[QUOTE=xilman;386473]I'm quite sure that is incorrect for many things. You may have a good case for hosuing but not, I suggest, for stuff such as foreign vacations, cars, home electrical goods and restaurant meals. All of those have fallen in price in real terms over the last few decades for most people in most parts of the deveoped world. Quite a few have fallen in deflated currency prices. My first home computer, a Research Machines 380Z, would have cost me about £2000 in 1980 or so. I couldn';t afford it then and got it only because it was a gift in return for some freelance hacking for RM. My wife's first laptop was around £1700 in about 1990. Their present day equivalents are perhaps a quarter of those figures.[/QUOTE]

So only the really big-ticket stuff, the things people go into hock for years and decades for, have been price-inflated due to EZ-money debt programs? Great.

BTW, the vast majority of economists will tell you the price-deflation in items such as you note, i.e. the concept that advances in technology and manufacturing *should* lead to deflationary trends (= greater real wealth at the broadest societal levels) over time is aberrational and needs to be stamped out. Because if da peeps be 'tinking da prices a' 'tings be lower nex year, dey won' buy anyting dis year. (Much less going into debt to do so).

(By that 'reasoning', one would *never* buy a new computer or tech gadget, but the rare heretical economist who actually check his models via such real-life extrapolations has no future in academia or government.)

o [url=io9.com/how-chinas-rare-earth-weapon-went-from-boom-to-bust-1653638596]How China's "Rare Earth" Weapon Went From Boom To Bust[/url] (Followup on a topic that was covered in the MET threads back in 2008)

o For those of you who've been wondering what oligarchy-gadfly Matt Taibbi has been up to since leaving [i]Rolling Stone[/i] for First Look Media, the online alt-media venture funded by PayPal billionaire Pierre Omidyar, the answer is, alas, "bugger all". We can only hope that the announcement of [url=http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/10/matt-taibbi-leaving-first-look.html]his leaving First Look[/url] bodes better for a return to the form he showed while at [i]Rolling Stone[/i].

As many have noted, the whole Taibbi/Omidyar dalliance seemed a bizarre marriage from the beginning: gadfly journaist famed for his merciless skewering of the oligarchy and need for investigative free-rein goes to work for control-freak tech billionaire oligarch. What could go wrong? /sarc

And ... he's back (at Rolling Stone), at least for now. That was quick!

[url=http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-9-billion-witness-20141106#ixzz3IJS13brU]The $9 Billion Witness: Meet the woman JPMorgan Chase paid one of the largest fines in American history to keep from talking[/url]

A five week online DelftX course on the economics of cybersecurity starts in January.
The price for participating is $250 (presumably U.S. dollars).

For further details:
[URL="https://www.edx.org/course/delftx/delftx-econsec101x-economics-4691#.VGt1AuOfp0o"]https://www.edx.org/course/delftx/delftx-econsec101x-economics-4691[/URL]

[QUOTE=Nick;387985]A five week online DelftX course on the economics of cybersecurity starts in January.[/QUOTE]

I am more interested in the security of cybereconomics myself, but thanks for the link!

[url=www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/11/jonathan-gruber-obamacare-stupid-voters-couldnt-happen-nicer-shill.html]Jonathan Gruber, ObamaCare, and “Stupid Voters”: It Couldn’t Happen to a Nicer Shill[/url]

You have to read to the end to get to the "but note that ObamaCare is genuinely a bipartisan creation" part of the article.

Perhaps the only thing more annoying than Gruber's haughtiness, is that he is *right* - most 'merican voters *are* stupid. I don't mean in terms of IQ-style intelligence, but in terms of letting themselves be lied to, oh-so-easily distracted by partisan "hot button" distractions, and wilfully ignorantized about genuinely important issues, #1 of which is that in fact, and especially at the national level, there is very little difference between the 2 major parties in terms of who they serve, and the actions they support (e.g. with respect to warmongering, above-the-lawness of big corps, and unending support for idiotic US foreign policy and post-9/11 NatSec state trampling of the Bill of Rights.)

[URL="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/11/paul-ryan-dynamic-scoring-tax"]The GOP Controls Congress. Now It Can Change How Math Works.[/URL]
An obscure budgeting trick could make Republican tax cuts for the wealthy appear less costly.
[QUOTE]Here's how it would work. In January, Republicans will be in charge of Congress. And that includes the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), which calculates how tax laws affect revenue, and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which produces official budget projections. Right now, when the CBO and the JCT calculate the impact of tax laws on government income, they consider how Americans might alter their behavior in response to tax rate changes. But these tax-math bodies do not evaluate how tax legislation could affect economic growth—largely because those sorts of impacts are hard to predict. Republicans have long claimed that tax cuts lead to greater economic activity that inexorably yields more tax revenues—a point much disputed. But Ryan, who in January will head up the House Ways and Means committee (which has jurisdiction over tax reform), and his fellow GOPers are looking to enshrine this Republican belief into the hard and fast calculations of Capitol Hill's number-crunchers.[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=Nick;387985]A five week online DelftX course on the economics of cybersecurity starts in January.[/QUOTE]

