So why the desire to have a VTOL car right now? The capability to do affordable commuter air is almost in reach and we already have aircraft in the certification pipeline that can fly 2 people on electricity alone for about an hour (see Pipistrel Alpha Electro and Airbus E-Fan). VTOL is something we've been working on for decades and still have issues with reliability (MV-22/F-35 anyone?) but airplanes are inherently stable and incredibly simple once you have a power plant that doesn't suck. If you want to know why GA has been lagging so hard, just about every plane you see has a $30k, 10gph, 258lb, lead guzzling O-360 in it that dates back from the 1930s. And yes, we still use leaded gas (100LL).
In general aviation (anything other than the airlines for our purposes) midair collisions happen with alarming regularity anywhere there is any congregation of aircraft (typically within 10mi of a non-towered airport). Add to this that they are nearly 100% fatal, unlike traffic collisions, and you have a recipe for disaster. There are systems coming online to help mitigate this issue (ADS-B) but they've been in the pipeline for years and won't see universal adoption until 2020 in theory.
At the last company I worked for, we discovered an intrusion when we started getting a ridiculous number of credit card fraud complaints. It should be noted that we sold scientific instrumentation to other small companies and rural markets so it was pretty easy for them to figure where their info got stolen from when they only used their cards for infrequent transactions.
If all the dimming star headlines are piquing your interest, you must read Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained by Alexander Hamilton. It's about the same event being observed but a couple hundred years from now in a post FTL society, so naturally they have to wander out and see what's up. The pair is one of the best recent science fiction stories to come out in the past 15 years.
Yeah, Hamilton really gets into world building. Often to the detriment of actual storytelling -- which on its day, is actually quite good.
I'd still recommend these books though.
Edit to add: Hamilton also wrote The Void Trilogy, set in the same universe as The Commonwealth Saga. They're interesting, but less so than the Commonwealth books.
Recently read it on my phone, which tells me it took 27.4 hours, or about the same as Scott Lynch's first two Gentlemen Bastards novels (also a good read, for different reasons), or a bit longer than the first 4 Dresden Files.
I love all the FPGA boards coming out but I really wish the software was better. Lattice uses the same synthesizer as Xilinx which is well known to be completely user hostile (will silently optimize huge swaths of code because it doesn't like them). The least headaches come from Altera but that's not a high bar...
And I think you'll find this is the exact reason the iCE40s are showing up in so many hobbyist projects.
I'm at my hackerspace right now. There's three people with HX8K evaluation boards at this table alone (I've got two, actually). None of us have even downloaded the Lattice tools.
I've got the HX8K eval board doing text over VGA at 1280x1024 with a simple home-etched PCB that plus into it and some very naive code, hope to hit 1920x1080... It's a lot of fun. The toolchain has some niggles, but overall it's extremely pleasant and I'm so happy it exists. I've been wanting to work with programmable logic for a few years since getting into electronics, but I've just not got along with the Xilinx and Altera tools.
It sounds like this board is going to be available for $30 and you add your own Rasp-Pi - but the $5 Pi-Zero plugs straight in on the end of the board.
There's an ARM M3 acting as FPGA programmer, GPIO, ADC and up to 512K bytes of fast SRAM on the flip-side of the board.
You might consider Clifford Wolf's Project Ice Storm - an open source tool chain for several Lattice devices - consisting of YoSys Synthesiser and Arachne Place and Route.
I think with Intel starting off on FPGAs, we might see some sanity. It's clear that those FPGAs can compute with GPGPU workloads, and depending on their adoption, we might see similar tooling.
The Xilinx synthesizer is certainly interesting. I had some fun porting a design someone else had created for I think Synplify to that a few years back, because it went and replaced a state machine crossing two clock domains with one that wasn't safe for that purpose.
the national instruments myRIO board has probably the lowest barrier to entry for FPGA programming and also microcontroller programming since it uses a zynq processor, both of which are programmed with LabVIEW. it also runs a real-time linux OS. but it isn't available to the general public, being reserved for academic use. i am not for sure why.
In this case, what they mean is that the signal will be truly line of light. As you go up in frequency, radio starts to behave more like light so while you may get some convenient reflections here and there, for the vast majority of the time, if the antenna doesn't have a clear path to the transceiver, you won't know there even is an access point.
I suspect this can be quite convenient for various places where you want to limit access to individual rooms etc, but don't want to deal with the tangle of cables and ports that a wired network would require.
Can someone provide an explanation of how this works or provide a reference with an overview? The article is light on details. I assume this means preventing banks extending credit against deposits that don't necessarily exist?
