More typically a co-op will raise funds from members via shares. I'm a bit shaky on specifics, but those shares may be capable of being sold back (to the co-op as a whole). Voting righs often _don't_ accrue per share.
Debt financing, as mentioned, is another alternative.
The problem with that is there are tax implications to giving someone a chunk of a company (it's technically income), even if it is completely illiquid. Tax implications the employee probably can't afford much better than a buy-in.
coops normally have special status to get round some of these issues.
And coop members can have direct or indirect ownership a full on worker coop normally has direct ownership and organizations like John Lewis have indirect ie shares held in trust.
Lets not forget that economics is a social science like psychology or history. Also lets not forget that there is no such thing as "fake" and "real" money and that the economy is a social construct. The concept of fake dollars pesos or reales its a valid one but fake money is just nonsense.
I think you miss understood him. Money is just like any good subject to suply and demand. So if a country produces goods that they sell only in their national currency the more you produce of this goods the more demand there is for your money. So imagine there is a fixed quantity of money and a certain level on demand based on the quantity of the wealth produced. If suddenly you stop producing this goods then demand for your currency sinks. If this happens what you are left with is inflation. And all of this without the need to create money. For example the us prints masive amounts of money and they can do so because of the Bretton Woods system. Because the dollar is the international currency they print based on demand for their money that commes from goods produced all around the world by many countries. So it also depends on the power the nation has to oblige others to use their money.
Hyperinflation is a completely different game. Your explanation also does not cut it, because a country's GDP simply does not reduce 1000 times in a month, month after month for years. You can not have it if your government isn't printing money like mad.
Also, no the 4 QEs of the US since 2008 weren't not nearly enough to create hyperinflation. They are not even growing exponentially.
>a country's GDP simply does not reduce 1000 times in a month, month after month for years. You can not have it if your government isn't printing money like mad.
Yes, but the trigger almost never a government that goes insane and decides to print money like mad. The money printing is ramped up in an attempt to maintain the same level of spending in response to a supply shock.
>Also, no the 4 QEs of the US since 2008 weren't not nearly enough to create hyperinflation.
QE actually causes retail deflation. Which is counter-intuitive, I know.
(the reason is that money printing doesn't cause inflation - spending does, and QE actually reduces spending in non-investment products)
Fiat currency is debt. Its in its definition. Gold coins is gold. But you are right i should have said fiat currency not money. Thanks.
Edit maybe fiat currency is only debt when created through borrowing (like most of the currencys right now). But its a bit ambiguous to me because if it was diferent and goverments were alowed to produce money instead of borrowing it from the ones with the monopoly of money creation. The first time they introduce a surplus of currency to the system or the first time the currency apears the party accepting the currency in exchange for value would be making a loan of value to the goverment or an investment.
Fiat currency is simply currency that is not backed by something physical - in itself it has nothing to do with debt.
In modern economies, a central bank can and does create fiat currency out of nothing - literally declaring it into existance. This has nothing to do with debt. And yes it is an advantage for the central bank / government to be able to do this - this advantage is called seigniorage.
Usually the central bank creates money to increase financial liquidity in the banking system, and as such it wants the newly created currency to enter the financial system. The most common way to do that is for the CB to buy something - usually a bond, but it could be anything. The person selling just gets the market value for their product - no special advantage in selling to a central bank vs anyone else. But the total amount of fiat money in the system goes up. In this way the creation of money is often seen to be linked with debt but is not a fundamental link.
Then there is a second, entirely seperate kind of money that is not fiat money which is called bank money. Bank money is entirely based on debt - it is the debt of fiat money. And bank money is the most common sort of money we use, much more common than fiat money e.g. I typically buy larger purchases with bank money (a bank card transferring the IOU of my bank to a shop) instead of with fiat money (notes and coins).
I agree this stuff is entirely not too obvious & the misconception that all money is based on debt is incredibly common.
Thanks. I was talking about the genesis of the first bond. And the debt refers to the debt the goverment of the country gets when "creating money". So that the money created its created trough a loan from the CB. Then the high-powered money serves to cretae more debt money. But its a complex process that i havent studied yet and its allways nice to have a conversation about money.
Printing of money to cover for the fiscal deficit is not rare or bad by itself. Inflation can be a form of taxation if the goverment fully controlls the creation of money. The problem is that goverments are stripped from their right to do so and evey cent they create is actually borrrowed from the central bank.
Thats what i said. Goverments can't print money they need to borrow it from the one that prints it. Also borrowing from normal banks is creating money.
That is true for the goverment printing but the central bank printing its just printing i mean if you follow the chain to the creation maybe the BIS or something. Because when you print money you don't pay interest to anyone so instead of borrowing you could just jump the middleman and just print he is printing anyways. If you borrow you need to pay exponential sums. Using inflation to collect taxes was normal when the logistics were a nightmare. Its dangerous maybe but not necesarily bad and there are a lot of financial gambels done by goverments which are more dangerous.
>Because when you print money you don't pay interest to anyone so instead of borrowing you could just jump the middleman and just print he is printing anyways.
>Because when you print money you don't pay interest to anyone so instead of borrowing you could just jump the middleman and just print he is printing anyways.
