IIRC only about 10% of all America dollars are actually physical, the rest are numbers in a ledger (so essentially like bitcoin); not sure about other nations, but it's probably a similar scheme.  The physically printed money is produced by mints paid for via taxes and distributed to banks in armored vehicles protected by well armed and armored guards (used to know a guy who did this stuff, he got paid handsomely); to attempt to rob them will pretty much be the end of your life, either literally or through a lifelong prison sentence.  The physical notes then get passed on via bank withdrawals e.g. from an ATM, which then proceed to circulate into and out of businesses, say, when you make a purchase, and when you get change back from your purchases, and also from trading between other folks.  This is done every so often since the bank notes aren't all that durable, they get worn out or torn over time.

For everything else, check out Mike Maloney's video on how money goes from digital to physical--it's needlessly complicated, not the video but the system itself, but it is what it is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFDe5kUUyT0

Way too far gone; America's a falling rock at this point.  This is what happens when a culture is centered around vote-buying--cough, I mean democracy.  The end result is always the majority of naive idiots voting themselves into prosperity, but all it does is make life increasingly harder for everyone else until you segue into some stupid political system like communism, where people completely exit the market and try to live off politics.  As it turns out, you can't eat a political preference.

It's the most popular alternative currency; currencies get better the more people use them.  I wouldn't use, say, altcoin-X, because if I wanted to make a purchase, I'd likely have to exchange altcoin-X into bitcoin or perhaps dollars, so I may as well cut out a step.

But if you're asking why bitcoin is the most popular and not some competitor, it's likely because bitcoin came first so it's the most established; everyone knows bitcoin, not altcoin-X or some other p2p system like, say, ripple.  This may change in the future, nobody knows for sure.

Net neutrality is only a problem because existing telecom companies have incredible government grants and restrictions making it extremely difficult for new businesses to sprout, as it's too expensive.  Because you have a limited amount of companies providing any given service, those companies can easily collude and lobby and do whatever the hell they want with their businesses, such as slowing traffic and charging for certain sites.  What are you gonna do, change services?  You got like two, maybe three max options in any given area, you're pretty much screwed if they all agree on the same practices.

The solution?  Take away these grants and restrictions, stop allowing your government to regulate your businesses, and regulate them yourselves with your money.  In this case, if any single business starts acting naughty, there's plenty of alternatives to go to; the more alternatives, the easier it is for any one company to undercut another company and take their business as their own.  That's good: this is what competition does, you either be the best at what you do or you go under for being crap.  No need for net neutrality, it'd never be a problem.

And what do people advocate?  More government grants and restrictions: classify the fuckers as a public utility and further solidify their ranks as oligopolies, making it that much harder for any new business to come up and compete.  The fuck is wrong with people?  Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMG-LWyNcAs  Caterpillar is "the people", wasp is "the state and all its kin including corporations", and the maggots, well that's the wasp's ideas slowly killing the caterpillar while it cares and nurtures these ideas to its own death.  Some seriously fucked up zombie mind control voodoo bullshit going on here.  There's also folklore in Africa surrounding the idea of zombies, except they're not undead, they're just slaves to the "witch" that turns them into mindless drones.  Expending one's time, energy and health for the benefit of a predator...I have to say, it's among the most vile schemes in this world.

The free way of achieving justice is through disassociation e.g. exile; the offending party must make up for what they did in order to be welcome again, which returns their reputation to a balance in the given society.  It's a lot like prison, except they're being kept out of society via refusal to participate with them, rather than in a box in society; this is hard to pull off in a group of millions of people, but not so hard with lots of communities with local governance (which is probably what's going to wind up happening in a voluntaryist environment.)  If this individual cannot be located for whatever reason (say, they were anonymous on a website), then helping the victim get back to a state of normality is another form of justice; sometimes this is simply impossible, e.g. loss of loved one, but for many cases it's doable.  There was something which happened fairly recently, where an overweight man was laughed at and caught on camera dancing.  So then people on twitter found out who the guy was and threw him a dance party so he'd feel accepted for who he is.  Not the most serious case of injustice but it was certainly a righted wrong.  There was another answer to this injustice: put people who fat-shamed in prison.  So essentially, the libertarian approach, and the authoritarian approach; fortunately the libertarian approach won out, the wrong got righted, and nobody gets hurt.

There's never justice in a society with a state, because the state is always on a different moral standard than everyone else; for there ever to be true equality--which seems to be what justice seekers desire--there cannot be a class of higher beings with the power to do that which the individual cannot.  By this I mean, for there to be a state, there must first be a monopoly over at least one service within those political lines, usually being the security industry, so the monopoly is enforceable at all.  If a state cannot hold a monopoly over anything and is perfectly equal to all other businesses in those political lines, then it's just like any other business, no longer a state.  The state itself is an injustice; it physically stops people from doing what it does, then proclaims nobody can do it like they can like there was an option.