" limit financial speculation by requiring private banks to hold 100pc reserves against their deposits. "
Normally, banks aren't required to actually have the money they lend out, so when a loan is credited to your account that money is created (and when you repay the loan, the money is destroyed). In many countries banks are required to hold a certain amount reserve (I think it's about 1.5% in the USA - the UK doesn't have such a requirement), so this is simply requiring that the banks have 100%, which means banks can only lend money they actually have.
EDIT: Did you mean how does the whole money creation thing work at all? There's a very clear guide at:
Say I deposit $100 in a bank. The bank has $100. Now, say the law requires a 10% reserve. They can lend $90--which they actually have. That person takes the loan, and deposits it in their bank. Now, there are $190 in deposits from the original $100. But the bank never lent money it didn't have. Instead, the money creation comes from the fact I get to treat my $100 deposit as good as cash on hand, even though 90% of it has been lent to another person.
No, read the pdf I linked. Yours is the first misconception they address.
In summary, though, if we imagine that the bank is required to hold 10% reserve: I go to the bank and get a loan for $900. This is credited to my account. There is no requirement for this money to actually exist. The same day, you go and deposit $100 in actual dollar bills. Your account is credited with $100.
The bank's liabilities are now $100 (in your account) plus $900 (in my account) for a total of $1000. The banks reserve is $100 (real dollar bills you gave them). This is 10% reserve so the bank is legally OK. $900 has been created.
That's how it works. More detail in the PDF I linked.
Quite. Now suppose you take that $900 you've been loaned and spend a mere $90 of it buying goods from a supplier that uses a different bank. Suddenly your bank cannot meet its reserve requirements. However, if the supplier used the same bank everything would be fine. The amount banks can lend is constrained not by how much deposits they currently have, but whether it could cause a net outflow of deposits to other banks in the future.
Amongst other things, this means that how profligate a bank can be in lending money depends heavily on how much all the other banks are lending. So long as all the other banks are lending just as much out and their savings terms are competitive, the outflow of loaned funds will be balanced by an inflow of other banks' loaned funds. What happens in practice is that there's a glut of easy credit during booms which dries up during busts, making the boom-bust cycle worse. You can find some discussion of this here: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/documents/workingpap...
Thanks for the pdf and this comment. The source seems reputable and it definitely changed my understanding of how money is created. I thought banks could only lend the money they took in through deposits or borrowing and had no idea they had the authority to actually create money directly.
It's interesting to realize that you can create money in the same way that a bank. Just give your friend a promise that you will pay him in the future and he could use it as money with third parties. Most people wouldn't accept it, but that is a different issue.
If somebody is in the mood to destroy more preconceptions about economy I recommend Warren Mosler 'Seven deadly innocent frauds of economic policy', it can be a good introduction to Modern Monetary Theory:
> Deadly Innocent Fraud #1: The federal government must raise funds through taxation or borrowing in order to spend. In other words, government spending is limited by its ability to tax or borrow.
Unfortunately, in the (deadly?) Eurozone this is indeed how it works.
«In accordance with Article 123 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, overdrafts or any other type of credit facility with the ECB or with the national central banks in favour of Union institutions, bodies, offices or agencies, central governments, regional, local or other public authorities, other bodies governed by public law, or public undertakings of Member States shall be
prohibited, as shall the purchase directly from them by the ECB or national central banks of debt instruments.»
Anyone who reads Modern Monetary Theory should keep in mind that its somewhat fringe (not outside fringe like Austrian school, but very criticized and not widely accepted).
What you mean is that it's not mainstream. That's true.
Despite that, I can't recommend it enough. It's just after starting to read it that what was going on in the economy of the world made any sense to me.
Also, mainstream economy is just totally wrong in many of its descriptive aspects, but they continue teaching falsehoods anyway. An example at hand is how the fractional banking and the creation of new 'money' by banks works in, virtually, all the modern economies.
This is the reason that the linked PDF by someone a few posts above is so important. They say what Modern Monetary Theory have been saying all the time but the source is the Bank of England.
As Henry Ford said:
"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
The problem with MMT is that it extrapolates far too much from accounting identities and treats both the financial system and the state as a closed vacuum divorced from all issues of public choice and expectations. This is what leads to Mosler's "Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds" and his policy proposals. That they're frauds is technically correct from a national accounting POV, but taking them literally as the MMTers do can be disastrous. In fact, it's not taking them literally that separates MMTers and other people. It's not that mainstream economists aren't aware of the logical implications of ex nihilo fiat money creation.
Also, MMT is nothing new or groundbreaking, contrary to their claims. There have been chartalist and endogenous money creation theories for ages, and most mainstream economists are quite aware of them, contrary to the assertions of many MMTers. What separates MMT from the rest is its fusion with more dubious Post-Keynesian theories.
