It's totally unfair and undemocratic for some people to be able to print money and for the rest to not be able to. Gives the former huge advantage, and creates economic inequality.
You can print money; if you hand a friend a piece of paper that says "I owe you $10" or "I owe you ten apples", you've printed money. The nominal economic value of that paper becomes the value of what it promises. Your friend could then trade that marker to one of his friends on its nominal value, as long as his friend trusts that you're good for it.
You perhaps can't print currency, but you can create money in exactly the same fashion that banks do - any time you issue a debt marker, money is created.
This is an interesting angle. The important thing to note is the "I owe you $10" piece of paper is worth roughly $10 when it comes from a trusted source.
I think if I wrote that it might not be worth the full $10 in "publicly traded" circumstances.
There's an interesting exercise in how bank-like you can become before you need to register as a financial institution.
The real difference is that you can't force the FDIC to 'insure' your 'debt marker', while a bank can. If there were no deposit insurance, depositors would actually have to worry about the soundness of their bank - and probably would demand 'full reserve' banking.
Banks allocate real resources in the economy, and the instrument by which they exercise this power is making loans (printing money) for projects they deem appropriate. I think often people get the causality backwards: banks don't have more power than other institutions and people because of their ability to loan money into being, they have the ability to make loans because of their existing power. That is, loans are merely the mechanism by which banks exert their power over resource allocation in the real economy. This Swiss referendum may put the kibosh on this particular style of loan generation, but I see no evidence that private banks won't just create a new system of loan accounting and money creation for the central bank to implement which will accomplish the same outcome within the parameters of the new referendum.
That's what I have been thinking how the system should be.
Just print eg 3% more money each year. Give eg 30% of the new money to the state for its expenses, give the rest equally divided to all the population. End of story.
No need for IRS, no need for filling taxes, layers, tax accountants, tax checks. The amount would be insignificant (as a percent) for the rich, significant for the poor, thus helping them more. The only tax would be the specifc controlled inflation.
Looks to me as a very simple, nice system. ..Any thoughts anyone, why this would or wouldn't be a good idea, and / or how it could possibly be improved?
I think it would be hard for central banks to control inflation well in this system. Japan has been trying hard for 20 years to trigger inflation through QE and related money-printing schemes, but it hasn't translated to inflation.
In Japan's case, inflation happened because of a sales-tax increase. Taxes are forced spending, and you can target heavy savers if you need to.
I think that just the levers of how much money to print and percent going to gov't could give a good amount of control though.
Some practical considerations though: How do you get the money to each person? Not everyone has a bank account. In a lot of countries (including US), there's no good single-identifier to find people either. Fraudsters could claim for other people, and the innocent people couldn't get their share. There's some logistics involved.
One small thing is that taxes have also been used a way of incentivising certain behaviour. Carbon taxes aren't about generating revenue but reducing pollution. How would that enter in this new system? Maybe Carbon...incentives? Kind of weird to implement I think
Money would find its way from the consumers to companies that need investment. Instead of banks estimating how viable your business is before giving you a loan you'd get your money straight from your customers. The market would decide which endeavors should get funding.
My only concern is that printing money would not provide enough money to run country budget (let alone basic income) without creating hyperinflation.
I meant on the logistics side of things. Lots of people don't have bank accounts. Lots of people don't have any solid ID. Plus you'll get people who are really in limbo in whatever system you build to get money to the people... some tricky stuff (especially if it's real large amounts of money).
Maybe Medicaid has solved all these kinds of issues already, and it's just about scaling
..Of course we are all humans, but that doesn't say anything about what you have been taught since birth, what you believe to be true, your values, etc.
This is not "immigration". It's invasion by 80% military age young men with unknown past, and very questionable beliefs.
The fix to failed integration is not to prevent people from getting in. It's to improve integration.
I can't believe this has to be said on HN. When you find a bug in one of your app's features, you don't remove the feature, you fix the bug.
Edit: As a sidenote, linking to the daily mail as a source for immigration-related matters is akin to linking to timecube as a source for physics papers.
Edit 2: Someone replied to my edit, but deleted their post and I didn't reply in time, so posting my reply below:
The Daily Mail doesn't so much reflect "the feelings of a large portion of the country", as much as "the feelings of a large portion of the country" happen to be easily manipulated by outrage-driven media. As for integration failures, one of the main drivers is islamophobia. Removing that really does come down to treating each other as human beings instead of being afraid of "The Different Ones".
> The fix to failed integration is not to prevent people from getting in. It's to improve integration.
And why is that our responsibility?
