A Job Fair For Jobs In India — In California

dcblogs writes "Indian and U.S. companies are holding a job fair at the San Jose Convention Center this weekend for jobs in India. The job fair is aimed at Indian workers in the U.S., but anyone with an interest in working overseas can attend. India is pitched as a 'sea of opportunity' in a PowerPoint presentation about the job fair. That's in contrast to another slide that makes the obvious point that the U.S. has 'barely recovered from a downturn,' with 'signs that it's headed for another.'"

Comments

Recovered?

[fnj]

What the FUCK are people smoking when they say the US has "recovered" from its "downturn."

Re:Recovered?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the FUCK are people smoking when they say the US has "recovered" from its "downturn."

Ron Paul has never said such a thing.

Re:Recovered?

[Thing I am]

The same thing our past fearless leader was smoking under the banner: "Mission Accomplished"

Re:Recovered?

[Kraftwerk]

The same thing our past fearless leader was smoking under the banner: "Mission Accomplished"

Yet it's happening under a totally different administration, *4* years after the leader you're referring to.

Re:Recovered?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please spare us the political advertisements. He will never win and the endless Ron Paul plugs are getting tedious.

Re:Recovered?

[Anonymous Coward]

The "economy" will NEVER recover. It's simply too good an argument to keep wages down "because of the tough times and everybody has to sacrifice*".

*CEOs not included

Re:Recovered?

[Larryish]

"Sea of Opportunity"?

More like "Sea of Things I Don't Have Antibodies For".

Re:Recovered?

[Anonymous Coward]

By the methods economists have traditionally used people aren't really important, at least not directly. A "recession" is when there's negative overall economic growth. We're in positive territory now, and have been for a while. To these economists, that's "recovery." The assumption, which has been somewhat true in the past, is that eventually employment will begin to rise. That assumption may not be true this time. Or, at minimum, it may take much longer for employment to rise, and there may be some people who can never find a job.

Things may have changed fundamentally this time, and we need to do something about it. First, let's all stop listening to Ron Paul. He means well, but he's living in a previous century. ( the 19th) Second, we need new definitions for "recession" and "recovery."

Re:Recovered?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ron Paul

Re:Recovered?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey now, don't you know that pointing the errors of another administration is the god given right of every American lunkhead? You actually expect a party to make progress? Fuck that. Just point out the other guys did the same thing and act smug about your own party fucking things up just as bad, if not worse. That's the American way!
 
Fucktards like "Thing I am" wouldn't have a leg to stand on if it meant having to own up, be a real human who wants real progress for other humans and accept that their little cult of choice is just as fucking worthless as the other one. It would hurt their poor little heads too much.

Re:Recovered?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, to be fair, that statement is really intended for the illegal aliens (mostly from Mexico) that they are trying to get to go to India and take jobs from the folks in India.

Re:Recovered?

[Anonymous Coward]

a vote for Ron Paul counts as much as a vote for anyone else

Re:Recovered?

[overunderunderdone]

This. It's technically true that the economy recovered. But, the sad fact is that it's only growing at the same rate as before the recession which is only sufficient to add new jobs about the rate that population growth is adding new workers. We're stuck with high unemployment unless we can grow the economy faster than before (which is what usually happens after a recession). If they're right that we're headed to another downturn unemployment will go up even further, at which point we're looking at something closer to great depression levels of unemployment.

Re:Recovered?

[bryan1945]

Need new terms for a lot of things. When unemployment goes up less than expected, that's an "improvement." When less people file for unemployment one month to the next, that's an "improvement." When cutting the *increase* of the budget, that's "saving money."
UGH.

Re:Recovered?

[chrb]

Did Obama ever actually claim "the economy has recovered"?

Anyway, it's all about how you define "recovered" - some economists argued that the economy had "recovered" once it showed 3 months of consecutive growth. See this businessinsider article for an example of that usage. The man on the street may well argue that "recovered" means the jobless % returns to previous levels, but others are arguing that may not happen at all in the "jobless recovery". So, by what metric is "recovered" measured? Profitability? Employment? CEO salaries? Salaries for everyone else? Economic growth? Consumption? House sales? The deficit? And over what time period is this metric to be measured?

Re:Recovered?

[ooshna]

I agree that he will never win but remember a vote for Ron Paul is one less vote that could go for Herman Cain or Rick Perry.

Re:Recovered?

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to forget - you are unimportant.

For those who count: Mr Market

Re:Recovered?

[Anonymous Coward]

They mean this is as good as it will get. Its all downhill from here folks.

Re:Recovered?

[overunderunderdone]

You're complaining that the definition of technical terms ("recession" and "recovery") having to do with one thing (economic growth) aren't a about another related thing (employment). There are already other terms that address the issue you think economists are missing (unemployment, underemployment, job growth etc.). And there's even qualifiers you might notice economists attach to terms like recovery, for instance "weak recovery" or "slow recovery" to describe exactly the situation we're in, a recovery that's too slow to add many of the lost jobs back.

An economy is a complicated thing with lots of moving parts. Dumbing down the vocabulary used to describe those parts to accommodate the ignorant it unlikely to help much. "Recovery" even qualified as "weak recovery" may sound too positive to people when it describes a situation with persistent high unemployment. On the other hand it's certainly more positive than the alternative.

Re:Recovered?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the FUCK are people smoking when they say the US has "recovered" from its "downturn."

I know - the recovery has started when you have your $80K job where the boss says hi to you in the morning, even if you arrive at 10 a.m.

All politics is extremely local.

Re:Recovered?

[jrminter]

It is technically true that the economy has recovered because the GDP measure is terribly flawed. it is defined as:

GDP = private consumption + gross investment + government spending + (exports - imports)

Note that no distinction is made for government spending financed by tax revenue and that financed by borrowing. In his book, "Leverage" (p. 81), Karl Denninger has analyzed the official GDP data from the BEA GDP Series and debt from the Treasury's "Debt to the penny" source and has shown that when government deficit spending is removed from GDP, there has been essentially no growth in the past 30 years. This is why most of our wages have grown very slowly. The problem is that we have spent our way into a very deep hole that no matter what we do there will be a massive contraction in nominal GDP - a real depression. This is unavoidable. However, digging a deeper hole with with more debt will only make the eventual pain worse.

What we have here is an economy based on the foolish presumption that we can survive when our income and expenses are two diverging exponential functions. Our expenses have been growing much more rapidly than our income and it has all been financed with debt. This debt was used to fund immediate consumption, not to produce the means of generating more income. This is not sustainable for an individual family and is not sustainable for a nation. We now see both Greece and Italy on the verge of collapse. The US is just as vulnerable. The math says there is no doubt there will be a crash. It is only a matter of "when." We do not have the national political will to have an adult conversation about this and plan and carry out the triage approach to spending that will be required to turn this around. The best an individual can do is get out of personal debt and make preparations to survive a nasty situation.

Re:Recovered?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's recovered in the Bay Area, startups are getting VC and are hiring like mad. So are big companies like Apple and HP. Tons of activity in social media, ad networks, games, analytics, and mobile. If you're any good and experienced with Hadoop, Javascript, iOS/Android, or scalable infrastructure on EC2 then you can easily get a well paying job. Don't forget all the companies can never find enough people with embedded experience or biotech domain experience.

It's gotten to the point where you don't even have to know the language and stack they use, they'll take someone that's smart and knows something similar. i.e. Rails shops not requiring that you know Ruby, Python and Django/Pylons/whatever and the ability to learn is enough. Web/mobile game companies are not requiring any game experience.

Re:Recovered?

[Pinky's Brain]

We're only stuck because of the neoliberal/globalist blinders we have on ... we need to stop caring about global competitiveness, it won't guarantee full employment either. If we really try to compete with the Chinese who the hell is going to consume any way, austerity is necessary ... but it's not sufficient. We need austerity so our economies can become relatively self sufficient (trade balance) giving us the room to rebalance them towards greater overall employment (even if it comes at a hit to efficiency, ie. work week reduction). We don't need austerity so our economies can become competitive, that race to the bottom goes off a deep cliff.

Re:Recovered?

[xmorg]

Ron PAul!
how about your endless rick perry plugs, they are getting REALLY tedious. If i could change 3 things about rick perry fanboys i would change...uuuh...uuu....uuum...ahhhh...uuuum uuuuh.

Re:Recovered?

[tomhudson]

Tons of activity in social media

... most of it doomed to never make a profit.

Social media is a bubble, same as the previous tech bubble, same as the education bubble, same as the stock bubbles, same as the group buying sites bubble, same as the "cloud" bubble. If it fails, it loses money, and if it succeeds, it quickly becomes commoditized and goes from profitable to barely breaking even. It's not like past industries where there were significant barriers of entry.

Re:Recovered?

[vinitagrawal]

but you should

Re:Recovered?

[Iamthecheese]

I'm afraid high economic growth and output is now possible and becoming even more possible without adding jobs. We're heading for Great Depression levels of unemployment either way.

Re:Recovered?

[cbraescu1]

You're a cretin. Stop publicly comment on things you obviously have no grasp of.

Re:Recovered?

[Iamthecheese]

I agree with your first point but completely disagree with the follow-on. The US is, indeed, in the midst of a huge debt-fueled rut. A look at the per-person productivity numbers fueling this "jobless recovery" will show you there have been massive increases in productivity of the last decade. There's no reason to think that (a) these increases in productivity will cease as long as there is a demand for produced goods anywhere in the world. (b)there won't be sufficient demand anywhere in the world to drive the US economy over the next decade. I feel that if we just buy a little more time increased productivity will pull us out of our debt rut. And I'm not for debt spending!

Re:Recovered?

[MechaShiva]

I'm sick of all the liberal Bush bashing. Let's get one thing straight - Bush never smoked anything. He was a coke head.

Re:Recovered?

[overunderunderdone]

I won't argue with that since I haven't read the book. It sounds frighteningly plausible. However, if I'm understanding it, it's not that GDP measures nothing. It's that it's not measuring something else we'd better be taking into account (and maybe we need another more prominent measure that does). We've experienced real growth over those years otherwise with population growth we would have seen increased unemployment and/or falling wages rather than modest wage growth and relatively higher employment (aside from the more recent unemployment which may be only a harbinger of what's to come). We're in the position of a guy who buys a new sports car, a big house and takes a huge vacation all with debt he can't possibly pay back. He has the real benefit of those things for a little while. The car, the house and the vacation are real for today but so is a painful bankruptcy tomorrow.

Re:Recovered?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is the term "recovery" considered a technical term of art of the field of economics? Why isn't it considered a more general political term? If economists want to use "recovery" as a technical term, let them do so within the confines of their journals and conferences. If it's used in popular media and political discourse, it needs to carry the definition that's most applicable to the audience. For that audience, the issue of employment is inherent in the term "recovery."

Specialists need to stop commandeering common-use vocabulary, then claiming the common people aren't using it correctly.

Re:Recovered?

[Anonymous Coward]

sure he smoked some crack at some point. have you heard him speak...

Re:Recovered?

[scottbomb]

They're called Obama voters.

Re:Recovered?

[Anonymous Coward]

The US will eventually print its way out of debt - "Quantative Easing" was what it was called when the UK started devaluing the pound to recapitalise its banks and prop up the still-present property bubble. The penalty will be that the USD will stop being the global reserve currency, and the US will have a hell of a time trying to borrow any more money. That's the end game - in 2021, feel free to link back to this post.

Re:Recovered?

[Grishnakh]

we need to do something about it. First, let's all stop listening to Ron Paul. He means well, but he's living in a previous century. ( the 19th)

The only problem here is, what is the alternative? Should we listen to Bachmann? Perry? Obama? Yes, Paul's got some pretty obsolete ideas (shutting down the EPA is particularly bad), but the alternatives running for that job aren't any better.

Re:Recovered?

[foobsr]

We're stuck with high unemployment unless we can grow the economy faster than before

(Wikipedia) "The Limits to Growth is a 1972 book modeling the consequences of a rapidly growing world population and finite resource supplies ... In 2010, Peet, Nørgård, and Ragnarsdóttir called the book a "pioneering report", but said that, "unfortunately the report has been largely dismissed by critics as a doomsday prophecy that has not held up to scrutiny.""

Interesting how the belief that "growth" is a solution still is almost ubiquitous.

CC.

Re:Recovered?

[Anonymous Coward]

cloud isn't a bubble, it's a fundamental and lasting change in both business IT infrastructure and in consumers use of their computing devices

Re:Recovered?

[Thing I am]

The crack pipe has no political, religious or ethnic boundaries.

Re:Recovered?

[Thing I am]

Fucktard? That's funny! I haven't been called that since I was in 5th grade.

Re:Recovered?

[tomhudson]

cloud isn't a bubble, it's a fundamental and lasting change in both business IT infrastructure and in consumers use of their computing devices

It's a bubble. Too much money chasing too little long-term potential. And if you thing it's a lasting change, you're blind to the first lesson of history - that the only constant is change. Within 10 years, "the cloud" will be dead.

Nobody will need it when they'll have terabytes of their own storage sitting on their own devices, accessible from anywhere. The same will go for business, as the network infrastructure improves. 15 years ago, it was impractical for most companies to self-host. Now? Anyone can for next to no cost - and the only way that hosting companies could compete was by comoditizing, which is why hosting is so cheap nowadays, compared to 15 years ago. It's now a low-margin business.

And it's going to be the same for "the cloud" - which is not a new way of computing - it's just client-server with a new name.

IPv6 is going to help kill it as a profit center, since by then your own uniquely addressable personal server will be a $200 device with 10 TB of storage and a 1gb/sec connection to the net. Need extra security? Swap backing up on your sister's equally cheap personal server. Distributed shared location services will make dns obsolete within 20 years.

Re:Recovered?

[Ihmhi]

We supposedly ended the recession in 2009. Keep in mind, a "recession" is two quarters of negative GDP growth. Two quarters of positive GDP growth is technically the end of the recession.

My theory is that someone, somewhere had an idea click in their head - if we don't hire a whole ton of people, we can exploit the hell out of existing workers and have plenty of people to replace them if they ever get fed up.

Re:Recovered?

[PhrstBrn]

Why do you think IPv6 means everybody will have gigabit internet access to their front door? Those two things are unrelated.

As far as access goes, the last mile is the largest cost by far. The cost of everything in-between is insignificant in comparison. That's why it costs $1/Mbit to get network access in a carrier hotel, and $10 to $100 per Mbit to get access to your front door. The cost to lay the fiber to your home is nearly the same whether you buy 1Mbit or 10Gbps. Why you buy 100s of Gbps at a time (which large datacenters do), you can get bandwidth really cheap, since by that point the majority of the cost is equipment, and not the last mile. Equipment scales somewhat more linearly compared to the last mine costs, which are the same no matter what.

Datacenters will never go away, since economies of scale dictate that bandwidth there will ALWAYS be cheaper.

Re:Recovered?

[Anonymous Coward]

US is not recovering, it is still on its way down. And it will not change as long as money is more important than people. However, going to India will only help temporarily, as the economy in India will also become a nemesis when the financial industry's revenue outperforms the revenue of the producing and industry and services.

