(from elsewhere)
I don’t do ‘stupid’. I do my job. Which is to provide operational definitions of those ideas about which people are frequently ignorant, confused, wishful thinkers, or dishonest.
I am really, really, really good at my job.
Don’t waste my time
Source date (UTC): 2017-12-21 11:40:00 UTC
ALL ABOUT MONEY: WHAT IS MONEY, GOOD MONEY, TOLERABLE MONEY, BAD MONEY, AND WHAT IS NOT MONEY.
(DRAFT: it’s getting too late to finish, and I’ve been sick for the past few days, so Ill finish this – as promised – later or tomorrow)
The main functions of money are distinguished as:
– A Store of Time.
… If I could educate people on just one idea, it would bet that our only existential commodity is time, and we are no wealthier than cave men, but through a continuously expanding division of labor due to property, money, prices, and contract, we produce more per moment of working life than ever before. So we are not wealthier than in the past, we have merley made everything vastly cheaper.
Hard money is the result of saved time. Credit money is the result of anticipated savings of time. Fiat money is the result of gambling that in the aggregate will will save time.
And so credit, and fiat money are only so valuable as there is opportunity to save time. This single idea is the basis of all of economics. Yet it is virtually unknown, and ever more rarely understood.
– A Store of Value (Purchasing power) – with stability of value (Purchasing power) within dependent production cycles.
– A Medium of Exchange – thereby satisfying the problem of “coincidence of wants”, and increasing the velocity of trade, by decreasing the friction (cost) of finding opportunities for trade, and performing that trade. Mediums of exchange save time.
– A Source of Liquidity – A commodity of continuous demand.
( … )
– A Provisioner of Prices.
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– A Unit of Account;
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– A Standard of Deferred Payment – debt, credit, interest,
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– A Scope of Utility – “Range” – A commodity of demand sufficient for imputation for production cycles
( … )
To fulfill those functions, money must possess the following properties:
– Cognizable: its value must be easily identified.
…. Stamping ‘coins’ serves as a ‘trademark’.
…. Protecting that trademark serves to protect its value
…. Trademarking is … increasingly inordinately expensive.
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– Unitary (‘countable’) by object, weight, volume – (and now index.)
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– Fungible: its individual units must be capable of mutual substitution (i.e., interchangeability).
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– Durable: able to withstand repeated use.
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– Portable: easily carried and transported in relation to their purchasing power.
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MONEY AND IT’S SUBSTITUTES (DEPENDENCIES)
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Source date (UTC): 2017-12-20 20:29:00 UTC
No. the metric system was a mistake. “Human Scale” measurements are superior.
a thumb is an inch.
A foot is a foot.
A yard is an arm.
A mile is a thousand paces.
Fahrenheit is superior for temperature sensitivity.
The only reason for the metric system was to make calculations easier.
https://www.quora.com/Should-the-United-States-switch-to-the-metric-system
A) Um, all aggregate measurements are misleading. If in a country of 1M people, they make $1 a day and I make $1B a day, the GDP/Population will be 365M + 365B/1M, giving the impression that everyone in the country is making more than $300K per year.
B) Resources are a curse, because they lead to corruption, rent seeking, subsidy, and a lack of innovation.
C) Putin does not get credit for his expansion of rule of law. But corruption is pervasive. It is not like corruption in the states – which is invisible – it’s visible. And in some ways that’s more tolerable. But it is very hard to start and keep a business running, and it’s middle class and business that drives a people out of low income.
B) Russia is a VERY big place. I mean, the USA is big. But Russia is 11 time zones big, and like canada, the population is largely along the borders. Imagine the cost of infrastructure in Belgium or Denmark vs the cost of infrastructure in Russia? For example, I spent some time with the founder and ‘president’ of one of the popular mega sports store chains. And what do you do when you run a business across that many time zones, and telephone, internet, and power, are often unreliable? What do you do when you must pay (bribe) people in the government just to get basic things done – not even privileges, but just to do their job? I tried to buy a company in moscow, and i literally couldn’t find one to buy. Not because there weren’t any. But because you can’t keep ‘legit’ books and survive. And it’s never clear who owns anything. Until the past few years it was difficult to trust the courts so contracts were difficult, and cash rather than credit slows the economy. So all of these ‘frictions’ add up.
C) Moscow is a VERY expensive city (I wish I lived there, I love it and I love russian people). But people outside the major cities are still quite poor. (And Belarus and Ukraine are even worse.)
D) Russians were virtually slaves 150 years ago. Under the soviets it varied quite a bit from murderous, to horrible to comfortable, to exceptionally good. And then they had a catastrophic event (collapse), and then dragged themselves out of it.
The only difference I have found between ‘white’ russians and ‘white’ americans is that americans are foolishly optimistic and trusting, and russians are foolishly pessimistic and untrusting. The rest of the western world has turned effeminate in the french(postmodern) and jewish(marxist) and outside of Australians, White americans, and White Russians, Christendom is in a catastrophe.
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Russia-with-this-great-potential-140-million-intelligent-people-large-country-with-natural-resources-great-geography-and-climate-etc-still-relatively-poor
We actually have quite a bit of data. The data I have seen is cross compiled from a number of surveys and has something just under 100K samples – which is about what you need for something of this size. (No studies of less than 1000 are meaningful, and at 10,000 we begin to see some value
The top ten most racist and bigoted countries, in descending order, are the following:
In american, the most racist people are
White people are the most tolerant and accepting – in the world.
White people are just the most likely to be INVADED because they produce the best *Commons* in the world, and therefore the best life experience.
So whites experience the PROBLEM of racial conflict more often. So the question arises more frequently.
Anyway. It’s the opposite of what you’d think.
https://www.quora.com/What-races-are-the-most-racist
No. the metric system was a mistake. “Human Scale” measurements are superior.
a thumb is an inch.
A foot is a foot.
A yard is an arm.
A mile is a thousand paces.
Fahrenheit is superior for temperature sensitivity.
The only reason for the metric system was to make calculations easier.
https://www.quora.com/Should-the-United-States-switch-to-the-metric-system