Good heavens!!!
Well, it seems the people of the Eurozone are escaping the dire clutches of lower prices. What a relief!!! I was scrambling to put together care packages for our friends in the Eurozone.
Eurozone period of falling prices ends in April
But, of course, we all know this is impossible. Once prices start to lower, people quit buying stuff they need because they think the prices might go even lower, so they just quit buying stuff like food, clothes, electricity, gasoline, tires, washers and driers ….. etc …. because prices might be lower a few months from now. This causes an economic calamity, which has happened never.
But, let’s look at the article ……
LONDON (AP) — Well that didn’t last long.
The drop in consumer prices in the eurozone has come to an end after four months, easing concerns about a long-term decline that can choke the economy.
Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics agency, said Thursday that consumer prices were unchanged in the year through April, up from the 0.1 percent fall recorded the previous month.
The flat reading was in line with market forecasts and reinforces expectations that the impact of lower oil prices is moderating. In the year to April, energy costs were 5.8 percent lower, against the 9.3 percent fall recorded in January.
Energy costs were the main reason why consumer prices in the eurozone fell between December and March. Fears that a long-lasting period of falling prices could weigh on the eurozone economy were largely behind the European Central Bank’s recently launched 1.1 trillion-euro ($1.2 trillion) monetary stimulus. More money in the economy has the potential to stoke inflationary pressures as does the consequent fall in the euro, which raises the price of imports.
At first glance, a drop in prices sounds nice — particularly for consumers getting goods for cheaper.
And that appears to have happened over the past few months as consumers gained in their pocket from the fall in oil prices. Money saved filling up a car was money that could be used elsewhere. Most economic figures over the past few months have shown an uptick in eurozone economic activity, though concerns over Greece appear to be having an effect again.
The problem confronting ECB policymakers was not about the short-term fall in prices. Its concern centered on the possibility that prices might fall consistently over time. Such a longer-term, called deflation, encourages people to put off spending and can prove difficult to reverse because it requires altering people’s expectations. It can lead to years of economic stagnation, as in Japan over the past two decades, or at worst, into something more pernicious, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s. ….
Let’s stop there. Lower prices didn’t cause Japan’s stagnation. Nor did lower prices cause the Great Depression. It is malicious stupidity to even suggest this. Japan’s stagnation is the reason for stable prices in Japan, but, even then, prices aren’t cheaper, and people in Japan didn’t put off buying a smart phone for twenty years because they think the prices may go lower tomorrow. What sort of idiot would even put that in print? And, of course, lower prices didn’t cause the Great Depression, lower prices was a symptom, an effect of the Great Depression. People didn’t have jobs, thus, they had no money to buy stuff. That’s what caused prices to drop.
Here’s something else ……
Though deflationary pressures appear to have eased somewhat, the ECB still has a long way to go before inflation is where it wants to be. Its aim is to have prices rising at a tad below 2 percent annually. ….
This notion is an insidious attack on people worldwide. Central banks world wide target an inflation rate without regard to the accumulated wealth of the people. Given the fall of the Euro, and the herculean efforts of the ECB to cause inflation, all else being equal, this is simply an effort to impoverish the people who possess Euros. It’s disastrous for the people! Unless they’re getting raises equivalent or greater than the fall of the currency and the rise of inflation, then, they’re losing wealth and their pay is losing value!
How much value have the people holding Euros lost to the US dollar over the last several months? And the ECB wants more inflation? Damn those ideological bastards! The Weimar Republic wasn’t a good enough example for the people of Europe?
There is never, once, an example of lower prices causing any economic harm to any people, nation, or entity. Lower prices equate to more wealth for the people ….. always! Inflation, OTOH, has caused horrid harm to the world, expressed in many different ways.
suyts space 
“It can lead to years of economic stagnation, as in Japan over the past two decades,”
BTW; Japan’s Lost Decades are a myth anyway.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2013/08/11/now-for-the-truth-the-story-of-japans-lost-decades-is-the-worlds-most-absurd-media-myth/
Dirk, the times I disagree only come about because of the amount of times you comment. I agree with most of what you state, but, you state a lot! So, because of the frequency, it’s natural that we’d find disagreement in some places. Here’s the key portion of the article you offered.
Well, the mere mentioning of “echoing Paul Krugman” should be enough for anyone, but, then theres the absurd notion they’re seemingly expressing that demographics are somehow unrelated to economics. Yes, demographics are a large part of the cause of Japan’s demise. They’re an aging society. More money must then necessarily be given to more and more people who don’t produce. All economies will decline in such circumstances.
In terms of GDP per capita Japan did not underperform the USA, as the USA was growing its population.
I don’t think that Krugman was the first or only person who noticed it. I picked the Forbes article because it was the first in the list of google hits.
Well, performing better than the US in GDP per capita over the last 20 years isn’t a big trick.
But, that’s the point. A shrinking population …. all else being equal, is a shrinking economy. But, Japan’s population is more aging than shrinking. Again, that equates to less doers and more takers. And, the doers have less and less to do because Japan is moving their production to other Asian nations.
One of the things Japan did outperform the US in, which was a big trick, is debt to GDP.