Re:Recovered?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a cretin. Stop publicly comment on things you obviously have no grasp of.

And THIS is why people are getting sick and fucking tired of liberals. Someone posts an argument that attacks the situation and provides alternatives, but you don't agree with it. So what do you do? You go straight for personal attacks.

Too many times I've seen liberals have an issue with someone, and instead of countering with "this is why I think you're wrong and here's what I think should be done", they lash out and start screaming about how the other person is "part of the problem." They let their emotions and sense of self-righteousness take control, and everybody loses.

Not saying it's ALL liberals, just the seeming vast majority. I have a friend who is quite left-leaning, while I'm decidedly not. We've had lengthy debates over various issues in the past, but always maintained a respectful attitude. In the end, both of us would come away with a greater understanding of the issue, or at least a broader viewpoint and respect for each other's opinions. Why the hell can't EVERYONE (on both sides) do this?

So to borrow an oft-uttered liberal attack, cbraescu1, YOU are part of the problem!

Re:Recovered?

[jrminter]

You might enjoy the book. To your point - Denninger also shows that the labor participation rate has also dropped steadily. The unemployment rate typically reported does not capture those who have stopped working. One might also note that 60% of households now receive some kind of government subsidy. Not a pretty picture...

Re:Recovered?

[nnnnnnn]

You don't understand, there is this thing called the multiplier effect, for every $1 the government spends, it creates $1.5 of economic growth, Krugman says so, don't trust a Nobel winning economist? ( http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/bang-for-the-buck-wonkish/ ) So, all we have to do is have the government spend $15 trillion dollars and it will create $22 trillion in GDP. And the next year, the government can spend $22 trillion and create $33 trillion in GDP!!!!!!! Financial crisis solved, perpetual GDP growth guaranteed!!!! Eat your heart out Bernie Madoff.

Re:Recovered?

[tomhudson]

I never said they were connected.

IPv6 means that every device has a unique address. No more NAT, you can address your home personal multi-terabyte storage from anywhere.

For home speed, it's increasing everywhere except ... wait for it ... the US of A. Why? Because the telcos have no real competition. Let municipalities get into the game for all comms (tv, voice, net), and gigabit to the home becomes reasonable, because you have 1 carrier, and 1 medium.

At that point, you don't need a data center - Sun's "the network becomes the computer" becomes not just viable, but the only economic way to look at it.

"The cloud" and data centers are just another passing fad. Once the technology permits, and the lawsuits FORCE businesses to be more careful with data, forget it.

Re:Recovered?

[PhrstBrn]

I agree the US is dragging behind in comms, but I disagree with letting municipalities be the carrier for the last mile. That creates a completely different sent of problems since you're just making the cost a hidden cost in the form of taxes.

I might have agreed if you said let municipalities lay the fiber, and allow carriers light the fiber (and pay a lease fee to the city), at least that way you're not creating a government run monopoly over the network, that way there can be some real competition carriers. There is a natural monopoly not because it's impossible to lay fiber, it's very expensive, and there is a lot of risk in doing it. Google's gigabit to the home showed that there is a demand for it, but nobody is willing to pay for it. If somebody thought they could make money by laying their own fiber and selling it to customers, they would. Except it's not profitable, so they don't.

One carrier, one medium is the same problem we have today, and certainly isn't the solution to the problem.

Re:Recovered?

[Kjella]

There's a huge barrier to social media, because it has almost zero value without people to socialize with. Most other products and services I can use if I'm happy with them, doesn't really matter how many that are not. People try Google+, go "that's neat and all, but all my friends are on Facebook" and return there. Of course if you first lose your position as "the place to be" the same network effects will kill you quickly too, but it doesn't happen easily.

Re:Recovered?

[negRo_slim]

Interesting how the belief that "growth" is a solution still is almost ubiquitous.

Our entire economy is based on growth and it's absolutely ridiculous. I cannot offer an alternative but without heading to the stars I think it's pretty obvious growth as an economic model is unsustainable and I do not understand why this is never discussed.

Re:Recovered?

[tomhudson]

I agree the US is dragging behind in comms, but I disagree with letting municipalities be the carrier for the last mile. That creates a completely different sent of problems since you're just making the cost a hidden cost in the form of taxes.

I might have agreed if you said let municipalities lay the fiber, and allow carriers light the fiber (and pay a lease fee to the city), at least that way you're not creating a government run monopoly over the network, that way there can be some real competition carriers.

Why? What yo propose is the worst o both worlds - the public takes any loss and risks, and private enterprise takes the profits.

The net should be a public utility, the same as the pipes that bring your water to the house. Why do you think the carriers take municipalities to court to prevent public networks? It's because they make a nice fat profit by keeping the cities out of it, and preventing them from merging voice, data, and television into one public service, at a lower cost.

Re:Recovered?

[tomhudson]

There's a huge barrier to social media, because it has almost zero value without people to socialize with

It has almost zero value even if the whole world is using the same one. Advertisers haven't figured that out yet, but eventually they will.

What makes social networks vulnerable is advances in the same technology that created them in the first place. Once software gets to the point that you no longer need a central "provider" to create and maintain your network of contacts, "social media" will die.

And that's not just a "Good Thing" - it's something that needs to happen, because "social media" is an oxymoron.

Re:Recovered?

[nickmalthus]

Its the plutonomy, stupid

Re:Recovered?

[Anonymous Coward]

hey, but salaries for management have shot up 4x for senior management because they have improved the business model. This business model means that the salaries for people in the bottom half of the jobs in the economy have sunk. However you might feel about financial systems inplace, where is the ability to get your true market rate when the game is rigged.

Re:Recovered?

[ChrisMaple]

I remember hearing about 8 years ago that all recoveries are "jobless" initially. Stockpiles of goods and supplies are depleted, and production resumes to fill the supply lines. Underutilized workers stop slacking, and then are encouraged to work harder. Demand increases more and workers do some overtime. As production becomes steady at levels higher that non-overtime work can maintain, then finally more workers are hired (because overtime is expensive and wears people out.)

Thus, the initial stages of a recovery don't involve hiring; they're jobless.

Re:Recovered?

[Rennt]

Only problem with this theory is that consumers need money to consume. Higher unemployment means less customers.

Re:Recovered?

[Ihmhi]

So, you're saying that their strategy is retarded and short-sighted?

That's how modern business works nowadays. Long-term planning is unacceptable in the cult of quarterly profits and shareholder meetings.

Re:Recovered?

[Kjella]

Uh, the easiest solution for non-technical people is to not deal with it. Let Hotmail/Gmail/Yahoo be your email provider, Wordpress your blog provider, YouTube your video provider, Flickr your photo album provider and so on. Nothing else has shown the slightest hint of decentralizing, why should social media be any different? In fact they're more converging to be your one-stop email/im/blog/photo/video/rss/kitchen sink provider.

A lot of people today just have a laptop, when they bring it somewhere or don't have it turned on their shared photo album would go away so grandma can't look at the pics of her grandkids. You can email them but then you're back to the push model, just because you share an album on Facebook doesn't mean all of those who could look want all of it pushed to their machines. And by far most people don't want to manage a server, so you'd want some kind of hosted solution anyway. Something that doesn't go down or get you excess overcharge fees if you get a slashdotting or your video goes viral like on YouTube, that you don't have to deal with versions and upgrades and outages and whatnot. You know, not unlike what they get today....

Re:Recovered?

[foobsr]

I do not understand why this is never discussed

My very personal explanation is that an alternative (sustainable) model would require to overcome the (perhaps) 'natural' trend towards emerging exponential distributions (e.g. populations, words in languages (even think RISC), wealth) by means of intelligence. One will not discuss the lack of latter, which largely implies that 'this' branch of evolution has failed (epically).

CC.

Re:Recovered?

[jep305]

What we really need is for people to take a basic economics course before blabbering about changing the definitions of terms. They might find that there are already widely-accepted terms for the situations they think are so neglected in the language of economics. But I do agree about the monkeys. Its possibly an improvement to my idea of appointing representatives via a random draft or lottery system instead of elections.

Re:Recovered?

[lexsird]

Free trade and globalization are terms used by modern robber barons. No country in their right mind puts up with trade policies that screw over their own economy, but the whores we have on both sides of isle in Washington will. We need fair trade. I would suggest a "mirror policy" to start with. If they don't let us sell to them, then they can't sell to us. This is the job of our Government, to tend to the ecology of the environment of our nation's business. They aren't doing their job, in fact, they have sold us out.

What we have now is "slash and burn" capitalism, that exploits this "free trade" situation to saturate our economy with goods that come cheaply from outside of our economy's ecology. This burns our jobs to the ground and puts us in dire straights, puts us in debt, we lose industry, etc. We need trade policies that are healthy and aggressive for us. Business is war and Trade is the mother of all business wars.

Big money that is in power now due to these exploits control our politicians, both sides are bought and paid for. Until we have political reform in the form of removing legalized bribery, we will never have any progress. That isn't going to happen, that is like asking the fox to fix the hen house. Politicians aren't going to fix themselves. This is going to have to play out to the bitter violent end, and it will be a lesson hard learned in blood, not just for us, but the whole planet as well.

You can't fix a machine that vast, that has run that wild for so long and is so far gone from its purpose. It will run you over if you get near it, if you get on it, it will chew you up to human hamburger. Hide from it, let it run out of gas, then cannibalize it for parts, and never build one that stupid again.

Re:Recovered?

[lexsird]

Not to throw gas on the fire, but both sides practice this. Observe Ann Coulter who literally demonizes liberals in her book "Demonic". Listen to "hate radio" in the daytime ran by the usual perpetrators, and you will get a major dose of it. Here's a mental exercise for you. Every time you hear the term "liberal" and it being used by the right, substitute it mentally for "Jews", and see if you see a parallel in history. If you find that disturbing do a quick google of the term fascism and compare and contrast the rise of it in history.

Re:Recovered?

[tomhudson]

When it gets to the point that you're carrying a terabyte or more in your pocket, in an always-on smart device, connected to an intelligent network, your points go away.

Who needs centralization when they can just share stuff right off their local device and not have to worry about logging in anywhere? And if they realize that those pics they have in one of their shared folders could be embarrassing at a job interview, just delete it locally?

And have their own white lists and black lists, all easily manageable?

And the network being smart enough to do de-duplication of bytes traveling along the same path, up until the node they diverge at, so slashdotting becomes impossible (and uses less bandwidth overall).

10 years - 20 at the outside. Because the hardware is going there, and the software, while it always lags behind by a decade or two, will catch up with the "new realities."

As for "back to the push model" - privacy concerns may end up making that inevitable as well for some types of communications. Certainly webmail as we know it is a concern, as are social networks in their current centralized form.

Re:Recovered?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an indian, and I must say thats, err, appropriately put. :) :D Lol. Love this.

Next

[Anonymous Coward]

Indian users complaining about the bad English of all those US based call centers.

Re:Next

[wisnoskij]

If there were call centers setup in the US to cater to Indian clients then why would they be speaking English in the first place?

Re:Next

[LinuxGrrl]

English is the closest thing India has to a common language.

Re:Next

[wisnoskij]

No that would be Hindi...
First off because it is the official language and secondly because way way more people speak it in India then English.

Re:Next

[wisnoskij]

And yet still you could say that still a lot of Indians speak English even if it is significantly less then Hindi, but basically every single one of those Indian English speakers has English as a second language and would rather/is just as comfortable in speaking a Indian language (mainly Hindi).

Re:Next

[Anonymous Coward]

english is the national language of india. that's why we outsource so much shit there. a billion people who speak english and work for dirt.

Re:Next

[Anonymous Coward]

> First off because it is the official language

So is English. And other 30+ languages. All treated equally as Hindi - all are 'official' languages. And there is no national language.

Re:Next

[toriver]

Well, it is one of the official languages.

And I sure know many speak it. For instance, they can say in a daily scrum about their code for their chosen task: "it is working fine", and then when someone points out their code does not actually do what it is supposed to do but is just some example they googled up, they can say "oh shit!"

Le sigh.

Re:Next

[Anonymous Coward]

>speak it in India then English
You mean they speak Hindi, and then they speak English?

Re:Next

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't ever say that to anybody from the south, particularly Chennai (Madras). They'll hand you your head on a platter. Even though their English pronounciations really suck (and I'm comparing it to other Indians, not to Americans, Brits, Canadians or Australians), they'd much prefer English to Hindi, a language whose very existence a lot of them try to deny. But you are right - most low income people are more likely to know Hindi than English.

I've been to some of these job fairs hosted by Silicon India magazine, which is nothing new - has been going on for at least 6 years.

Re:Next

[unixisc]

The number of people in India who know English is not even close to a billion. It's very likely ~30% of the population. If everybody in India knew English, then English, rather than Mandarin, would be the most populous language worldwide.

Re:Next

[Anonymous Coward]

Indians use English a lot to talk to each other, because they have so many languages. In Northern India, Hindi acts as a "national language" - many have it as their native language, and those who speak other languages generally know Hindi as well (and those other languages are usually relatives of Hindi). By contrast, in the South, where they speak Dravidian languages, knowledge of Hindi is still present but less, and a lot of Southerners have an ideological opposition to having Hindi as a national language, they want English to be the national language instead.

I know my company's India offices, they all speak English there, even for discussions that are purely local/internal. The chatter in the cafeteria is very multilingual though.

Re:Next

[Ster]

If there were call centers setup in the US to cater to Indian clients then why would they be speaking English in the first place?

Because English is one of the official languages of India, and is spoken in every state.

-Ster

Re:Next

[wisnoskij]

As far as I have heard that is completely wrong, yes a moderate amount of people speak English but it is only a subsidiary official language and is just the second language of basically everyone who knows it in India while compared to all other languages Hindi is basically universally known (and guess what the most likely primary language of all of those English speakers).

Re:Next

[wisnoskij]

It is a subsidiary official language and only like 15% of the population speaks it and of that 15% nearly 100% only know it as a second language.

Re:Next

[wisnoskij]

But there is a difference with India as a whole and your little Americonized section of it.
Using statistics you can easily deduce that only 10% of the population speaks English and all of them know another Indian language making it quite far down the list in potential universal languages in India.

Re:Next

[wisnoskij]

It is a subsidiary official language and is only spoken by 10% of the population with basically every single one of them only knowing it as a secondary language (meaning most of the English speakers know Hindi as well).

Re:Next

[Anonymous Coward]

Hindi's not quite universally known. About 600 million people don't speak it. And it's not the language of tech center Bangalore.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India

Re:Next

[nashv]

Take it from an Indian. That is incorrect. Try speaking Hindi anywhere in South India.

For one, it is not THE official language of India. It is one of 25 or so official languages.
The language of the Parliament in English or Hindi along with any official language.
The language of the Judiciary is English.

English is the closest thing to a common language.