On this theme, Bruce Schneier's [url=https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/11/economic_failur.html]Economic Failures of HTTPS Encryption[/url] links to a recent paper, "Security Collapse of the HTTPS Market", which borrows some terminology from the late great financial crisis to describe the dynamics. He quotes from the paper's conclusion:
[quote]Recent breaches at CAs have exposed several systemic vulnerabilities and market failures inherent in the current HTTPS authentication model: the security of the entire ecosystem suffers if any of the hundreds of CAs is compromised (weakest link); browsers are unable to revoke trust in major CAs ("too big to fail"); CAs manage to conceal security incidents (information asymmetry); and ultimately customers and end users bear the liability and damages of security incidents (negative externalities).

Understanding the market and value chain for HTTPS is essential to address these systemic vulnerabilities. The market is highly concentrated, with very large price differences among suppliers and limited price competition. Paradoxically, the current vulnerabilities benefit rather than hurt the dominant CAs, because among others, they are too big to fail.[/quote]

[url=thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/225500-how-to-stop-the-government-from-snooping-on-your-phone]How to stop NSA from snooping on you[/url] | TheHill (snip emphasis mine):
[quote]While both Apple and Google have made similar security claims about their devices, Soghoian favors Apple.

“I think Apple is probably doing a better job on the security of their smartphones than any other electronics company,” he said.

[u]However, “security of Apple’s encryption is only as good as the password you use on the device,” he added[/u].[/quote]
...and furthermore, the security of Apple’s encryption is only as good as, well, the security of Apple’s encryption, which you have to take their word for - not so much in the maths of the crypto scheme(s) used as in their implementation. Article also goes on to describe that anything you store "in the cloud" is more or less completely insecure, and as most cloud-based data services back up user data to the cloud "for your convenience" they are thus incompatible with any reasonably strong notion of data security.

A great deal of money is spent on the security of smartphones and other such devices, but it is not the consumer's security: most of the time, he/she is viewed as one of the potential threats.

[url]http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/feds-want-apples-help-to-defeat-encrypted-phones-new-legal-case-shows/[/url]

[QUOTE=Nick;388787]A great deal of money is spent on the security of smartphones and other such devices, but it is not the consumer's security: most of the time, he/she is viewed as one of the potential threats.[/QUOTE]
There was a free weekend on all channels on cable and we watched the "Enemy of the State".
Way ahead of its time, that movie.
Already then, in 1998, dealt with this question! Tony Scott apparently knew too much.

[SPOILER]Reminds me to spend an evening reading conspiracy theories about his death.[/SPOILER]

[URL="http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2014_Fall_McPherson.php"]Falling[/URL] -- William McPherson (Reprinted from [I]The Hedgehog Review[/I])
[quote]Like a lot of other people, I started life comfortably middle-class, maybe upper-middle class; now, like a lot of other people walking the streets of America today, I am poor. To put it directly, I have no money. Does this embarrass me? Of course, it embarrasses me—and a lot of other things as well. It’s humiliating to be poor, to be dependent on the kindness of family and friends and government subsidies. But it sure is an education.

Social classes are relative and definitions vary, but if money defines class, the sociologists would say I was not among the wretched of the earth but probably at the higher end of the lower classes. I’m not working class because I don’t have what most people consider a job. I’m a writer, although I don’t grind out the words the way I once did. Which is one reason I’m poor.

My income consists of a Social Security check and a miserable pension from the Washington Post, where I worked intermittently for a total of about twenty-five years, interrupted by a stint at a publishing house in New York just before my profit-sharing would have taken effect. I returned to the Post, won a Pulitzer Prize, continued working for another eight years, with a leave of absence now and then. As the last leave rolled on, the Post suggested I come back to work or, alternatively, the company would allow me to take an early retirement. I was fifty-three at the time. I chose retirement because I was under the illusion—perhaps delusion is the more accurate word—that I could make a living as a writer and the Post offered to keep me on their medical insurance program, which at the time was very good and very cheap.

The pension would start twelve years later when I was sixty-five. What cost a dollar at the time I accepted the offer, would cost $1.44 when the checks began. Today, what cost a dollar in 1986 costs $2.10. The cumulative rate of inflation is 109.7 percent. The pension remains the same. It is not adjusted for inflation. In the meantime, medical insurance costs have soared. Today, I pay more than twice as much for a month of medical insurance as I paid in 1987 for a year of better coverage. My pension is worth half what it was. And I’m one of the lucky ones.[/quote]