While that's true technically, when governments borrow from the central bank they tend to roll over the debt instead of paying it back, so the interest is never really paid.
The big advantage to borrowing from the central bank is the average person thinks you can only borrow deposited money and doesn't realize what's happening.
I think that it has something to do with distribution. Most of the business was about distribution. Before it was dificult to distribute the information (music, movies etc) so you needed to hire someone to distribute your product and you paid a company which had the infrastructure to do so. This middle man soon became a cartel controlling distribution. Now distribution is easy and abundant so obviously it changes everything. They were selling a solution for something that used to be dificult that now is easy. Its like if your business was selling water in the desert and one day someone finds easy acces abundant water. Lets remember that most of the money is going to distributors not creators.
What i allways ask myself is for example if someone has an old car which polutes more than a new one, what would polute more to buy a new one or to continue to use the old one. Because producing the new car releases a lot of polutants as well. I have never investigated this.
I would rather see a massive uptick in retrofitting newer engines into older cars; I've done it a couple of times on older Volvos (240-940 vintage) and other makes, after the engines got really tired. I'd imagine it's cheaper/easier to just manufacture better engines and ECMs than it is to manufacture new cars, and you get to keep cool old cars on the road.
surprisingly (or not) , this is rather difficult to do in California. There is a referee that has to validate that the engine swap was completed successfully and without compromising the emissions equipment of the swapped engine. Though not every ref judges on the same scale. There have been reports of some requiring that the gas tank from the donor car be swapped as well (very difficult since the tank usually fills a space in original car that is unlikely to match with the recipient).
I'd like to see a more thorough emissions test be implemented (i.e. more than testing at two speeds, enough to gauge all operating conditions) so that it could be more objective in its process. This would also have the benefit of allowing a way to bypass the restrictive modification exception system.
Well you have to assume that if a car is serviceable it will be sold second hand so the pollution isn't really removed. But perhaps that person will be able to scrap an even worse car and the total pollution will go down.
That's a sad reflection on out throwaway economy. Obviously repairs are often a much cheaper option. Further cars limited lifespan so 1 new car could mean replacing 15 cars 1 year sooner.
You’re not counting labor costs, tracking down an issue with an older car can be seriously time consuming, and that time costs something like $75-100/hr.
For instance, my fun car had a persistent miss that made it basically undrivable. It took me something like 20-30 hours to find the issues and fix them. I have OBD2 scanners (the real deal, not the toys), all the tools needed, and the ability to read the service manuals and follow the dianostic proceedures.
Someone driving an old pile, isn’t likely to have the time, know how, or funds to fix the old car. So instead of spending $5k to fix the thing, they spend $300/mo on a new (or new to them) car.
Most states limit the max outlay required before they give someone a pass. In some cases, a vehicle requiring repair expenditures over $450 may get a waiver from the state exempting it from further repairs regardless of test outcome.
You can see a lot of details here. http://www.rff.org/Documents/RFF-DP-99-23-REV.pdf Also, repairs often increase fuel economy so not only do city's become far more livable again the net cost is fairly low.
I'm a student at Epitech, 42 it's a fork of Epitech. They have almost the same program. I love the school methodology it teaches you that grades are not important and that learning is your responsability. I think the conventional system teaches students to be insecure persons that are always looking for validation from authority figures.
In this type of system you learn how to search knowledge it changes the pasive role of the student into an active role. Also you learn that healping others and teaching them is good for everyone and never a waste of time. I think the school works really well and one would need to measure the succes of their students in the happiness and sense of acomplishment they have.
The school is not a factory producing identical products. It's a human journey of knowledge seeking and personal developement and everyone developes diferently. At times it's very intensive and people that are not really passionate and motivated drop out.
As an example of what we do this year the first project we worked on was to recode the malloc function in c. To do this we have some videos explaining the basics as well as some introductory excercises. After some research i found that the projects at harvard cs61 are very similar to what we will be doing in the unix module so i used the book they recomend there Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective. I read the relevant section and afterwards i coded a lovely implemenation of malloc. I finished in time the project. Some times it is more dificult, for example for the assambler module i found that it is more dificult to find good explanations online. But this time another student explained some key things and afterwards i was coding in intel assembly.
The most dificult information to come by is with respect to parsing and compiler theory or coding in Ocaml. Sometimes i think that if i had a teacher which was an expert in the field this sort of thing would be easy. But the truth is that learning is a personal journey and no one will solve it for us. Education needs to evolve to generate mature people that study and learn because they find that doing so fulfils them and not because they are searching for validation or an external reward waiting for someone to clasify and rank them. Clasification and ranks are subjective and are only means and not ends.
I like your description of your journey through school but your anecdote is a bit odd:
> As an example of what we do this year the first project we worked on was to recode the malloc function in c [...] after some research i found that the projects at harvard cs61 are very similar [...] so i used the book they recomend there Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective. I read the relevant section
So you used the materials put together by the teacher responsible of CS61 at Harvard, and you read the book recommended to the class
You say Epitech and 42 are similar and it describe 42 as: "This French tech school has no teachers, no books, no tuition"
Yet to succeed in that case you used the Harvard teacher information(maybe some lecture notes, slides?) and read a book.(borrowed from the library? or 'found' a pdf online)
Also on a side note: you had to be able to read and understand that book so your English level had to be at a good working level, level that you do not really have when you're straight out of French high school, does 42 expect their students to be proficient in English?