Re:Next

[wisnoskij]

OK well then multiple wikipedia pages are wrong then.
But even if Hindi is not the main official language it is still the closest thing to a common language with far and above the most people speaking it.
While English only has about 10% of the population (and basically every single one of them only knowing it as a secondary language) Hindi weights in at over 40%.

Re:Next

[donscarletti]

Check the Wikipedia page. English, although being far from the widest spoken language, remains the official federal administrative language outside of areas that speak Hindi as a native language. Back in '47, there was a plan to transition to Hindi as the federal language, but a couple of decades later, other groups realised that it would put them at a disadvantage in federal politics, so blocked it.

Re:Next

[nashv]

The most widely spoken language is not the language with most speakers. Languages in India are dispersed in local regions (states) where >90% speak that language.

Your argument is the same as saying : German has the highest number of speakers among Europeans and is therefore the common language of Europe. I assure you, it doesn't hold in Paris.

In any case, Hindi itself is known as a secondary language by most people. The closest thing to a 'common' language, in terms of area of coverage AND number of people who speak it, is English .

Good riddance to smelly rubbish

[Anonymous Coward]

All of the Indian folk I have had the misfortune of working with locally in the valley have been dreadful. They are plagiarizing, uninsightful rote learners, who make terrible developers and sysadmins.

Re:Good riddance to smelly rubbish

[Anonymous Coward]

We've got one of those. His English is incomprehensible, his personal hygiene is non-existent and his work ethic is nil: He pawns his work off on others whenever he can and points fingers at others for his mistakes.

Management hasn't done anything, despite complaints: The stench of cheap cologne mixed with body odor and (when speaking to him) halitosis is nauseating.

What's really weird is that his clothes are always clean and neat - how does that work? He'll take the time to do laundry but can't be bothered to bathe nor brush and floss?

Re:Good riddance to smelly rubbish

[tomhudson]

We've got one of those. His English is incomprehensible, his personal hygiene is non-existent and his work ethic is nil: He pawns his work off on others whenever he can and points fingers at others for his mistakes.

Management hasn't done anything, despite complaints: The stench of ...body odor and (when speaking to him) halitosis is nauseating.

You work with RMS?

Re:Good riddance to smelly rubbish

[Anonymous Coward]

Aww c'mon!
You guys are condemning the whole race based on a totally random sampling.
I think I speak for all pinko liberal hypocrites in saying that we don't need anal quality control types like you this country.

Re:Good riddance to smelly rubbish

[TheRaven64]

A race? No. An educational system? Absolutely! There seems to be something badly wrong with teaching in India. There is a huge difference in quality between students I've taught who went to school in India and those who went to school elsewhere. It can't be genetic, because the ones educated out of India seem to have the same spread of abilities as everyone else.

It seems that Indian education teaches you to memorise a large problem-to-solution map, and if the problem is not an entry in that map then it doesn't teach them to think. As far as I can tell, thinking seems to be actively discouraged. It's not that they're stupid, they just seem to have been conditioned not to apply thought to problem solving. It's really painful trying to teach them - they know all of the steps to solve a problem, they know how to fit them together, but something seems to prevent them from doing it. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to be permanent brain damage, because after you've slowly and painfully gone through a few things, they eventually realise that they do know how to think and that they won't get into trouble if they do.

Re:Good riddance to smelly rubbish

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point!
Many pine for the old glory days when the Indians education systems were under the control of the British.
All the great Indian contributions were exclusively made when they were a British colony.

Re:Good riddance to smelly rubbish

[Anonymous Coward]

And they come in with resumes full of BS. But because of affirmative action we need to maintain some of them here.

I used to meet one on the train and he smells like weird curry, like those that come out from your ass. And then he start complain about me smells like fish because I am East Asian and eat tons of seafood.

There is a reason why India is lag way behind China even though India is a democracy.

Re:Good riddance to smelly rubbish

[shutdown -p now]

A lot of Indian folk who work in the States have studied there, as well. You never know until you see their LinkedIn profile.

Re:Good riddance to smelly rubbish

[TheRaven64]

That's okay - I don't live in the states, and I'm talking about undergraduate students.

Let's compare the US to India, shouldn't we?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the Heritage Foundation's Economic Freedom Index, the United States is 9th in the world. India? 124th. And according to Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index, US is 22 (next to Belgium) while India is 87 (next to Liberia).

I think I'll be staying in the US.

Re:Let's compare the US to India, shouldn't we?

[Alex Belits]

So according to a two American political organizations, US is among the top countries chosen by being favorable to American companies? Stop the presses!

Re:Let's compare the US to India, shouldn't we?

[luis_a_espinal]

So according to a two American political organizations, US is among the top countries chosen by being favorable to American companies? Stop the presses!

Regardless of the messenger's origin, the message describing the disparities between the US and India is still true. Talk to any random Indian living permanently in the US or in Canada, or Germany, or Japan. They love their country and the relatives they left behind, but they'll tell you that this is true, and that they have chosen to stay abroad permanently so that their children do not grow and/or get educated there because of those disparities.

Economics is not the only factor middle-class, college educated Indians leave their country. Ideological disagreements with the cultural status quo in India is a great motivator for many as well.

Re:Let's compare the US to India, shouldn't we?

[Alex Belits]

I am all too familiar with immigrants spending the rest of their lives trying to convince themselves that moving to US improved their lives. Most of them are full of shit.

Re:Let's compare the US to India, shouldn't we?

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like it didn't improve yours, so you're bitter at the rest of us who managed it just fine.

Re:Let's compare the US to India, shouldn't we?

[Anonymous Coward]

... having read your LJ, I see that my guess was spot on. Such a whiner. It sounds like you liked your life the USSR a great deal - what the hell are you even doing in United States?

Re:Let's compare the US to India, shouldn't we?

[Alex Belits]

If you didn't get the news, USSR was dissolved in 1992, and at that point its former members adopted Libertarian ideology provided to them by US and its local sycophants. It triggered the worst economic devastation the whole area had seen since WWII (and one may argue, worse than WWII).

Re:Let's compare the US to India, shouldn't we?

[Alex Belits]

Actually it did improve my situation -- at least until 1998-2000 I was in a far better situation here than I would be dealing with a massive 90's crisis over the whole ex-USSR. However I happened to be an unusually capable and well-educated engineer who left a country while it was going through the total devastation of its economy.

It taken those both conditions to make it somewhat worthwhile for me.

Re:Let's compare the US to India, shouldn't we?

[luis_a_espinal]

Actually it did improve my situation -- at least until 1998-2000 I was in a far better situation here than I would be dealing with a massive 90's crisis over the whole ex-USSR. However I happened to be an unusually capable and well-educated engineer who left a country while it was going through the total devastation of its economy.

It taken those both conditions to make it somewhat worthwhile for me.

So, spoke for yourself then when you said this?

I am all too familiar with immigrants spending the rest of their lives trying to convince themselves that moving to US improved their lives. Most of them are full of shit.

Stop projecting. If you are such a capable individual, I'm sure you can fix the conditions, here or abroad to make them more worthwhile. Until then, you are the one full of it. The arrogance of criticizing others' self-measure of happiness or well being is repugnant, arrogant, sour and a little bit disturbing to say the least.

Your experience, and perhaps the collective experience of the social group you belong to, they aren't the norm. Keep that in mind next time you say "most of them are full of shit".

Re:Let's compare the US to India, shouldn't we?

[luis_a_espinal]

If you didn't get the news, USSR was dissolved in 1992, and at that point its former members adopted Libertarian ideology provided to them by US and its local sycophants. It triggered the worst economic devastation the whole area had seen since WWII (and one may argue, worse than WWII).

Yeah, but those conditions are no more. Granted, there are still problems, but the conditions are better now, reap with opportunities for Russians ex-pats with the know-how and the heart to go for it. I came from Nicaragua, and I know what bitterness of seeing your country turn into a pile of crap (or more of a pile of crap in my case) feels like that. But you can't control those things.You can only control what you do. You either build your life here well, or you go back and try to reconstruct things. Anything else is just self-indulgent whining.

Re:Let's compare the US to India, shouldn't we?

[Alex Belits]

Granted, there are still problems, but the conditions are better now

Conditions are worse. Spin is more aligned with American ideology, and technology was advancing for two decades after that event in a manner that had nothing to do with politics or Capitalism, but those are the only thing that are "better".

reap

ripe

with opportunities for Russians ex-pats with the know-how and the heart to go for it.

"Opportunity" is an invitation to fight and gamble. Neither me, nor any sane person on Earth actually wants that. I want a peaceful, prosperous society, enabling people to perform useful and fulfilling work that helps other people in dignity and -- I repeat -- peace. With all its flaws 70's-80's USSR mostly was such a society -- you had to be a professional revolutionary to actually be flatly denied that. Modern US and modern Russia are nowhere close to this, and have a snowflake's chance in Hell to ever approach it without being turned into rubble first.

Re:Let's compare the US to India, shouldn't we?

[Alex Belits]

So, spoke for yourself then when you said this?

It's possible that this is the case. Personally I think, I have some valid reasons to see myself as something different:

Most immigrants into US that I know or knew, had to resort to lies to get a refugee status, claiming whatever political and religious leaders who "helped" them wanted to hear. I got an H-1B visa after arriving as a visitor, and finding a job entirely based on my then-current education and work history.

Most of those immigrants happily gobbled up tons of brainwashing for no other reason but getting assistance and money -- not just political but also religious crap that they would never touch with a ten foot pole otherwise.I started with genuine interest in US culture, and ended up rejecting its foundations as a direct result of obtaining knowledge and understanding of it, but being unable to internalize those foundations.

Most immigrants accepted US citizenship as a kind of yoke that permitted them to work for Americans without offending or threatening them. I got a permanent resident status, however I kept my original citizenship because I would rather let Cthulhu rule and represent me than a bunch of corporate lackeys that Americans supposedly elect every few years. And I can assure everyone that despite similar deficiency in diplomatic and communications skills and nearly infinite inferiority in performance arts, Lukashenko represents me much better than Cthulhu ever could. I still think that it would make sense for me to accept US citizenship if politicians better than Cthulhu (not necessarily better than Lukashenko or whoever would be in power in Belarus at the moment) ended up anywhere close to power in US, but alas, Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations, along with the whole Congress over all those times, still scored far below my betentacled arguably Chaotic Evil reference point.

Most immigrants abandoned their original profession, and jumped into either demeaning kind of work, or some questionable get-rich-quick (or, more often, get-not-poor-quick) scheme, usually of dubious legality, and accomplished nothing. I, despite my fundamental disagreement with foundations of American ideology and society, never did anything more illegal than speeding of farther removed from my profession than Windows GUI software development (and only went that far in an extreme situation where it was somewhat rationally justified).

Most immigrants who managed to find a job somewhere related to technology, ended up becoming either:
1. A walking cost-saving measure -- a person who, through some great ingenuity and heroic effort, maintains hopelessly broken equipment because it's cheaper for employer to pay him peanuts than replace, repair or properly service said equipment.
or
2. Professional charlatan. At least 80% of "programmers" are in this category regardless of their country of origin.

I currently do embedded systems development, and my previous work history includes large numbers of successfully developed projects -- though occasionally ruined by things far beyond my control.

So I think, I can place myself among large, but nowhere close to majority, category of immigrants who actually had a valid reason to move here while escaping a unique and serious economic crisis that coincided with my graduation. It also helps that when moving to US, among all hope and expectations, I clearly understood that I am coming there to be oppressed, and that even if I ended up liking the place and being perfectly aligned with dominant ideology and taste, I will never be accepted as one of the locals. Surely, disappointing me was a tough task, but American society accomplished it in the most successful way possible.

Really?

[warp_kez]

Or how to scam your fellow man by claiming their Windows has a virus even if they are using a Mac or don't even have a computer.

No, thanks!

[Anonymous Coward]

India is modern day slavery. The sight of shanty towns and poverty is unbearable.

One can't ignore these (or the stench of Mumbai) from the confines of cushy western living quarters and restaurant.

Re:No, thanks!

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in Redwood City. Today I walked by a guy sleeping under the Jefferson St. Rail overpass. You were saying? No, it ain't Mumbai... yet.

Re:No, thanks!

[Anonymous Coward]

China is slavery, not India. Indians have the choice of take it or leave it, and the government doesn't pocket their salaries and give them crumbs, as China does.

I agree that pollution is a far bigger problem there than in the West.

Re:No, thanks!

[Anonymous Coward]

"the government doesn't pocket their salaries and give them crumbs, as China does."

Wow! The Chinese have their own version of IRS.
Looks like they have a far more westernized society than I thought.

Re:No, thanks!

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

and they already have a single-payer health care like Europe.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Good, let them go

[bryan1945]

Less competition for the unemployed here.

Can you handle the truth?

[roman_mir]

So can you handle the truth?

The truth is that Socialist / Marxist / Keynesian ideas that are implemented all around the Western world are causing the mass exodus of capital from that world.

The truth is that government regulations on all facets of business and labor, even such 'small' things as minimum wage create mis-allocation of resources, create imbalances in the markets that are then corrected by the capital and the jobs shifting elsewhere.

The truth is that economy depends on production and not on consumption, consumption is a trivial consequence of production, especially consumption that is tax financed, vendor financed, debt financed, inflation financed consumption.

The truth is that politicians use 'free cheese', such as SS/Medicare ponzi schemes in the mousetrap to push forward their own agenda of stealing more power for themselves and growing the government with all that stolen money and selling the power that the larger government then holds.

The truth is that printing money is not the same thing as producing something of value that market want and the truth is that the so called 'economists' that are supporting this agenda of money printing are just mouthpieces for the government, and they are pushing this agenda that government wants and this is the biggest part of the sickness in the economy - 'free money', currency destruction, which results in gambling rather than investing and of-course results in stealing.

The truth is that the people do NOT understand the real problem and the government is again very successful at playing the blame game, which misdirects the attention of the people from the real problem.

The truth is that the real problem is the loss of liberties and individual freedoms, allowing the government to create a huge prison and fight perpetual wars, taxing, borrowing, printing ever more money, which go to the real owners of the system.

The truth is that the government is incapable of fixing this without getting out of the way and shrinking and becoming proportionate to spending rather than to income of the economy in totality.

The truth is that the loss of jobs is a result of the government policy of implementing a fascist state (merging of government and largest corporations/monopolies) by using socialist ideology (wealth redistribution and 'taking care of people'). All the money printing, income taxes, business regulations, all of the unelected departments creating regulations that then can be sold and can be used to prop up monopolies and prevent competition.

The truth is that it is the government that stands in the way of healing the economy. The economy is being destroyed by the government. The problem with people becoming poorer (socialists/fascists like to call that income inequality, but it's not income inequality, it's just poverty) and people are becoming poorer because they have no choice but either to work for very few companies or to be on welfare or even go without. This is all created by the socialist/fascist agenda of the government. That agenda i

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

So I should starve on slave wages instead?

fuck off you cunt.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Kraftwerk]

If only a GOP candidate was running on the platform of limited government, personal liberty, deregulation, ending the federal reserve, and had a firm understanding of Austrian economics. Capitalism’s about profit and loss You bail out the losers there’s no end to the cost

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[roman_mir]

The answer to the question: "Can you handle the truth?" is given in the moderation of the question.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

So I should starve on slave wages instead?

fuck off you cunt.

