Regular force troops rotate in & out of war zones. Most of them are in the States at any given time, so once you pull out of Iraq, they'll all come home, and then go to the end of the list for a rotation in to Afghanistan (or wherever the next target is)

Gotcha

Salvaged from page 15 (fifteen!) because I don't want the thread to die,

1) Signs that the UK/US policy on extremist terrorism is a bit nonsensical #94:

Virtually every major project includes a healthy cut for the insurgents. Call it protection money, call it extortion, or, as the Taliban themselves prefer to term it, “spoils of war,” the fact remains that international donors, primarily the United States, are to a large extent financing their own enemy.


Billions of pounds, dollars, euros, yen - billions of our tax-money - are being spent on reconstruction projects of one sort or another. The Taliban must really hate that, mustn't they? The altruism of western governments showing the Afghan people a positive alternative to all the infighting. Well, not quite. The Taliban, it turns out, are actually quite keen on reconstruction. Largely because it helps to keep them in bombs.

It works something like this. There's a construction project funded by the British aid budget - say building a school in some godforsaken patch of dirt, mainly so that a minister can point to it when he wants to claim - falsely, most of the time - that girls are being educated. But the government doesn't build the school, a private firm gets the contract to build it. And a very generous contract, too, which I suppose is fair enough given how dangerous it is to get anything done in that part of the world. In order to get the school built, the contractor then has to bribe local "community leaders" - that goes without saying. But it also has to negotiate with the local Taliban leadership - who insist on a cut of the aid money as their price for not blowing the place (or the workers) to smithereens. So British taxpayer's money goes to the Taliban, who spend it, among other things, on the IUDs which blow up British soldiers instead. 20% is the typical figure, although it's estimated that in some cases the Taliban are raking in as much as 40% of the international aid money.


2) Interesting looking series of lectures from the London School of Economics

In particular Paul Krugman on 'depression economics'. I appreciate that he's a somewhat divisive figure, and in particular CT will probably explode from listening to what he has to say, but Krugman has had an interesting POV on the Japanese deflationary cycle, so I think he's worth listening to at the very least. (I've not actually listened to it, I only just stumbled over the link just now)

I will most likely not bother reading it because quite frankly he's a mainstream troll. I'm sure he understands economics better but the stuff he's writing usually presents economic insights that a 7 year old can understand as completely idiotic.
I'm very gratefull he got the nobel because I reference him to everyone who conciders the economics nobel to be anything more than a propaganda device.

wait what!?

Funding the Taliban!? Nobel price as propaganda!?!?

say it aint so

nice bump...

OK, so CT will explode at the mention of his name alone. I regard that as a win all the same. I've never read his journalism, only academic papers written by him, and they (probably only 1 or 2 of them) were interesting and good.

Also, key fact about the economics nobel, is that it's not even a nobel prize at all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize

Can someone tell me what forces Pi to be 3.1415... ?

I mean, i know it's the ratio between radius and area, but when you think about it, it's effectively a constant representing 'dimensionyness', quantifying how 1-D relates to 2-D and so on, and conceptually i see nothing saying it could not vary, say over large areas of space, or over time, or in alternate realities. But then there are alternate ways of calculating pi - such the series which come out of (iirc) sin and cos taylor expansions, pi/6 = 1 - 1/2 + 7/11... or whatever they are, and they in effect force pi to take the numerical value it does. But I can;t recall enough maths to really pin down what the fundamental facts/constants/rules are that underpin those expansions. Also, what other ways of determining pi are there (beyond, say, monte carlo methods which in effect rely on de facto measuring the pi from a circle)?

diameter and area, w/e. fu nits

diameter and circumference, double fake out!

in essence, i want to know what there is that stops pi being, say, 5, other than circles.

i'm sure the government has something to do with it

I don't think it's actually possible for the value of pi to vary given a euclidean geometry, and I think the value is pretty much logically dependent only on the meanings of the underlying concepts such as point, line, equidistant, etc.

If the geometrical interpretation of spacetime in general relativity is correct the ratio of diameter to circumference of a particular circle in some region of space may vary from the traditional value of pi, but that's really a semantic issue, as pi is defined as the ratio in the context of a euclidean geometry, and obviously the whole point of general relativity is that spacetime is not euclidean. But I do think the value of pi for circles described on equally curved surfaces will be the same.

I think the fact it's such an unwieldy number if probably just accidental to the representational systems we tend to use. Obviously we should switch to base-pi.

i'm not sure i even understand how base pi would work.

i guess you're probably right about euclidean geometry, i'd have to check, but 1) lol euclid, it just means the assumptions are wrong somewhere, and 2) it means pi is fixed in _this_ geometry (if it is euclidean, which it isn't), but does it fix the value of pi in _another_ euclidean geometry as the same as our pi? I don;t per se see how.

what is the ratio of d to c on the surface of a sphere?

Noone knows what the value of pi is though.

i like to let the market decide

I'm pretty sure it does, because the numeric value logically depends only on the definitions of the abstract entities we are discussing. (I am assuming by "another euclidean" geometry you mean some alternate universe with some flat local region of spacetime).

Also I suppose there is a little semantic confusion here because in a lot of math "pi" is just a constant, i.e it's a value that so happens to correspond to that particular ratio in classic geometry but it's adopted as a constant, and so even in non-euclidean spacetime where the ratio between circumference and diameter is different (depends on the curvature, and on a curved surface pi will vary with diameter I believe relative to the curvature) "pi" the math constant is still the same.

I like to use the biblical value

yes, i am interested in the numerical value of pi, rather than its use as a constant, and whether ultimately there is any way of determining its value that doesn't in one way or another amount to directly measuring it. I'm still not sold on your euclidean argument.


Also, here are some interesting market graphs:

Even if there is a way to do this you can onle store so many digits so I suggest you first set out to prove that the universe is infinite in size. Even then it's a usueless exercice because a human being can only look at and comprehend a finite set of digits before death so might as well go ahead and find a solution to prolong life forever.
And even then it seems like a kinda boring task to just look at digits all day; not to mention that given infinit time and space you still never reach the end of the number.

that's a boring argument that misses the point entirely and can be ignored by including the phrase "to any given degree of accuracy" or somesuch every time you say 'value'

yes ok all judgements of quality are arbitrary and yadda yadda. Page turnery chapter endings still suck. And profit margins (you mean absolute profits really, no?) is a crappy measure of quality because people suck. Theonly really decent measure of quality is to ask me, because i'm right.

3, search is over.

Glad that you're joining the anti-plurality movement
Personally I think all these hippy wannabe artists and writers and whatnot that don't sell their **** are pretty useless.

can one of you austronauts link me to a commentary for the current credit crunch from an austrian perspective. I've been playing around with mises.net or whatever it is and haven't found anything.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/41...r-term-568375/

I need a little bit of context and justification before i wade into a 5 pager from the politics forum. What's so good about it?

Also: bernanke's reappointment is so utterly unsurprising it's untrue. It's almost not news.

just read the Borodog posts if you want the Austrian perspective

they were pretty good - thx for the link.
I'd still be keen on finding an article that laid it out in a bit more organised fashion (and didn't involve having to wade through a load of crap to get to. It's so tempting to get involved into the politics forum...