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Nothing To Fear But Fearlessness Itself?
theodp writes "In a post last August, Robert X. Cringely voiced fears that Goldman Sachs and others were not so much evil as 'clueless about the implications of their work,' leaving it up to the government to fix any mess they leave behind. 'But what if government runs out of options,' worried Cringely. 'Our economic policy doesn't imagine it, nor does our foreign policy, because superpowers don't acknowledge weakness.' And now his fears are echoed in a WSJ opinion piece by Peggy Noonan titled 'We're Governed by Callous Children.' She writes, 'We are governed at all levels by America's luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they're not optimists — they're unimaginative. They don't have faith, they've just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don't mind it when people become disheartened. They don't even notice.' With apologies to FDR, do we have nothing to fear but fearlessness itself?"
...to really see it in action. The state legislature approval rating was approaching single digits last I heard.
Do you think a single one of those scumbags give a gnat's fart about it?
They don't have to- not with district boundaries drawn like fractals and the vast majority of you voting the Party line.
We should stop putting value on the work of those who make money from money, from paper instruments, rather we should value money for goods. As a socialist, I applaud takeovers; they always lose money. As someone who likes to get paid, I want a return to the time before the Masters Of The Universe ruled our financial institutions.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Basically, the thesis of this piece is the same thing the right wing has been pushing since Reagan's time: government can't work. Nothing that comes out of government can ever be good. We might as well just give up.
Maybe she's right, but history isn't on her side. So this sounds more like sour grapes: Peggy has no hope, because her people have no relevance, and she doesn't like who's in power. So she hopes we will listen to her and lose hope as well, because that way nobody will have hope. Not the Republicans, not the Democrats, not the independents, not the geeks. In that nihilistic world, her folks can waltz in and take over the government and keep pouring our tax dollars into their pockets the way they did under Reagan and both Bushes. Government doesn't work. Might as well send your tax money to Halliburton and Xe.
If any employee caused this kind of damage the customers/consumers would sue and employees would be terminated. Yet in this case, we have companies (and hence employees) that are "too big|valuable|important too fail" so they get bailed out.
If I did this at my company (I manage a large mainframe storage environment at a recognizable financial institution on WallStreet), say by blowing away a ton of customer data, I can guarantee I would be walked to the door before the end of the day.
People in peer departments of mine (like those than manage the networks, server admins etc) that have no input to the investment direction of this company's holdings, have lost bonuses, haven't been able to purchase equipment and staff has been cut. We had nothing to do with this bullsh!t, and yet us like the rest of American's are having to suffer while the MBAs reap in the dollars that the Federal Gov't is handing out.
I wish I could get a $200k bonus for blowing away a PetaByte of mainframe storage. Maybe I'll go power off the z10 and see if Obama will bail out my unemployed ass.
i don't buy noonan's premise. most elected officials i know (and i know hundreds) don't come from any so-called privileged "leadership class," whatever that is, they come instead from nearly all walks of life and bring with them the experience of extremely diverse backgrounds, including poverty and marginalization. it's true that the profoundly destitute among us, the homeless, the institutionalized etc rarely make it past the intention to run but this recurring conservative refrain that the country is held hostage by an arrogant and privileged elite (by definition "liberal") is nothing more than a constant whine from a group of philosophically bankrupt extremists who don't have the intellectual firepower to understand why we're not all in thrall to alissa rosenbaum and her fifty year old adolescent fairy tales.
I mean think of betting on a coin flip where you call heads. If it comes up heads, you get a billion dollars. If it comes up tails, the fed bails your bank out for a billion dollars and maybe your bonus this quarter is smaller, but you lose nothing directly, and your bonus is back to normal 3 months later. Kind of makes fearless and stupid betting par for the course.
I think not.
If she said the Sun was shining outside, I would grab my umbrella and raincoat and worry about flash floods.
"And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense."
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
This seems to be part of a rather wide ranging campaign on the part of the conservatives to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the current government. The previous administration was clearly in over its head. This one seems to have a clue...
In order to get one of those top bankers jobs you need to have:
- Perfect credit rating
- Clean criminal record
- At least a degree (although a masters is more realistic)
- Private school and or brand university
If you don't then forget it. You would never make it past the interview stage. Which in turn results in every banker being a white male with fairly rich parents and a bunch of peers they fit in well with. The entire system is set to allow people "like them" in and to keep "those other people" out.
It isn't just about sexism or racism, it is about class. They don't want poor people into their club.
Thus it results in exactly what the article is talking about. Bankers have no real life experience. They never make mistakes or are down on their luck. I mean, heck, they likely complain if their pent house is a rental... So are we really surprised when they lack understanding of what might happen if they lose their gambling?
But truth be known a lot of bankers didn't understand the level of risk. They left it up to third parties to literally invent ways to measure risk and sell it back to them. Then they could turn around and blame these third parties if what was a "low risk" investment wasn't (which is a false self-reassurance).
Should prayers be covered?: "As the health care battle moved forward last week, Phil Davis, a senior Christian Science church official, hurriedly delivered bundles of letters to Senate offices promoting a little-noticed proposal in the legislation requiring insurers to consider covering the church's prayer treatments just as they do other medical expenses. Critics say the proposal would essentially put Christian Science prayer treatments on the same footing as science-based medical care by prohibiting discrimination against "religious and spiritual health care."
The current global economic system seems to be fundamentally broken - it requires endless exponential growth in order for old debts plus interest to be paid off by new money, backed by goods and services to maintain that new money's value. I fear that until this system is re-designed from the bottom up it cannot be sustained for very much longer. I think the current turmoil is evidence for this.
I'd recommend watching Money As Debt for more insight on this.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
These are the people who (amongst other things) think offshoring technology is a good idea. They don't see the danger, and they don't worry about the implications. Money is money.
It's news that affects nerds at least.
Stuff that matters.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'm sure the guys at the top realize that taking trillions from the government is going to have some effect. But why should they care? In the short term they have little to lose and much to gain. In the long term it might not be the best course of action, but they can't stop because if one rich thief stops pillaging the country then another one will just take his place right? The only way this will change is if the thieves start being held accountable. For instance, if the lower classes get pissed off enough to start torching mansions. So far, Americans are too fat, dumb, and happy to rein in the ruling class.
Okay, so in pretty Peggy's view anything that government does by way of governing won't work. (Didn't she write Reagan's line, "Government is the problem"?) Since Democrats to some extent believe government can be, and should be, effective - well, we should just give up on this. We should become disheartened as Democrats. If "most everyone else" knows that government - which by its nature involves regulation, and public investment, and yes collecting taxes to pay for those activities - is "not a path through," we're left asking "Who is this 'everyone else'?" Pretty clearly it's the shrinking demographic which still identifies as Republican: prevalently old, white, and living in the Deep South - people who last liked government when it was run by Jefferson Davis.
Well, I'm middle aged, white, and live in New England. I'm hopeful. The way through looks obvious, and I see an administration with a fairly good vision of it - even if they're not going nearly far enough in regulating Peggy's friends on the street her Journal's named after. It's so brightly obvious, it's almost blinding. It's based on government, businesses, and individuals each doing our part. Yes, government should not go too far in controlling businesses; but in return businesses have to back way off, as they've gone much too far in recent years into endeavoring to control government. Why do people like Peggy never worry when businesses control government too much?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. - MLK Jr.
"They don't understand that if they start to tax me so that I'm paying 60%, 55%, I'll stop."
Who is John Galt?
The "top" people in both government and business are spoiled children. From Bill Gates to GW Bush, they had everything handed to them, and when things got tough, their parents bailed them out. In the socio-economic stratosphere of the US, it has never been about merit. It's always been about money, and now we can see what that has bred.
We hear a lot about the sense of entitlement among the baby boomers, but it's almost always in the context of Medicare and welfare for the relatively poor. Now we see what this sense of entitlement does on the grand scale. It's ridiculous when GM assembly line workers expect health care in perpetuity. It's mind blowing to see the same attitude applied to C level executives who think they are entitled to year over year growth, and bonuses, regardless of how bad things really are.
And things are bad. The financial wizards of Wall St. have, almost literally, destroyed trillions of dollar in wealth over the last year. None of them think they did anything wrong, and any who are taken to task for this colossal screw up will cry about how unjust it is. When will people realize that handing the reigns of power to spoiled brats, who have no concept of the consequences of failure, is a stupid idea? Doesn't look like they've learned it this time. Maybe in 10 more years when the next economic crisis is screws everyone but the people who caused it.
Silence is Foo!
Scrap Cap-and-Trade: Americans would spend $100 billion to $200 billion a year for limited results: a 15 percent cut in U.S. emissions would reduce global emissions by less than 4 percent, which would have a negligible worldwide impact. Investment bankers need cap-and-trade to make their "green energy" deals successful. That's great (and profitable) for them, but their earnings would come at the expense of every other American.
Psychopaths have the desire to reach leadership positions because that way, they can gain the most profit for themselves (not just monetary profit), and they also have the best tools to reach leadership positions, by manipulating others - something psychopaths excel at.
Psychopathic executives will not blink to destroy their own company, a whole industry, or cause food poisoning, water and air pollution, lower the standard of living of hundreds of millions - as long as they have profit out of it. Wake up, guys, with the few exceptions of people like Warren Buffet, corporations are run by highly functional psychopaths.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
You lost me at 'clueless about the implications of their work'. the crooks at AIG, JPMC et. al. lied about their involvement in the subprime mortgage crisis. many of these guys hold advanced degrees in finance, economics, etc. and they knew what the hell would happen. Come on now, not only does Congress need to stop enabling these Criminals by looking the other way (granting them a covert opportunity to recoup their loses), it's time We demand they prosecute them under the laws which match their Crimes- RICO. It's not just been Fraud and embezzlement- it's been extortion. Not just against their own 'customers', but against the entire citizenry of this country (and others) which taken in it's totality equals Economic Treason. They've not only endangered the US & World economy, they've been trying to cripple them by busting our knees to get the rest of the money out of Us all. In fact, Wall Street makes the 'Teflon Don' and the Gambino Crime Family look rather quaint, in retrospect. It is Cringely that is clueless yet again, not the other way around
The real problem, is that there is no simple answer. Only a complex one.
Is capitalism or socialism the answer? Yes.
Yes, because BOTH are the answer, at the same time.
Allow me to try to explain this, before you explode.
There are things government does well and things private individuals do well, but they are NOT restricted each to a field.
This means that private individuals should be free to engage in business, but not without any controls and limitations. And government should be allowed to interfere if it serves society as a whole better.
You had a little while ago the laughable story about the US press. You saw several posts commenting that either a state run media or a company run media are the only alternatives.
How idiotic, everyone knows that in Europe, BOTH exists, besides each other, fighting each other tooth and nail. THAT is how you get progress. If you think a state run media alone can be independent, you are insane, although not nearly as insane as the idea that company run media will be independent. Fox News is company owned. Case closed.
The US needs to accept that you need a healthy balance between the state and the individual and that this balance can NEVER be achieved, you always will end up with a pendulum swinging back and forth. Things only go wrong if the pendulum is either hanging still or doesn't swing back.
The problem is that you can't get elected with this policy. You need to pick a side and that means in the US that the pendulum can be pulled to far of the center. That is what happened with the credit crisis, to many administrations, from both sides, who did not excersise the control of the state on the financial institutions.
We need to get away from the idea that their is ONE ideology that is the answer. Uncontrolled financial markets are clearly not the answer but neither is total control. What you need to have is the right control at the right time but that can't be achieved, so you need to accept the situation that sometimes there is a bit to much control and sometimes to little without going to extremes.