You'd rather live a comfortable life and leave the eventual shit storm for your kids?

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[roman_mir]

I don't think that's the choice.

I think the choice is either to have a completely destroyed economy and to shift to dictatorial/totalitarian government, to lose all freedoms.

OR

The other choice is to allow the restructuring of the economy, have a very hard 2 years, and eventually see the capital return to the US.

But to do that the government must be shrunk, the budgets must be balanced NOT by giving more revenue to the government, but by doing real cuts in spending (wars, SS, Medicare), by shutting down Federal Reserve, FDIC, Freddie/Fannie, FHA, HUD, IRS, FBI, CIA, DHS, dep'ts of education, energy, commerce, agriculture, EPA, FDA, FCC, FAA, etc., abolishing the income/payroll/corporate taxes, shrinking the federal registry.

This is not supposed to be a bad thing - more liberty and more freedom. This is supposed to fix the money, this is supposed to fix the environment for investment capital to return and re-open the production facilities. 1-2 years of this will be very hard.

I would go further than Ron Paul of-course in firing up to 99% of government employees, but I am not running, nor can I.

But this does NOT mean that people will be poorer for it. It means 2 years of real shake down and then it means reopening of production facilities, recreating the actual real economy, not based on vendor financed, debt/inflation financed consumption, but recreating the production, which allows real consumption and real money and real investments and real markets.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, let's get rid of all our protections. Abolish it all. Our economy will prosper from all the dead people.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[roman_mir]

There are no protections. There are no protections in your system. The people are not protected. Where do you see protected people?

The only real protections come from market regulating the behavior of individuals. Individuals are the real owners of property and businesses.

Corporations are not faceless, there are individuals behind the fictitious legal structures built by the government to protect those, who need that protection and are willing to 'share' with the politicians for those protections.

The protections are not to the average people, the protections that exist in your system are to the real owners of your government.

The only protections that exist protect the real owners of your political system and your government from YOU. From you, as a competitor. From you as an independent person. From you as a savor and investor of your own money into your own business and into your own future.

The real protections are only found in real free market - market free of government misdirection and mis-allocation of resources.

Market is the real democracy, with people voting on who is giving them the best value for their money.

--

As to the political system and the government, I think the best change would be to have people serve limited terms in the government, the way they serve in military in many countries. Yes, why not have people serve in government the way they serve in jury?

You can be drafted to serve in jury and you should be drafted to serve in government maybe? Maybe that's the real way to fix the problem of the broken political system.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

You live in a fantasy land, history has clearly shown us what unregulated capitalism looks like (think industrial revolution you clod). Either you failed history and are simply ignorant or are being a bold face liar. Either way you couldn't be more wrong if you tried. Why is that the last 20 years of deregulation has only lead to an increase in the concentration of wealth? If you were correct we should have seen the middle class rise, not be stagnant while the rich grew their wealth greatly above the rate of inflation.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

The GOP and their lame policies over the last 30yrs are WHY the fundamental reason the economy is in the shape its in -- and you want to hire them back? It'll never cease to amaze me how people can live with their heads in the sand. Everyone wants the quick fix.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[roman_mir]

Yes, industrial revolution. The best thing that the free markets did for the people - allowing the people to be more productive by efficiently organizing land, capital and labor to increase productivity to the point, where under 5% of population could actually feed 100% of it. Allowing hundreds of people to work in factories manufacturing all sorts of products that would have taken tens or hundreds of thousands of people to produce purely by hand before that time.

Making the workers so efficient and productive that they didn't have to work 15 hours a day to feed themselves, but instead allowing a man to feed his family on his own income, eventually allowing the children not to go to work at a very young age as they have always done until the industrial revolution. Allowing the women to have to be baby factories to prop up subsistence farming to support the aging parents and thus shifting the role of women in society, actually allowing them to be free. Actually allowing the productivity of a free worker to become much higher of than that of a slave worker (slavery is very inefficient, it requires taking care of people's living and health and food, it's expensive, much more expensive than to hire people).

All those terrible things, like Ford being regulated by the MARKET, doubling the pay of his employees to reduce turn over, allowing them to buy the product they were working on with 4 months of salary, bringing down their working hours to 8 only and their working days to 5 in a week, paying them double what anybody else was, hiring the disabled people nobody else wanted, all because of that terrible industrial revolution, which increased the productivity so much, that even a partially disabled person could work on an assembly line building cars. Oh, incidentally he doubled his production capacity within a year after implementing those changes, paying his workers equivalent of 1.25 ounces of gold a week, which in todays prices is about 2200 USD or over 110K a year. That's without income taxes, that's without SS or Medicare. That's with those workers being able to support a family with a stay at home wife, 5-6 kids, paying for everything (health/education/pension) out of pocket and no debt.

Yes, the terrible industrial revolution, which only was the most innovative and inventive time in history, which allowed the US become the biggest creditor nation, biggest producer of high quality cheap goods nation on the planet.

Terrible thing of-course.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[roman_mir]

Are you telling me there is a difference between your parties and between your candidates? Are you telling me that Clinton was any better than any of the Bushes or Reagan?

Why? Is it all the wars he went into? Is it the US debt refinancing with variable rate short term borrowing? Is it the bubble that was inflated during his time by the traitorous Greenspan's policy of taking price of money down to 1%? Was it NAFTA maybe? Maybe it was the increase in drug war spending?

But I am not protecting any party, they are all corrupt.

Nixon took the world off the gold standard - that's the last beginning of the destruction of US economy. Of-course all the previous destruction (Fed, IRS, FDIC, SS, Medicare,) didn't help. The wars didn't hep. The education dep't and all the loans didn't help.

Obama just pust 1Trillion dollars on the US Treasury books (liability side). Single handedly, like a Boss.

No. None of that works. The only real change can come from people understanding that the government is not supposed to be involved in business regulations, loans, labor, economy, price setting, interest rates, money printing, education, health, insurances of any kind.

All of those things are moral hazards. All of those things end up growing the gov't and destroying the money and the economy and turning you into slaves.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Pinky's Brain]

If the US is Marxist/Keyenesian then why hasn't the Gini coefficient gone down? Sweden and Denmark might be called a Marxist/Keynesian fusion, but most of the west is crony capitalist.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[khallow]

Yes, let's get rid of all our protections.

A lot of those protections, protect rent-seekers. For example, some agricultural subsidies might "protect" the US food supply in some useful way, but they most definitely protect the big agribusinesses and food processing businesses.

And as others have noted in the Chevy Volt story, many countries have become nations of cowards. A few less protections would help us recover from that.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Pinky's Brain]

The US doesn't need capital ... it needs oil. The US is swimming in capital, the whole world is ... there just isn't anything worth investing it in, except for natural monopolies and governments (to protect your ownership of the monopolies).

The only end result possible of anarcho capitalism in the absence of economic growth is feudalism (rent seeking will keep concentrating wealth more and more). It's not a solution for the modern world of natural resource limits and automation.

After 2 years of "creative destruction" nothing will have changed about the fact that an US worker would be trying to compete with a Chinese worker with vastly lower wages ...

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[roman_mir]

I don't know about Denmark, but Sweden is moving away from socialism towards less regulated free market. They have a long way to go of-course, but at least they are on the right track. If they don't do it, they are facing the same problem as the rest of the socialist world. As to them being 'keynesian', I don't know that for a fact. Sweden at least is an oil exporter. Maybe what they really are is a better way to be an energy exporter economy than say the Saudi Arabia or Russia or most of African exporters, where majority of wealth that is acquired from the exports ends up in very few hands.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[overunderunderdone]

What both you and the OP are missing is that there is a balance between costs and benefits. He is looking only at the costs of those protections, you are looking only at the benefits. I'll disagree with the OP and say that many of those protections are necessary and ultimately beneficial, but realizing that they have very real costs. On the other hand a great many of those protections are NOT worth the cost. If you assert that they are worth the costs you have no standing to complain when the bill comes due in the form of a slower economy and persistent high unemployment.

On thing to remember when evaluating those costs. It's not usually the big bad corporations, the villains of the morality play that usually bear those costs. They have the resources to comply with the regulations and in many cases welcome them as a barrier to entry protecting them from competition. The law preventing BigFoodCo, Inc. from poisoning children (like they really want) is at worst a minor inconvenience to BigFoodCo. They do what's required, file the paperwork, raise the price of milk by a few pennies and turn to some other scheme to fulfill their goal of poisoning children. The people who bear the cost are potential entrepreneurs who look at the costs and decide it's not worth it. Or those that go for it but end up bankrupt because the costs of compliance were too high. Or, those who don't comply and get caught like organic coops and Amish farmers raided by the police and FDA for selling raw milk to the tree hugging hippies who want it. Note that in the California case selling raw milk is legal, but they didn't have all the proper paperwork filed.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Pinky's Brain]

So if not the EPA who is going to regulate ... you can say they do more harm than good, but we have plenty of object lessons in third world countries of free market inspired environmental destruction to say that some government agency has to keep the externalities under control. Maybe market forces could be incorporated more, but someone still needs to make the regulations and police them.

A factory owner will never have a contract with every person on the planet breathing the air he pollutes, contract law can't solve everything ...

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[khallow]

After 2 years of "creative destruction" nothing will have changed about the fact that an US worker would be trying to compete with a Chinese worker with vastly lower wages ...

I think this needs to happen. US labor is less valuable than it's ever been and with greatly weakened pricing power, yet people still want to be paid what they used to be paid. The faster we adapt to the real world, the less painful it'll be in the long run.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[khallow]

As another example of my previous statement, it's worth noting that capital has kept its value far better than labor has. I think this in large part explains the growth in income inequity over the past forty years.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[nomadic]

Why don't you tell us what country you're posting from? You're obviously not from the US, and you have a very poor grasp of United States history and government.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Osgeld]

The industrial revolution I read about had people working 15 hours a day in sweatshops for a bucket of piss at age 6, you are about 100 years off the mark there cheif, the industrial revolution did not happen in the 1920's

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

How can this stereotypical talk radio rant (listened to only by people who never graduated from college) get modded "Informative"?

Hello, moderators? Anybody home?

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh look, the Ron Paul bobbleheads found slashdot...

The economy depends is a system that depends on governance, not the other way around. Capitalism is not a magical force of nature that will lead us to prosperity if we all adopt some pie-in-the-sky lassez faire attitude. Capitalism probably works best when a fair marketplace is maintained by the government not when those that accumulate the most are allowed to abuse the system at will.

PS. I read your little treatise on SS. You seem to be missing the reason SS was started in the first place. That said, it is cute to couch an entire argument within one outlier (most people don't live to be 100). We should really just index the age of collection to life expectancy.

Troll successful!

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[theskipper]

Are you saying that no government regulation was necessary during that period? For example, without the Pure Food and Drug Act, the meat industry would have naturally corrected itself based on market forces? Pardon the pun, but it seems difficult to swallow after what was (eventually) proven true in Sinclair's The Jungle.

Whether the FDA and other agencies have grown too large is a different issue. Some regulation will always be necessary because the basis of capitalism is growing profit by any means necessary. Having regulations changes that to "by any legal means necessary".

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[cjb658]

When are we going to start requiring congressmen to take basic economics before serving office?

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[paiute]

Bleatings of a Judas goat.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

So why is the economy of the People's Republic of China booming? Remember, this is a dictatorship run by one of the last Communist parties in power. Any enterprise of any size is either dominated or directly owned by the government.

Oh, right - your definition of freedom is the freedom of enterprise owners to control their slave labor force, to prevent the population from effectively petitioning their government, and to restrict the population's ability to find the truth. The PRC is free by this definition, and hence is a paragon of capitalist enthusiasm.

Your freedom is the freedom of the slave owner to do as they wish with their slaves without interference

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Richard Dick Head]

Yeah, darn GOP!

Europe, the US North East, and California have been doing so well all these years! lol

Of course, W was a spend hound, so it comes from both sides.

The problem with government is that if the capital base shrinks, the burden of govt as a percentage shoots up. Hence the massive borrowing going on. Its all hidden right now. That is why Democrats print so much money, it is the best way to steal from the rich. Carter was the most successful thief-in-chief in history, and that is why anyone who was any kind of success from that era hates his guts.

The problem with socialism is the reality of the bell curve. If everyone was as productive and intelligent as the top 10%, then socialism is not only possible, but would be the best form of government.

But, welcome to reality, we still have a lot of genetic detritus wandering around and breeding like mad. You need things like abortion and prison to keep these elements from spreading like a cancer.

The root of this problem comes from the area of the world where humans originated...where you don't have to work to hard to survive, there is no harsh winter to remove the lazy from the gene pool, and the most efficient mode for basic survival is to do as little as possible.

Any successful form of government requires a harsh, hard-nosed treatment of your human trash...even Marx foresaw this and suggested imprisoning the shiftless laggards and feeding them only bread and water as a motivation for people to stay productive.

Giving these people government jobs is a solution, but a prohibitively expensive one. There must be a better way!

Well, you could poison the illegal drug supply. However, you'll find that people who on both ends of the bell curve are more likely to do these than the middle, so while destroying your worst, you also take out your best. (for example, it is common, more common than you might think, for extremely talented and productive programmers to use meth to get stuff done. it is also common among borderline-retarded urban hipsters).

Ah, but what about anti-depressants? AHA! Why don't we restrict the drug supply to modes that reduce libido and restrict orgasm. Oh wait, already done. Actually, its a symptom for almost every chronic genetic disorder drug treatment program out there :D

What about a dumbass-restricted disease? Oh wait, AIDS, already done.

Huh, it seems that the good options we have available are already in place, we just got to wait until gene screening becomes available.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[roman_mir]

EPA today is a way to strip people of private property rights.

There should be no EPA of-course, but only property owners can ensure real environmental protection. There is plenty of precedent of property owners protecting their property and suing those, who pollute it. If you are a large polluter, you end up polluting other people's property, that's what courts are for.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[scottbomb]

How's that Hope 'n Change working out for ya? Oh that's right... he needs 4 more years to fix it all. Got it.

Remember that real estate bubble that kicked it all off with the "affordable housing" programs? See: Chris Dodd (D), Barney Frank (D), Bill Clinton (D).

Remember what unemployment rates were under Bush? Roughly 4-5%. A typical liberal's response is, "the economy started going to hell under Bush". That was in 2008 (his last year) in the fall (election season) when investors began to see that a Democrat (any democrat) would most certainly win and change fiscal policy for the worse. Shit REALLY hit the fan when they realized the next president would be an extremely liberal (if not downright Marxist) "community organizer"-professor-ACORN lawyer-Saul Alinsky disciple from Chicago that had absolutely no executive experience but kept company with scum like Jeremiah Wright, Billy Ayers, Tony Rezko, etc. But people were going to elect him anyway because he was "historical" (black) and they wanted "Hope!" and "Change!"

