Author Topic: Wikipedia's SOPA box  (Read 86621 times)

Offline veekie

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Re: Wikipedia's SOPA box
« Reply #180 on: February 26, 2012, 08:49:35 PM »
If anyone hacks... Google?  Really?

Don't laugh. China broke into gmail a year and something ago.
Doesn't Google pretty much block everything from China now, though?

That may be true, but maybe some kind of proxy might be able to fool them... I guess...
Not quite, Google cannot actually do so since China is one of their few actually contested markets, with chinese search provider Baidu offering a legitimate challenge for a change. They have enough netizens to provide a sizable user base, so much that Google is actually mostly used by foreigners in China(I say mostly taken very loosely, theres still more chinese using google than there are foreigners in china).

Plus, due to how the internet works, they can't really cut themselves off completely without severely compromising their connectivity(and thus becoming useless)
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Offline SolEiji

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Re: Wikipedia's SOPA box
« Reply #182 on: February 27, 2012, 06:31:06 PM »
This is so twilight zone... but Rick Santorum is actually right on this one.

When the Gold Standard was the law, the government somewhat routinely melted down their gold coins, mixed it with cheaper metals like iron, nickel, etc., and then redistributed it at the same price as pure gold, creating more money.  Further, one of FDR's first acts as president was to change the value of an ounce of gold from about $20 to $35, creating instant inflation.

So yes, all this "Gold Standard prevents inflation" bullshit is just that: bullshit.

Santorum is right about what?  About social issues being more important than economic issues?   :???

On the inflation issue, see, while I do get how that ends up in inflation when you devalue your currency like that... why is that even legal?  On that note, why would they be able to create money like that?  Isn't the point to keep that constant so that, barring a sudden influx of more actual gold, $1 will always equal 1 gold whatever?

On google, thanks Bhu.  I actually had it before but its good to share.  I went ahead and did it, just as a safety precaution.
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Offline X-Codes

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Re: Wikipedia's SOPA box
« Reply #183 on: February 27, 2012, 07:04:25 PM »
Well, the reason for the Gold Standard back then is because we hadn't thought of the idea of the "fiat" system yet.

The reason for the Gold System now is to have a talking point that distinguishes you from the crowd and has something of a good-sounding, feel-good quality to curry favor.  It's really just pure politics.

Offline SolEiji

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Re: Wikipedia's SOPA box
« Reply #184 on: February 27, 2012, 07:52:35 PM »
But that doesn't really answer the question on why the system (and really, any system I suppose) would permit them to create more money, via devaluing the material goods, printing more paper money, or just by adding zeroes to the end of a digital readout.  All of those cases seem to violate the very concept of having money in the first place.
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Offline Kajhera

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Re: Wikipedia's SOPA box
« Reply #185 on: February 27, 2012, 07:57:09 PM »
But that doesn't really answer the question on why the system (and really, any system I suppose) would permit them to create more money, via devaluing the material goods, printing more paper money, or just by adding zeroes to the end of a digital readout.  All of those cases seem to violate the very concept of having money in the first place.

...The concept of showing how much someone is owed?

Offline X-Codes

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Re: Wikipedia's SOPA box
« Reply #186 on: February 27, 2012, 08:33:00 PM »
But that doesn't really answer the question on why the system (and really, any system I suppose) would permit them to create more money, via devaluing the material goods, printing more paper money, or just by adding zeroes to the end of a digital readout.  All of those cases seem to violate the very concept of having money in the first place.
This is where supply and demand comes in.  If more people want dollars, then the more the value of the dollar goes up.  This is counter-balanced by printing more dollars to keep the overall value stable, since a currency that constistently increases in value becomes an investment.  Since people are "investing" in cash, cash gets pulled out of the economy, cutting supply further and increasing value even more, and it creates a snowball effect that essentially locks up the banking institutions.

Something similar happened a few years ago, except there the money was pulled out of the system through gambling on mortgage-backed securities: some people put massively huge bets against these securities, and collected incredible payouts when the bubble burst, sucking all the cash out of the system.  This is probably also a big reason why you don't see a 1:1 correlation between currency inflation and price inflation.