Interestingly, here’s an article claiming Krugman said the opposite,
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/krugman-and-the-keynesian-chorus-are-lying-japans-lost-decade-is-a-myth/
but maybe Krugman did state BOTH ideas – maybe in 2013 he said the Lost Decades are a myth, and in 2014 he changed his mind, who knows and who cares.
It’s probably likely that Krugman did state both. He’s a moron.
“Lower prices equate to more wealth for the people ….. always!”
That is, until the counterbalancing force, the state with his NEGATIVE wealth, decides to jack up the taxes to forestall his bankruptcy. (And when currency is created by creating debt, there MUST be a counterbalancing debtor, the state, otherwise there would be no currency to go around)
Of course you could argue that that dilemma is specific only to debt-based currency, which is true.
Yes, exactly true. Put in a different perspective …. Money is power. Governments compete with the people for power.
“And when currency is created by creating debt, there MUST be a counterbalancing debtor, the state, otherwise there would be no currency to go around”
“when currency is created by creating debt” – interesting point. If the state would simply print the money in the same amount instead of creating debt there would not be more inflation, but there would be no debt.
Imagine the horror, 43 % of current Japanese government budget would be available for something else instead of financing debt…
I think we know that this has been tried, repeatedly. Governments issuing debt and requiring that debt to be ‘bank reserves’ does indeed ‘print’ money via an associated fractional reserve system for demand deposits (whether directly or indirectly through a GSE monopoly/oligopoly); and it still results in inflation, which isn’t rising prices so much as perceived falling purchasing power. The less people perceive any increment of currency as having purchasing power the less they want to hold it, decreasing the demand for that currency while increasing ‘nominal’ demand for other things which do hold their perceived value, which may or may not result in visible rising prices, for some things will still be a relative high demand good with limited supply while others will be a relative low demand good with not so limited supply.
People really need to remember that there is a supply for and demand for money, too; and this affects the visible prices in combination with supply of and demand for other things in an economy.
Now, about inflations and deflations. There is a natural bottom to a deflation and if the government keeps its nose out of it, the economy will recover from on its own without a disaster. Inflations, though don’t have such a natural top. Those end in disaster every time, either a crack-up boom followed by so much capital destruction that the economy collapses or a violent change of government.
“Governments issuing debt and requiring that debt to be ‘bank reserves’ does indeed ‘print’ money’ ”
Sorry no, that is debt.
‘printing money’ between ” is debt, whilst printing money directly is well, printing money.
Issuing debt is requiring interest on debt and a ‘promise’ of repayment. Exactly the same amount of money that was printed through issuing debt and requiring that debt to be bank reserves, could be simply printed.
It does not create any more inflation then the money ‘printed’ through debt.
What is that ‘printed’ money backed by? What can one call on when things have to be liquidated? Anyway, per the Austrian School, a circulating money substitute is functionally the same as money, as long as people are willing to use it as such.
“What is that ‘printed’ money backed by? ”
The real printed money will have the same value and the same backup as the ‘debt printed money’. Tell me the difference? Tell me why debt money is better, what are the advantages of it? Sorry but you haven’t put any reason for it so far.
Ah, I see. Debt backed money isn’t better than commodity money. I wasn’t arguing that debt backed money was better than commodity money. What I was arguing is that there isn’t a difference as long as the people treat it as such voluntarily.
Printed money is a money substitute, unless paper is the commodity people want to be money.
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings.
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/04/evaluating-nasas-futuristic-em-drive/
“With this design, a mission to Mars would result in a 70-day transit from Earth to the red planet, a 90-day stay at Mars, and then another 70-day return transit to Earth.”
This is really a huge development, what is funny is that they are not clear why it works 🙂
“The concept of an EM Drive as put forth by SPR was that electromagnetic microwave cavities might provide for the direct conversion of electrical energy to thrust without the need to expel any propellant.”
“It was reported (in SPR Ltd.’s website) that if the Chinese EM Drive were to be installed in the International Space Station (ISS) and work as reported, it could provide the necessary delta-V (change in velocity needed to perform an on-orbit maneuver) to compensate for the Station’s orbital decay and thus eliminate the requirement of re-boosts from visiting vehicles. Despite these reports, Prof. Yang offered no scientifically-accepted explanation as to how the EM Drive can produce propulsion in space”
VERY INTERESTING!
“On April 5, 2015, Paul March reported at NASAspaceflight.com’s Forum that Dr. White and Dr. Jerry Vera at NASA Eagleworks have just created a new computational code that models the EM Drive’s thrust as a three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic flow of electron-positron virtual particles.”
That would be a way to access what is now called zero point / vacuum energy.
“A note of caution is that Dr. White’s simulations do not assume that the Quantum Vacuum is indestructible and immutable. ”
And the Ether is back. Somebody put the theoretical physicists on suicide watch.
Even wikipedia has something
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive
Shawyer himself
“Somebody put the theoretical physicists on suicide watch.”