Liberals (like Nanci Pelosi) were already in control of the House and Senate. Nancy-on-steroids was on his way to the White House. Yes, investors took their money and ran. And unemployment began going up by 1/2 million jobs a month for the next 2 years.

But we're supposed to believe it's all Bush's fault. Keith Olberman said so.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[roman_mir]

The US doesn't need capital ... it needs oil.

- this comes from complete misunderstanding of what capital is.

Capital consists of savings that accrue when somebody overproduces/underconsumes and these savings are the result of actual work. I am not talking about worthless currency.

In most primitive terms, if somebody is smelting iron ore, any of the metal that he is not consuming, he is saving. These are real savings, and this is what constitutes capital.

Printing money does not constitute capital, as there is no underconsumption, so nothing is saved from real production.

Savings are only nominally expressed in monetary equivalent, but they represent actual productive output. USA is lacking real savings that results from productive output, this is clear from USA's 53 Billion USD / month trade deficit.

USA is not producing enough to save, thus there is no capital. So no real investment can be made. Without real investment capital there can be no new productive capacity, because tools cannot be bought, machines cannot be bought, labor cannot be paid for, nothing can be done without real savings.

That's why credit is so important to businesses, not to consumers (debt financed consumption), but to producers, who use credit to create productive output that can be used to pay interest and the principle back to the creditor.

But with government eating all of the available credit and setting artificial price on money, the businesses cannot have that credit available either. Only banks have access to the federal discount window, no real business can have that access.

So there is no investment capital, so how is all this new oil going to be extracted? It can be extracted of-course by those, who have real savings and real investment capital - oil firms have it of-course (and their income is huge, but it's that big because of inflation, in real money oil prices are very low.)

As to wages - there are over 20,000,000 people out of work, saying that they must not be allowed to work for lower wages is just suicidal for the economy. You rather see them on welfare?

The creative destruction has to happen, debts have to be restructured and liquidated, credit has to become available to the business, so government must shrink for that to happen. Price on money must go up to the level where markets want to see it, not to remain at the inflationary levels that the government prefers, because it is the largest debtor and counterfeiter.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[roman_mir]

That is why Democrats print so much money, it is the best way to steal from the rich.

- out of all the other stuff, I just want to bring out the point, that in reality the inflation tax hits the poor much harder than the rich.

The rich can shift money from asset class to asset class, sure some get hit with inflation, but the only people actually suffering from real rising prices that result from expansionary monetary base are the poor, who have to spend more and more of their fixed income on the same basket of goods.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[roman_mir]

I think that's not going to help as long as the basic economic principles that are widely accepted are based on the wrong (and long discredited but very much accepted by the politicians) Keynesian model.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[roman_mir]

So why is the economy of the People's Republic of China booming?

- because economically they are the freest market in the world today.

That's true by de-facto, as all the productive capacity shifted there for a reason. You can also ask these people.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, the classic mo-Ron philosophy. Ron Paul has zero grasp of economics, much less foreign affairs.

Lets say he and the tea baggers win. He pulls the military off the South Korean DMZ, the Navy aircraft carrier groups mothballed, and out of Pacific waters. Great cost savings. Come a few days later, Kim has invaded Seoul. China still has a grudge against Japan so their carrier fleet now is menacing that country. Taiwan becomes red. Now the West is in deeper shit because 1/3 of the total manufacturing capacity we have is now controlled by hostile countries or destroyed.

Ron pulls out of the Middle East leaving any allies (Israel, UAE, Saudi Arabia) to their own devices. Iran starts striking Tel Aviv with rockets, Israel retaliates with nukes, but gets overwhelmed by every country in the region swarming them. Countries friendly to the west or at least not hostile (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Turkey) now have a bloodthirsty mob. Now, nuclear terrorism is going to be a primary threat to the world as a region-wide caliphate expands to threaten Spain and western Europe.

Ron pulls funding from hospitals, Social Security, and Medicare. Now hospitals and charity organizations have to take care of the sick, and we are back to poorhouses that are like African AIDS clinics where a drink of water, much less an IV of useful medication is a rare thing.

Ron sells off government land. Great money maker. Now Yellowstone Park is a privately run resort, with multiple golf courses in between the geysers. The parts of the park that just have animals running around are turned into ranches and deer leases.

The land that isn't turned into resorts gets logged. Ron Paul has been an enemy of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the EPA in general. Can't have people living in a country without acid rain.

So, after a while, the US starts looking like a post apocalyptic hellscape, even though the economy went up for a bit. Any areas that had old growth forests are gone, other land becomes toxic waste pits due to strip mining and contaminated water tables. Classic farmland gets taken away from families and handed to big agribusiness. Soon, the US doesn't even have the ability to feed itself (think the Irish Potato Famine where there was plenty of food, but England took it all.)

Don't forget Ron Paul's stance on national security (or lack of one). Once his defunding policies take hold, the drug cartels wouldn't just be a border menace, but would be happy to set up shop in cities, just like the mafia did. I'm sure local businesses would love to be paying an additional protection payment to the Spanish speaking people with the teardrop tattoos in most US cities.

Wow, what a utopia! I wonder how many people would love to live in a place with no national parks, lead in the water, a nuclear threat from foreign combatants whom we have no intel on due to no troops in the area. Any useful resources (rare earths), we will have to beg a Chinese-Russian coalition for. Of course, national security will be shit because the Army doesn't have enough boots to keep order when some town gets nuked.

I sure want to raise my kids in a country where I have to pay for a symbol on my house so the FD would come, a transponder on my wrist so an ambulance would actually stop, and where I had to pay the police to investigate a crime a la Heavy Metal. Schools? Screw that. The kids can have the luxury of working on farms as migrant workers, mines, or spend their lives in jails if they can't get work. Keeping people in prison for life helps private corrections, so that is important for US business. Literacy? Being able to read a contract and refuse signing is anti-business. Have to stamp that out.

Ron Paul's version of the US is a country full of robber barons worse than Carnegie and Frick. At least they left concert halls and foundations behind. Modern day CEOs leave nothing behind.

Ron Paul appeals to those who have failed economics, civics, and government in high school. I have yet to see someone who has any form of formal education champion his crap.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[perrin]

Sweden has no oil. You must be thinking about Norway.

As for being on a right track, the current craze of de-regulation does not seem to be helping anything.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[roman_mir]

Yep, the classic mo-Ron philosophy. Ron Paul has zero grasp of economics, much less foreign affairs.

- yet he is the only person in gov't who understands enough of it to build up a portfolio, with minimum gains of 300% and maximum gains of 2000% based on his ... 'misunderstanding'?

He pulls the military off the South Korean DMZ, the Navy aircraft carrier groups mothballed, and out of Pacific waters. Great cost savings. Come a few days later, Kim has invaded Seoul.

- first of all, yes that's a real cost saving, because USA has no money.

Secondly, South Korea is plenty capable of protecting itself. In any case it's non of US's business.

China still has a grudge against Japan so their carrier fleet now is menacing that country.

- all that China needs to do in fact for US to stop its militarism is to stop funding it.

Seconly, Japan is plenty capable of protecting itself.
Thirdly, Chinese rather trade with Japan than fight a war.
Lastly, it's none of US's business.

Taiwan becomes red.

- right. Why don't you attack them preemptively? The failed Vietnam war shows just how misguided the approach of proliferating the 'righteousness' of US ideals is, and now USA is trading with Vietnam.

Now the West is in deeper shit because 1/3 of the total manufacturing capacity we have is now controlled by hostile countries or destroyed.

- maybe it's good for the West. It now will have a perfect reason not to pay the debts back and to re-invent its own productive capacity. There you go - instant jobs.

Ron pulls out of the Middle East leaving any allies (Israel, UAE, Saudi Arabia) to their own devices.

- terrorist attacks against USA stop. USA stops funding people that caused 9/11 (with money stolen via inflation and borrowed from China). That's just terrible.

Iran starts striking Tel Aviv with rockets, Israel retaliates with nukes, but gets overwhelmed by every country in the region swarming them.

- Israel has over 300 nukes. USA has nukes as well, if anybody attacks Israel with nukes it will immediately destroy the opponent and I am sure that Ron Paul would go to CONGRESS and ask the AMERICAN PEOPLE if they are willing to DECLARE A WAR.

What a fucking amazing concept, Anonymous Coward, isn't it? Who are you, Dick Cheney? How is bloodsucking going for you, you heartless prick?

Countries friendly to the west or at least not hostile (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Turkey) now have a bloodthirsty mob.

- Way to mix Saudi Arabia and Turkey into one crowd of 'non-hostile' or 'friendly' countries.

Again, 9/11 was FUNDED by Saudis, you fucking shit.

Now, nuclear terrorism is going to be a primary threat to the world as a region-wide caliphate expands to threaten Spain and western Europe.

- no no, you are Bill O'Reilly, aren't you?

Ron pulls funding from hospitals, Social Security, and Medicare.

- unfortunately that's not his platform, so you are a lying (what else is new).

Now hospitals and charity organizations have to take care of the sick, and we are back to poorhouses that are like African AIDS clinics where a drink of water, much less an IV of useful medication is a rare thing.

- More Bill O'Reilly.

Ron sells off government land. Great money maker.

- BETTER than the status quo, where the coal and gas and oil are extracted from these lands without ANY payments of any royalties. That, of-course, and all the moral hazards of the government setting liability caps and limitations while sniffing crack off toaster ovens and fucking with the company's executives.

Now Yellowstone Park is a privately run re

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like the entire 'seal team 6' is on the offense here. "Troll", "Flame", "Off-topic" are almost as good as M16 rounds, but not exactly the same.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[roman_mir]

You know what, I did think of Norway's oil. Sweden exports stuff, but not that particular substance. The deregulations in Sweden are the only way to keep that economy from falling in some not so distant future. There is no reason to stay there as a company in today's world, even such trademarks as Volvo, Ikea, Ericsson, Scania will outsource and move their businesses and they will be right to do so. There is no reason not to. Thus Sweden is doing the right thing even if you don't see it as such immediately.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[roman_mir]

So CAN YOU handle the truth?

The reality is obviously not looking very bright, if the majority vote is that the truth is a 'troll'.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Pinky's Brain]

Any industrial activity pollutes ... who is going to determine when continuing industrial activity should only require compensation and when it is simple beyond the pale? Is it going to be the judges making pure value judgements every single time? Without a value judgement all you would be left with are absolute property rights, with any single downstream property owners able to close down a factory. In the case of AIR that is everyone, any kind of economic activity (including agriculture) instantly becomes impossible ... there will always be one person not to agree to the pollution regardless of compensation.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[pwizard2]

So you're seriously saying that a race to the bottom is a good idea? Really? It would be tolerable to work for less if the cost of living decreased in proportion to wages, but it hasn't. Gas is still a rip off and the price of food and goods has gone up because of it. (it costs more to deliver things) It costs the same to live as before the recession happened (if not more so) yet people have less resources to make ends meet.

The recession only ended if you were rich enough to get a government bailout. You can't have a functional economy when most of the working people have very little money. The occupy movement is just the beginning. Things are going to get bad if this keeps up.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

But in that case, such capital and jobs should go to countries with freer economies, such as Singapore right? China has transformed from a communist economy to a de-facto command economy, where thinly guised skilled slave labor is what attracts the bulk of manufacturing. India still is largely a socialist country, which granted has loosened a lot, but still a lot less freer than the US. Only difference that in India, enforcement of laws aren't always uniform.

Bottom line - the reason jobs have been going from the US to China & India is the price tag.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[The Wild Norseman]

When are we going to start requiring congressmen to take basic economics before serving office?

I used to think like this too. The fact that our current president is supposedly a Constitutional scholar really puts the lie to the idea that basic economics and Constitutional knowledge are in any way supportive of what they actually do once in office.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[The Wild Norseman]

Why is the US labor less valuable?

And why would you think it's better to bring the US down to third-world poverty levels rather than trying to stay a first-world economic base? Or maybe I'm misunderstanding your use of "the real world".

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[roman_mir]

Yes, race to the bottom is the best thing, because that's race to the bottom in all prices, not just labor prices but prices for all consumer goods and services.

You want everything to be as cheap as at all possible INCLUDING the labor price, this allows the greatest production capacity and the greatest distribution.

If majority of the people are making 10 bucks a day, but a private yacht only costs 1000 dollars, then it's a really really excellent world to live in.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[udachny]

and this neo-con fox view garbage gets +4? This is what, not slash-dot but fox-dot here?

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[khallow]

So you're seriously saying that a race to the bottom is a good idea?

I'm just saying that it will happen. But we can get a better outcome if we don't wriggle on the hook for a decade or two.

It would be tolerable to work for less if the cost of living decreased in proportion to wages, but it hasn't.

Here's an example of the wriggling on the hook, I was talking about. Rather than let housing prices decline to their true values, society has tried with various stupid ideas to prop up the value of housing. It won't work in the long run except to cause a lot of pain.

The recession only ended if you were rich enough to get a government bailout. You can't have a functional economy when most of the working people have very little money. The occupy movement is just the beginning. Things are going to get bad if this keeps up.

The worst thing that could happen here is if the Occupy movement ever becomes credible. Sure it sucks, if you don't have wealth, but the reason the wealthier are that way is because labor is declining in value. Destroying the value of other parts of society, such as capital or knowledge, isn't going to help.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Pinky's Brain]

The problem for most of the "socialist" world is that they don't have oil ... they require austerity for that simple fact ... no amount of capital,free marketets or deregulation will fix that nearly every facet the productive economy is dependent on oil. They can only produce luxuries while other countries sell them necessities, a poor position to be in. Redistributionism or social darwinism are really orthogonal issues to that of the real problem of the modern world ... peak oil (it doesn't matter if peak oil isn't global).

You didn't answer my question though ... if the US is Marxist/Keyensian why hasn't the Gini coefficient gone down?

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[melted]

Both China and North Korea are nuclear-capable countries with 1M+ strong armies. US army can't defeat a handful of towelheads in Afghanistan. It's completely useless against North Korea or China.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[roman_mir]

I explained this in many of my posts and journal entries. Look up the original comment for reference.

What USA has now is a growing difference between the incomes of the top and the bottom earners, and this is very easy to understand if one looks at when it started to grow - which almost exactly 40 years ago now. That's the time when Nixon took the world off the gold standard.

Find the graphs and look carefully at what happened - the cost of borrowing was becoming lower, as the federal reserve pushed the discount window interest rates down to allow banks to borrow more currency, which became at that point baseless.

The inflation - counterfeiting of money is the reason for the calamity USA finds itself in. Everything - from the impossibility to save and invest money at a decent interest rate (and now with negative interest rate), to impossibility to get a credit line for business because of how low the rates are, nobody allows businesses to get credit. This credit is really only available to the largest banks, who turn around and buy government Treasuries.

This is done on purpose - on one hand the banks can appear to be solvent (they are all bankrupt by the way), by arbitraging between FREE money and Treasury bills and the government can 'borrow' money from the Fed (indirectly), through the banks. This is money counterfeiting.

