"Even Milton Friedman, the high priest of monetarism (or perhaps Scott Sumner today on market monetarism) insisted that you want the money supply to be expanding so as to cater to the greater demand for money as the economy grows. Sure, too much monetary expansion will lead to inflation, too much money chasing too few goods. But deflation means the opposite, where the economy, if the deflation is strong enough, will shrink in terms of the goods and services available to us. That is indeed the same thing as saying we'll all get poorer."
Scratches to Sketches
Monday, 30 December 2013
Manufacturing lessons from Germany - Tradegood
"Germany is the largest economy in Europe and the second largest exporter in the world after China. The country's 2.7 trillion euro GDP accounts for nearly 30% of Eurozone output. Over the past decade it has posted the fastest GDP per capita growth, making it the second largest production powerhouse among the G7 economies. With the second-lowest unemployment rate in Europe and an economic growth at 0.7% in the second quarter of 2013, the country successfully weathered the 18-month economic downturn in the Eurozone. As seen from the recent Global Manufacturing Competitiveness Index 2013, Germany ranked second in global manufacturing competitiveness after China, but topped the list among the developed countries. It has also gained political clout thanks to its role as the biggest financial contributor to Europe's bailouts."
I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on | Heather Linebaugh | Comment is free | theguardian.com
Few of these politicians who so brazenly proclaim the benefits of drones have a real clue of what actually goes on. I, on the other hand, have seen these awful sights first hand.
Edward Snowden declares 'mission accomplished' in Moscow interview | World news | theguardian.com
He continued: "I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn't want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself."
NSA mass collection of phone data is legal, federal judge rules | World news | The Guardian
Judge Pauley said privacy protections enshrined in the fourth amendment of the US constitution needed to be balanced against a government need to maintain a database of records to prevent future terrorist attacks. "The right to be free from searches is fundamental but not absolute," he said. "Whether the fourth amendment protects bulk telephony metadata is ultimately a question of reasonableness."
NSA 'hacking unit' infiltrates computers around the world – report | World news | The Guardian
NSA officials responded to the Spiegel report with a statement, which said: "Tailored Access Operations is a unique national asset that is on the front lines of enabling NSA to defend the nation and its allies. [TAO's] work is centred on computer network exploitation in support of foreign intelligence collection."
How London's Heathrow Software Died Causing a Massive Disruption of Services
"Placing barriers in the way of widespread dissemination of relevant details of adverse events is a way of preventing learning in any organization," said Dr. John Wreathall of the Resilience Engineering group. "Bear in mind that one hallmark of a resilient organization is that it is prepared not only for its own failures, but those which it can learn from others. The more resilient an organization is, the larger are the lessons it has learned from others."
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Sketches from scratches is a provocative blogspot that has grown out of the Wuh Lax experience. It is eclectic, which means that it might consider just about anything from the simple to the extremely difficult. A scratch can be something that is troubling me or a short line on paper. From a scratch comes a verbal sketch or image sketch of the issue or subject. Other sites have other stuff that should really be of interest to the broad reader. I try to develop themes, but variety often comes before depth.
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