For most of us, that requires relocating to a cheaper home, or telling your significant other that she'll need to chip in just as much as you do. Both are pretty big hurdles.
CONCLUSIONS: Among older adults who are moderate drinkers, the apparent unique effects of wine on longevity may be explained by confounding factors correlated with wine consumption.
I don't understand what you are trying to show with this study. It compares moderate drinkers among themselves according to the type of alcohol consumed. It doesn't compare drinkers vs non drinkers
Well, wasn't e-gold shut down because it didn't comply with aml laws?
What if there were two separate entities? One for the currency, and another one for the exchanges? Only exchanges would be considered money transmitters in such a case, right?
Liberty reserve was structured similar to your idea, you could get it only via exchanges, not directly. That didn't help to protect from US government.
Microsoft exists due to intellectual monopoly (copyright) granted by government. Copyright wouldn't exist in free market because it conflicts with property rights.
Hard to prove, hard to disprove. Even without IP the sheer staggering output of such a large and at the time, effective corporation would not have been easy to copy in any reasonable manner. Enterprises certainly would not have trusted their support to people without the source code. Lack of IP, after all, wouldn't mandate that Microsoft make their source available externally, and without that, the knockoffs aren't going to have a lot of luck doing anything but blind aping. Consumers might have had some copy-based knock-offs available, but frankly, they probably would have always had reliability problems and Microsoft would have made efforts to make those problems worse, many of which would have worked well enough to probably make the problem mostly go away.
I can't disprove that Microsoft depended entirely on IP, but I'd suggest that it's at least a reasonable theory that it really didn't.
The problem with that data set is that it can produce huge fluctuations due to exchange rate volatility. I think a better measure would include 'purchasing power parity'.
However, the above figures may not be a good indication of the increase in the standard of living for each county because:
(1) Japan has almost no immigration while US has had a huge influx of immigrants. My guess is that immigrants have lower incomes than the general population but much higher incomes than in their previous country. It is not fair to compare an immigrant's 2012 income with the average US income in 1995.
(2) USD GDP growth between 1995 and 2012 heavily favoured an elite, very small minority. The vast majority of the US population increased their average income by far less than 3.5% per year. I doubt Japan has skewed its income growth to the same degree.
You are, to my understanding, not correct about #2. I don't have a star for you off the top of my head. It is a bit difficult to compare transnationally because of the differing tax regimes of Japan and the US. CEOs of peer companies have similar lifestyles but in Japan they are on the books at low six figures in income, despite massive subsidization of their lifestyle by the company.
Basically, he argues (perhaps my interpretation) through statistics that income equality is very significantly related to what is typically considered a good country to live in, which in contrast to many, does not include salary/GDP and such monetary stats but rather how long you live, infant mortality rates, social mobility, etcetera, where the Nordic countries and Japan outperform all other countries (more or less) and where the USA have it really difficult to compete against other Western/developed nations.
Thus, one can quite easily argue that regardless of the adjusted GDP growth, Japan has managed to develop in a much more healthy way compared to the USA, which may be because of the quickly rising income equality.
"Whereas the U.S. labor force increased by 23 percent between 1991 and 2012, Japan’s labor force increased by a mere 0.6 percent. Thus, adjusted to a per-worker basis, Japan’s output rose respectably. Indeed Japan’s growth was considerably faster than that of Germany, which is the current poster child of economic success."
Yes i heard the opinion on the Japanese economic situation that it's hopeless because you can't fix something that ain't broken. Japanese have a problem with demography, not economy, their labor force is shrinking and people are getting older which explains their GDP being stuck, no other problem to speak of than that.
And here China will also find itself in the similar situation soon due to their one-child policy for the last 40 years. And it will be even worse than Japan's. Fortunately U.S. demographics is healthy - it's nice to have a conservative and religious society :)
With the risk of picking on details (sorry if it sounds that way!): From what my understanding (and also what I've heard is the story from Chinese people and gov) is that the situation of China regarding demographics is the way it is because Mao promoted population growth without end, mainly because a larger workforce would be able to outperform in output (which we've actually seen now is true). The downside with that policy was that there were no thought taken to when it would end, and the government/leaders that came after saw that a growing population would be impossible to feed (it was a big problem already for Mao) and it would eventually cause a sort of population bubble. Thus, they enforced the one-child policy to stop this. The current Chinese government seems to be quite aware of the demographics problems. According to official statistics (based on from what I've heard from a Chinese person), they estimate China will grow from the current 1.3 billion population up to 1.6 before it stagnates and possibly decreases. Considering the problems of a decreasing population and skewed demographics, they have started to loosen up the one-child policy however so there seems to be thinking within the top of China that they need to make a slow transition back to a more healthy size of the population.