The government started growing faster than ever once the gold link was severed, at that point nothing was standing in the way of growing the number of regulations that destroy businesses, nothing was stopping the government from any growth. It was borrowing and printing like a drunk maniac, and obviously the productive capacity shifted to other places, because you can't invest in an economy like that - huge government spending, huge number of regulations, very high taxes (and it's a ruse that taxes used to be higher than today, today the effective taxes are the highest in US history as people cannot deduct what they could even when nominal rates where above 90%, nobody was paying that ever).

The problem with the monopolies is that they enjoy government support globally, all around the world they enjoy government support, and so there is very little competition. Obviously with little competition the prices are near monopolistic, and thus the top earners can set as high prices as they want.

So the problem is government - it's big, it's expensive, it's growing, it destroys competition, it prevents people from starting competing firms, it prevents credit from being available to the potential entrepreneurs, it creates regulations that benefit monopolies, because it prefers monopolies, because monopolies have the most cash to dole out to politicians. Government destroys the money, and this is a huge problem as well.

The Fed doesn't even admit that their interest rate manipulation is all about lowering the cost of labor! That's right, when they say: we lower the interest rates to heat up the economy, it means they CREATE INFLATION, which destroys the purchasing power of the salaried workers, which basically lowers their salaries, that's all there is to it.

The economy would have been so much better off without all this nonsense, without money counterfeiting and without the inflation.

People don't think about VALUE of money, they just see a nominal dollar amount and think that that's value. It's NOT value.

Dollar is falling in value all the time, that what they do not teach in schools, because it's basically anti-government knowledge.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Pinky's Brain]

No, you really haven't ... the thing about redistributionism is that if government really wants to do it, it can. Monetary policy is just a side show, they have the guns ... and if they want to redistribute they simply do it. FDR did it, the French revolution did it .... the current US government simply doesn't ... they go through the motions, they keep old inefficient build to fail wellfare systems going for now, but they are not redistributing wealth faster than it is concentrating ... they are just towering debt on debt, preparing a way for a collapse which will leave the 0.1% with all the collateral underlying it.

Not very Keynesian and certainly not very Marxian.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[roman_mir]

1. It's Marxism that allows the government to gather the power that it is not authorized to have - that is my point. I am not saying that gov't is Marxist ideologically, only as a matter of convenience to have a mousetrap that works with 'free' cheese in it.

2. The policy is very much Keynesian in terms that people believe that government must spend money in a recession because people aren't spending. Nobody cares to ask: why are people not spending and nobody cares to realize that spending is the disease, the cure is savings, underconsumption, deflation and debt restructuring.

As to redistribution - that's just stupid. It never solves any problems, it only destroys capital that is held privately and is invested. Any capital that a person is underconsuming is invested.

Any rich person who spends only a tiny fraction of his yearly income doesn't need to work to sustain his lifestyle. He can kick back, relax, do nothing. Enjoy life. Why did Steve Jobs work until 6 weeks before his death? He didn't have to work another day since 1985.

Stealing his money (that's what 'redistribution' means), doesn't do anything good for the economy. It doesn't create any more business. It doesn't create any business that can SURVIVE on its own without government just pouring money into it. Solyndra went bankrupt at the exact moment when the government money ran out.

There is nothing good about taking money away from a person who is not spending it and instead is investing it and giving that money to anybody else, especially to the government. The only thing that government can 'redistribute' is poverty.

Revolutions show this very well actually, as they destroy private capital and production capacity and the revolutionaries are left poor and without jobs. Then they have to go down the chain, taking the money from the next people in line, whoever has the money after the richest people. Then they have to go down the chain again, because they just consume the money.

Like in the former USSR in twenties-thirties, tens of millions of Ukrainian farmers were killed by gun and famine, because the revolutionaries needed to take away the fruits of their labor. Literally.

Systematically stealing money is wrong not just because it's immoral (that too), but it's BAD BUSINESS.

As I said - the real problem is NOT income inequality. The real problem is poverty - and that's direct result of government destruction of economy.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

TRUTH = HATE

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, seeing your (you as in roman_mir) reply to this AC has made me decide to check the "post anon" button, because I can't believe I'm replying to someone who just wants to shine to the world their ignorance.

Dude, have you heard of the concept of "balance of power"? This is something that presidents fret over throughout their own term. But since you don't have a clue about geography or history, it flies over your head... WHOOSH.

Japan does NOT have the capability to defend itself. There is a little thing called a treaty. Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security to be exact. In return for the US protecting this California sized island with her ships and nukes, Japan keeps their forces small. Ron Paul has stated that he wants to break this treaty by leaving Japan to its own devices. Japan is a smart nation; they will immediately militarize once they realize the US doesn't protect them. Now we have a Pacific Rim armed and tense. Compared to the Middle East, having Asian nations go at each other would be comparing a cup of tea to an ocean. Left to its own devices, Japan can turn on the US, especially with pressure from China. You have proven yourself ignorant of this fact, which has been instrumental in keeping peace in the most populated areas of the world.

Now for Israel: You contradict yourself. You say that Israel doesn't need support, but now you say that the US will defend them. If RP leaves them to their own devices (which you stated), yes, Israel has 300 nukes, but there is a lot of territory that angry people are on that is far greater than 300 nukes, and if Iran is viewed as "martyring" itself, Israel isn't going to be able to stand up to the combined armies in the region. Think the US will come back in to a hot war in the ME? Not when China starts reinforcing what is left after the nukes and states that a hit on Bam or what is left of Tehran will be an active hit on the Chinese mainland. The result will be a Middle East essentially unified and hell-bent on destroying Europe and the US.

You think moving the army back to the US and ignoring allies will make threats like Iran and North Korea go away? I would recommend lessening the intake of psilocybin because they are not going anywhere, and would strike at the US with another 9-11 if given the chance... and no US intel or presence will give them plenty of chances.

You state that businesses have to obey property laws. However in a previous post, you state that those laws need to go. Contradicting oneself is pretty pathetic. You can't argue one side, so you have to start arguing two.

You fail to understand the difference between a terrorist cell acting in a country versus the country. Saudi Arabia is a grudging ally (which if you have actually studied history from WWII forward, you will understand why), but of course, they have elements that hate the government. You fail to understand the difference between an insurgent and a citizen.

As for the loss of parks and US areas, can you come up with a rebuttal? It shows that you are obviously champing a wholesale destruction of protections of clean air, clean water, public parks, and small farms -- stuff one can say is truly American.

Calling people Bill O'Reilly repeatedly isn't an argument. You have done that to the other AC in multiple posts. It shows nothing, and reminds me of a recent COPS show where this belligerent woman kept calling someone who complained on her, "the Klan". It did not help her arguments in the slightest.

So, in the exchange of posts with people who are obviously of better education and intelligence:

You have resorted to ad hominem attacks, the last resort of the clueless.

You have contradicted yourself numerous times on core points.

You HAVE to CAPITALIZE every OTHER word JUST like the TIMECUBE guy AND other RANTERS. This by itself indicates mindless fanaticism and little interest in dealing with rebuttals, which are commonplace.

You have showed little to no knowledge of matters economic

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Pinky's Brain]

"the cure is savings, underconsumption, deflation and debt restructuring."

So ... where exactly are jobs supposed to come from in that scenario? The service industry after minimum wage is removed? (ie. more servants.)

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[ChrisMaple]

Ad hominem is not a tool of cognition.

The essence of capitalism is production and trade for profit. Governance is an edge constraint, it is not part of the central mechanism. And conflating governance with government is dishonest.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Dainsanefh]

"a completely destroyed economy and to shift to dictatorial/totalitarian government, to lose all freedoms"

Not really. A national socialist democracy is possible after transition. Look at the Arab Spring uprisings.

A national socialist democracy will get rid of the Zionist pigs which land us in this situation in the first place.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Dainsanefh]

Let Iran stay strong. Fuck Isreal. Without those Zionist bankers the world will be a better place.

SIEG HEIL FUR DUR REICHSFUHRER! HEIL HITLER!

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

Not if there is some food rationing program in place that does not require you to use money to get food.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[euroq]

The only real change can come from people understanding that the government is not supposed to be involved in.... money printing....

Umm, no? Then who is supposed to mint money? Are we supposed to barter with beads and oil? Money is pretty darn nice to have. Why wouldn't you want a government making it? Who else would print it?

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

His being moderated as 'Troll' is not enough for you? What's this - HuffPo, where moderators are meant to be a bunch of Stalinists who mark people down just according to their opinions? As for college, make that 'graduated from Arts college', since it's only the Arts colleges where Bolshevik losers such as you are produced.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[euroq]

the US North East, and California have been doing so well all these years! lol

The US north east and California have been doing just fine. They have some of the highest standards of livings in the world and they aren't feeling the current economic downturn nearly as much as the rest of the world. They have some of the same problems that everywhere else in the rich world has, like the housing crisis, but they are by no means examples of bad societies. A better example of places that are doing bad are Michigan and Mississippi/Louisiana/Arkansas.

That is why Democrats print so much money, it is the best way to steal from the rich.

Wooooah, woah, woah. I don't think you're being serious in your post because it's a lot of hyperbole (or actual craziness), but to anyone else reading this, let me respond because this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. The "democrats" have been a party of tax and spend for a long, long time. The republicans have been a party of borrow and spend since Reagan. In other words, the Democrats don't need to print money or borrow money, they paid for their spending. The party which prints money without paying for it is the Republicans. There are advantages and disadvantages to each of these methods, but the facts are clear about which party tends to do which. There was a recent one time instance in the past few years where both the administrations of GW Bush and Obama spent a whole lot of money for bailouts/stimuli, but that was for a unique scenario, which was to prevent the "great recession" from turning into another "great depression" - that was done by both parties and is not indicative of what the Democrats have been doing for the past half century.

And when you print money, you cause inflation. Inflation, understood by even the most basic economic theories, is a tax on the poor, not the rich.

tl;dr the Republicans, not the Democrats, print so much money, and it fucks the poor, not the rich.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[euroq]

LOL. You can blame a lot of the causes of the recent economic downturn on "liberals" and "democrats", for the right reasons. But you went the crazy route. Do you really think approximately half of this country voted for Obama because he was "historical" (black)? I don't even know what you mean by historical. And do you actually believe that the worldwide economic downturn was caused by investors who stopped investing and instead began hording? There's lots of explanations for the downturn, but nothing credible involves "because investors feared that a Obama was going to win the U.S. presidency". Most people at the time thought Hillary Clinton was going to win the U.S. Democratic nomination anyways.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

(Posting as AC again, the moderators love to swing my account back and forward to prevent me from posting as myself.)

In that scenario there is investment capital again and the lack of regulations and barriers to entry allows people to start their businesses, competing with whatever companies that used to have government protection but no longer have it (in my scenario.)

Service industry is not it. Service industry is not it because in my scenario the interest rates are much higher, which means debt consumption can no longer be financed, so people will have the need for all the things they cannot afford to buy overseas.

Today US consumers cannot afford Chinese goods out of pocket, they borrow to buy them. So if the debt financing is gone (and higher interest rates will cause that), then there will be plenty of unfulfilled market for domestically produced goods.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

(all my views are being moded down, so have to post AC because the account is locked.)

yes, that's what I am saying.

There should be no gov't involvement into anything beyond military and criminal/contract law to catch criminals and fight fraud.

If there is a need for a rating agency in food and drugs - this can be done privately with competition.

Some people would prefer not to pay higher premiums for having such certifications (yet try and sell raw milk in USA across the State borders to somebody who wants to buy it, you may end up in jail and definitely your business will be shut down).

Industry did correct itself purely based on market forces. It found ways to make food last longer and be safer with preservation and refrigeration and with more clean environment, all on its own the industry was doing that back in 19 century, de-facto this is true because the populations of the world were growing, not shrinking and dying out from various food caused diseases.

FDA is selling licenses and preventing competition in food and it destroys competition in drugs, it adds hundreds of million USD to the cost of R&D and prevents any small company from doing it.

Yes, government must not have a role in it.

If you WANT FDA you can definitely have a private entity fulfilling that role, but don't force everybody into the system, which is inherently corrupt.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

By the way, you are the guy who said this: The US doesn't need capital ... it needs oil.

So explain to me what is the purpose of redistributing somebody else's money if US doesn't need capital?

Now, I know that you believe that money should be redistributed from some who have it, to those who do not have it. The purpose of you redistributing money is what? More consumption of-course.

Even if there are 1000 people in USA (I doubt it), who make say 100,000,000 dollars a year AFTER all taxes, everything. Say you take that 100 million from each of the 1000 people, that's a lot of money.

But that money is not sitting there in form of paper, it's being invested somehow into the economy (some buy stocks, some buy futures, some increase their own business production output by opening more capacity, some buy government bonds). Whatever.

So you are going to stop all that activity and you are going to take money away. OK. So now you have 100,000,000,000 - one hundred billion dollars. Alright, you are going to do what with it?

Say you are going to write a check to everybody in USA for an equal amount (perfect, right, that's exactly like what Sharikov said in Bulgakov's "Heart of a Dog" - take away everything and divide it equally). OK.

Now you gave everybody out of 330,000,000 people in USA an equal amount of 333.33 USD - three hundred and thirty three dollars and thirty three cents.

Wow. Amazing. Now they can spend 333.33 cents to do what? It's not going to be on any business (well, with a rare exception). It's not at all an amount somebody lacks to start a business with. So it's for consumption.

Consumption of Chinese produced goods. THAT will increase your economy, right?

So you took away productive capital concentrated in one place, and thus allowing somebody (who made that money) to make more money from it, because what they do. Absent government, the people make money by satisfying some market demand, not by robbing the tax payers.

But you are giving everybody 333 dollars they didn't have to work for. So that's -333 X 330,000,000 productivity - they didn't have to work for that money, they didn't have to produce anything to get it, so there are no savings being underconsumed. Like nobody smelted iron ore and had 333 dollars worth of underconsumption, which is the only legitimate savings and investment capital.

So you took away savings and investment capital to give it to somebody who can spend it without producing for it. So the Chinese can get that 333 USD x 330,000,000 people and do what with that 100 Billion? Because that's 100 Billion of GOODS that they had to produce and they can get NOTHING for it.

They can get nothing for that money, because the people who spent it didn't actually produce anything of value for it, so there is nothing to exchange for with them.

You are forgetting a simple thing: trade is not about exchanging your products you produce for some paper somebody printed. Trade is about competitive advantage, it's about one person producing oil and the other producing fish and they are exchanging.

If you have 330,000,000 people NOT produce anything of any value to exchange for all the goods they are going to buy with that 333USD allowance, then it's the 100 Billion that Chinese now have and that cannot be exchanged back for anything. It's worthless.

THAT is what redistribution actually means as well, that's why it's bad business and not just immoral. It destroys productive capacity of the saver and investor to give the money to somebody who is not going to have to produce that amount of products but will spend it on products somebody else made without having to give them anything valuable in exchange.