> This French tech school has no teachers [...] Yet to succeed in that case you used the Harvard teacher information
I don't think anyone imagines that human beings can educate themselves into pushing the state-of-the-art in technology, especially in the XXI-th century, without benefiting from actively transmitted knowledge from former generations.
What's disrupted by 42 isn't the concept of mature people helping younger ones acquire knowledge and later expand it; it's the school setup, its organisation around academic authority, its mass production mentality (use exams to filter uniform kids--socially and intellectually--as input, so that you produce normalized batches graduates as output, through a highly scalable and repeatable process). The teacher's knowledge, and his ability to condense it into a synthetic form (here a book), remains as valuable as before, if not more. Teachers currently have to use the Ivy league bureaucracy in order to turn those skills into a livelihood, but that can be changed.
Schools destroy kids' curiosity and self-confidence, although those are the best individual learning drivers. That's not (only) willful sabotage: the problem is, those drivers are well suited for tailor-made education, but they're considered unmanageable to handle batches of hundreds or thousands of kids. What 42 questions is: can't we claim those drivers back, now that Internet has deeply altered how humans can interact? I'm thrilled to see the answers they come up with.
I think the title is obviously clickbait exageration. Epitech does expect its students to be proficient in english. But many are not at the begining and they find resources in french. I'm also glad to share the knowledge i gathered trough english sources with them. I still think that research and academic life are vital but there is clearly some place for improvement. It is good to challenge the monopily in knowledge some want to have. The oportunity to learn should be given to anyone and internet will change the dinamics in the interaction with knowledge which is power even more than the printing press did. Being prepared for this paradigm shift is vital.
The real difference between Epitech and 42 is that Epitech does have a tuition, it is actually rather expensive by French standards.
42 innovated on that, I think it is the only privately-owned school with no tuition. Schools with no tuition (or a very low one that you can pay in one or two months of internship) are not rare in France though, it is actually the norm for the public "Grandes Écoles" and universities.
I don't think being a "conspiracy theorist" is delusonal at all if there are overwhelming facts supportig the theory.
When did it become crazy to "...have an explanatory proposition that accuses two or more persons, a group, or an organization of having caused or covered up, through secret planning and deliberate action, an illegal or harmful event or situation." Watergate, Iran-contra, prism, the cia drug trafficking during Vietnam, Cia torture programs. All of them can be defined as conspiracies yet they are true. Something is not false just for being a conspiracy. Almost everything secret agencies do can be defined as a conspiracy.
I don't think "conspiracy theorist" is really accurate term to define what is going on in most of these cases.
The vast majority of "conspiracies" are more like Underpants Gnomes business models. There's no explantory proposition anywhere. There's no overwhelming theory - put ten truthers in a room and you'll get ten wildly different theories (if you get a theory at all), and no overwhelming facts.
Watergate didn't require any theory - people connected with the Nixon administration were caught red-handed breaking and entering. It's obvious why they might do what they did and to ask who knew what/when. It was obvious people had a motive for covering up a criminal action. It was just a matter of documenting it.
When Iran leaked the Iran-hostage story via a Lebanese newspaper, nobody had a conspiracy theory before that. There was no "why would Reagan do that?" - the motivation was obvious and it was in print. When the -Contra side came out, no one had a conspiracy theory about a connection there. It was more investigation/leaks and a total surprise.
So I don't see where Conspiracy Theories really equate to uncovering Criminal Conspiracies. They seem to be more exclusive than related to each other.
That's a ridiculously narrow and exclusionary definition of conspiracy theories, one that's set up to only include those theories that are clearly delusional.
If you asked a average person three years ago whether they thought that all their calls were being recorded and that the NSA was hacking into companies and stealing data you would have been called delusional and your explanation would have been bizarre and unreal. Yet here we are today with clear evidence that all these things are being done with no repercussions for the perpetrators.
> If you asked a average person three years ago whether they thought that all their calls were being recorded and that the NSA was hacking into companies and stealing data you would have been called delusional
A person can still be operating under a conspiracy theory and talk about pervasive government surveillance. Just because it's true doesn't make it not a conspiracy theory.
But also, for your example, anyone paying attention had been saying, pretty loudly, that governments were surveiling their populations. See, for example, the EU parliament report into ECHELON. We know about ECHELON in the early 1990s. Thus, if someone had said "They've done it before, look at ECHELON, they're probably doing it now" -- that's a reasonable bit of evidence and a reasonable conclusion. If someone says "I hear clicks on my phone line and so the government is spying on me" that's a conspiracy theory (because the evidence is bogus) even though it's true (governments do spy on citizens).
If Iran-Contra was not discovered you'd think it is a 'bizare explanation' and a conspiracy theory. And it was only by a chance that it was discovered. This is even more evident in the case of Watergate.