This middle path is NOT taking the road of least resistance, on the contrary, you will face opposition from all sides, but it is the only one that has been proven to work.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This McClatchy investigation suggests otherwise.
Faith that everything will always turn out fine.
I don't think a belief in Jesus would keep them from feeling that they are entitled to the wealth of the world. It certainly never stopped the Catholic Church.
As someone who likes to get paid, I want a return to the time before the Masters Of The Universe ruled our financial institutions.
When do you think that was?
The Industrial Revolution with the Robber Barons who would hire "security" firms to shoot labor if they stepped out of line? When everyone worked 12 hour days 6 days a week to work to get behind?
Or back in the big landowner days when peons like me would be working the land and just working to get behind?
Or before that when we were hunter gatherers?
I don't think there's anywhere or anytime to back to when things were better. The only way things will get better is if we as a species progress. Our economic system won't improve until we humans improve. In other words, I think it's humanly impossible to have a better economic system than the quasi-capitalistic one that we have developed in the West. And no, I think Socialism is a bigger waste than capitalism.
So far, and I think for the rest of the time humanity exists, capitalism is the best economic system we are capable of having. Humans are just not emotionally capable of anything better.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Oh, and California? What a perfect example. The Granola State (home of Fruits, Nuts, and Flakes) deserves what they got for electing who they elected.
That's callous and unreasonable. (1) We haven't had any good alternatives in a long time. (2) Everyone is too caught up on the lesser-of-two-evils mentality brought about by our first-past-the-post method of election (I'd be surprised if you lived somewhere different in this regards). Combine that with gerrymandering, and congress stagnates. (3) California is said to have the 5th largest economy in the world. Our government hurts our economy (without question) which ripples throughout the rest of the states. (4) The country as a whole has a tendency to follow California's lead. This doesn't predict the future, but it's worrisome. (5) Only the federal government is more beholden to a plethora of special interest groups, making real action nearly impossible to mobilize. (6) Not every Californian voted for these idiots. You're blaming a lot of innocent people. Yes, I've voted for third party candidates before. (I'd support an actual third party if any of them reflected my political views.)
I'm not asking for an apology. Just be careful who you lump in with the "Fruits, Nuts, and Flakes".
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
The media is a reflection of the population itself. It gives what the population wants. Most people won't take the understand one issue, let alone several.
... my son won't eat honey because it 'exploits' bees. I explained to him then that he had better stop eating many fruits, because the fruits are also pollinated by those same exploited bees. He simply grabbed onto an idea without really looking at what 'exploited' really means because it suited his purpose, not eating honey.
Which is why we are not a democracy, I'd bet that 75% of the population have not done any real reading on any single topic beyond what appears on the front page of their newspaper or in emails their like-minded friends send.
Unfortunately, the population can't really distinguish a leader from an orator like Obama. And many think that being famous gives someone insight into political wisdom. So we get mindless rantings and half-truths from the left and right, and most of the population follow it blindly depending on their own personal beliefs. When people with 'new ideas' like Ron Paul show up, the frustrated run to their half-baked ideas without any real analysis either.
Here is an example
And that, my friends, is really what goes on. Most people latch onto ideas that prove the point of view they already have, and won't take the time to examine any opposing opinion. When presented with such opinions, they shut down or simply state 'you just a liberal/conservative sheep spouting talking points'.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
This article is the definitive proof that nerds are being governed by brash jocks with tunnel vision. I'd say this qualifies as a classic Slashdot article.
May the Maths Be with you!
It took me a long time to figure out why things are going to hell. Then I read http://www.youmeworks.com/sociopaths.html and it all made sense. Sociopaths seek power and winning without conscience and this is why banking and wall street leaders are where they are, because they've changed the system of laws to favor themselves. Like terminators, they don't feel remorse or care if their actions hurt other people. These people are now a large proportion of our international corporate leadership. Until our system collapses, they will stay in power, even though they are the reason for our suffering and downfall as a nation. Not sure what there is to do about the situation except have people come to recognize sociopaths for what they are, broken people who should never be allowed to hold power. From the web site the 12 clues to recognizing a sociopath HOW TO KNOW The big question is, of course, how can you know whether someone is a sociopath or not? It is a difficult question and even experts on the subject can be fooled. If you suspect that someone close to you is a sociopath, I suggest you read both of the books I mentioned and think hard about it. Compare that person to the other people in your life. Ask yourself these questions: 1. Do you often feel used by the person? 2. Have you often felt that he (or she) doesn't care about you? 3. Does he lie and deceive you? 4. Does he tend to make contradictory statements? 5. Does he tend to take from you and not give back much? 6. Does he often appeal to pity? Does he seem to try to make you feel sorry for him? 7. Does he try to make you feel guilty? 8. Do you sometimes feel he is taking advantage of your good nature? 9. Does he seem easily bored and need constant stimulation? 10. Does he use a lot of flattery? Does he interact with you in a way that makes you feel flattered even if he says nothing overtly complimentary? 11. Does he make you feel worried? Does he do it obviously or more cleverly and sneakily? 12. Does he give you the impression you owe him? 13. Does he chronically fail to take responsibility for harming others? Does he blame everyone and everything but himself? Tags: evil, Hitler, anti-christ, sociopath,
Only a naive idiot would believe that Goldman Sachs actions were accidental or lacking foresight. These are the best minds in the country, they are specialists in predicting market trends and they pretty much invented most of the toxic assets that crippled everyone ELSE, while the profited.... A coincidence ? I don't think so.
The real purpose of cap and trade has nothing to do with the environment. It is all about transferring wealth from first world nations to the third world, and allowing financial markets to reap huge profits in the process. Otherwise, why would this idea get so much corporate support?
The education system (run by the left wing for the past 30 years)
As I'm not living in the US, could you expand on that a bit? Not living in the US anymore, the only time I hear about political fighting in the schools is when religions zealots complain about not teaching their world view(creationism/ID) as fact. That, and not forcing everyone to adhere to their own religious practices in school. Neither of those sound very left/right to me, more sanity vs. disturbed.
His insight is apparently annoying to some people, so they need to read it again,
The Cringely article is an interesting take on the way technology enables the destabilization of our economic system. But the Noonan article is just whining about these young-uns who never had a difficult life. With the logical conclusion that we should lower taxes!?? Slash-dot is better off not linking to any of these opinion pieces, but whoever linked to the content free post by Noonan should be banned from putting up articles on slash-dot.
The likes of Goldman are neither clueless nor evil, merely self-interested. From what I understand, Goldman is one of the smaller firms on Wall Street, and they seem to have been one of the few to profit (legitimately, without bailouts) from the housing collapse. And it's important to realize that they did so by doing the right thing before any of the others, by divesting themselves of many mortgage backed securities and by hedging against the collapse of the market. If any of them are clueless, it's the larger banks (Citi, BoA, Wells Fargo) that rode the real estate market right off the cliff. If any of them are evil, it's the government-sponsored mortgage backers who encouraged (with stolen tax dollars) such a ridiculous mis-allocation of resources to begin with.
Furthermore, profiting by "betting" against mal-investment is in no way evil. Here's an analogy. Let's say you know someone who discovers a coal mine in his backyard. And he says that he'd rather not go to the trouble of developing the mine and selling the coal to produce electricity or heat houses or whatever. He'd rather just ignite it to burn off underground.
You clearly recognize that this is an economic waste, a mis-allocation of resources, an increase of entropy with no discernible benefit to anyone. So you tie him up and rob him of his coal instead. You have saved an entire mine full of coal, and provided that benefit to the market and the economy, by preventing him from destroying this natural resource. This example is much more extreme than merely betting against some endeavour, it's actually physically preventing it. But is what you did evil? You prevented someone from destroying a valuable resource. If it required no physical force, would performing the same action using paper instruments or "betting" be evil?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Definitely an Ayn Rand adherent. They'll just pick up and leave. Oh my god, what are we going to do when the parasitic captains of industry just disappear? Yeah, like there aren't some of us ready to pick up the mantle.
Showing leadership in a flagship model of emissions management to the rest of the world? Having a large, robust, functional carbon-trading market when the rest of the world catches up? In the most innovative and diverse economy on earth, creating a system which will result in innovation and progress in any energy related technology? Sounds like a total waste of time to me.
[FUCK BETA]
Geez, sounds like you too, are a fan of the book, "Snakes in Suits" (All about psychopaths in business, government, etc.) Highly recommended.
(Mind you, it's too late now to prevent their collosal destruction of the world economy...but perhaps enough of them can be recognized and thrown out before they continue screwing over the world...
Encumbents are re-elected at enormous rates, even right now.
Before you make stupid arguments about how killing people is the only way to get change, you might want to assess the current situation accurately.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The "leadership class" is privileged because they had the millions of dollars it takes to run campaigns and win elections. I'm surprised you didn't figure this out while you were thumbing through your thesaurus.
Here is an example ... my son won't eat honey because it 'exploits' bees. I explained to him then that he had better stop eating many fruits, because the fruits are also pollinated by those same exploited bees. He simply grabbed onto an idea without really looking at what 'exploited' really means because it suited his purpose, not eating honey.
This is a really stupid example. Fruit is not the product of a bee's labor. They are out there pollinating plants, so that they can make their own food. Which is then "stolen" by a beekeeper. This is very different from what humans do when they eat fruit, even though bees are often tangentially related to that process.
Here's what "exploit" means:
1.To employ to the greatest possible advantage: exploit one's talents.
2.To make use of selfishly or unethically: a country that exploited peasant labor. See synonyms at manipulate.
3.To advertise; promote
Which of these do you think your kid meant? Obviously, number two. You seem to think number one is the ONLY definition that matters. You said as much when you insinuated that your kid "latched on" to an idea without even understanding what the words meant. Your son has an ethical issue with stealing food from animals. There is no contradiction between that and still wanting to eat the products animals help produce but do not consume.
In short, your kid is right. And you are wrong. And an insincere debater, at best.
Some trading is parasitic on investing. There are those who have higher rate market access than you and just profit take on every transaction you try to make. That's not really serving anyone.
But a lot of trading activity is not so impressively unhelpful.
-josh
It's not like any of the carbon emitting industries gets (or has gotten) any less support at the expense of taxpayers. If we have to pay either way, it is for the very least desirable to have the financiers' interests aligned with our environmental interests.
"""
These are some ways to deal with increasing joblessness, even if our economy recovers for those who still have jobs or money, which will be explored in more depth over time:
Likely we will see a mix of all those in the future, and in fact, a mix of all those is what we have now (not that the last five options of advertising, faddism, schooling, prison, and war are recommended, even as our society currently relies on them heavily to destroy abundance and create guarding jobs). This web site will go into the details of all this over time. That list is defining the landscape of a jobless recovery, showing connections between things that dont usually seem connected. Like for example, why President Obama just suggested the school year should be longer while our best educators say compulsory school as we know it should disappear entirely.
The important thing to remember is that joblessness is not necessarily a bad thing. It means people have more time for family, friends, hobbies, and volunteerism. What is bad about formal un
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."
-The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Cringley should stick to technology since he clearly knows even less about finance than tech.
From TFA:
Trading relies on finding and exploiting inefficiencies in the system while investing grows the economy. Trading is a parasite on investing. I’m not saying to ban it, I AM saying that technology has enabled outfits like Goldman to be such efficient parasites that they threaten the survival of their hosts.
What he's really talking about is speculation. Despite speculators being the traditional scapegoat (frequently deservedly) whenever there is a problem with the financial system, a certain amount of speculation is arguably healthy. Speculators make certain critical markets liquid when they otherwise would not be. If you want to see the effect of no liquidity, you only have to look at our recent financial meltdown when the banks stopped lending. Liquidity is critical and speculation is frequently the grease that lets the machinery do its job.