I have to read yet a good criticism of MMT that have not been addressed by the MMT proponents. Maybe you can address me to one.
MMT people don't claim it to be any new or groundbreaking, on the the contrary, they claim is just common sense and chartalism. What they claim is that chartalism is true, especially in modern economies. This is a very difficult thing to dispute if you analyze how money works nowadays.
In my experience, the real problem with MMT, is that the implications of what an economy is or how it really works are politically indigestible for a lot of people and inconvenient for a few.
Again, the problem is not the chartalism per se, it's that they read far too much from it for the policy aspects. They basically use the monetary theories as a front for the far more dubious Post-Keynesian policies, which have to be analyzed separately.
A good reading of the Public Choice journal and similar is a nice antidote to some of the zanier MMT and Post-Keynesian proposals.
§5 speaks in broad hypotheticals and apologetics of efficiently administrated policy, and is unsurprisingly very weak relative to the accounting and qualitative statements in the previous four sections.
If anything, you've convinced me more that MMTers believe in a perfect State. Post-Keynesian ideas seem to emanate from it. Kalecki and Robinson were outright Marxists, the former basing their economics on class conflict and the latter praising North Korea and Maoist China. The entire Post-Keynesian literature is devoid of public choice considerations, sans one weak paper from ~2004.
If MMT claims are so weak we are in dire necessity of a paper or, at least, a blog post that address its issues seriously. After searching, I have not found such thing. Maybe you could write it.
Most critics dismiss the conclusions or address questions that are not really part of MMT.
Personally, I am specially interested in criticism of the most descriptive part of MMT, starting on chartalism but going beyond, banks money creation, sectoral balances, foreign exchange, etc..
I keep trying to repeat that the monetary economics of MMT are not that objectionable, but that the MMT banner encompasses a host of other unrelated conclusions that must be examined separately, and moreover that MMTers do not take public choice seriously. This isn't some shit-flinging that you can address in a blog post. You seem to be completely unable to differentiate across several taxonomies.
(FWIW, I do intend on eventually writing a criticism of Post-Keynesianism in book form, but I'm still in earlier research phases.)
Under your scenario, if a bank can lend out $900 for every $100 it collects in deposits, then won't we see runaway monetary growth? Consider the following scenario:
1) Alice deposits $100 in Bank X
2) Bob takes out $900 loan from Bank X and deposits it in Bank Y
3) Charlie takes out $8,100 loan from Bank Y and deposits it in Bank X
4) Eve takes out $72,900 loan from Bank X and deposits it in Bank Y
5) ... the cycle continues ...
Also, I would assume that the interest rates that my bank pays for my deposits would be a lot higher if it could lend out 9x as much as it holds in deposits.
The model where a bank lends out 90% of its total deposits still makes more sense to me and will result in $900 of total money created per $100 initially deposited.
1) Alice deposits $100 in Bank X
2) Bob takes out $90 loan from Bank X and deposits it in Bank Y
3) Charlie takes out $81 loan from Bank Y and deposits it in Bank X
4) Eve takes out $72.90 loan from Bank X and deposits it in Bank Y
5) ... the cycle continues ...
and if you sum the geometric series, which in this case is finite, you get $900 of total additional money created for the initial $100 Alice put in.
"2) Bob takes out $900 loan from Bank X and deposits it in Bank Y"
If Bob takes cash from Bank X and deposits in Bank Y, Bank X has less cash, that movement is reflected in their balance and in their reserves.
If Bob makes and electronic transfer from Bank X to Bank Y, at the end of the day, Bank X and Y have to clear their balance with each other. As some people have moved money in the opposite direction, from Bank Y to Bank X, the balance could be compensated.
If for some reason, people only retire money from a bank without never making deposits, you have a bank run and it's an indicator of mistrust in that bank.
Put another way, if everyone tried to withdraw all of their money from the bank at the same point, 90% (100% - 10% = 90%) of people's cash assets would be wiped out[0].
This is known as a bank run, or (when it happens to lots of banks simultaneously) a bank panic. During the Great Depression, banks were frozen, and people were barred from withdrawing money from the bank for a certain period of time. The motivation for doing this was to halt the bank panics that were occurring.
Raising the required reserve ratio has very far-reaching implications. Broadly speaking, it tightens liquidity, making loans more difficult to come by, which decreases investment in infrastructure. This slows economic growth, because it's harder to find capital with which to start businesses, and it's harder for people to obtain money to purchase a home, further their education, etc.
[0] in the aggregate; not everyone would lose 90%, but 90% of aggregate cash assets would be.
The loans are easy to come by because the fractional reserve requirements allow the banks to create money which they use to provide loans.
When the government creates the same amount of money and directly spends it on infrastructure as opposed to loaning it to infrastructure providers... what changes other than the fact that the infrastructure becomes cheaper to the public since the provider does not need to pay back the loan?