EDIT: Also, the value of our currency relative to other currencies goes up when demand for US produced goods goes up, since our currency is required in order to purchase those goods.  How exactly this works out is also based on supply and demand, but is rather beyond my own knowledge on economics.  Further, demand for American goods is an example of something that impacts our currency, but doesn't strictly impact the price of gold under the current system, which is exactly why I call the Gold Standard a dishonest system: you're going to wind up improperly valuing either gold or our currency no matter what you do.
« Last Edit: February 27, 2012, 08:38:38 PM by X-Codes »

Offline brujon

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Re: Wikipedia's SOPA box
« Reply #187 on: February 27, 2012, 10:01:05 PM »
Gold standard as it were will never be coming back... But the idea of setting the value of money to a commodity is gaining strenght in economical circles over the last few years, for reasons obvious: the anarchical speculation is insane. Banks are leveraging more than what their own country's GDP's and everyone is ok with that... So some economists are thinking about setting the price of the dollar to Wheat, Barley, Alcohol, and other renewable commodities, effectively indexing the Dollar to more than one indicator, so that the system is more rigid and resistant to climate changes(generally when one area experiences a bad crop of something, another area receives a better-than-usual crop of something else, so nature tends to "balance out"). Now, there are advantages, and there are disadvantages to a system like this, and 70 years of Keynesian economy to justify keeping things the way they are. But all economists know one thing, and that is that the capitalist system is trying to balance an elephant on the head of a toothpick. A wooden toothpick. What we're seeing are the first cracks on the toothpick, but EVERYONE knows the toothpick will cave someday. Such is the nature of speculative capitalism. It's a spring collecting energy, the energy being a massive inflation/deflation cycle, and the crisis are the spring showing just a tiny little bit of the collected energy.

The day the toothpick caves, money will suddenly value close to nothing. Next a lot of money will disappear as people sell desperately, and we go to a massive deflation, plummeting the prices of everything, and breaking everything. Yes, this will happen. Yes, there are checks and balances keeping it from happening right now, but it will happen if we keep on like we are. Systems relying on a single currency are a growing trend, for instance. If you take away the floating speculation between currency prices, you take away a nice, big, FAT chunk of the problem of current capitalism. This can be achieved by a World Government, something that's gaining more and more strenght everyday. The world is organizing into blocks, mirroring the Euro block, and that's one way of bettering things... (But of course, there's no free lunch. Someone's gotta pay the bills, and that someone's usually the country with most debts and problems... Hello Portugal. Hello Greece.)

I for one gravitate towards the idea of a world government, because i think it's a feasible and doable thing in a few years, and i'm confident that i'll see something close to that in my lifetime yet. As for a single world currency... I think that i'll probably never live to see it flourish, but i'd really like that... The indexation of a single currency to a lot of stuff, and other currencies to that first one, is basically achieving the same goal a single world currency would achieve, only with much less stability. (Although a single world currency would suffer heavily from major wars, mass riots or plagues in certain parts of the world[The ones that supply the commodities]). In the end, it becomes a question of ideological preferences, because current world economy is too complex to make accurate models of off it, and that tends to escalate with the lenght of time you're trying to predict. Every system has it's holes, it's flaws, and there's no perfect system... Except the utopical, unfeasible and undoable idea of everything being available free of charge for everyone, and everyone working for the betterment of everything else, in a perfect 100% cooperative way with no outside influence... Physicists know this as the perfectly round sphere in a perfect vacuum... Yeah. It also would obsolete the idea of a economist AT ALL...

[rant]
And i'm sleepy and too pissed off thinking about the wrong fiscal, monetarial and political decisions made in my country... How i wish i was born Superman. I would make things right in one day. One single fucking day, i tell you.
[/rant]

Ok now seriously. I'll go watch Princess Mononoke and sleep. Peace out. Don't kill me for my naive conceptions of economy...
"All the pride and pleasure of the world, mirrored in the dull consciousness of a fool, are poor indeed compared with the imagination of Cervantes writing his Don Quixote in a miserable prison" - Schopenhauer, Aphorisms: The Wisdom of Life

Offline skydragonknight

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Re: Wikipedia's SOPA box
« Reply #188 on: February 28, 2012, 01:55:55 AM »
We don't even have Keynesian economics anymore for a lot of things. Anything with a futures market (commodities) has it's price set based on that index, give or take a few percentage points. That index changes with speculation - not supply and demand, but rumors and fearmongering, hope and risk-taking. And HUGE pension/retirement funds who use commodities to hedge their other bets, blindly throw money into them regardless of risk, adding a steady influx of cash and thus making a bubble.
Hmm.

Offline dman11235

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Re: Wikipedia's SOPA box
« Reply #189 on: February 28, 2012, 03:23:08 AM »
If there is one thing I have learned from playing Dwarf Fortress, it's that we would have been a lot better off if our ancestors had minted only one stack of coins.
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Offline X-Codes

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Re: Wikipedia's SOPA box
« Reply #190 on: February 28, 2012, 01:58:30 PM »
I don't think commodity speculation will really be helped by fixing the value of a dollar to some other commodity, though.  It's all-but-impossible to have a system that is flawless enough that there won't be some extremely profitable loophole for those willing to act in bad faith, and that's the driver behind so many problems in our market.  We need to, instead, enact and enforce regulations against commodity speculation.  Something on the order of only certain types of companies being able to buy or sell crude oil, for example.