Where Cringley is wrong in his argument is that technology has only a minor role in why we have the current financial situation. The current financial situation is complicated but was caused by a lack of controls, outdated regulation, excessive leverage and a lack of transparency among other causes. We have access to new financial instruments for which we have not yet developed adequate regulations. Our current fiscal crisis looks very much like a classic liquidity trap. Interest rates are about as low as they can go so further injections of cash will not lower interest rates and stimulate investment. Technology played no more than a minor supporting role. Factors such as the elimination of Glass-Steagall, inaccurate credit ratings, speculation, excessive leverage, low interest rates and others were at the root of the problem and these have nothing fundamentally to do with technology.
I’ve talked with these guys and they are clueless about the implications of their work.
I have more than a few friends who are in investment banking and NONE of them are clueless about the implications of their work. Their incentives are misaligned with the public good sometimes but they are well aware of that fact. It's rather like knowing that the smokestack in your factory is polluting the environment. Just because you are aware of it doesn't mean you are in a position to do anything about the problem. The folks at Goldman and Morgan Stanley are smart. VERY smart. They understand the macro-economic implications of what they are doing for the most part. When they don't get it, it's usually the case that few others understood the problem either. That doesn't mean they are blameless but I wouldn't for a second call them clueless.
This process builds financial bubbles until they pop then it is left to the despised government to fix things. But what if government runs out of options?
Then you have a long and protracted depression. Sometimes civil unrest if it is severe enough. Governments aren't omnipotent and their ability to influence the economy has always had limits. Financial bubbles are a regular occurrence. No amount of government regulation or intervention can stop all of them. But we can learn from past mistakes.
Remember the work of Black and Scholes that underlay the staggering growth of derivative securities was based on thermodynamics. We use principles from one area in another to good effect, but what makes an efficient heat exchanger can make a deadly security.
Only if one is stupid enough not to understand the limitations of Black-Scholes which only works under a huge pile of assumptions that exist in very narrow and rare circumstances. Black-Scholes is
Perhaps Davis is really trying to rid the US of the religious nuts by convincing them "religious and spiritual health care" actually works. Good luck to him.
Every time I see the oxymoron Christian Science I cringe.
Goldman Sachs actions were accidental or lacking foresight. These are the best minds in the country, they are specialists in predicting market trends and they pretty much invented most of the toxic assets that crippled everyone ELSE, while the profited
Goldman Sachs did not invent adjustable rate mortgages, mortgage backed securities, collateralized debt obligations or credit default swaps. So what exactly is it that your think they invented? Or are you just using Goldman as a bogeyman proxy because you don't actually know anything about investment banking and they make a convenient scapegoat?
In fact Goldman actually stayed out of the subprime mess for the most part which has a lot to do with why they are still around. Other investment banks didn't and three of the five major US investment banks no longer exist as a result. There is PLENTY of blame to go around for the current mess but let's try to assign the blame correctly shall we?
Articles such as this that place blame the elected suffer the lack of responsibility that is the core of the problems. Try to get an honest person elected, and see how far you get. Elections in this country are no more than a popularity contest, an overly complicated beauty pageant. The winner? The one whose flashy smile best matches their swim suite. This was no more apparent than media's hounding of Sara Palin, not for her IQ, or her ingenuity or leadership, but for the quality and cost of her suits. It doesn't start or end at the top. The last presidential election, I tried to dedicate my skills and experience in IT to help the local 'support our candidate' team. Of course, the person in charge of the local office ran a web design company they wanted to advertise using our candidates page, so my offer went unheard. I did canvas the streets, and speak to whoever would listen. But this was certainly not the best use of my time considering the web and email systems for the office were rolled out 1 week prior to the election. This kind of in-fighting and "where's mine" attitude has built the current situation, not the leaders who take advantage of the end result.
The 'architect' of the bailout, Henry Paulson, left as the CEO of Goldman Sachs to become Bush's Secretary of the Treasury in just 2006. It is widely believed that Paulson exploited conflicts of interest, putting his former firm ahead of its competition, leaving the others in ruin. The link is a reasonably brief good read.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
They don't believe it does affect them. If they have money, then that money can be relocated, so they don't care whether the software company they own is in the USA or in India or wherever. And if some of the owning class still choose to live in the USA, then that's fine for them too because their wealth disparity will be all the greater.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Uh, Reagan was. That's how the system works: the President sends Congress a budget. There's negotiation from there, but it starts with the President.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
...why do they pee themselves every time they hear word "terror"?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I'm not going to discuss the bailouts, but this isn't as good a point as you think. Assuming you end up losing (even a little less than) a billion if you get tails, that's actually a good bet from a financial perspective. The expected value of the bet is greater than 0. Make this bet a thousand times and you will most likely end up ahead.
You "just" need a lot of cash flow to make it work in you favor, in the long term. This is how casinos operate, for example.
I do work in a related field (I am a "research analyst"). The whole point is to make bets that are beneficial to you. Because if you're placing lots of bets, statistically speaking under some modest assumptions, some will win and some will lose. And if you're making bets beneficial to you, you will win more from winning than you will lose from losing. On the one hand, this requires a certain amount of "risk tolerance" or even callous fearlessness about money and risk.
People often conflate this educated risk tolerance with something sinister. It's not.
After all, I am strangely colored.
To be socially conservative is, at heart, to be anti-intellectual.
That seems like a rather sweeping statement... what do mean by "social conservative"? Conservatism means a lot of different things, in different places - all from the islamic theocracy in Iran, via the unstable coalition of right wing economics and religious nuts in the US to liberal conservative parties in e.g. Scandinavia and Germany. Calling all of these for anti-intellectual would probably imply that you think everyone who disagrees with you are anti-intellectual... which isn't a very good basis for a useful discussion.
> These are the people who (amongst other things) think offshoring technology is a good idea
It arguably *is* a good idea. If you can hire 3 engineers in India for the price of one in the USA, then yes, it harms that one in the USA, but it helps *three* in India. I'm operating from the assumption that an Indian is just as valuable as an American, so there's a net gain of two people finding good jobs. If your premise is that Americans are more important than everyone else in the world, then you might reach a different conclusion.
It's also better even for the rest of the USA. I recently bought a made-in-China power tool for $50. The made-in-USA equivalent cost over $200. So yes, it harms the few people making those tools in the USA, but not only does it help the person in China making them, it means that far more people in the USA can afford the tool at all. It increases the standard of living of all the people who were not involved in producing that tool in the USA, *and* it increases the standard of living of the people in China who did produce it.
So yes, there are tradeoffs; some are harmed, but more are helped than harmed. Overall, offshoring is a benefit in the aggregate.
"Easier said than done. If you do, people stop giving loans,..."
Sorry, dood (jfengel), but your response is nonsensical. The banksters received the bailouts, and instead of allowing credit to small biz they have used tax payer funds for further bonuses, hired lobbyists to halt necessary financial re-regulation, used those funds for oil/energy/commodities' speculation and stock market arbitrage, and the consumer (formerly known as "citizen") is far too strapped to spend what little money they still possess.
The problem has always been the same, what we Hackers realized long ago with regard to knowledge, that there should be no existing monopoly by the Corporation and the State on land and capital. PERIOD!
Only a true end to the Corporate Fascist State and the Totalitarian State will ever begin to give way to Economic Democracy!
Republicans have decided that they aren't actually against welfare state or government spending, they just want it to go to religious groups instead of scientists and social workers.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Exactly! Our bosses are people who have never experienced anything but the need to consume. We emphasize sports and music over learning. We reward people who spend outrageous time looking good with ridiculous contracts to read the news. We spend obnoxious money on marketeers who don't even know what they're selling.
I'm saddened. We discourage engineers and technical workers from executive level positions. And we do so to our detriment. There was a time when engineers were prized in such positions. However, for some reason the Philosophy and English teachers declared us techies illiterate. I'd be laughing my ass off if they weren't so dogmatically obnoxious about it. Today, we have ignorant marketeers, corrupt accountants and lawyers running companies. And they don't know what their companies even do for a living.
No wonder we're in trouble.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
People aren't push for MORE government, wizardfarce, but for honest and legal government.
The prob today is the Corporate Fascist State, i.e., the banksters have taken control of the government. To paraphrase Prof. Taleb from a year or so ago, during the Great Depression there was pushback, but in the present, the sheeple have allowed the banksters to take over. I guess Americans were smarter back then. Certainly, today we the sheeple require a kick-ass president on the level of a Teddy Roosevelt....instead we have ourselves a Yeltsin!
As the context is discussion of the Republican Party, I mean the American definition of "social conservative". Mostly the "religious nuts" you mention: anti-feminist, pro-death-penalty, against the teaching of evolution, against sex education in the schools, against legal recognition of same-sex marriages, supporting censorship of "indecent" material, and usually in favor of state establishment of religion as long as it's Christianity. The old "Moral Majority" and the "Christian Coalition" would be the exemplars.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
The WSJ article is highly un-balanced. While it talks repeatedly about the "sins" of too much government, it barely mentioned the role that deregulation played in the current mess.
Here's an exmaple:
The implication made is that they left mostly because of taxes. However, they never justify that with a reason-for-leaving survey, etc. They simply run with that assumption. The WSJ does this often, as do most Murdock-own publications.
Table-ized A.I.
Remember that Noonan comes with a strong point of view in all her writing. She was a speechwriter for Reagan and currently has a weekly column for the Wall Street Journal and appears on the news talk shows. She far from an unbiased observer. I personally think her columns are usaully vapid and logic-free, including this one.
We should stop putting value on the work of those who make money from money, from paper instruments, rather we should value money for goods.
Easier said than done. If you do, people stop giving loans, which is the most straightforward way of making money from money. That means no new small businesses, no student loans, no mortgages.
Actually I don't see a major reduction in lending as a problem AT ALL. In fact I see the overabundance of willing lenders to be the very thing that is thinning the "middle class" down into the "lower class", and preventing them from getting a leg up.
Remember when parents saved up something known as a "college fund" for their children, over the course of twenty years or so? Well, now children whose parents weren't that smart have the "freedom" to take on a back-breaking loans as a substitute for that. Who is bankrolling those loans?
Remember when people saved up big hunks of money and then purchased land or homes outright? No, I don't either. Those days were long gone a hundred years ago. But here in California where I live, if you want to buy property anywhere near where you work, you either need to be a member of the upper class with almost a million dollars cash, or you need to take on a mortgage that will claim HALF your income as interest for thirty years - effectively turning you into an indentured servant of bank shareholders for almost your entire adult working life. Your only way out is to spread the debt amongst your friends by living together; spread the debt out and down in other words.
Personally, I think the American Dream turned into a myth shortly after credit cards became common. Instead of accumulating cash for which the bank PAID YOU, people now accumulate debt for which they PAY THE BANK. Writ large - across the entire nation, and up into the federal government itself - this mechanism is all it takes to turn capitalism into a brick wall separating an upper class from a lower class.
Fuck moneylenders and fuck their supposed vitality. Banks should lend to generate wealth, not to generate debt. If they need to be split up into tiny entities capped at 1 billion total assets for this purpose or something equally bizarre, then I'm all for it. Too big to fail means too damn big.
I mean, you don't need Einstein to tell you than when you offload real risk from the lending institution to investors, that the lenders and their middle-men will make crater-loads of money, while people that buy the products that they off-load the risk to have no real idea of its trustworthiness. The fact that investment banks that then sold off these packages while at the same time making exotic and wildly speculative bets against (or on) them completely destabilized the international financial system.