> When the government creates the same amount of money and directly spends it on infrastructure as opposed to loaning it to infrastructure providers what changes?
It's massively less efficient. It's important to note that this is true by definition, not by assumption.
For starters, the provider absolutely does still "pay back" the loan either way. Infrastructure investment isn't free, and if the aggregate value produced by the investment adds up to less than what it cost in the first place, then we would have been better off not doing anything at all.
Secondly, the government isn't able to spend on all types of infrastructure, and when it does, it's almost always less efficient. Public works are only one type of infrastructure spending, and they're pretty much the only one that remains exclusively in the domain of government projects these days.
To give you an example of what "infrastructure" can look like, look at the website we're on. Silicon Valley has a robust network of companies and organizations that both provide capital as intermediaries[0] and increase the ROI of that capital[1]. This wouldn't be possible if there weren't sufficient liquidity
When money is created by the banks, it's created in response to market forces. Banks have to turn an economic profit of zero on the aggregate of all loans they extend, which means that they price them accordingly, and therefore the price of capital converges (in the long run) to the value added by that investment. This makes it difficult (though not impossible) to secure capital for projects that have an inferior risk-adjusted payoff.
By contrast, the government does not create capital in response to market forces. Keynesians would argue that this is the entire point of government economic policy - to smooth out short-term cyclical trends. The problem with "spending" all newly-created money on smoothing short-term cyclical trends is that it leaves zero liquidity allocated to long-term economic growth.
[0] most startups are still funded by banks, at the end of the day, with VCs serving as intermediaries - venture capitalists get their money from LPs, which tend to be institutional investors like banks (or substitutes for institutional investors).
[1] even aside from the money that YC provides a company, YC makes companies more successful (or at least more likely to succeed) through the other, intangible assets it provides.
You claim less efficiency, 'by definition', but fail to provide a definition. You then state a non sequitur (the provider doesn't exist under the posited scenario).
George Bailey explained this, in one of the greatest movies ever made.[1]
CHARLIE
I'll take mine now.
GEORGE
No, but you . . . you . . . you're thinking of
this place all wrong. As if I had the money back
in a safe. The money's not here. Your money's in
Joe's house . . .
(to one of the men)
. . . right next to yours. And in the Kennedy
house, and Mrs. Macklin's house, and a hundred
others. Why, you're lending them the money to
build, and then, they're going to pay it back
to you as best they can.
I have absolutely no idea what Switzerland will wind up with if they vote for this. But it certainly won't be banking as we know it.
I take it those with large loans would be affected as potential buyers couldn't loan as much for real estate. However it also seems like it would be more sustainable.
Additionally, this $90 deposit can then be treated as 'real' money and loaned out according to the same 10% reserve - $81. In the manner of a babushka doll, this can be deposited and loaned out ($72.90, $65.61, $59.05... etc.) until the amount becomes vanishingly small.
While this is a textbook example reserve requirements haven't been a significant constraint on bank monetary creation since the 80's. The Bretton Woods system put in place after WWII and Nixon closing the gold window in the 1970's made reserves a less unique.
The creation of non-bank demand deposits like money market funds put the nail in the coffin of using reserve requirements to manage the amount of money in the economy.
Today the biggest constraint to monetary creation is bank capital ratios. Under current rules banks have to have roughly 1 dollar if equity for every 12 dollars of loans and that can vary based on the type of loans the banks make.
I've skimmed this before and have to say I read it as the BoE absolving itself of responsibility. The popular stance is "blame the banks" and some people even believe that (commercial) bankers just print money (for themselves) whenever they feel like getting a nicer car.
Several places the paper state that the ultimate control of money creation is monetary policy i.e. not the banks. This is what I'd always thought before this idea of commercial banks having complete freedom became popular. It also states that the interest rate set by the central bank decides the rate of the loans, and thus the demand for them, and thus the amount of creation. Interestingly the link between the central bank rate and the commercial rate is not stated (I did not read it end-to-end). I always thought that ultimately they had to borrow from the central bank to remain solvent/meet reserve ratios. And that goes down as a debt to the central bank, whereas the central bank can genuinely create that loan from nowhere and is doing the creation.
Banks would essentially just facilitate transactions and act as conduits between borrowers and the central bank. I don't think it makes much sense for country like USA that places such a high importance on free markets and liberty.
Different Adblockers work in different ways, some block based on size/shape of images (IAB standards) but the most prevalent method is regex'd URL identification to known ad+tracking sites.
True, but the sites it's working against aren't the content providers, just the advertisers. As such, it's not intending to help you violate anyone's TOS in particular (except maybe and advertiser).
