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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