If you want to blame the Community Reinvestment Act or other similar legislation to kickstart lending to low-income areas, you are free to, but to convince others you better have some real evidence to back it up.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
>>>Actually almost all the spending of the last 30 years was done by the idiots reagan and bush jr.
I don't accept your premise. First-off why only limit the last 30 years? Because you know we only had one Democrat during that time (Clinton) and he inherited a booming economy. Let's look at the last 100 years, so we can include the big spenders like Woodrow Wilson who forced us into a war the American people did not want, FDR who spent money like crazy (and imprisoned farmers who were simply trying to grow corn/feed their families), plus Kenndery and LBJ and Carter.
And finally Barak Obama who is going to increase our national debt from $130,000 per home to $200,000 by the end of second term (2016). Even Reagan never spent like that.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Who enlist psychopaths as their enforcers.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Some of them saw it coming. They were ignored by the Bush administration and mocked on Fox News.
Not if your an American....not if you are a US citizen and wanting a home and to feed your family. At that point...you don't give a flying fuck about giving your job to 2 people abroad.
It is one thing to give and care about others in the world, but, rarely is someone altruistic enough to do so at the expense of their quality of life.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
One problem with your hypothesis: Regulations for the financial sector (and all sectors) dramatically INCREASED during the Bush administration.
Sure, Noonan's article is full of the usual partisan crap that comes out from the losing side in the last election, but it is nevertheless true. She does at least note that no one is looking to the Republicans for a solution either.
But I think she misses an awful lot:
First, there are many reasons why people have lost hope in America, and economics is just one small part of it. The moralistic laws passed by both parties to try to force everyone to adhere to their belief systems - whether religious or secular - are also responsible for a great deal of revulsion at what America has become. Truth is, there's no great difference between the person who tells you to profess a certain dogma or die, and the person who tells you that you'd better buckle up or face a hefty fine. They're both assholes out to tell others what they must do. Certainly there's room for persuasion and facilitating (making easy) good choices, but all the "leadership" on both left and right is committed to the idea that Americans must not be free.
Second, there IS a great deal of real OPTIMISM among many educated people - it's just that that optimism is somewhat retarded by the idiocies being perpetrated by government.
There is much to be optimistic about - we stand on the edge of what could be a golden age, if we can just get past the idiots who have hijacked the political and economic systems of the world for their own benefit. If we could prune back the cartels that dominate the financial, medical, and academic sectors (among others) and introduce freedom to compete and to cooperate without undue and burdensome regulations, then the future is very bright indeed.
But it looks like it might not be happening in America.
Really? I've certainly not seen any different support with the liberals currently in power.
They seem to support big business over individual rights just as readily as the conservatives from what I can observe.
Possibly, they do tend to favor the big unions over big business, but, those aren't really concerned with individual rights either...both parties suck just as badly.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
---
Libertarianism Feed @ Feed Distiller
source
It usually means to be very antisocial and often quite radical in the context of party politics, it's a flat out lie to allow extremists to pretend they stand for the ideals of the nation. Ironicly "Christian" in this context also means calling anyone that wishes to help the poor a communist, and always being prepared to throw the first stone.
Most "social conservatives" wish to implement major changes that will hurt a lot of people. One in my state had the audacity to set up his own fake religeous group to endorse him before an election and called the two leading bishops in the state capital communists, and informed them they would be arrested if found on state school property.
You have a wrong definition of nerds. Nerds like to solve problems, preferably technical ones. There are many low-cost cool nerdy things (like those smartphone-based virtual reality goggles).
If there is little money to begin with, either the toys gets cheaper or there will be a different set of toys available for the nerds to tinker.
Those are pretty isolated cases. Remember the media rules: they go after the loony stuff. And yes, that's not just the USA media. I have family all over Europe, so I know it's the same over there. The pro-creation side is generally aligned with the right wing, though.
Most teachers I had were pretty liberal, but students (and kids in general) tend to be rebellious, so the schools don't exactly turn out legions of the indoctrinated. That's why I laugh at folks who say the schools are trying to politically indoctrinate kids. They either never went to school or they're totally senile and don't remember.
I had a college Political Science prof who was a card carrying Marxist. On day one he said to always question authority, so I questioned him every single class. :-) He gave me an A, so I give him props for standing behind his philosophy. I promised him if he ever got into power I'd personally lead the rebellion against him. He said he'd hold me to that. ;-) Good times.
I'm afraid you're mistaken. Congress writes a budget, the President approves or vetoes it.
Google confirms it - "Who writes the Federal budget?" is a good query.
DATABASE WOW WOW
You're right in the fact that in a certain sense it is a good idea, and outsourcing to quality people(and as much as I've wished in the past it wasn't so, there are some damned good and highly qualified IT folks in India) isn't necessarily a bad thing.
The problem with the American version of outsourcing is that it's very short sighted, like a lot of US policy government or otherwise.
Outsourcing is immensely profitable because you can buy goods at foreign prices and sell them to Americans at American prices. The problem with this is that as you lower employment in the US and move money overseas, there is less of it in the US to support US prices. Eventually the standard of living in the countries you outsourced to will rise increasing your outsourced costs, and the standard of living in the US will lower decreasing your revenues.
There's certainly something to be said for the idea that averaging out the world standard of living, but it's not a particularly great long term strategy for the US market. Particularly not luxury markets which may be cut out entirely if standard of living drops sufficiently.
That said, the United States economy is probably irrevocably fucked anyway at this point. The national debt skyrocketed out of control under Bush(even worse than it was under Reagan), and though I believe that most of the changes are necessary there's really no money left for any of Obama's plans to fix anything(isn't it funny that Reagan and the Dubya who are supposed to be from the party of small government are responsible for the vast majority of US debt?). The dollar is no longer considered safe and will likely continue dropping against nearly all major foreign currencies(possibly excluding the GBP which is also screwed). Most importantly, the US has done almost nothing to change any of the factors which got it into the position it is currently in. There has been no change in attitude towards sustainable economic policies(and I'm talking finance not environment here), or towards any of the economic stabilizers like workers rights and protection from unfair termination(you'd be amazed what having the vast majority of your population fairly confident they're not going to be randomly fired can to for keeping your economy a bit more stable). The US has been digging a hole under itself for a long time now, and it is about to fall in. It's going to be a long fall, and it may not be possible anymore to prevent it.
Personally this doesn't particularly please me for all that I live in another country now. I see a lot of people who want to see the US get its comeuppance, but I'm not sure how thrilled I am with the prospect of a world in which the primary super power is China. The US has made and continues to make an awful lot of mistakes, and it may be that the only way for us to learn from those mistakes is to face the consequences, but at the same time a large proportion of the western world depends on the US for military security. Even without that, while US foreign policy is often short sighted and misguided, it is largely well intentioned and I still hope that it isn't too late to prevent the coming fall.
I don't know about the rest of you but it seems that most anyone (yes you may get the odd actor or MD) who seems to run for political office of any major degree are all Lawyers. When ever someone who wasn't a lawyer then during their campaign they are accused for being under qualified to run for office. This seems to worry me as we tend to think about solving problems differently as we have different backgrounds. I am a computer scientist, I feel most of the problems can fixed if there is some good software that can optimize government. However people from other backgrounds will have different ideas and methods, many of them will work. The problem is that we have lawyers as the majority of the thought process so their problem is to create laws and regulations with very strict lettering. Hence we create the problem were there is so much problems due the complexity of the legal system.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Media is not the reflection of what people want its a reflection of what people (as unconscious as they are) would buy into .. that's what the 'big interests' would wrap their arguments up in.
If one just looks at an issue from 2 opposing viewpoints you will find every issue can be broken into pieces that that will be leaning to one side or other. The key to demagoguery is to miss the pieces that don't fit the point you are making.
The problem is here really is that YOU (as in the public) does not really have a more nuanced & insightful source of opinions plus they don't have time to do this research as they have preferences (American idol??).
We are always correct.. even when we realize we were wrong.
Further, for all the suckiness of the American system, and however you rate GW Bush on the scale of jackasses, a good case could be made that the American system is the best in the world, when you factor everything in. Yeah, I like Canada and the Scandinavian countries, too, but the case can be made.
If you want to boggle at how bad things can get, contemplate Zimbabwe or North Korea for a while.
In group behavior: 'because they're evil/morons/sheep/crazy' is not 'insightful' it's 'oversimplified'
A lot of techies are for all intents and purposes illiterate, at least when it comes to any form of communication which the general populace can understand.
That's not to say that style over substance isn't a bad idea, but I've met very very few techies over the years who would make even remotely good managers, let alone high level executives in any company which wasn't 100% technically based.
It's not necessarily important for engineers to be in executive level positions. A lot of them would make a complete hash of it the same way that having a lot of people who are currently executives wouldn't work either. What is important is for executives to hear and to value the opinions and knowledge of engineers, programmers, etc where it is applicable to the health of the overall business. The problem is that by the time any technical advice has passed through half a dozen middle managers to finally reach someone who can actually do anything with it, it's become so garbled that it doesn't make any sense, even if they were going to listen to it.
That said, it's not just management's fault either. I know a lot of tech people who think they know how a business should be run, who haven't any sort of clue whatsoever. I've seen a lot of people who think that IT should drive the direction of the business as opposed to the business driving the direction of IT. IT is, for the most part, a service industry, and we all forget that more often than we should.
Fearlessness could never be described as being unimaginative, stupid, and faithless, so your turning of FDR's phrase is inaccurate at best. From Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche to www.answers.com, fearlessness has not been used in this manner. However, the content was good, so kudos for that...
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
You're right, I don't care about Indians or Chinese, nor do I think we ought to be supporting their welfare unless they want to become the 51st and 52nd states.
China you can argue is a country that is going to at least make good on the money we give it, an investment there is an investment in someone's future. However it stands for pretty much the exact opposite ideals that we stand for in the USA (and that Europeans generally want to believe in). They haven't met a civil liberty that they wouldn't trample. Their commitment to communism equals only their commitment to capitalism: the people may suffer as long as the status quo marches on. India? Replace evil ideals with poverty and corruption. Investing there is like flushing money down the toilet. How does that help anyone?
So in the process of impoverishing that American, you're also hurting his country, and also hurting the ideals that enable the free world to be free. You don't have to like America, but you would be a complete moron to not understand that the free world is safe, as long as we're here doing whatever we do. It doesn't matter if we're fighting a war that doesn't need to be fought in Iraq, or if we're late to show for world wars you do happen to care about, the key point is top to bottom we do value what we have and we will help protect it, as long as we have the resources and know how to do so. That doesn't mean that a few very short sighted people will not sell us out to make a quick buck, and then wake up one day wondering why the villagers are lined up outside their castle with pitchforks and torches.
It doesn't matter if you end up with a cheaper power tool if you lose the jobs required to pay for it, or you lose the edge on technology required to build more and better tools. Talking about "unskilled factory jobs" moving offshore was 30 years ago, we're losing science and engineering jobs at record rates. The only thing we're keeping are service jobs and managerial jobs, none of which is going to keep us in a position of power for very long. I don't know how many managers it takes to invent a light bulb, but I suspect it will get lost in committee before we find an answer.
Seriously, have a look. A fascinating take on how the basic structure of our no-longer-so-representational government has changed over the years, watering down the significance of any single member of the electorate.
http://www.thirty-thousand.org/
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
There is a reasonable reason for limiting it to the last 30-40 years. Both the Republican and Democrat parties before that time period had much different agendas than the ones they do now.
OTOH, your argument that this biases the figures against the Republicans is also valid.
