note to self: check and make sure c troy does not live in your area
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did he kick during the defense?
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Yes, GMUâs law school might as well be a branch of the Federalist Society.
I would bet yeah. I was not at the actual defense.
I thought it would just add to whatever anxiety and nervousness she might be feeling, even though the committee had already reviewed the original and all the rewrites they had suggested.
The last rewrites I fully participated in, over an end of week and weekend at her office. On the Sunday early afternoon when we dropped the final text off at the Xerox/binding place on Thompson St, we went to the Bleecker St Cinema to watch a then recently arrived Spanish movie called Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.
He was kicking up a storm about a month before at a fund raiser for a Puerto Rican not for profit at a club with LOUD dance music, and a very LOUD bass on their sound system. Maybe thatâs why as a pre-teen he took up bass first, then guitar. 
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at least it wasnât drums
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Those are excellent questions. Actually I guess I understand the very basics of tightening or easing credit. But itâs not even really an economics question here. I think all you need to understand is that Trump wants to put cronies in the Fed to keep money loose and juice the economy to help him politically. And he doesnât care if theyâre obviously inappropriate joke nominees. He canât tell the difference himself, since thatâs what he is too. And mentally ill. Letâs not miss any opportunities to make that point, since it explains 85 percent of the whole phenomenon.
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He asked for drums first. On his way to spend the Summer with his grand parents on the island, I bought him a rubber Snare practice pad, some sticks and a book of practice drills. His grandmother informed me that she practiced more on the pad than he did. It was ok. We live in a very small apartment building. We would have had to buy one of the electronic drum kits for him to play with headphones. This worked out. He became a Flamenco guitar enthusiast (has played Saturday afternoons for dance schools in the city he previously lived) and in HS had a band, where he played bass, which started off doing Ramones and Strokes covers and progressed to their own material. I acquired the bass by adverse possession. He is teaching me every now and then, before and after baby sitting gigs.
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I pity all neighbors of those with drum kits.
I love flamenco guitar and music - not such a keen fan of the dancing though.
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I try to listen to some of the real authentic hard core stuff he acquired during his gap year in Spain at a Flamenco Institute. I find it hard to get into, although individual pieces or songs I will like. But it does not grab me most of the time. My wife lived in Spain early and she and I liked Paco de Luciaâs solo albums and those he collaborated with US musicians on. We saw the ensemble in concert at the Palladium in the 80s. I actually like listening to Classical Spanish stuff more than Flamenco, but I am always open to listening to new stuff.
There was a Spanish Flamenco guitarist who was known as El Tomate. His son was also a Flamenco guitarist and was known as Tomatito. (You canât make this stuff up.) Tomatitoâs daughters had a group called Las Ketchup who had this dance club hit in the 90s, sort of the Macarena of its particular Summer season hit parade in Spain.
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SoâŠover the last 12 months, the Bloomberg Commodity Index is down 7%, meaning we must have massive deflation, right? However, YTD, the index is 7.8%, or 30.9% annualized. Which means that inflation is NOW running at 31%!!! Yeah, this guy is a nut.
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Yup. Gold has intrinsic value as a quality transmitter of electrons. The fact that people get moist over the metal and apply value to their emotional reaction is what makes it, and other rare things, a fetish commodity. That sort of value is entirely extrinsic.
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Yes, I agree that it has value, and it served its purpose as a backer of currency at one time. My question was more about why some people feel this it would still be a viable base for our currency and that we should return to it.
People donât like the idea that currency is a collective agreement. It makes them nervous. So they want Big Daddy in some for to set the price for them. Authoritarians again, only stupider.
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A friend (winger gal) bought silver after the 2008 crash. Warned her that Glen Beck and pals were idiots to recommend gold and silver.
Bought IIRC $70,000 at about $37 per ounce. Now trades for less than 1./2 that. Sad.
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Yes, money is a social construct.
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Gold prices were also volatile after that original surge post-Crash of 2008. Many wingnuts predicted President Obamaâs policies would usher in hyper-inflation, and that gold would be a hedge.
Lotta folks cleaned up off of those suckers.
Gold only functioned as a currency back-up because we all agreed that gold would serve that purpose. It has virtually no intrinsic value. I think few people understand that a dollar is just a unit of trust. People who want a commodity to back currency are fetishizing the commodity. Ancient Egyptians valued Jade above gold.
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Donât know if anyone is still following this thread, but thatâs an interesting point.
Since getting us off the gold standard was part of President Nixonâs unilateral withdrawal from President Franklin D. Rooseveltâs historic Bretton Woods agreement â which replaced older colonial-era trade blocs and spheres of influence with a liberal postwar system of international cooperation and open trade among free and prosperous nations â I would like to see a broader discussion of the impact of the withdrawal from Bretton Woods.
The withdrawal from Bretton Woods wasnât really a repudiation of the international cooperation and open trade stuff, it was a recognition that the particular mechanisms laid out in that agreement were obsolete. (Imo, but Iâm one of a minority of non-economists in my immediate family, so this was the kind of thing we talked about at the dinner table.)
In particular, the major currencies had fixed exchange rates with respect to each other, which could only be adjusted by a complicated process of negotiation. Which had worked early on when the volume of trade wasnât that high and when stability was an important hedge against weird unilateral actions that made currencies essentially impossible to convert. But that handicapped the different countriesâ monetary and fiscal policies and made for trade imbalances that were hard to correct. Especially in the presence of varying levels of inflation. So eventually something had to give. And now we have completely floating rates, which bring a different set of problems.
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Thank you. In your opinion are there any elements of BW that we should re-examine in light of current conditions?