There will always be justice so long as there are people who seek it (and trust me, they're everywhere); the only difference between the free and confined is how they pursue this justice.  There's the authoritarian approach to justice, which requires the initial injustice, the "necessary evil", followed by violent action, and then there's the libertarian approach to justice, as described above.  You don't have to choose between justice and freedom, just between a free approach and a non-free approach; justice-seekers are tireless people who just don't let any injustice go without recourse.  Everyone's got a conscious, nobody but those who commit injustices will participate with kin, and since most people--as in like +90% of people--aren't these types of people, it's pretty obvious who wins out in the end.  That means a clear majority of healthy, functioning societies, and a tiny portion of miscreants.  To be exiled is essentially to be cast into hell; this is incentive enough not to commit injustices, assuming someone understood no other incentives like leading a happy productive life.

Of course, there are some perversions of what justice is, such as, say, communism, where the only way people feel there would be justice is if everyone was on perfectly even ground, in status and property and wealth etc.  Even this was a joke because there was still a state who was unequal to everyone else, who were the true owners of these things and people, not the public which they claimed to represent.  It's very bizarre, you see forms of this happening even today, primarily in identity politics where some race/gender/whatever wants some form of equality to another, and it's always through an authoritarian approach: others must change for them, not the individual seeking the change (because the other way around is "victim blaming".)  I consider this, in itself, a form of injustice, but those who seek it, ironically, are often called social justice warriors.  A strange perversion of language but it's a very real, active and sadly popular approach to justice in the world.  I'm not sure how these people can be dealt with, except in the way I mentioned prior: disassociation.  Essentially, I just refuse to know these people: don't work with them, don't follow them, don't recommend them, avoid avoid avoid.  The more people do this, the harder it is for the offending individuals to get ahead in life, which encourages them to change their minds: no force required.  It's like a partial exile: they're not completely removed from society but they're definitely more limited than they were before, even if only by a little, but you know what they say about the power of the individual.  And there are far worse offenders than these people of course, but those are more obvious cases; nobody wants to know the thief, the murderer, the rapist.  All that needs to change is the approach.

Collectivism has long been known to be a complete and total failure, it's just completely unnatural for human beings to live this way; it only occurs in the minds of the imaginative that such things are possible, but the facts are clear that people need to be able to surpass others in order for society to function prosperously (of course, it can still function for some time depending on how much and how fast it can burn through capital, i.e. the reason why the USSR took several decades to collapse instead of collapsing instantly.)  Everyone's different, everyone has different talents, some talents are more valued than others, some people are better at certain things than others, and some people are great at allocating resources, and some people are bad at it; the worst case scenario is voting with a ballot who should be in charge of such allocation, because most people do not know who is great at it and who is not--ignorance of the ability primarily--and this is even assuming democracy is perfect and free from corruption.  In a market, people give their money away to people who know how to allocate resources properly enough to form a profitable business; the business is profitable because it fulfills a need or desire with as little waste as possible, objective superiority in resource allocation as opposed to the subjective "whoever is most popular" approach.  People don't need to understand how to run a business to know which businesses function the best for their needs, because the most efficient businesses have the lowest prices for the best products.  It's as perfect a system as mankind can muster thanks to the process of evolution: all the other systems failed miserably, and continue to fail miserably as we see in places like Venezuela and soon to be Greece, which is why the most prosperous societies of today don't use them but this market system instead.  Sadly, that initial injustice, of the state, gets in the way of this system to right the supposed wrongs via the authoritarian approach, and the authoritarian justice-seekers continually push us back into this previous era where violence is believed to solve everything.  Thankfully, people are continually moving away from this belief.

http://liberty.me/cops

What they need to do is get out of this political-centric lifestyle (i.e. indebting their children so they can laze around today), and get back to work so they can pay back what they owe to the rest of the world.  Instead, they got all these fancy new ideas purported to help the economy, just like all "well-meaning idealists" love to do, and which will worsen the problem and result in a new idea which will be purported to help the economy...  But all it is, is for the "farmers" to find new ways to prod the "cows" to produce more milk (that is, at this point in Greece, the "cows" just aren't producing much at all), while refusing to give the "cows" enough space to actually produce since, y'know, that'd cut into the "farmer"'s paycheck and fundamental life role, which is to be narcissistic and persuasive enough to convince the "cows" that "farmers" know what's best for them.  To escape the political-centric lifestyle is as simple as rejecting the notion that people are cows in need of farming; there has never, ever, ever been political action to have productive and beneficial results in the long-term, so long as we don't include "inaction" as a form of action.  If you've never read The Road to Serfdom, now's a good time, so you can see what this is leading to (here it is in comic format: https://imgur.com/a/y0d33 )  Greece doesn't need any more ideas or plans, they need to go back to what worked.