To me the variation between individual presidents seems larger than the variation between the parties in how they spend money. E.g., Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Johnson (and, to a lesser extent, Kennedy) spent money on developing the social infrastructure. Many spent significantly on wars with unclear purposes and no clear beneficial result (and many undesireable results). Note that I carefully phrased that to exclude Roosevelt, and that this *was* intentional. I have not been satisfied with the justifications used for ANY major military conflict since WWII. (I wasn't very aware of the Korean conflict, but that's one that I'm not aware of the justification for how we participated.)
I am definitely not what people call a pacifist, but I also dislike being treacherously lead into violent actions. E.g., the whole Viet Nam war's justification appears invalid. It occurred because we refused to accept the decisions of an international conference, and it turned people who could have been our allies against us. And for no reason that was ever made clear. And note that this was a big part of Johnson's expenses. There are others to which the same analysis applies. We incurred expenses for wars initiated by our dishonorable behavior. (Sometimes it was only our own expenses that were do to our dishonorable behavior, and the wars would have happened anyway, sometimes without our dishonorable actions the wars wouldn't have happened.)
N.B.: I'm *not* claiming that we have acted more dishonorably than most countries do. Instead I'm claiming that our dishonorable behavior has been very expensive, has cost us allies, and hasn't produced much in the way of publicly observable gains. Some have claimed that these wars are for the benefit of private interests, but I'm not certain. Clearly there are private interests that benefit, but it's not clear that they are effectively initiating the dishonorable actions, rather than just taking "low hanging fruit".
If you make your decisions on the basis of Democrat vs. Republican, you are making your decisions on a false basis. The only consistent difference that I've noticed between them is that the Democrats are more interested in having people like them, and the Republicans are less interested in that. They both seem to have the same goals, and largely the same methods.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
First of all don't lump me in with the Religious Right just because they've managed to high-jack my party. I'd like it back as a semblance of what the party was but as it stands in the current two party system here I don't have a better choice. The education system has been largely aligned with the Democratic Party (a.k.a. "The Left") at the primary and secondary school level because their union (the NEA) has aligned themselves with that party. The Democrats tend to be more "education friendly" as a result and all members of the respective education unions (i.e. all teachers) are strongly encouraged to be Democrats.
Well, rest easy on that worry. The US is not fucked. The article is a typical doom and gloom polemic that simply isn't true. Good not to be blind to such possibilities, but it isn't going to happen. Yes, many of the so-called captains of industry have their lofty positions through nepotism and inheritance, not merit, and that's bad for everyone. George W. Bush is the archetype of that sort of thing. He couldn't run a business worth a damn, not the several oil ventures he tried, not the Texas Rangers, and certainly not the US. He was elected by people just like him, who managed to convince enough of the rest of us that they did know how to run a large organization. And they got what they wanted, a country run by the Man, for the Man, and it was terrible. The article is quite right about all that.
But that's not America. They really don't have the control of America the mainstream media seems to think they do. The Bush presidency would have been a much bigger disaster if that were so. Iraq was in a sense Bush's biggest oil venture ever. But America is not a ship that when steered towards a reef will blindly bull onto the rocks. Plenty of us see that stability in oil rich countries is not a long term solution to our energy needs, and while the Bush government was wasting effort and resources on Iraq, many people inside and out of America were continuing work on real solutions. "Drill, baby, drill" did not win the election this time. Yeah, so we're currently in the Great Recession. The fools were going to blow their wealth sooner or later anyway, and the media was going to have a field day about it. They sure can't handle money, but many of us here can, we just aren't into that like we are into technology and science, or we'd all be a lot richer, on paper anyway. We understand there's more to life than money, and that money does not measure all forms of wealth. I am speaking as one of the 80% of the employees who just had our positions with a small company cut way back 2 days ago, thanks to inept management and delusions meeting reality. We all saw this coming, and none of us were so stupid as to keep on partying like the paychecks were never going to stop.
A few kids can still pop up from anywhere with the next big disruptive technology and throw all the captains' unimaginative, plodding, pedestrian planning into a black hole. And, Peak Oil? Bring it on! Life can get pretty boring, you understand. Chinese might think "may you live in interesting times" is a curse, but we like a little excitement. The biggest impediment to working out new transportation and energy systems isn't technological ineptitude however much you might read about how the US isn't educating enough scientists and engineers, it's that the status quo is still very comfortable. China putting a man on the Moon would be wonderful, as that would almost certainly lead to US attempts to rise to the challenge by perhaps something like a visit to Mars. Pay no attention to any wailing about how cleaning up our act will destroy our economy, as was often hysterically said about the Kyoto protocols. Might destroy some existing business models, why else do you think there's screaming about it? We're plenty inventive enough to work out these and other problems, and they really aren't impossible.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Wow - Google confirms the budget? I didn't even know they were *in* the Constitution!
FFS I'm tired of every country giving this argument.
Yes, in the grand scheme of things, no country on its own can make a difference to global emissions, but if every country does their part, that will make a massive difference.
Orchards hire bee keepers or keep bees themselves to pollinate the orchards. It is a very common practice even among organic orchards to do this. And since there is no label on an apple to say whether or not it is 'naturally' pollinated, by eating store bought apples, even from an organic store, one perpetuates the exploitation of bees.
The argument that honey isn't vegan because bees are killed in the process has some merit. But again, eating that organic apple may have been possible because some bee keeper was hired to pollinate the orchard, and he sold the honey. Someone who eats the apple but doesn't eat honey is being a hypocrite unless they have verified that the apple was pollinated 100% naturally from non-exploited sources.
That's not true of all fruits. Date palms, for instance, are male and female. There are no natural pollinators of dates as they are wind pollinated, so it is common practice to hand pick the pollen sheaths from the male plant, extract the pollen, and apply them by hand again to the female plants. The female flowers are then covered with a large sack to keep insects and animals from eating the dates, and to keep the ripe dates from falling to the ground and being ruined.
Of course, eating dates perpetuates the exploitation of low skilled workers by the bourgeois upper class. So if one cares about one's fellow human beings, I guess they need to only get dates from collective farms where all workers carry an equal share.
If one truly wants to not exploit bees, they need to do further homework to determine which growers do not use bees, or which fruits are pollinated without them. THAT was the point of the discussion with my son. Don't take a valid point and misuse it to suit ones on purpose. Understand it and apply it without prejudice.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
It was the Congress under Bill Clinton that mandated banks sell homes to people without money ("no money down" mortgages),
This seems to go around quite a bit, but I've been unable to find a reference to a specific law that forced banks to lend to people who could not demonstrate an ability to repay on a loan associated with a given property.
The Republican Congress and the Clinton Administration still did some unwise things -- in particular Gramm-Leach-Bliley -- but no forced lending as far as I can tell.
BTW you probably won't believe my first paragraph, so here's the videos so you can see yourself. Even after Bush, McCain, and other republicans tried to fix the impending housing bubble, Democrats refused to listen:
Republicans tried to fix the housing bubble? How? Republicans had majorities in both houses during the 108th and 109th Congress. And the Presidency, which gave them not only the power of the executive bully pulpit and veto, but also executive regulatory authority.
If they'd actually tried to fix anything, there'd be a significantly greater trail than a senate bill that languished in committee and some videos on YouTube.
Tweet, tweet.
The difference between the idiots who used to wreck the world 100 years ago and the idiots who wreck it today is that the modern day idiots are under the microscope, while the idiots back then could get away with anything.
For all of the faults of modern society, the wealthy are still far, far more accountable for their failures and for the damage they cause society today than they were 100 years ago. 100 years ago, if the public pissed the rich off, the rich responded by killing a hundred strikers and burying them in a mass grave. Environmental damage? Ha! Poverty? So what?! We've come a long way from the days when immigrant-lined sweatshops were the norm.
What Noonan, especially, is whining about arises from a myth: that our Great Leaders were soooo fucking much better. It's not an accident that she masturbates furiously to the myth of Ronald Reagan -- she used to write for the fucker! Talk about being doused in a big bucket of "DUH!"
The difference in this age is that we are aware. We know the emperor has no clothes. Politicians are afraid of asking for real sacrifice in the name of national unity. The public knows that corporate America churns out reams of bullshit every day.
What Noonan is really crying about is that the peasants are now aware.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
It does not matter why all of those taxpayers left New York. The point is that with them gone, the government's solution will be to make up the tax revenue shortfall by raising taxes on those who remain.
The point of the article is that politicians and people who have faith in them - like you - have not bothered to consider that such a move is doomed to failure. In her opinion, this is because they are disconnected from reality.
#1. we're all psychopathic to some degree or another
#2. it excuses criminals. rather than start with idea of a human who has erred, you start with the idea there's something special about someone that has made them a criminal. no: good people go bad, and bad people go good, and whatever someone's flaws, you talk about their criminal acts, not this supposed otherworldly quality about them that means they are forever more this cartoonish stereotype of behavior. it also ignore st eh fact that YOU can commit these crimes, which you can, under the right conditions. you put your guard down
#3. it perpetuates this stupid idea of a magical "other", some sort of special class of people who can have superhuman powers of turning off their empathy and lording over us. its an "us" versus "them" situation, and its the same old retarded thinking from throughout history. it also makes you think you can't succeed, because only a psychopath can truly run a business
this is the truth: you can do any of the crimes you see snakes in suits do. snakes in suits are as flawed as you and me. there's nothing special about them, except the crimes they've committed, which they should be prosecuted on that basis and that basis alone. not this quasi-cartoonish idea of a "psychopath"
the word has become a massively overused mental shorthand for "bogeyman" and does not retain its narrow psychological definition. therefore, it as useless as any other overused synonym people use for bogeyman, like "socialist" or "terrorist"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Why is parent modded troll? Like it or not, it is at least a somewhat substantive argument.
It's not even a specifically American problem. Simply put, our so-called heroic leaders have no idea what to do with their power, a bit of a problem since we have no intention of doing anything to help.
To quote (as I often do) Voltaire's Bastards:
We are profoundly conformist and authoritarian, the biggest cowards in history. We wait for a disaster so we can fix it, rather than taking preventative measures, all the while hoping someone else will do it for us.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
If everyone buys everything from China and the tech jobs get shipped to India, who here will have any money to spend here so that you can keep your job?
The answer is nobody. Then the $50 power tool might as well cost $5000 since you won't be able to afford it anyway.
The workers in India and China meanwhile only see a tiny fraction of the benefit. Most of it goes right into the pockets of the wealthiest 5% of the U.S. They would be far better off growing their own technologic and economic base free of the leeches.
"I recently bought a made-in-China power tool for $50. "
Thou art a fool, and probably the son of fools.
If you had bought that $50 dollar tool made-in-India, I would ask you how well the tool worked, and how long it lasted. But, I know how well that $50 made-in-China power tool worked out. It has 1/4 the power of the "comparable" American made tool, and it will last about 1/10 as long.
In short, you are full of shit, because there is no "made-in-China equivalent". Replace China with any of a dozen other nations, then you'll have my interest. Korea, Taiwan, India, Vietnam - there are indeed a lot of Asian markets who are undercutting us on goods that might be comparable. But, it sure as HELL isn't China.
Bought any milk products, lately, from China? Drywall? Children's toys? Clothing?
No wonder you post as Anonymous Coward - you have your head up your ass, or you are being paid by China to astroturf for China.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Obama wrote a budget last year? Amazing - how did he find the time while on the campaign trail?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
"Even Reagan never spent like that."
Maybe - but "You're either with us or against us" Bush certainly did. You remember "The seniors are just going to have to tighten their belts" Bush? Men and women who lived through the Great Depression, then fought in WW2, then came home to build a booming nation afterward were told that there was no money for them in their old age.
