The redacted page 8 of the document is easy to get clear by just openening that page in Inkscape. Result: http://imgur.com/mIjpIii

http://imgur.com/mIjpIii

(no idea why that inline image does not work).

That lends credibility to the leaked document, I'd say.

Hmm, good question My first thought was that nobody would really put reasonably numbers under the redacted cells. Or perhaps the creator is just really good at trolling?

Satoshi wasn't the inventor of cryptocurrencies, as bitcoin wasn't the first one (but the fourth or fifth).

Ok, It may be the first decentralized one, but that was not what hdbuck wrote. Egold started in 1996 iirc, and ecash in 1993, then there was digicash, webmoney and a few others.

Counterpoint: Volkswagen in Germany has an organized labor rate of about 98%, workers have 32hour work weeks and 6 weeks (IIRC) of  holiday per year. And half of the seats in the board of advisories are represantatives of the workers*. Yet, they are quite profitable.

* = Thats German law for public companies.

edit: typo.

Quite the opposite; it helped weaken it. Look it up for yourself: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxisgeb%C3%BChr#Folgen_der_Praxisgeb.C3.BChr. The stated goal was reduced visits to a doctor. It failed to archieve even that after a bit more than three years. Since then, the number of visits per inhabitant of Germany was even higher than before the introduction. Even worse, it turned out that it was effectively a tax on the poor, as poor people tended to go visit the doctor even less, especially for preventive cancer examinations by dermatologists and gynecologists (numbers are in the source). The effect will be rising cancer treatments in the future, which will be way more expensive than the savings from the examinations.

Practically every one of the reforms was economically short sighted and will do more harm than good in the long run - exactly as Germany's treatment of Greece  right now.

No ad hominems necessary, just provide a different source that pleases you and proves your point.

Public health insurance in Germany is designed to not generate profit (like the USPS), so that's hardly a problem: After a year ends, the new insurance premiums are calculated based on the bottom line of the past year. And 650 million are a joke: The revenue of the three biggest health insurances alone is way over 100 billion €. If they were in the red, upping the premium from 15.5% to 15.6% for the three biggest insurances alone would have changed that (calculate it for yourself!). Praxisgebühr was a purely political move, and it failed.


How can that be if visits have risen? Why was it scrapped if it worked?


Then give better examples?

Praxisgebühr hasn't worked because it failed to address the root cause of the negative profit of the insurance companies. Health care premiums are paid relative to the people's wages, and inflation adjusted  wages in Germany are shrinking because they are artificially kept low (to fuel Germany's exports at the cost of the rest of the EU), while health care gets more expensive because people get older. In practically every other EU country thats less of a problem because of rising wages:

http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Eurozone_real_wages_growth_2000_2008.jpg

Marginal Utility as a concept cannot discredit LTV for the simple reason that both try to explain similar but not identical phenomena. The subject of LTOV is the economy as a whole, whereas marginalists and neoclassical theories describe only markets, a subset of the economy. Marginal Utility fails to describe reality where markets end. That humans reproduce, for example, is an essential variable in an economy, yet it happens outside of markets. Raising kids at home means work has to be done, and in the future potentially results in productive participants of the economy. LTV try to integrate that into the theory, whereas price-oriented theories only become aware of that new person the moment he/she enters the market.

Another example: Simple Machines Forum, the software this forum runs on, is open source, it has been written by people in their free time. Marginalism cannot describe why it is useful despite having been created outside the market.

Despite having read quite a bit from both sides, I still have no clear position on what I prefer. What I dislike about marginalists, though, is that they simply factored out the hard, fuzzy parts of the whole economy and settled on describing just markets.

Try this as a custom uBlock origin filter:


This and generous use of the ignore button almost makes this forum readable