Also, we need to shut down those inane stock options.  If you think a stock will go up, buy the damn stock.  Likewise, if you think it's going to go down, then short it.  Don't place an arbitrary bet whose value is independent of the stock itself, yet still has an influence on the price.  Same thing with anything like credit default swaps: there should be no insurance against making any kind of bad loan, and often these mechanisms are actually used like stock options to bet against the system.  The big thing here is that we can't have the money interests in an economy looking to make a profit off the de-valuation of everything else.  You may as well call that razing the economy.

Offline veekie

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Re: Wikipedia's SOPA box
« Reply #191 on: February 28, 2012, 04:54:09 PM »
Well, people seem to be manipulating sizable fortunes on things that are effectively educated bets, this first tier seems mostly harmless(they are part and parcel of market self regulation after all). And then you have people trading said bets(i.e. betting on the outcome of a bet). Then it gets really hinky and I've no idea what financial purpose it serves other than to increase transactions in general.
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Offline dman11235

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Re: Wikipedia's SOPA box
« Reply #192 on: February 28, 2012, 04:57:16 PM »
That's pretty much it.  It's a way to make money off of making money.  I really don't see how anyone can claim with a straight face that it's beneficial at all to any economy, other than their own pockets.
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Offline X-Codes

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Re: Wikipedia's SOPA box
« Reply #193 on: February 28, 2012, 06:36:47 PM »
Well, people seem to be manipulating sizable fortunes on things that are effectively educated bets, this first tier seems mostly harmless(they are part and parcel of market self regulation after all). And then you have people trading said bets(i.e. betting on the outcome of a bet). Then it gets really hinky and I've no idea what financial purpose it serves other than to increase transactions in general.
While that may be the case, it's easier to say "no derivatives" than "no derivatives of derivatives," and everyone is still perfectly capable of making assloads of money on the market in either case.

Offline SolEiji

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Re: Wikipedia's SOPA box
« Reply #194 on: February 28, 2012, 07:59:31 PM »
Also, we need to shut down those inane stock options.  If you think a stock will go up, buy the damn stock.  Likewise, if you think it's going to go down, then short it.  Don't place an arbitrary bet whose value is independent of the stock itself, yet still has an influence on the price.  Same thing with anything like credit default swaps: there should be no insurance against making any kind of bad loan, and often these mechanisms are actually used like stock options to bet against the system.  The big thing here is that we can't have the money interests in an economy looking to make a profit off the de-valuation of everything else.  You may as well call that razing the economy.

Even though I debate the fine details, I can definately agree with this.  It's pretty messed up.

....>.>.... <.<.... actually thats all I had to add.  Now, time for various links I have run across while sailing the webs.

(!) *MGS alarm sound*
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/the-grid/anonymous-wikileaks-stratfor-fbi-hacker-cyber-attacks

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/revealed-us-plans-to-charge-assange-20120228-1u14o.html

Then scary stuff:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/27/business/media/white-house-uses-espionage-act-to-pursue-leak-cases-media-equation.html?_r=3&ref=todayspaper

And bailout stuff:
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/02/27/433250/general-electric-tax-rate-decade/?mobile=nc

And a good reason to vote in someone uncorruptable:
http://blog.pfaw.org/content/the-number-one-reason-to-vote
Mudada.

Offline X-Codes

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Re: Wikipedia's SOPA box
« Reply #195 on: February 28, 2012, 08:09:46 PM »
The GE story isn't exactly "bailout" stuff, it's just plain business as usual.

Offline bhu

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Offline X-Codes

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Re: Wikipedia's SOPA box
« Reply #197 on: March 01, 2012, 09:21:14 PM »
That is something deserving of outrage.

Offline Prime32

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Re: Wikipedia's SOPA box
« Reply #198 on: March 05, 2012, 01:50:06 PM »
http://www.thejournal.ie/sherlock-opens-online-consultations-on-new-copyright-law-review-373789-Mar2012/

Interesting... Now to see how much of the legalese on this survey I can interpret.
« Last Edit: March 05, 2012, 02:20:53 PM by Prime32 »

Offline skydragonknight

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Re: Wikipedia's SOPA box
« Reply #199 on: March 06, 2012, 02:02:51 AM »
http://www.thejournal.ie/sherlock-opens-online-consultations-on-new-copyright-law-review-373789-Mar2012/

Interesting... Now to see how much of the legalese on this survey I can interpret.

Ten bucks says his major opponent is named Moriarty.
Hmm.