I'm not completely sold on Obama's ideas, but I sure as hell hate to hear people forgetting that the country went to hell on Bush's watch. The crash came while BUSH was president, not Obama.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people
Income level doesn't have much to do with the risk level of a given loan. Someone making $30k might be a fantastic candidate for a $100,000 30 year mortgage. Someone making $100k might be a poor candidate for $300,000 30 year mortgage. There are much better indicators than income level for predicting financial risk, and there's no indication there was any public pressure to ignore credit scores, or the ratio of the income level of the loan applicant to the value of the loan and property, or any other indicator.
and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.
Not particularly a government problem, but it does shed some light on how we got to the point where in 2005 more than 80% of mortgage lending -- including mortgage lending in the subprime segments -- was done by private firms not subject to any particular legal pressure to do so.
Tweet, tweet.
It's not necessarily important for engineers to be in executive level positions. A lot of them would make a complete hash of it the same way that having a lot of people who are currently executives wouldn't work either.
A lot of sales and marketing guys make a complete hash of things - look at Fiorina, for instance. The fact that most people wouldn't be good CEOs is no reason to pick them from the ranks of the sales department.
I've seen a lot of people who think that IT should drive the direction of the business as opposed to the business driving the direction of IT.
IT is the part that keeps your desktop running and the lights on in the datacenter. Perhaps you mean software development? Where I work, we are dictated what to build and how, rather than being given goals and expected to achieve them. We have little to no ownership, are treated like cogs, and haven't any budget to spend on tools and support automation. As a result, we spend up to half our time fighting fires.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I would be surprised if anyone understands much beyond their own narrow area of expertise. The world, especially the economic and political world has become incredibly complex. The US tax code alone is thousands of pages that probably no one fully understands. The total number of laws in the US would be completely unmanageable without Lexus-Nexis and even with that it is incredibly hard to be sure when you're breaking a law or not! We have created a minefield for businesses that really insures that any business that has been around for a while can be prosecuted for something. The patent trolls and environmentalists are just the beginning! According to one article, the US spends about 2% of the GDP on lawyers and I expect it to get worse.
This country is screwed in a number of ways but the regulatory and legal impediments really seem like the stake in the heart. It is slowing reforms in health care, energy and food production at the least. Some laws keep out herbal solutions that could replace some pharmaceutical solutions because hundreds of years of anecdotal evidence isn't good enough. Some laws slow or kill nascent industries because the regulatory threshold is so high that it becomes cost prohibitive to jump through all the hoops. I have seen it happen for biodiesel pump introduction. Food subsidies artificially pick the food winners because it hides the real cost of production. It is why so many foods use corn syrup sweeteners instead of sugar.
I believe that most of the laws were made with good intent but that the cumulative effect has been to crush progress that would have made the common man's life better instead of just making the rich even richer. The laws have become a straight-jacket that keep common sense from prevailing.
"Meaningless!, Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless!"
It arguably *is* a good idea. If you can hire 3 engineers in India for the price of one in the USA, then yes, it harms that one in the USA, but it helps *three* in India. I'm operating from the assumption that an Indian is just as valuable as an American, so there's a net gain of two people finding good jobs. If your premise is that Americans are more important than everyone else in the world, then you might reach a different conclusion."
it is also a good idea to hire Indian or Chinese CEO's and managers. You can hire hire 3 of them for the price of one in the USA. Why outsource only non-CEO's and managers?
I sense sarcasm, but I need to make this point.
This article is definitive proof of someone with no definitive proof using the faucets given to them as a journalist to demonize a class of people whom she has little ties with and knows absolutely nothing about. Maybe she forgives on Sundays, but every other day of the week, it appears she's throwing punches.
Considering such hear-say proof will mess with all equations. That is exactly what most of us do, because we do not know better, and how we end up hanging the innocent in the name of justice and faith. Years later we shudder at our own ignorance, and promise we'll do better. That pretty much sums up the history of civilization, and if you think that somehow ends with us, then you are part of the problem.
That is what this article is evidence of.
with the few exceptions of people like Warren Buffet, corporations are run by highly functional psychopaths.
As long as we're naming names of good guys, don't forget Aaron Feuerstein [wikipedia.org],
The Mensch Of Malden Mills [cbsnews.com]
Holy shit, he truly is the mensch! What character, this guy now tops my list of good CEOs. Thank you very much for bringing this to my attention.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
So yes, there are tradeoffs; some are harmed, but more are helped than harmed. Overall, offshoring is a benefit in the aggregate.
Except that in reality it doesn't quite work that way. Over time one needs to aggregate all of the job loses and gains, and it starts to reach a point where the local market's buy power starts to wane and the demand for the off-shore produced goods slows down.
My opinion however is not an apology of protectionism as much as a decrying of consumerism. And wealth inequity. And over-population. And ignorance. And human kind, I guess :P
Maybe I just need some dinner and TV :P
+Raider of the lost BBS
"I'm operating from the assumption that an Indian is just as valuable as an American"
Not if your an American....not if you are a US citizen and wanting a home and to feed your family. At that point...you don't give a flying fuck about giving your job to 2 people abroad.
It is one thing to give and care about others in the world, but, rarely is someone altruistic enough to do so at the expense of their quality of life.
Well that's fine from your american point of view, globaly though it is a good thing. The difference here is that from an exterior objective point of view it makes sense that two people having a job is better than one however nobody is really in that position the world works by looking out for your own first which means that in reality one american is more important than two foreigners (if you're american). This is just selfishness and self preservation but its hardly going to go away.
The problem comes when the people running their companies decide they actually care about an even smaller group of people (themsleves) even more than they do about their neighbours and that they can make more money by out sourcing at the expense of their country. Really though the logic as to why outsourcing for them is a good thing is the same as why its a bad thing for you so complaining that people need to look after themselves actually just leads to more outsourcing.
how is the process of this "artificial" pollination? can it be compared to "stealing" a food reservoir? I bet it doesn't...
Disclaimer: I work in an investment bank.
No, generally these are not the kind of people who think offshoring is a good idea. Traders want IT staff close by. Preferably close enough to shout at them.
or you are being paid by China to astroturf for China
Chinese-made tinfoil hats are on aisle 3.
Some laws keep out herbal solutions that could replace some pharmaceutical solutions because hundreds of years of anecdotal evidence isn't good enough.
I'm sorry, but this is wrong. If there was a natural, effective, SAFE, alternative to any medicine then that's what would get used. Do you think all the pharmaceutical companies spend all that money on R&D just for fun? If there was already a compound that did the job then they could save an enormous amount of money by just manufacturing, marketing, and selling that instead of the synthesized/synthetic solution. Herbs and supplements are "alternative medicine" because they DON'T WORK. When something DOES work it stops being "alternative medicine" and becomes simply medicine.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Sure, why not. But then it needs to be evaluated like any other treatment. If found wanting, then it gets the ax. PS: it has already been evaluated and not only found inefficient, but actually detrimental. Picture this: you are on a hospital bed and are told that there are 500 people currently praying for you. Does that make you feel better before you incoming surgery ? Fail.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
You need to get out of the GOP then, because as long as you still wear that label I'm going to count you among the bigots, the homophobes, the religious zealots, the birthers, and every other wing-nut dujour who now speak for the Republican party--and they DO speak for the Republican party, it's not even a matter for debate anymore. The Dems aren't much better in practice, but at least they don't have any of the morally repugnant qualities of the current Republicans (other than graft and corruption, that's universal among the two).
Be an independent, or join a party closer to your actual beliefs. Democrats weren't liberal enough for me so I now vote for the Green Party.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Yes, the crash did come on Bush's watch, and his administration was part of the problem and wouldn't face the issue in order to become part of the solution. However, it wasn't entirely Bush's fault. The biggest part of the problem was the American people; they bought houses they couldn't afford, second houses, etc. They voted in anyone promising not to raise their taxes in order to pay for the programs they also demanded. Americans also decided that science and technology were luxuries; that by endorsing an Educational establishment that had no respect for science and technology was somehow a winning formula. The children of the '60's were too good for science and tech, they sent their children to Business School. The result was Business School Product that thought nothing of shipping anything not nailed down out of the U.S.
There is plenty of blame to go around, and Bush's Administration did not nothing to stop the slide, including pissing on science by thinking it could be made to support their policies. In doing so, they made toilet paper out of clear rational thinking; but they also had a lot of help. So much help that it encouraged an America to vote in Obama who never saw a promise he couldn't make. Now we can have some serious deficit spending.
A "basic income" or making work fun are other alternatives.
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
Bob Black talks about "the abolition of work" here:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working. "
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
On Education vs. Schooling:
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Compulsory-Schooling-AnarchistMar03.htm
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This is really insightful. As California goes, into a depression and insolvency from an ideological inability to tax and regulate and invest in the public good, so goes the nation? Some alternative ideas:
"Why limited demand means joblessness (and what to do about it)"
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/10/03/why-limited-demand-means-joblessness/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/16
"""
When you cut right through it, right-wing ideology is just "dime-store economics" - intended to dress their ideology up and make it look respectable. You don't really need to know much about economics to understand it. They certainly don't. It all gets down to two simple words.
"Cheap labor". That's their whole philosophy in a nutshell - which gives you a short and pithy "catch phrase" that describes them perfectly. You've heard of "big-government liberals". Well they're "cheap-labor conservatives".
Once you understand the general concept, you will frequently find yourself in debate over specific issues, like healthcare, social security privatization, public school vouchers, the "war on drugs" and of course the war in Iraq. What better way to put your conservative opponent on the defensive than by exposing the true motivation for his position - "cheap labor". Can you really find the "cheap labor" angle in every conservative policy initiative, and every conservative position on any particular issue?
Yes, you can. Here is a catalogue of some of the major issues on the national agenda. In every single one of them, the conservative position advances the cause of "cheap labor". I defy any conservative reading this to show me one single conservative position, belief, principle or policy that has any tendency to boost the earning power of labor.
"""
Some ideas on what to do about it, because automation only makes this worse:
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/10/03/why-limited-demand-means-joblessness/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It may be an aggregate short-term gain but think in terms of long-term. We are now paying part of that company's profits (say, $30 of the $50 you spent on that tool) to another country's workers where it is more likely to be reinvested in their small businesses and local economy than to be paid back to another American company operating over there. (Ie, the chinese will go to a local shoe store with their paycheck from the american shoe factory, instead of buying from the american shoe stores in China).
The overall effect is less money to go into reinvestment - maintenance of company property, R&D, other workers' salaries suffer because the company is bleeding money at the reinvestment stage even as they save on cheaper labor. For some companies this is a manageable loss; they sell enough product that they will never have to worry about their bottom line as long as the product stays cheap. For others, it's a cost they can not afford to absorb long-term and one that will ultimately stifle the creativity and growth of that company.
You also have to count the costs that increased unemployment over here can have. Unemployed people are costing us a lot of taxpayer dollars in food programs, shelters and medical care that they can't afford to pay. They aren't paying much, if anything, back into the system but are draining it daily. If we aren't giving them an opportunity to work, they may end up taking what they can't buy - and now you've got higher crime rates in poor areas, which costs us money for more police activity, more "security" measures, more full jails... you get the point. If enough people offshore or cut jobs here, you get a pretty damn big mess.
I don't like the idea of feeding hungry Chinese when I'm starving myself. I've got a relatively low standard of living but when the economy makes it hard for me to put a roof over my head and the company down the street is hiring 200 Indians and not 100 of my neighbors, I'm naturally going to be a little bitter about outsourcing.