That's your fairness? That spells destruction of economy.

And it's me, who is being locked out of my account for my opinions!

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Pinky's Brain]

In a free trade situation if you can not afford Chinese goods you certainly can't afford American made goods until America has comparative advantage in it's production ... which means similar labour and environmental standards. You have to take into account that even though the US kind of sucks at production, it's still massively subsidized by foreigners in the form of the suppressed oil price. Without debt and the trade deficit it makes possible the oil price in the US would shoot up and cause massive inflation across the board (cue conspiracy theories of artificially suppressed oil production and massive reserves).

Why would anyone invest when consumption is dropping? Left to it's own devices economies will seek hard bottoms in a depression, ie. minimum levels of employment necessary for pure necessities with for the rest only luxury/service industries for the monied class ... it's what makes sense. It makes no sense to invest in supplying the bottom 99% if they have no money.

The 99% also can't form an economy amongst themselves, because even if they all personally default they will still need somewhere to live and work. That means going back into debt ... because there is no more land to homestead, all land is owned and without government all the fruits of their labour above subsistence level will tend to go towards paying rent until full employment is reached (which it probably won't be, automation and all). Henry Ford was the exception, not the rule.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately I can't reply as myself again, account locked, people don't like my opinions.

In fact US Constitution prohibits government from printing money, which is of-course the right thing.

Article 1, section 8:

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;

- US Mint can take YOUR money (gold/silver) and make a coin for you and they can punish for counterfeiting the coin, that's the extent to which gov't is allowed to deal with creation of money.

Article 1, section 10:

No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.

- this concerns the States.

Constitution is a document that lists what the Federal government powers are, what it is allowed to do. Everything that is not listed is not allowed.

Federal government does not have a listed power to emit Bills of Credit (and the States are specifically prohibited to do so in A1S10.)

So to answer your question: "where does money come from", I suggest you first figure out what money is, for that I suggest you watch this Congressional Hearing.

Once you watch it, you'll understand what money is and then you can answer your own question given what the Constitution says. Specifically: money is gold and government is only allowed to mint coins for you from your gold that you bring to the mint or gold that government has (say when it collects taxes).

That's what government is allowed to do. Also obviously banks (not government) can issue credit if their customers know of-course that their deposits (loans to the banks) are being loaned out. The customers, who would be OK with that would not be paying storage fees for that money (of-course, there is less money to store), and instead they would be getting some amount of interest on the money that the banks loaned out on their behalf.

That's by the way, the answer to the question: "why is debt financed consumption wrong?" It's wrong, because a loan that is given by a bank is supposed to generate income. If it doesn't generate income, it shouldn't be loaned out, but there is no income that can be generated by giving out a loan for somebody to make a purchase that is for consumption and not production related.

In a normal economy, where government doesn't meddle with money and interest rates, there would be very very little debt financed consumption and all the loans would be given out to increase production, so that interest and the principle would actually be repaid.

What you have now is gov't that basically prints money, and thus this is production that never happened, so it's not real money. That's why gov't hates gold - gold requires to be mined and it cannot be printed. Gold is a natural barrier for government to get into debt, so instead of debt, gov't would have to raise taxes, and population would then control how much government can spend. It would be the citizens who would control the spending and not the Federal reserve and Treasury (and by proxy the largest banks, who want to gamble with free money). And thus bubbles wouldn't be inflated and government wouldn't grow and wouldn't destroy the productive capacity as it's doing now and the economy would actually be sound.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[roman_mir]

still same guy, posting as AC, account is locked.

1. Yes, Americans cannot afford Chinese goods without debt financing that consumption.

2. Yes, American goods are even more un-affordable to US consumers than Chinese goods, because there is so much less American produced goods.

3. Oil and other commodity prices are only going up relative to USD, which is being destroyed, I have a comment on that.

Why would anyone invest when consumption is dropping?

- it's not consumption that's dropping. It's production that dropped off and that's why consumption cannot be funded, so it's all debt financed. Consumption that is debt financed cannot be sustained given the fact that there is no production.

You have to PRODUCE something to consume something. Given that US cannot produce enough for its own consumption, it means it cannot consume. It means it must under-consume, over-produce, save and re-invest in order to rebuild production, so that consumption can happen again.

There is always demand - this is proven by the 53Billion USD/month trade deficit. Demand is not disappearing just because the means of payment are disappearing. But eventually this debt financed consumption will stop, and the only way to have consumption again will be by restarting production. What do you think will happen in the middle of that?

In the middle of that there will be a period of very low consumption and high level of poverty, because these poor people won't be able to pay for those products with anything for a year or two at least. There will be very limited consumption and standard of living will be very low.

Why would anybody invest in that environment? Because people can't all take off and leave from USA. 330,000,000 people can't all move to China. It's not possible, so you'll have over 300 million people and they will be sitting there, waving their dicks in the prairies or what?

They'll be producing again. People will go fishing again. They will go farming and mining again.

90% of US sea food is bought from Asia. That makes no sense - USA is surrounded with oceans an it has plenty of lakes and rivers. It makes no sense. So there will be more people fishing. Farming.

They won't have enough capital and tools especially the first year, so they will be saving all of their fish to sell it on the global market and to buy some better tools to improve their efficiency.

Everybody will have to do this. USA WILL be under-consuming, there is no question about it. The debt financed consumption WILL run out.

It's not about just money, it's about work. The 99% will have to do work that will allow them to underconsume and overproduce and to acquire some capital and tools in order to restart their economy. That's going to happen whether you want to or not, because there is no choice.

So far the choice was: will the US Congress approve another debt ceiling increase? (Now Obama just uses executive order to put another 1Trillion on the Treasury liability, whatever).

But soon the question will be: will the creditor BUY US debt or not? And once the people stop buying that debt, that's it. It's over. There will be no way to consume with more debt and production will have to restart.

And if you think you can't do anything about it - too bad for you. If you think the 99% of people can't start over, can't form new businesses to overproduce and underconsume and to save and restart production, well that's too bad.

I think you are wrong, you just don't understand that people will rather do that than starve to death. And it's not like you can tax the 1% 'rich' to keep the charade going. That's not possible, they already moved much of that capital outside of US into production capacity in other countries because of the way the government treats the productive class and investme

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[bmajik]

Ron Paul appeals to those who have failed economics, civics, and government in high school. I have yet to see someone who has any form of formal education champion his crap.

I have a modest 4 year state-university education. I did not fail any classes in highschool.

If you think there is any value in standardized tests, I'll mention that I always rank in the top 1 or 2% in all of them I take. So by that problematic metric, I'm not the dumbest person in America.

I agree with everything Ron Paul stands for. While I happen to think he is right regarding the increased prosperity,and peace we'd see with his plans, that's not the primary reason for engaging in them.

I beleive his policies are simply more ethical than what anyone else in government is suggesting. Less compulsion of the individual via a violent state is a more moral basic premise than any other system that posits a more interventionist role for the state.

What Paul critics who ascribe to him all of the ills of the standard republican party often fail to realize is that Paul in his way is a much stronger advocate for the "little guy" than anyone currently in major office.

Paul rightly concludes that government all too often colludes with the "private" sector, and that instead of government working to rein in corporate malfeasance, government often encourages and rewards it.

The approach then is not to blindly distrust the private sector, as many on the American political left seem to, but to intelligently distrust the government, as Ron Paul does, and to view the intersection of public and private affairs with great scrutiny and concern, and to the extent possible, minimize it.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[roman_mir]

Ron Paul has huge following in universities across USA and on the web and greatest donations from US military members, that hardly qualifies his followers as people who have 'failed' all those disciplines.

The parent comment is moderated at +4 and at some point it was at +5 while my original comment that is based on understanding the problems and the fact that these problems originate from not following the US Constitutions is at -1 Troll, this just proves one thing:

The majority of people are ignorant thieves. It would be impossible to have the US Constitution if majority of people had to vote on it, because the Constitution wouldn't directly allow them to have various privileges.

Unfortunately the system today produces people who are feeling that they are entitled to have other's productive output to be stolen and given to them just because they have committed a marvelous act of 'existing'.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Pinky's Brain]

There's other things you can do with money than investing into production, you can simply sit on it (in the absence of monetary expansion) or you can purchase rent generating assets ... which is what people in a free market will do until the hard bottom is reached, without a realistic avenue of growth there will be no investment.

Farming and mining tends to take oil and owned natural resources, both of which will require people to go into debt to acquire (at which point they're fucked again, even if they defaulted previously). Everything takes oil, unless you go back to third world methods ... certainly possible, but not exactly the great future you described, back breaking work with near infirmity from physical wear and tear long before you reach pension age.

I think austerity is necessary, I think the population can run a self sufficient economy ... I don't think automation is going away, I don't think full employment is possible any more without work week reductions, I don't think an economy can run well when all capital is owned by 0.1% of the population extracting all fruits of labour of the 99.9% in the form of rent.

It's very hard to remove capital (ie. refined natural resources and means of production) out of a country ... all that has been moved out of the country is paper. The top end creditors leaving the US is hardly a huge brain drain either, entrepreneurs are important ... old or dynastic billionaires? Not so much. They provide something to aspire to perhaps, but they don't really do much productive any more ... just rent seeking.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Pinky's Brain]

The purpose of redistributing money at the moment is to keep the country from tearing itself apart ... usually it's to provide a social safety net for the weakest in society and run services which can not be efficiently run by the private market (energy/water distribution, defense, roads ... that sort of stuff).

Again, not all investment goes towards production ... rent seeking is an extremely powerful force only opposed by taxation. Good taxation/regulation drives capital towards investment rather than rent seeking when growth is possible and redistributes work when it is not (the 1970s and work week reductions for instance).

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[roman_mir]

There's other things you can do with money than investing into production, you can simply sit on it

- very few people with enough money to invest just sit on it, and it's proven not to be a problem in USA, out of all places, 19 century USA had a constant rate of deflation. By 1913 the USD was worth twice the amount it was worth in 1800, and so what? In that time period USA became the largest creditor nation on earth by starting most of the businesses, allowing most of the innovation and invention because there were no artificial barriers to entry imposed by a government, because government was mostly insignificant (as it is supposed to be) at the time.

Government is evil by definition, because its primary role is to occupy the power vacuum that exists without a force of that type, and so criminal organizations form to occupy that role (like in post-Soviet Russia in 1990s,) and these criminal forces just want to extract revenue from whatever companies/people that exist around simply to 'protect' them - protection racket.

(AFAIC it's actually better not to have any government and even to have this industry - protection racket, to be a competitive industry, but even though I do have this believe, I don't normally argue for it, people are not ready for that at all.)

But USA became the largest creditor nation and exporter of high quality cheap goods, increased the efficiency of US worker because of high investment capital, which is a direct contradiction of your (Keynesian) premise, that during a deflation people don't want to generate more revenue by actively investing.

People sit on their money during INFLATION, but they sit on their money the way I do for example - by owning assets that protect against inflation. I also invest into my business, but I don't trust any other business and any government, so I don't buy bonds, I don't buy stocks (with rare exception of some mining stocks). If there was deflation and SHRINKING of government, I would have been inclined to invest into production capacity because there would have been a real chance to make money due to absence of government intervention and protection of monopolies that government prefers.

Farming and mining tends to take oil and owned natural resources, both of which will require people to go into debt to acquire (at which point they're fucked again, even if they defaulted previously). Everything takes oil, unless you go back to third world methods ... certainly possible, but not exactly the great future you described, back breaking work with near infirmity from physical wear and tear long before you reach pension age.

- The depression caused by the inflationary policies of the Fed caused a huge depression in 1921, but it was over quickly because government cut spending by up to 70%. By 1923 the economy was back to full employment.

I don't KNOW how much time precisely it would take to regenerate the economy, but I KNOW that the course USA is on right now is not it. Expanding the monetary supply, debt financing consumption, fighting wars, supporting the welfare state, regulating businesses out of US market, none of this helps, it all destroys the economy further.

IF it takes such a long time to redo the economy, say 2-3 decades (which I don't believe would be the case, I think it would be under 3 years), then USA is in much more trouble than I ever thought.

But what you seem to completely misunderstand is that I am not advocating something that US has a CHOICE in. There is no choice on this matter.

There is no choice. You think I am telling you: you have a choice?

No. I am telling you that you have no choice. You have no choice in how this will be fixed, it's going to be the way I described.

But you DO have a choice where it concerns the time-span within which the problem is solved. USA had a choice back during the Clinton era not to get into variable rate, short term debt and not to expand the spending of go

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Pinky's Brain]

The US hadn't hit peak oil in 1921, also the major cut in government spending came in 1919 ... preceding the depression. In 1921 local spending actually increased to more than offset any reduction in federal spending (much smaller than 70%).

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1910_1930USk_13s1li011mcn_F0xF0fF0sF0l

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I'm not Roman Mir, but I am posting anonymously since I don't want the Leftards @ /. to mod me into oblivion, and restrict me to 10 posts a day - or less.

In the scenario above, I didn't get how the Chinese who'll be making $100B worth of goods are getting nothing for it. The way I see that transaction, let's say that the 1000 people whose savings were confiscated for redistribution was R, the 330M 'poor' who got it gratis are P and the Chinese are Z (I'm using the Sinofied name & initial here, since China's TLD is zh.) In that case, R gave away $100B, Z made $100B worth of product and got $100B for it, but the $100B worth of product, instead of going to R, ends up going to P. It's akin to R buying it from Z and handing it over to P.

So it's not that the Chinese have nothing for it - whatever R did to produce that 100B is what they theoretically have the equivalent of, while P has whatever they made, w/ R getting squat for it. But you do make a good point - the result of such a policy would be a shitload of cash simply going to China a.k.a. the Chinese Communist Party, to do whatever it likes with it - whether it's preparing the PLA for an invasion of Taiwan, buying all oil rights in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, filling up Tibet with Han Chinese, or whatever it is that the CPC Central Committee deems worthy. If the Chinese Intelligence Agency wanted to try and get the US to send all its money to China, they couldn't think of a better way to do it.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because of the meals on wheels mission that they undertook after it was over. The sole job of any army is to kill people & destroy property, nothing more, nothing less. The US completed the toppling of the Taliban within 3 months - in January 2002, the discussions started for Karzai to take over a new regime. That was when they should have stopped, and kept on the hunt for Osama in Pakistan, where every major al Qaeda leader was captured. The US army has no business trying to reconstruct either Iraq nor Afghanistan. Just break it and leave!

Similarly, in Iraq, when Bush stood on that aircraft carrier with his 'Mission accomplished' sign, he happened to be correct. Saddam's regime was gone, the IAEA was now free to go back and search anywhere it wasn't previously allowed. There was no need for the occupation of Iraq, no need to hunt down Saddam, no need to try and rebuild Iraqi 'civil society'. It was fine to let the Shia & Sunnis fight it out. 'Democracy' in Iraq has simply meant the Shia taking over, and in the process, making it a puppet state of Iran. In all the 'Arab Spring' countries, like Tunisia, Egypt and now Libya, it has made way for Islamic Winters. None of these countries will become democracies - Libya, for instance made its first priority the reinstitution of Shariah law, in Tunisia, the Islamic party has won a plurality of the vote, and in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood is the party that's sure to come out on top after their elections, whenever that is.