This is outrageous. I were forced to emigrate due to war, poverty or prosecution and happened to be accepted in a country that is not my own, I would have to be 1) extremely thankful of my hosts for saving my life and 2) morally obligated to obey their laws and customs. This is basic morality.
> come down to treating each other as human beings instead of being afraid of "The Different Ones".
This is naive to the point of irrationality. The social unrest that is spreading through Europe is not _caused_ by yellow journalism (they just profit from it), it's driven by actual contact with radically different, incompatible cultures.
Because humans are humans, regardless of where they originated from. It's our responsibility to take care of people, period. I'm not american but remember "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"?
Here's what I don't understand. When it's about blacks, the mentality comes down to being so scared of "being racist" that people want to stop using the word "slave" in database/hardware lingo. But when it's about muslims, it's not our responsibility to integrate them, they are all guilty of terrorism until proven innocent, they should be thankful we even accept them in our country (even though, really, we don't), etc..
The contrast is so fucked up. I just don't get it. And often enough it's the same people talking both talks.
> The social unrest that is spreading through Europe is not _caused_ by yellow journalism (they just profit from it), it's driven by actual contact with radically different, incompatible cultures.
{{cn}}. Most people who will complain about muslims have never met any, if they don't actively entirely avoid them. I'll give you that I can't prove all of the unrest is directly caused by toilet-papers, but I can show you a LOT of people who only know the term islam as a synonym of terrorism because the daily mail is the only place they actually read about islam.
> Because humans are humans, regardless of where they originated from. It's our responsibility to take care of people, period
I think that only westerners, with our pathological altruism, are silly enough, or brainwashed enough, to think that way. The rest of the world think of THEIR people first, as is natural. And any government has to take care of its citizens, not play world saviour.
But my point stands: if you emigrate, it is YOUR responsibility to integrate.
> because the daily mail is the only place they actually read about islam.
Surely Islamic terrorism existing in the first place is a factor to take into account. People aren't worried about Shintoist terrorism for some reason.
> if you emigrate, it is YOUR responsibility to integrate.
It's both parties' responsibility. Don't get me wrong; it's mostly your job... but the government also has to step in and make the same efforts they make towards their own citizens. Anyway, those seem to be details; I think we agree on this point more or less.
> People aren't worried about Shintoist terrorism for some reason.
And in some unnamed country, a majority of people are not worried about gun violence despite it taking far more lives than muslim terrorism. It's all a blame game on video games, mental health, etc...
The majority of people are worried about what their media makes them worried about. I'm no different - I nearly exclusively worry about what I read about. I can't worry about things I don't know about. My only choice there is to seek as much information as possible, to avoid merely mirroring the opinion of whoever wrote the piece I read.
Do you have any actual suggestions to force them to integrate better? We are no longer in a world where most of these people will be consuming their host countries mass media, and they will certainly set up their own school system, so as far as I can see there is no way of getting them to integrate.
You're making pretty wild assumptions and following that up with "so as far as I can see there is no way of getting them to integrate".
I did give suggestions to improve integration. My edit#2 was directed to your previous (now-deleted) post. But above all you make it sound like nobody's integrating, this is not the case. A large majority of muslims are integrating fine despite how hard the xenophobia and islamophobia is making it.
What about our own citizens that aren't integrating? The poor, the unemployed, the criminals, the homeless, the mentally ill... do we kick em out too because they failed to integrate? Is it always "100% or else"?
I made no such claim: you claimed that integration had failed, and I asked if you had any solutions, while pointing out how why previous methods of integration of foreign populations might no longer work.
So I guess it comes down to a question of which came first - the islamophobia or the violence justified by Islam, and you're claiming it's the islamophobia?
Did you actually see the pics on the link? Do you think a person indoctrinated since birth to hating / wanting to kill the infidels, can be "fixed" 2 or 3 decades later? I think it's a losing game, at the extremely very best.
As for the quality of the daily mail, I don't know, but those photos have been posted on various news sites around the net. They are not disputed at all.
I'm not disputing the photos, I'm disputing the source. The Daily Mail has an agenda and constantly tries to show the worst of the worst of any situation.
Are those kids actually coming to europe in waves of immigration? If not, why do they matter in talks of immigration?
And let's imagine for a moment they are - is denying them entry the right approach? Leave them in whatever neighbouring country they happen to be in at the time? These kids can be fixed. They're not wielding weapons because they're inherently evil. They were raised in a terrible environment and need to be treated like other, non-immigrant kids raised in terrible environments. We don't give up on people just because they're from somewhere else.
We are all humans. This doesn't merely mean that we should treat each individual as a human being - it also means that we should treat our neighbouring countries as we would want our own country to be.