Wondering why SEC is not regulating the market capitalization of listed companies while FED is regulating the reserve ratio of all banks?
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
I propose all CEOs to publish relevant report every quarter.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
Point taken.
My view is that leadership is something that is not limited to one particular field. Some accountants are very good leaders. Some salesmen are very good leaders. And yes, some scientists and engineers are very good leaders.
Somewhere along the way, however, the idea took hold that you had to have a formal grounding in the humanities to be a leader. Little do these people know that scientists, engineers, and other technical professions often DO have a strong grounding in the humanities, though it isn't a formal education.
They have excluded those with formal technical backgrounds on the assumption that a formal training is the ONLY way to get a good grounding in the arts and humanities. I think that's foolishly arrogant, and very very wrong.
Let's let our leaders emerge from whatever backgrounds they have and not exclude someone just because they lack a formal education on the subject.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
it is also a good idea to hire Indian or Chinese CEO's and managers. You can hire hire 3 of them for the price of one in the USA. Why outsource only non-CEO's and managers?
LOL 3? more like 33...
Ehhh. You have the "consumer" mindset. Suppose you buy that 200 dollar tool, use it for a few years, and it's still lying around your shop. You decide one day that you don't use it, you might as well get rid of it. You can give it to a friend, you can pass it down to your kids, you can sell it, you can donate it to the high school - whatever you choose to do.
That 50 dollar tool? It's just so much more pollution, and wasted energy.
With all the talk of "going green", I'd sure like to see more of the "conservation" mindset, and less of the "consumer" mindset. Shopping for quality is a forgotten art. An item that costs 4 times as much, but lasts 10 times as long is always the higher quality item. If that item costs 4 times as much, and only lasts 4 times as long, then it is roughly an equal quality item - but, "greener", because it won't have to be disassembled and melted down to make something new so soon.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
What you say sounds very reasonable, but I'm troubled by the reflexive denials I have been reading from quants and financial engineers.
I'd agree that a "reflexive denial" is a bad thing. But there also is a difference between explaining what a particular equation really means and denying responsibility. Since we're so fond of analogies here on /. try this one. It's a bit like an engineer who works on technology is dual use (both civilian and military applications). The problems with it isn't in the technology it is in the application which is a policy level decision.
Our current fiscal crisis was at its root caused by two things in my opinion. One was that internal risk management within many companies was either negligent or compliant in allowing unacceptable risks to be taken. The second was that the regulators (up to and including Congress) were asleep at the switch. Previous administrations AND Congress had been in a deregulatory mindset for some time and were unwilling or unable to acknowledge that the financial regulations that are needed in 2008 were not the same as those needed in 1978.
"hey I'm just a geek with a model, nobody listens to me, and the traders do just what they want anyway". I don't think you can have it both ways.
So you are arguing the Nuremburg defense applies here. I'd agree with you to a point. If someone sees unethical behavior or suspects disaster is impending, they have a fiduciary responsibility if they are convinced they are right.
Where you have to be careful though is that consequences of a model are not always clear except in hindsight. If lots of people could see the end game in the housing bubble crash, one could reasonably assume they would have acted on it but that didn't happen. A LOT of very smart people were caught out by the crash. It's easy to make an argument for malfeasance if it is just a few but if lots of people make the same mistake you have to consider the possibility that the problems weren't so obvious prior to the crash.
At the very least the models like VAR were used as a fig leaf to persuade folks that junk was AAA.
We know that now but back in 2005 that wasn't actually so clear. There were seemingly reasonable arguments that seemed to indicate the AAA rating was appropriate. Of course it turned out to be quite irrational but it wasn't so clear at the time.
If people knew that their models were being used inappropriately, then they had a duty to make a stink about it, even if it meant walking away from their bonus and stock options.
It's just NOT that simple. Ethically you are correct in principle but its rarely entirely clear in advance whether a model maker is correct in a given situation. A model is not the same thing as proof and even our best models have huge flaws. No financial model would ever be used if we had to live entirely within its limitations. We simply don't have a sufficient theoretical framework for financial systems to do that. Even the best models come with pages of simplifying assumptions and usually depend on unreliable and/or inadequate data. At some point we just have to use our best judgment and take a guess knowing that there is a good chance you are wrong.
Finance is the act of trying to predict the future with imperfect information and inadequate models. If you think financial information is always reliable, you are quite mistaken. I'm a certified accountant and I'll be the first to tell you that there is a LOT of ambiguity in how financial transactions are booked even when done properly. Even questions as seemingly simple as "when does a sale occur" turn out to be quite complicated in the real world. We can't even always agree on what happened in the past which obviously means that predicting the future will be that much harder.
Every day we have p
manic depression, schizophrenia, psychopathology, etc., are all aspect of every human being alive. its just that in most people, its below a certain threshold. above that theshold, and you begin to show qualities which put you in a category of illness
but everyone, to some degree, exhibits an ability to dampen their human empathy. if you showed parents the body of their dead child, and one retched on the spot, and the other calmly and grimly left, which is the "normal" person? is the parent who exhibited no physical revulsion a psychopath? we all process these things differently, and you have no objective, only subjective measurement for temporary or permanent empathy deficits
just look at stanley milgram's experiments where he took normal everyday people and got them to shock people to death (in simulation)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
just with the excuse of peer pressure and following orders. so what does that mean? psychopathology is widespread?
no, it means "psychopath" is in every single one of us, and can come out under all sorts of conditions. yes, for some, it is easier conditions, but the term psychopathic behavior, in potential, and in our behavior in the past, is an accurate description of something you have done or could do under the right conditions, or me, or anyone reading these words
civilized behavior is a very thin veneer on a bunch of large bipedal monkeys. if the food supply dwindled, you watch how you and your fellow men behave. i think the majority of that behavior you would describe as psychopathic: you have to block out your ability to empathize with the plight of other people suffering if your own survival is threatened. we all can do that. the potential for psychopathic behavior is in all of us
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
George Bush & Ted Kennedy put into law a doctrine called "no child left behind". This enshrines a noble thought, that the USA shoudl educate all of its children, but in effect it focuses all of our resources on those children least able to repay that investment in their education. In my daughter's school, there are no programs for advanced students, there are reasonably adequate programs for "typical" learners, and extravagant resources spent on special education. In our district, special needs students account for 20% of the population but use about 60% of the funding. The town needs to provide funding for special needs students from the early intervention years of 2 until the age of 21.This funding includes transportation out of district if required, all at no cost to the parents.
I believe that is what is meant by the left wing running the education system. The total belief that we need to help the least fortunate and let the best and brightest struggle on their own.
Combine this lunacy with the sports worship of American culture and it is a wonder that we produce any gifted students.
that is, we all have the ability to turn off our empathy for other human beings
ever walk by a bum with sores on his face begging on the street? ever been to a third world country?
civilized behavior is a very thin veneer on a bunch of large bipedal monkeys. if the food supply dwindled, you watch how you and your fellow men behave. i think the majority of that behavior you would describe as psychopathic: you HAVE to block out your ability to empathize with the plight of other people suffering if your own survival is threatened. we all can do that. of course some people do it all the time, or rather, most of the time. and such people's behavior quickly marks them out for exclusion. so they wind up being homeless drifters, not sharks in suits. the sharks in suits act psychopathic IN THE REALM OF BUSINESS, and then go home to their family and are as "normal" as you are. they compartmentalize their psychopathology
the potential for psychopathic behavior is in all of us, and given the right incentives, right now, you, or i, or anyone reading these words, would act psychopathically
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Maybe you're not aware that the majority of pharmaceuticals are derived from isolating the active chemicals in plants and animals that are already known to have beneficial effects on humans. These chemicals are concentrated, put in a pill and sold as some "breakthrough" in medicine. The pills are obviously more powerful because of the higher concentration of the active ingredient but also cause more side effects because they don't have the supporting chemicals that were in the plant and often put a heavy load on the liver.
The problem in this country is that many people have put their faith in pills and live and eat in very unhealthy ways believing that the pills will ultimately save them. This is not a smart way to live. The pills are designed to treat a symptom but they generally don't fix the underlying issue which is probably poor nutrition and lack of exercise in the majority of cases. The herbal medications that do work, work more slowly and can't help people that wait until their body is in crisis to seek medical attention.
If you don't believe me maybe you'll believe a pharmacist. If you're going to take a pill then take the RED pill and find out the truth about drugs and our medical system.
"Meaningless!, Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless!"
You say that as if you're surprised. I think it's pretty clear that one of the Republican long-term goals is to get rid of Social Security, but since that would injure them with respect to getting votes from the elderly as badly as the civil rights movement damaged the Democrats in the South, the way they've decided to do it is by bankrupting the Federal Government through massive spending programs on projects that pump money into their own pockets and those of the people who vote for them. Once the Fed actually goes bankrupt they can say "see, we HAVE to cut SS because we're broke! It's not our fault!" and not lose the critical (and growing) elderly demographic that they need.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
No apologies to FDR. Without him and Wilsons bullshit socialist fixes, we would still be free men, no income tax and everything would run as it should.( The depression fix was unnecessary , as the economic and social shifts, albeit taking longer, still would happen.) Instead we have this mess and nothing short of bloody revolution to put things right.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Vote for me! I have "new ideas" too! One of the new ideas is you may eat only soup on Fridays. Another is that Tuesdays are Pig Latin days!
Ron Paul gets points from me for being a man of conviction and dedication... but then again, so was Hitler.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Wow - Google confirms the budget? I didn't even know they were *in* the Constitution!
Yes; the Founding Fathers demonstrated incredible foresight in their construction of our Constitution.
DATABASE WOW WOW
If this is a cordless tool, it really doesn't matter how long it lasts. The batteries of any power tool, made in China, US or anywhere else, will be dead in two years tops. At that point, its' cheaper to buy another drill. So the cheap power tool is actually matched to last as long as the batteries. My brother, a licensed contractor, bought the made in the US $500 drill. While it was an awesome drill, the batteries just don't last either. Maybe somewhat longer than the cheap brand, but certainly not twice as long.
A larger problem is that people purchased based on initial cost only, not life cycle cost. (Otherwise, there would be no Microsoft or Chrysler for that matter.) Replacement parts cost more than a new unit because people just don't fix stuff or purchase based on what will be cheapest to fix. No batteries are going to last 5 years in a power tool.
Now I do try to stay away from "made in China" because it is mostly junk, but nearly all cordless drills are made there or somewhere similar. Even the once stout Milwaukee's drills are made in China with the possible exception of their $500 models. (Now that they are owned by the same parent that makes Ryobi, the crappiest power tools on the market.) DeWalt? Made in China. Makita? Same.
I don't know, but it works for me.
That 50 dollar tool? It's just so much more pollution, and wasted energy.
Yes, bur for cordless tools, the battery won't last 5 years no matter how much you pay. So, might as well get the cheap one. Batteries for either will cost more than getting a whole new tool. (I've had this happen several times, even with nearly $200 tools.) Our economy is set up to be resource inefficient because labor is so expensive, even if made in China. It's just cheaper to toss everything that breaks and buy new due to the huge economies of scale.
I'm probably somewhat rare in that I try to recycle anything I can, but most stuff you just can't without PAYING to do so. Not worth it.
I don't know, but it works for me.
There are several problems with companies chasing the cheapest solution via outsourcing:
1. They don't save as much as they think due to increased costs of management due to communication problems and high turnover. However, these are harder to bean count, so they often don't figure into the picture. This is a major flaw of American business: if you can't quantify it, it's insignificant. Tell that to Gateway who used to be the largest PC manufacturer, but lost that when their customers bailed due to poor customer service.
