, ther's no actual inflation. But the same is true if , instead of burying it, you loan it to banks, expecting them to loan it out to others, and they don't because they have no good stable prospects.

Thus, noting that credit itself is a commodity that is used as a medium of exchange, the credit monetary supply dwarfs the fiat monetary supply, and thus MMT ends up being ineffective anyways.

Okay, first of all, deflation is a money supply issue, and when. Sou realize that money supply includes credit -- and that credit is the largest part of the economy, then you'll find that yes, we are in deflation here in the US.

Now, what about PRICE inflation / deflation?

Well, as robotics, improved methods, and tech make manufacturing faster, cheaper, and easier, that causes deflation. Likewise, as power over little folks forces their wages down, that makes things cheaper. More slaves (you, me) means cheaper goods.

On the other side of the coin, we are not just at peak oil, we are at peak everything. So as raw materials become harder to come by, that causes price increases.

Incidentally, that may have been how Greenspan or Paulson (I forget which) triggered the bursting of the housing bubble. Until then, they had kept the CPI at a constant price inflation of about 5% singe the '50s. early 2000s, they changed policy in response to the bursting of the tech bubble, to keep the CPI constant at 0% increase. But if things are harder to get, that meas that wages have to fall. But people had taken mortgages on the assumptionof 5% CPI price INFLATION. So when their wages fell, they couldn't keep up. That forced housing prices down, which then triggered massive losses from the investment flippers, who themselves were massively overleveraged, which caused Fannie Mae to go plfft, which triggered the hedge fund leveraged derivitive bets into losses, which caused TARP and the jobless recovery...