We don't know who is coming. I don't want to learn in the Paris way. And I think the probability for that kind of events is scarily high.
I didn't say they are "inherently evil". I say they are being taught since birth to be evil, and they naturally internalize it. "Being from somewhere else" being a problem, is totally irrelevant, I didn't say or believe that, and you are distracting from the real issue of what are their learnt since birth values and beliefs.
"We are all humans."
Well, my VM is running Linux. Maybe I should try win 3.11. After all, "they are all OSes". Maybe I should try to "improve" and "integrate" it. Or maybe I will continue running Linux.
> "We are all humans." Well, my VM is running Linux. Maybe I should try win 3.11. After all, "they are all OSes". Maybe I should try to "improve" and "integrate" it. Or maybe I will continue running Linux.
I would actually like to think that I'm having a discussion with someone who is above such ridiculous analogies. I wouldn't even say "racist" but you did just compare "immigrants" to "a primitive operating system nobody wants to use".
To address your other point: I'm french, and my sister lost somebody in the Paris attacks. This doesn't mean we have to close ourselves down in a bubble.
I'll elaborate on this another time (maybe when you come up with better arguments) - but the mentality of closing borders for fear of what might come through is akin to never going out for fear of hitting a car. And car accidents happen a fuckton more than terrorist attacks.
I've known lots of kids that where indoctrinated since birth with all kinds of political and/or religious beliefs. Most of them had pretty much grown out of them by their early 20's, and even the ones that didn't ended up much more nuanced in their beliefs than their parents.
a) you need to have the seed of having an open mind, that can help you later on. If you learnt to have a closed mind, then it's a fortress new ideas can't come in.
b) There is a upper limit of mixing proportions, above which the incoming mass of people is just too high, they stick together, and don't change / mix up with the existing population. This invasion is too big, too fast, for possible integration.
I don't know if this is your intention but the way you talk about immigration as if it's a virus whose spread needs to be contained is frankly disgusting.
It's sad but I find your fervor trying to shame others to think like you because your ideas seem noble quite disgusting too. "Let's all rush and make cultural and social experiments because some guys want to feel good and we should be ashamed of ourselves if our instinct of cultural/ethnic conservation tells us to oppose radical change of our societies". I already know what happened when too many muslims crossed the border in your country and you don't have any right to impose me to do the same in my country.
What makes you think I need to shame you into this?
You're there trying to imply that the paris attacks are a result of immigration (which they were not), as if you knew anything about my country. Exactly the same thing you do to muslims, you do it to me.
I've lived in romania, so I definitely recognize your mentality there. Looking at your comment history, you seem to almost exclusively attack other people, and most of them are on matters of ethnicity. I don't need any further proof that you are not, overall, a good person in terms of culture and acceptance.
If after all this -- all those comments, those attacks, those outrageous claims... if after all this you still yourself think you're in the right? There's nothing I can do to convince you you're not.
We've banned this account for breaking the HN guidelines. You can't personally attack other users like that here. Doing it after starting a flamewar makes it worse—or rather, not worse, but clearer. None of this is welcome on Hacker News.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com. We're happy to unban accounts when people give us reason to believe they'll follow the site rules in the future.
"Only" 12% of an almost 75 million population country is alot, furthermore "Research by the United Nations Population Fund indicates that 28.2% of marriages in Turkey — almost one in three — involve girls under 18"
12% is, by some numbers, less than the % of the french population that is muslim (which is reported to be between 9 and 13%). Whether it's a big or a small number does not matter - it puts things in perspective.
And turkey is not a good country, I never claimed it was (hoooly hell did I not claim that). So your numbers are absolutely meaningless.
True, you never claimed that, however you implied, as if "only 12% that favour Sharia law" is some statistically insignificant #. Maybe my numbers are absolutely meaningless as you say but so is your contribution to the discussion so far.
For Asylum Seekers this year the figures are 72% male and 54% aged from 18-34. So maybe about 40% of them are young men of military age.
I somehow doubt there are many toddlers indoctrinated by ISIS among the refugees fleeing from a conflict in a large part caused by ISIS. A lot of people seem to be under the illusion that the victims of ISIS that have been driven from their homes must, because they are mainly Muslims, be ISIS supporters. But I'm afraid that's the level of coherence I've come to expect from in anti-refugee rhetoric.
We don't know if all of them are victims of ISIS. We don't know if one in a thousand isn't ISIS, planning on attacking. ISIS actually has said they are doing that.
I find it fascinating how readily people will act and behave based on what ISIS does. Here's a riddle for you:
Step 1: Let's assume for a second that the marginalization of muslims leads to more hostility and radicalization.
