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On 2/13/2011 3:08 PM, Darren New wrote:
>> Its not just a mad rush of Caveat Emptor, followed by 3/4 the
>> population finding they have completely lost *everything* they own,
>> over night, because they can't afford to keep any of it and not starve
>> to death.
>
> Except that's *exactly* what happened in Iceland. And Zimbabwe. And
> war-time Germany. And etc. Primarily because something like gold, while
> arbitrary, is recognized everywhere as valuable, while something like
> the currency of the Confederate States of America really has no value
> outside of the confederacy, and when the war is lost, so is the value.
>
OK. Not going to belabor the point. There are circumstances where it can
be worse. My point though is that, for the average person, its not
terribly relevant, since the average person is neither going to have a
lot of ready coin to melt down, under systems where that sort of thing
is used, nor will it help them at all to only have a few hundred in
worthless scrip, instead of millions. The key issue is whether or not
the system that defined the scrip/currency remains. Short of the fall of
a government, there is, presumably, some capacity for recovery of "some"
of the value. There are exceptions to that, but those are ones where
there is already other unstable conditions, i.e. Zimbabwe, or limited
sources of income to everyone in general, including those responsible
for defining the standard.
I will say that if the Rethuglicans keep pushing for tax cuts to
companies outsourcing jobs, cuts in spending on helping people that are
short changed by this idiocy, and the left keeps doing stupid shit, like
Obama's proposal to cut grants for students (what, now suddenly the do
nothing, but charge you an arm and a leg in interest via student loans
people are OK, when they where declared to be worthless a few weeks
ago?), thus reducing the number of people that *might* still find jobs
that don't involve hamburger buns, the next financial idiocy the people
with money come up with might result in the US currency having the same
monetary value as the Mexican one. You have to take sane steps to
maintain the value, and keep the economy stable. Sending more than 40%,
or worse, of your labor some place else, raising pay rates for the top
to 50+ times what the bottom makes, then insisting that taxes need to be
places on those low earners, not the guys paying less than 20% what they
did in the 50's, while our economy gets *worse*, not better.. its a damn
stupid, and insane, method of ensuring that any currency has any damn
value. Especially since, even if we tried to melt down the change in our
pockets, it would be worth less than the cost of making the change.
Heard some idiot the other day at a winter festival thing we had here
babbling about, "If this doesn't stop, we might need to do what Egypt
did.", and the only thought I could come up with was, "Unfortunately, if
it happens, it will be idiots like you doing it, for the wrong reasons,
based on the wrong assumptions, and the *new* government will be made up
to so called conservatives, who will proceed to do **exactly** the same
stupid shit that caused the problem in the first place, because you
don't pay attention, you just listen to the bullshit coming from the
people screwing it all up in the first place." I don't care if you used
every dime you made in the US, unless you where making $50,000 a year,
on gold, or the like, if things go that bad, there is no one you could
sell the shit too that would save you from instant poverty anyway.
> Indeed, we even have a word, scrip, to indicate fiat currency that is
> intentionally of no value outside the very specific circumstances in
> which it is issued. You can't have a commodity-based scrip.
>
I actually looked up the definition of "fiat currency", not fiat in
general, and the definition given was a bit less specific as to what it
meant, stating merely (I don't remember the exact wording), that it was
currency representing a value, where the value itself was not *in* the
material it was made of. You definition is a bit more specific than
that, which may be part of the issue when trying to make my point.
--
void main () {
If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
if version = "Vista" {
call slow_by_half();
call DRM_everything();
}
call functional_code();
}
else
call crash_windows();
}
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