Exactly. I have the feeling the theory was built up further and further disconnected from experimental results and we have now a huge “head” without the underlying body.
ok, Lumo has a very hard piece on these:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2015/05/em-drive-warp-drive-gullibility-without.html
“But if you talk about the total momentum of the observed system and the observer, their total momentum is exactly conserved – it may be verified by an external observer. There is no way to circumvent this fact. This fact holds in any quantum mechanical theory where \([L,H]=0\). And quantum electrodynamics, QED, is just another sophisticated example of such a theory. No, the energy conservation law cannot be violated.”
TL;DR. Glanced over it. He argues it can’t work. I agree, if it works, all the theories that Lubos learned are toast. I hope it works. Schadenfreude, you know. Also, I’d like to see progress some day. We won’t get any with the Lubos type of people. They make a class of 100000000^256 theories and tell us we only need to find experiments that reduce the number of possible theories until we find the one which is correct. It’s wankery.
Well, yes, in the end real data, experiments win and theories need to explain the results or … we need new theories.
Speaking of different theories, there is the Lorentzian relativity supported by Tom Van Flandern.
http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/gravity/LR.asp
“Lorentzian relativity is a modern updating of the Lorentz Ether Theory (LET), first published in 1904 a year before Einstein published SR.”
He shows that gravity has no aberration, whereas light does. As both should propagate with the same speed why does one behave differently?
http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/speed_of_gravity.asp
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As both should propagate with the same speed why does one behave differently?
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It’s an interesting post Lars, thanks.
Newtonian gravity travels at an infinite speed. If you compare the Sun’s incoming light vector and Earth’s acceleration vector toward the Sun, the two don’t match. The light vector points towards where you see the Sun currently, and the acceleration vector points toward where the Sun was about 8.5 minutes ago–or exactly towards where the Sun actually is. GR tries to explain this with space-time distortions. Still, rotating binary pulsars and black holes should be radiating gravity waves. Where are these waves? None have been detected, yet.
Jim
NASA develops new airplane tech with up to 20 small electric propellers and a very lean wing.
This works because the fans move air directly underthe wing, producing the same lift with less wing area.
Are those fans powered? I can’t tell from the video. If they are powered by the tethering wire, how’s this going to be made to work on a real, free-flying plane?
Update: I found that video to be disgusting. It showed nothing but ‘marketing’ concepts.
I’ve built and seen built multi-motor/engine RC aircraft. A very hard problem, in the past, was ‘torque’ or ‘thrust’ matching. The guy in the vid was right about controlling this with reciprocating engines. So what are they using in reality? A diesel-electric generator with multiple electronic controllers (with redundancy, I hope)? Batteries? Sure, the new REE electric motors give great thrust to weight if you only consider the electric motor. What about the rest of the system?
Yeah it’s a marketing video, anyway, I was just looking for some video showing the wing.
How to power the electric fans? A pure battery plane would suffer from the low energy density of batteries, so the best solution would IMHO be a gas turbine generator / power plant on board. The fabled 95% efficiency drops, but you now have 10 times more energy per weight in the fuel so you’re good. Diesel-electric might be ok as well, but probably heavier than the gas turbine.
Currently they don’t have a plane in the air, there’s testing going on with the wing mounted on a truck.
“A very hard problem, in the past, was ‘torque’ or ‘thrust’ matching.”
As to the control problem, I would suggest one microcontroller system (where system means, if you need redundancy, the system becomes 2 or 3 CPU’s running in lockstep with comparison or majority decision, as used in automotive industry, these chips are readily available) per fan, and a bus system like CAN used in automotive, and a central system telling each fan what to do via the bus.
And more to the power plant weight problem: As a modern Diesel electric would already be more efficient than an old propeller motor, and the 95% efficiency of the electric fans would introduce only a 5% loss, a Diesel Electric solution is good enough.
well that’s a brilliant design…..those morons don’t figure on something breaking
I would never get my happy rear in one of those things….with the glide dihedral of a bowling ball
I disagree. When you have 20 motors you have lots of redundancy. As to the power supply, some redundancy must be buildt in as well – maybe two indepent power plants and circuits so at any time half of the power is still available. This is normal product development issues in aviation, SIL4 level.
Not if you need those 20 motors to make it work, then there is no redundancy.
Me; a plane without redundancy will not get permission. Whether it’s 30%, 50, 70 or 80 of the performance you need to keep it in the air until it can safely land, doesn’t matter, how failures are managed can be more or less complicated but it has to be taken care of or no permission. And it is also tested.
Currently at any moment in time 1 million people are in the air worldwide plus fleets of cargo planes. Yet we lose an airliner only once or twice a year. The safety regulations do work.
Really, and you know about all the green shit they are allowing? I guess they know where to draw that line.
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glide dihedral
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In my twenty-plus years of military flying, I’ve never heard of “glide dihedral.” I’ve heard of glide ratio, aspect ratio, and wing dihedral but not “glide dihedral.”
Jim
The hottest year eva… or something…
This is huge, we already knew it is so, but this is a new level of data corruption:
http://notrickszone.com/2015/05/02/151-degrees-of-fudging-energy-physicist-unveils-noaas-massive-rewrite-of-maine-climate-history/
“For the balance of the years, as they get closer to the present, the NOAA tweaks less and less. They have corrupted Maine climate data between 1895 and present by a whopping accumulated 151.2°F.”