2. You now have much of your intellectual capital in a foreign country with different laws, and in the case of ones like China, laws that can be changed when it suites the leaders. So when your cheap labor decides they can compete with you cheaper, courtesy of you who paid to train them and grow them enough to be a threat, you're screwed. Most of the jobs being outscored are for companies that could just as well be owned and operated from India!
I don't know, but it works for me.
Indeed so. Someone with a $30K income and no/minimal outstanding debts is a better candidate for a loan than someone who makes $100K a year, but has seven over-limit credit cards and a defaulted loan.
Why? Because the person with the minimal debt has proven himself to be more responsible with his money (and thus more likely to make his payments on time), whereas the guy with the over-limit credit cards and the defaulted loan has shown that he can't be trusted to make his payments on time.
a clear situation in which myself, or you, or anyone else would act psychopathically: starvation
you bring further proof for my position by citing the milgram experiments, where two thirds of people act psychopathologically... under the influence of authority. right, because acting under the influenced by authority is such a rare and exotic occurrence in modern life. pfffft
you accuse me of projecting. rather, i think it strange you have so much resistance to the idea of a straightforward universal simple ugly truth about the human condition. i think you have a lot invested in the concept that human empathy is stronger than it really is. this naivete on your part or willful blindness
one need only look at the state of the world and see that empathy is in short supply, that lack of empathy is not some strange rare condition that requires special mental illness labelling, but very common and just under the surface in all of us
but don't mind me. no need to change your theory that businessmen are strange exotic agents under the influence of a special mental condition which renders their behavior completely alien and completely criminal. zzz
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Today, we have ignorant marketeers, corrupt accountants and lawyers running companies. And they don't know what their companies even do for a living.
I'm taking MBA courses right now -- yeah, yeah, boo hiss, whatever -- and the other night one of my professors asked what seemed like a simple question.
"How many of you know where the company that you work for gets its money from?"
Out of nearly forty students, only half a dozen hands went up.
Scary stuff. We're all just hanging out, doing some minor task and watching the clock with no idea of a bigger picture.
--saint
i've simply pointed out common and straightforward human conditions that a kindergartener would understand and perceive as lacking in empathy. go ahead and reject that. you're not rejecting me, you're rejecting reality. so whatever
and you've tried to hurt my feelings, which is quite psychopathic of you LOL ;-)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
that i really am not inclined to hold your hand and spoonfeed you the intellectual charity you're asking for. you are not worth the effort. because if you can't see the proof you are asking for on your own, this reflects poorly on your abilities of perception, not my abilities at persuasion
so how about this: i admit complete defeat
you have utterly spanked me in this argument. lo do i regret the day i defied your ideas. your conviction that the world is full of empathic loving human beings, and is only ruined by an exotic 1% of senator palaptines, stands unsundered by my bizarre and unfounded assertions that empathy is easily turned off and often is. and of course, that i am desperately trying to make this absurd argument to you is because i myself am a senator palpatine
consider your delusions unpunctured by any rude intrusions of my so-called reality. carry on with your convictions unchallenged and unprovoked
(snicker)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
George Bush & Ted Kennedy put into law a doctrine called "no child left behind". This enshrines a noble thought, that the USA shoudl educate all of its children, but in effect it focuses all of our resources on those children least able to repay that investment in their education. In my daughter's school, there are no programs for advanced students, there are reasonably adequate programs for "typical" learners, and extravagant resources spent on special education. In our district, special needs students account for 20% of the population but use about 60% of the funding. The town needs to provide funding for special needs students from the early intervention years of 2 until the age of 21.This funding includes transportation out of district if required, all at no cost to the parents.
That sounds like a very good idea... "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". From the studies I've seen (which may be mostly European, but I think the general idea still applies) dropouts are many, many times more likely not to become productive members of society and far more likely to become criminals and benefits recipients. Given the cost of crime to society, the cost of locking a huge part of society up and the cost of benefits rather than taxes, spending money on these children seem like a good idea - even to people so different as Kennedy and Bush.
I'm obviously not saying that one shouldn't spend money on the brightest, just that spending enough money on at-risk children seem like a good investment and even more necessary. Increase funding to do both.
Why would you want to have two persons doing the job one person can?
You must be the type of psychopatic Luddite who would destroy automatic elevators in the beginnig of the 20th century so elevator boys could keep their jobs.
The problem with this is that as you lower employment in the US and move money overseas, there is less of it in the US to support US prices. Eventually the standard of living in the countries you outsourced to will rise increasing your outsourced costs, and the standard of living in the US will lower decreasing your revenues.
Actually, if you sell dollars and buy foreign currency, the dollars will become lower in value relative to the foreign currency and the dollar prices will rise to equilibrium with other prices.
If your statement were true, then international trade would be the destoryer of worlds. Alas, tis not so. Outsourcing allows people with a compqrative advantage to produce what they produce best.
Woe to the persons who denied you a literate education. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
Additional reading:
The term "Luddite fallacy" has become a concept in neoclassical economics reflecting the belief that labour-saving technologies (i.e., technologies that increase output-per-worker) increase unemployment by reducing demand for labour. The fallacy lies in assuming that employers will seek to keep production constant by employing a smaller, more productive workforce instead of allowing production to grow while keeping workforce size constant.[4] Wikipedia
manic depression, schizophrenia, psychopathology, etc., are all aspect of every human being alive. its just that in most people, its below a certain threshold. above that theshold, and you begin to show qualities which put you in a category of illness
but everyone, to some degree, exhibits an ability to dampen their human empathy. if you showed parents the body of their dead child, and one retched on the spot, and the other calmly and grimly left, which is the "normal" person? is the parent who exhibited no physical revulsion a psychopath? we all process these things differently, and you have no objective, only subjective measurement for temporary or permanent empathy deficits
just look at stanley milgram's experiments where he took normal everyday people and got them to shock people to death (in simulation)
That experiment is a perfect illustration of how wrong you are: only some of the people went through to the "end" of the experiment, pseudo-electrocuting an actor.
Furthermore, temporarily damping one's empathy is not even close to mean one is a psychopath! A psychopath is a psychopath 100% of the time. In addition to that, there are many more traits that make psychopaths what they are - like, being able to without blinking, while looking you straight in the eyes. Being able to manipulate you, become the person you would trust the most like the perfect chameleon ... and so on and so forth. People who, for whatever reason, are dampening their empathy, will at the same time NOT be able to like like a psychopath does - because they are not psychopaths.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I believe you are mistaken. I don't know which herbal remedies are good and which aren't, but the reason pharmaceutical companies spend all that money on R&D (a significant fraction of what they spend on marketing!) is so they can patent the drug and have a monopoly.
If the drug is more effective than natural remedies; great! If not, well, how could they afford to market a drug to be competitive with patented drugs without getting a monopoly on it? After all, anybody could then come along and undercut them on price, since the first company already paid for much of the marketing.
It is quite frequent that a newly patented drug that is shilled off on us is less effective than the old one that fell out of patent, but unless you do the legwork yourself (your doctor is biased by the pharmacy reps pushing their wares), you will be using the new, expensive drug.
I can try to make this point brief and direct.
Fearlessness? callous children?
The reason why the United States' version of a Capitalist Democracy is hurting is because when there is profit or savings involved nationalism goes out the window. Plain and simple. Apply it to every bottom line situation.
Communication is important.
Communication is important
COMMUNICATION IS IMPORTANT
That's not to say there aren't plenty of people with fluff degrees(any country which requires a university degree to manage a McDonald's is basically going to guarantee that) or to devalue the contribution of people who actually make things, but COMMUNICATION IS IMPORTANT.
If you can't tell people you have a product, you can't sell it. If you don't have managers you can't keep things going. A lot of different kinds of people are necessary to make any endeavor work, not just the guy who makes things. I know this, even though I'm one of the folks who makes things.
I'm well aware that this provides companies with comparative advantage(though in the end everyone outsources and you lose it). Lower production costs nearly always do.
I'm also totally in agreement with the fact that the currencies will eventually reach equilibrium.
The problem is that having the US dollar and the Indian rupee reach equilibrium would essentially increase the buying power of the average Indian and decrease the buying power of the average American, that's changes in the value of currency do, and it's what outsourcing does. It also causes an increase in the standard of living for the Indian and a decrease in the standard of living for the American. That's pretty basic economics. Pour money out of one country and into another country and the destination country gets richer and the source country gets poorer. This is especially the case when you have a massive trade deficit like the US.
Now that's not necessarily a fundamentally bad thing, it's certainly not a bad thing if you're an Indian. It is however when combined with no net decrease in the price you sell things for unsustainable. You cannot continue to sell high to Americans and buy cheap from the third world because eventually when you outsource enough jobs for a long enough time, the economic prosperity in your country collapses and people can't afford to pay the prices you were selling at. You then end up basically on the same margins you were at before only all your staff ar in another country.
As I said it's not necessarily a bad thing for this to happen. A few billion people in India would be quite happy with this sort of situation. The problem is that it's not necessarily in your long term best interest. Everyone outsourced to China and now China is probably the worlds strongest economy and the US economy is still going down the toilet. Add to that the fact that since the Chinese are making everything anyway they've started selling their own brands which come out of the same factories, and you reach a situation where the original outsourcing company has created their own competition which since they still have to pay their management fat western salaries they can't compete with.
The trouble with that argument --- speaking as a non-American --- is that we don't live in One World where three jobs given to India cancel out one job lost in America; we live in countries, where the government of each is meant to secure the well-being of it's own peoples, not the well-being of other competing nationalities. And it follows that if the work, whether is be programming or steelmaking, is done abroad, the gradual impoverishment of Americans due to the lack of paying jobs will mean that eventually they won't be able to afford to buy the stuff created elsewhere no matter how cheap. Plus that the countries with the high productivity will gain greater political control than America.
Take the expensive toys away from the nerds, and the people who make or build the toys will be out of work.
It should be noted that "Christian Science" (with capital letters) is the name of a religious sect. It is not really Christian and not especially science-minded.
America's WIN-LOSE culture is institutionalized to such an extent that WIN-WIN is considered Un-American. But the truth is WIN-LOSE is not scalable in the Globalized World.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
So eating honey is definitely exploiting bees. And eating an apple is possibly exploiting bees ?
a / Eats honey. Eats apples. Exploits bees.
b / No honey. Eats apples. Possibly exploits bees.
c / No honey. No apples. Doesn't exploit bees.
I think there's a good argument for the middle ( your son's ) option, the amount of bee exploitation is reduced greatly, people who professionally exploit bees receive less blood money for their efforts and no guaranteed harm is done to bees. Should everyone adhere to his standards bee exploitation would probably disappear almost completely ( maybe along with bees, but that's even further off topic. )
People are rarely so pure in their intentions as to not appear hypocritical at some scale... I think your son should be congratulated and encouraged for considering the consequences of what he consumes.
Demanding absolute commitment to protecting bees is something you've introduced to the argument, possibly with the idea that it will become impossible for him and he'll follow your wishes and restart eating honey.
He doesn't eat honey because it hurts bees.
Right. I'm just hoping that (in the example) with the increased prosperity of the Indian people, they will like to buy our goods and services, mitigating this effect.
It may be unfortunate for us if we are to go down a bit and another country goes up a lot, but i would say that's the way it has to be to provide the maximum benefit.
Of course, it doesn't have to be a zero-sum game since technology can increase our productivity, so COMPARATIVELY we aren't advancing as fast as another country, but we're still advancing. There's so many variables; no doubt it's difficult to foresee everything. I just hope our leadership can make the right choices that increase our productivity and everyone can win.