By the way, this seems also to be the case in general with the top leaders in China. As been previously stated, China is probably way behind on the prerequisites to be able to run a working democracy (compare for example many of the countries where democracy have been quickly forced upon a country such as many of the countries where the US have been engaged in various conflicts such as Iraq and Afghanistan as well as countries in Central America). The positive sign from the leaders in China is their current and (as it looks anyway) real fight against corruption, which is a huge problem in any democracy (it seems anyhow). Of course, education is another problem but it seems like maybe there's not so much that can be done right now that let it take the time it takes to develop (since old people in general are not targeted for the educational system).
This, in combo with my comment where I mention Hans Rosling's interesting statistics, makes me quite positive about the future of China. Hopefully it lands rather than crashes and perhaps it is healthier to the country to avoid a crash and slowly manage the much needed creative destruction rather than face the consequences of a crash. A crash may for example cause a lot of social unrest, which probably will become a larger problem for China as their growth slows. Hopefully, they'll plateau into a healthy developed country, similar to what (in my opinion) it seems like Japan did. Although we don't here much about it, China is a much bigger countries with many more different groups of people than Japan (as far as my knowledge goes anyhow) and I think social unrest has much bigger potential as a serious issue to China's well-being (and thus probably the world's well-being since we do so much trading with China).
China has a long way to go and lots of problems such as corruption, educational level of the average man, transparency, human rights, and so forth. I hope for the best! :) My 5 cents anyway!
UK is next. There's no doubt in my mind they will start blocking news sites, blogs and social media in the next mass protest (if there will be one anytime soon, since UK population seems almost as complacent and docile as the American one, which is just perfect for authoritarians).
We've discussed this in previous threads - but for those reading for the first time - there was no UK law, Cameron circumvented the legal process entirely to introduce these filters.
Indeed - he basically just said to the ISPs 'do this or we'll make you do it'.
Thanks to the (abysmal) technical knowledge of our MPs, any site-blocking bill would have flown straight through as soon as the phrases 'cyber-bullying', 'think of the children' or 'illegal downloads' were mentioned. In that light, I think the ISPs probably chose the least bad option - comply, lie low and hope that they can sit it out until the government forgets about the whole thing.
> since UK population seems almost as complacent and docile as the American one
That is really quite offensive. We have a culture of protest and resistance. What we have at the moment is a paradise of easy living. Despite the depressing lie of what the media will give you with "food banks and poverty" the standard of living for most Britons is really quite good, much better than the 1980s which saw major public political unrest.
People won't take to the streets for internet privacy or other such soft battles you can think of. The political classes will chatter about whatever games they play with each other but people really don't care about such issues.
I don't live in London, I'm in the East Midlands mining country. I spent years in campaign groups including street fund raising collection so I feel qualified to judge public feeling.
It also turns out some food banks were having to request international aid in order to cope over the winter. Our lovely Prime Minister, David Cameron, even complained about them not seeking his permission to do so. (He'd justified cutting welfare by arguing the food banks could cope.)
At least UK has independent courts. Human rights activists should hire good lawyers, get them in touch with experts on networks and cryptography, and start example cases, adding nice proper focused coverage on top of it all to form a public opinion. The precedents should be set until it's too late.
UPD: I should probably have mentioned that I'm from Russia.
Sorry, we have secret, closed courts now, without juries. They were intended for terror cases, but are being used a lot more broadly than most think. A barrister friend who raised concerns about this had his career assassinated-by-media last year, and is now a hate-figure.
I'm afraid it's too late.
Edit: This piece demonstrates quite nicely how this variety of assassination happens - you know, writing things in such a way that they look like direct quotes, when they're not, and getting every paper to carry the same story - http://barristerblogger.com/2013/08/29/criticism-robert-colo...
Sorry but unless you live in R. as well, I know better. Internet users of the West have plenty of ways to fight back, and yet they don't really use any. They don't value the freedom they have — so they will soon lose even that. The strategy I suggest is completely valid. It worked in the past, and it would work now if executed properly.
I guess, if you live in an oppressive regime and have to use whatever means are available, you get a good training. Alternatively, if the society is comparably more free and you don't use your rights, you tend to forget about them - why, most of the time it works by default. But when suddenly something doesn't work - you don't know what to do.
Compare to approaches Russian opposition is taking. They have to know law, often know (much) better than judges which don't follow the law anyway - but at least the opposition reasoning and their logical constructions could be heard. I guess, not anymore - state-controlled media isn't going to provide objective coverage of "criminals" in courts.
This is true. There is a belorussian website charter97.org and it lived through offline and online closures, attacks, and all sorts of filtering by using numerous techniques. They should do online training.
It's not even slippery. It's a high-powered conveyor-belt. The people in power _know_ this was always their ultimate goal. They don't care about you, or your child's, safety. It's all about amassing more power, more control, more influence.
The problem with slippery-slope arguments is not that they are slippery, it's that you can't predict the future to know that the assertion will fall off of it. It's a post-hoc problem.