Knowing that ISIS benefits from the radicalization of muslims, what do you think happens when their actions lead to islamophobia, which in turn leads to more marginalization? (Go to step 1).
If you think they're blind to this cycle, you are a fool.
Listening to the terrorists is always a good idea, especially when they are discussing how to attack us. I suggest you learn a little arabic or turkish, and browse their popular websites to find out what they think of westerners as well, while you're at it.
The vast majority of them support us. In polls, no Muslim country has more than 15% of the population supporting IS. Even the most supposedly damning statistic heralded in the hysterical press that '70% of Muslims are sympathetic to IS' is a distortion. Predominantly they are sympathetic that IS supporters have become so deluded and bitter, not that they are sympathetic to their cause.
The truth is that the majority of the victims of Muslim terrorism are actually Muslims. More children and teachers were killed in an attack on a single school in Pakistan this year than were killed in Paris. Every single one of those children and teachers were Muslim. Most Muslims all over the world are perfectly aware of this. Just this week Islamists captured a bus in Kenya and ordered the Muslim occupants to separate from the Christians so the Christians could be killed. The Muslim passengers refused, shielding the Christians with their bodies and saying they would have to be killed as well. Eventually the Islamists gave up.
Ultimately we are all either part of the solution or part of the problem. We need to work together and support each other to solve this. It turns out most Muslims want to be part of the solution. How about you?
Firstly, 15% supporting ISIS is a huge amount of people.
Secondly, there are lots of anecdotes about Islamic refugees throwing Christian ones overboard, or maltreating them at refugee centers and so forth too.
Thirdly, you don't mention what solution you are thinking of that you claim we are all for or against, and that we all need to work together for, so I cannot really be for or against it.
Polls and anecdotes are not as good as internet discussion fora for getting to grips with how a particular culture actually thinks.
15% is disappointing, but then the number of racist xenophobes that equate Muslim with terrorist is disappointingly high so what are you going to do?
All an internet discussion group tells you is what those particular people on that specific discussion group thinks. Anyone who believes otherwise is beyond help.
That's demonstrably not true. Experiments have been done on this with animals. There have also been experiments with filling a space with ecig vapor, and calculating how much nic was is the air. It was extremely low. You don't know what you are talking about.
"So ultimately, we learned that you can go for 9 months without sleeping before you die"
My "high score" is 3 days without sleeping. Think young, healthy, pretty physical, 1st year in university, while red alert 1 was hot. And I "kind of liked" red alert.
Outcome:
After that time, I layed on bed about noon, and woke up next day early afternoon. ~24+h later. Btw, I hadn't eaten the previous time. I managed to go to the uni restaurant with a friend, and there I semi collapsed, laying flat on 2 chairs, closed eyes, open mouth, slow breath. I was half a step from being rushed to the hospital, and one and a half steps from some serious life threatening situations. Didn't even have the energy to eat the food in front of me. What "saved" me, was that a concerned manager came, asked what's going on, and I asked for salted olive oils. He brought them in a hurry. I had barely enough energy to scrap the skin of the first one, and taste the juice. The first, took some time. And the second. After the third, I ate around 10 like there was no tomorrow. And then I had the energy to eat the food in front of me.
So, basically, IMHMO, no way you can survive 9 months without sleeping.
I would guess dehydration also played a not insignificant part in your symptoms. When it happened to me (dehydration, not sleep deprivation), the extreme fatigue was the weirdest part. Surreal and disturbing how little I could move.
I meant olives, with extra salt on top of them. Salt, to immediately kick you off, (with no real nutritious support), and olives, for their fat and iron, and nutrients to sustain and feed you. In this case they were greek, but I suppose that doesn't really matter.
True, anyone can argue anything, but sleep deprivation is pretty low on the pain scale once you have kids. You discover that the child will bring sleep deprivation to the parents for months on end. But, it isn't torture, because this is what you signed up to do. You volunteered to lose sleep.
On the other hand, once you have teenagers you discover that they would claim confiscating their iPhone for an entire weekend is torture.
That's broken logic on a grand scale. Using the same method, let's justify punching them ...
> True, anyone can argue anything, but getting punched in the face is pretty low on the pain scale once you start boxing. You discover that your sessions on the ring will bring punches to your face for months on end. But, it isn't torture, because this is what you signed up to do. You volunteered to get punched.
Ergo, using your logic, punching prisoners in the face is not torture !
Going on minimal sleep for a week is far less severe than no sleep for 11 days straight.
If they were keeping prisoners up for 24-36 hours, I could see that potentially being argued as not torture, if not done frequently. Anything beyond that is cruel.