Anyway.  I'm interested to see if Greece will pull out of this situation or continue to spiral into a North Korea sort of "democracy", where the political owners have to literally force their citizens to work to continue on as a political unit (it just so happens, North Korea has the worst economy in the world; how they're yet a smoldering hole in the ground eludes me.)  The fools in Greece fell for the thousands-years-old "we can give you everything you'll ever want if you just follow us with complete faith" gag that swallowed up so many nations in the past; they're just calling it socialism nowadays and painting it like it's something grand, when it's just more of the same that's been screwing them over: political spending sends wrong signals to market-participants makes the economy slow down because nobody knows what the market is actually like in reality anymore (plus, handouts disincentivize people from working because shit, they can just "tax the wealthy", e.g. borrow with no intent of paying back, and never work again!), nobody knows how to allocate resources effectively or productively anymore (least of all politicians; you can look at the USSR for how it worked out when market signals were almost completely obscured and their central planners had to look at the American economy to have any sense of how to allocate anything), nobody can generate capital correctly which leads to spending the capital the generations prior built up until no capital exists anymore, all that prosperity people produced via capitalist principles is gone, and all that's left is you, your state, and your compulsory participation in keeping your nation surviving at a baseline level, which they will say is owed of you for your "right to live there."

ITT, an asian supremacist seeks free advertising for their tumblr blog w/ the only incentive to copy paste from google images every 100 posts

I see, in the decision between being vain and narcissistic vs. being an intelligent and respectable human being, which direction you decided to go down

Yes, exactly; they're just two flavors of the same ideology, a vote for one is a vote for the other.  I find it funny when people call this a choice.

This is what a time sink looks like.



Years and years and years of "debating" over God and nothing has been accomplished to improve any aspect of our lives.  You're damned if you believe and damned if you don't; for example, whether your hate Kim Kardashian, or you love Kim Kardashian, it doesn't matter, what matters is that a portion of your time was lost thinking about it, or worse, that you repeated it to someone else (I recall this episode with her butt being on some magazine, and despite most people not liking any part of it, they wouldn't shut up about it and this magazine won in the end simply because people kept repeating it.)  God is special only in that it's among the oldest time sinks, and the longer it's repeated, the more religion remains in the spotlight; the only way to win is to stop thinking about it.

Tommy Emmanuel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cHeNscKZN0

Greece has a problem with itself; nothing can help Greece but the Greeks.

To pin this on a single man or organization minimizes the true problem here, that being their culture, the people themselves; they bred and raised and handed power to the men in charge of all this.  This is what the Venezuelans wanted: freedom from work and responsibility, the easy way out.  They reap what they sow.  Greece is no different, they follow the exact same footsteps; instead of honing up to their bad behavior and taking responsibility for their poor actions (e.g. borrowing with no intent of paying back), they continue to take the easy way out, and it's steadily eroding their nation.  To say, "Well, if only they had elected someone else," or, "If only the elected people had done things differently," is a red herring; the people will give power to only exactly their own reflection, always; a government will never shape its people positively, it is not a father of the people, it will only shape the public in whatever way keeps it in power; a parent will stop you from eating so many sweets because they don't want you to get diabetes, but a government will let you to eat as many sweets as you want so long as you keep voting for them, heck they'll even spend taxpayer money so you can have all the sweets you want, just keep them in power.  This is true in every nation in the world, it's just, some cultures succumb to these sweets easier than others.

The current Venezuelan manifestation is going the way of the dodo, and good riddance; they should adopt a better way of life, but if they're anything like the Greeks I've seen online, they'll be too hard-headed to do anything about it.  It works out either way: either they change or they die; we are witnessing evolution at work even in systems of human interaction.

Very enlightening, thank you for sharing.

Perfectly sums it up.  The English have been reduced to children.  That's the last stop before pre-life--or perhaps more aptly called death.  But hey, at least then, you'll finally be perfect equals and the egalitarian dream will be realized.

Glad you liked it

He said can, not must.

For most people, it's a hobby; I can think of nothing more useless to understand than economics, it's on the same level as the Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator in its potential for being any kind of good force in the world.  At best it can shape one's world view, and at worst it can shape one's world view--I'm sure you know what I'm referring to.  I've had friends who decided to major in economics in college; they all seem to regret it, esp. when I ask them why they learned it.  The answer is always, "I thought it was interesting."  Tsk, tsk; an investment like college necessitates a return, i.e. to pursue a field which is profitable, but apparently colleges will just teach you anything your heart desires.

Still, it's fun to think about and argue--we all have our pet interests.  But I'm just as baffled as you are as to why anyone disinterested in economics would listen to an economist, like he's a real Nostradamus or something.  Esp. the Keynesian school, it's horrendously abstract and disconnected from reality, takes a special sort of person; only thing that keeps it going is "only leftists have empathy and leftists like Keynes" a la Krugman; without such persuasive tactics there'd be nothing going for it.