If the war missions that are defined for the US are limited in scope, like they were in Grenada in 1984, it's bound to be successful. Success here is defined as the US toppling its enemies, whether it's the Taliban in Kabul or Saddam in Baghdad. If one defines success as making Afghanistan or Iraq the first Islamic Jeffersonian democracy in the world, then it's pre-doomed to failure, and no amount of money thrown at it is going to prevent that.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Arab Spring uprisings have all resulted in Islamic parties coming to the forefront, even in Tunisia, where Islam was long repressed and which prided itself on being quasi-European. The Arabs aren't automatically national socialists, rather, what they share with them is a blind hatred of the Jews and Israel, which is inculcated from Islam.

Your comment here and the earlier one above - I have no way of telling whether you're being sarcastic, or whether you are just one more of those anti-Semitic Ron Paul supporters out there, who've done a fantastic job in ensuring his marginalization, even when he makes sense. One might have thought that this is the work of fifth columnists out to sabotage his campaign, except that he's done himself no favors by voting with the pro-Islamic Left on issues like support for Hamas and Hizbullah.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[roman_mir]

Well, I know you are not 'roman_mir', because you are replying to my comment there.

The 100 Billion was produced initially, yes, but there is an actual multiplier effect, as that's the money that was not going to be consumed, but was consumed instead of being used for more production by the people who made that money.

OTOH the people who consumed it didn't offset that consumption with any production of their own, thus the multiplier effect is that 100 billion wasn't used for more production, but it was used for consumption that is unjustified with production by people who used that money to buy the goods from the Chinese.

What is lost is the opportunity of more production, had that money stayed with the original producers and the opportunity of production that the spenders would have had to do, in order to consume 333 dollars worth of goods. The Chinese get screwed in that transaction, as the people that transacted with them didn't produce anything that can be exchanged for that goods back for the Chinese goods that they bought with that money.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[melted]

:-) Have you considered the possibility that toppling enemies without installing your own puppets has a strong potential to produce even worse enemies? And puppets eventually lead to worse enemies too. Saddam was Rumsfeld's boy, Osama was a CIA operative. Maybe we should just mind our own business here in the US? Besides, why was Saddam and "enemy" of the US in the first place? Enemy of Israel, that I would (borderline) agree, but the US? And Osama has been in Pakistan for the past 8-9 years or so, but we for some reason did not declare war on Pakistan. Why? Because Pakistan has the nukes. Iran doesn't have the nukes, but it's armed well enough to make any military action against it an extremely costly and PR-disastrous endeavor. Aircraft will be shot down, ships will be sunk, thousands of troops will be killed each day. This is not going to go over well here at home. And once they build the nukes, it's game over pretty much.

On the account of China, all they have to do to topple the regime here is stop their exports for a couple of months, stop buying US securities, and start selling whatever they already have. That'll fuck the US pretty good. It'll fuck them pretty good, too, but they're not used to living in luxury anyway, so they'll survive.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[shutdown -p now]

We're talking about completely different conflicts here. Any conflict with China or NK would be a conventional war, and U.S., as any other conventional army, is well prepared to fight those. The "towelheads in Afghanistan" don't wage war like that, however. What's worse is that no-one actually knows what "victory in Afghanistan" should even constitute - and when you don't have a well-defined objective that leads to victory, defeat is the only available option.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[shutdown -p now]

He's a Russian, albeit in U.S.

I don't know what it is about my fellow countrymen who emigrate - we also gave the U.S. Ayn Rand, and I'm truly sorry about that one. This guy, at least, is just a lunatic raving on /. rather than a cult leader.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[melted]

>> Any conflict with China or NK would be a conventional war, and U.S., as any other conventional army, is well prepared to fight those

That's exactly the line of thinking Hitler had when invading the USSR. Three years in, he probably regretted it, as his troops were freezing to death and fighting the insurgents (in addition to conventional war). Wars are only "conventional" in the beginning.

What the US is not prepared for is fighting the enemy which actually has somewhat contemporary defensive weapons in abundant quantities, including anti-aircraft and anti-ship systems. This is the sole reason why Iran hasn't been invaded yet. It is one thing when a thousand soldiers die in a year, it's another when thousands die each day.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[shutdown -p now]

That's exactly the line of thinking Hitler had when invading the USSR. Three years in, he probably regretted it, as his troops were freezing to death and fighting the insurgents (in addition to conventional war). Wars are only "conventional" in the beginning.

This is only true when fighting an aggressive war followed by occupation - then, yes, you have to deal with guerrilla fighters from the entire populace, unless you have popular support. And even then, despite the vast scale of Soviet guerrilla movement, the war itself was won by the USSR by more conventional means; underground resistance behind enemy lines shortened the duration of the march to Berlin somewhat, but it would have happened even without that eventually.

A war with North Korea in defense of the South, or a war with China in defense of Taiwan or Japan, would be a defensive war, and would enjoy considerable popular support on the territories in question - so it would be the enemy who'd have to worry about guerrillas on captured territories.

What the US is not prepared for is fighting the enemy which actually has somewhat contemporary defensive weapons in abundant quantities, including anti-aircraft and anti-ship systems. This is the sole reason why Iran hasn't been invaded yet. It is one thing when a thousand soldiers die in a year, it's another when thousands die each day.

Logistically, US is perfectly prepared to fight just such a war - that is, after all, what it was preparing to do for many decades now, and has only started to change its ways in the last decade. Politically, it's a different issue, but it would largely depend on public perception of the war. After all, in WW2, American casualties were considerable (relative to other wars US had then and now fought), but there wasn't any significant anti-war popular movement. Ditto for Korea. I think that, if it really came to an attack on one of the allied countries, popular support in US would be vehemently in favor of the war, even once the bodies start coming in.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not Roman Mir. But too bad the Soviet regime came down - it suited you better. But hey, I hear that there are still places like Cuba, North Korea and now Venezuela, which you might want to try out

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[euroq]

Article 1, section 8:

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;

- US Mint can take YOUR money (gold/silver) and make a coin for you and they can punish for counterfeiting the coin, that's the extent to which gov't is allowed to deal with creation of money.

LOL! No, that's not the correct conclusion of the first sentence. It says that Congress can make money and regulate the value of it. It does not say anything about allowing or preventing of making it from the U.S. citizens' precious metals.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[shutdown -p now]

Yes, because the only other option to his kind of lunacy is the Soviet kind of lunacy. Ron Paul and Tea Party, or Stalin and Bolsheviks. No middle ground.

I prefer the stuff that actually works, you know. Like, regulated capitalism with a social safety net - where people can realize their potential and pursue their passion, and yet live without fear of ending up under the bridge. The kind of society the West has actually had for several decades now.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[roman_mir]

That's the point of the Mint. You bring your metal and they will mint a coin for you. They can mint a coin from metal they have from collecting taxes as well, but you can request a coin to be minted from your metal. There is nothing to "lol" about there.

Re:Can you handle the truth?

[euroq]

1. That's not the point of a mint, even if they can do that. Mints have never been a service to press coins for private people with the metal they collect, they have been a way of coining money for a government.
2. There is something to LOL about... He said that the US Constitution prohibits the government from making money. Absolute bullshit.

I think you may be confused

[Sycraft-fu]

I've not heard anyone say the US has recovered, what I've heard is that the recession is over and that is correct. A recession is a period where the economy shrinks. The US economy is no long shrinking, and has not been for some time now. However it has not been growing fast at all, and it shrunk quite a bit during the last recession, meaning that the economy is still quite far off its peak.

So it is not "recovered" as in back to or above its pre peak level, but it is no longer in a recession, though there is worry it could fall in to another one.

Re:I think you may be confused

[tomhudson]

When the economy "grows" slower than the population, you're still in a recession, because each person has less money, so individual spending power is shrinking. The problem with the GDP measurement is that it fails to take into account population growth.

If the population were to shrink by 50%, and GDP to decline by 10% and incomes almost double, that would definitely NOT be a recession, despite what some would claim.

We are not in a recession - we're *only* part-way through the 2nd Great Depression, and don't expect a recovery before 2018 - 2020, if then.

Re:I think you may be confused

[Sycraft-fu]

If you think this is a great depression I suggest you go talk to someone who lived through the real great depression so they can slap you upside the head and explain to you the vast, vast, differences.

Oh and by your measure, there is still growth. The US has a very low population growth, as do most industrialized nations. It is higher than many other industrial nations (some of which have negative growth rates) but it still only 0.9% annually. In 2010, the GDP growth was 2.9%.

Re:I think you may be confused

[pwizard2]

If you think this is a great depression I suggest you go talk to someone who lived through the real great depression so they can slap you upside the head and explain to you the vast, vast, differences.

I talked to someone who was around back then and he said that things are actually worse. Today, people don't know how to hunt or farm like they did back then.

Re:I think you may be confused

[Anonymous Coward]

I've not heard anyone say the US has recovered, what I've heard is that the recession is over and that is correct. A recession is a period where the economy shrinks. The US economy is no long shrinking, and has not been for some time now.

You can only estimate whether we are in a recession or not, but you can't know for sure. From the NBER a recession is defined as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales."

The key here is real GDP, which is GDP adjusted for inflation. But what was inflation? We only have estimates such as the CPI, PPI, etc. If the headline CPI estimate was too low, then the real GDP estimate is too high.

Further, for many the inflation estimate is certainly way too low (it generally strips out the effect of food and energy prices). For instance, if food and gas prices increase faster than iPods, then the poor experience a higher rate of inflation than the wealthy (a bigger proportion of their spending goes to food and gasoline). This means the inflation for the poor is higher than for the wealthy and the poor may well be in a recession when higher incomes are not.

So, whether we as a nation (headline CPI), or a particular wealth class, are in a recession becomes as exercise in applied statistics. Keep in mind, the government produces the CPI, and a low CPI implies real GDP is growing faster, and also social security payment increases are lower. This is why many decide to estimate their own inflation number (see MIT billion prices project: http://bpp.mit.edu/) which often comes in higher than the government number.

Re:I think you may be confused

[Anonymous Coward]

I've not heard anyone say the US has recovered

Listen to NPR. They call this a `recovery'. It isn't `as strong as expected'. All poor economic news is `unexpected'.

Re:I think you may be confused

[rahvin112]

My parents grew up in the depression. When you have to use the sears catalog for toilet paper, come talk to me about having it hard. Yes some of the people during the depression could grow their own food. So could you, but you don't because you don't know how. Well neither did most of the unemployed during the great depression. Food typically was about 40% of the living expense back then as well and significantly more expensive than today.

Unemployment was upwards of 50% that means half the country had no jobs and this was in an era when women didn't work at all. So in comparison to today that would be 75% unemployment. There weren't jobs, people didn't have land to grow food or hunt even if they knew how because the banks took everyones land. People were starving and dieing on the streets every day. Even farmers who were growing the food couldn't survive because they couldn't sell the food because the majority of people had no money to buy it. After a little while the bank takes the farm because they can't sell enough food to pay their debt.

You are an idiot if you think this is anything at all like the great depression. You don't have any idea what a real depression is call me when every single person you know is unemployed.

Re:I think you may be confused

[ChrisMaple]

and don't expect a recovery before 2018 - 2020, if then.

The US economy is dominated by the effects of government: Regulations, restrictions, land theft and removal of land from productive use, tax magnitude and the particular things that are taxed, corrupt movement of money to inferior enterprises (Solyndra, GM, Chrysler, various banks, brokers, and insurance companies), minimum wage laws, etc.. If these things are corrected, there will be an obvious and dramatic recovery within a month.

Re:I think you may be confused

[tomhudson]

The US economy is dominated by the effects of government: Regulations, restrictions, land theft and removal of land from productive use, tax magnitude and the particular things that are taxed, corrupt movement of money to inferior enterprises (Solyndra, GM, Chrysler, various banks, brokers, and insurance companies), minimum wage laws, etc.. If these things are corrected, there will be an obvious and dramatic recovery within a month.

Based on that, even my "don't expect a recover before 2018 - 2020, if then" is looking overly optimistic.

There is no way that's going to happen without at least a few states first going through bankruptcy, using a loophole in Chapter 9 to declare the state government in toto as a "government institution", and removing the debt overhead (and forcing the creditors to eat the losses).

Re:I think you may be confused

[Helen O'Boyle]

My parents gre up in the Great Depression. My mom's family had the only car on the block, and they took in 4-5 boarders at a time to make ends meet.

Now I myself am a boarder. Working overseas at less than half my old income in a coal mining town where housing costs 45% of my weekly paycheck. Mandatory insurance eats up another 10%. Then there's food (meat unlikely, as i cannot cook where I live, so I eat a lot of veggies out of the can, for example), detergent to wash my work clothes since I cannot afford to have them dry cleaned, etc. And that housing is a single non-airconditioned room big enough for a bed, garment rack and refrigerator. And hundreds of cockroaches and lizards no matter how many cans of spray I emtpy onto floors and into corners. In the tropics where 95 degree days are common. Kind of makes it not so bad that some mornings there isn't any hot water, because I need to cool off before going to work in my office geek job.

I was lucky to land this accomodation. Many people have it worse; I've heard my region leads the country in homelessness percentage. I begged my way into couch surfing for months while looking for impossible to find affordale housing that 2000 other people in town are also searching for. I was out on the street for a while, periodically when between accommodations. Lacking a car, I slept rough.

And I didn't have to use the daily newspaper for tp only because I could swipe some from a public restroom when needed. But the rest of it, like going without food for 3 days because I'd used up my stock of canned beans, while waitng for the next payday, is de rigeur.

If someone with a masters degree with 20 years experience working in a professional technical field is part of the working poor as a result of the events of the past 3-4 years, and even needed to leave the country to get a deal that good, the country has a problem.

Re:I think you may be confused

[Reziac]

Maybe if a few creditors have to eat the losses, they won't be so willing to extend basically unlimited credit to governments in the future, eh??

Re:I think you may be confused

[tomhudson]

Definitely. The problem is you have companies like GoldmanSachs and JPMorgan that have a financial interest in conning people into making bad loans, and for people and governments to take out bad loans.

And when those investments go south (like all those pension funds that invested in the MBS BS), they milk both ends of the resulting mess.

A few humongous bankruptcies, a few trillion wiped out, and a few perp walks, are the only things that will restore sanity. It will be painful, but it's also pretty much inevitable. If a tiny country like Iceland can do it, anyone can.

Re:I think you may be confused

[Reziac]

[goes off, reads] Hmmm... it sounds like in the end, the taxpayers are still the losers.

I have wondered what would happen if the U.S. simply defaulted on all its foreign debt, including trade deficits. Seems to me that if the external money dried up, government would be forced to reduce its impact and we'd be forced back on our own resources -- and that, more than anything, would revive industry and jobs in this country. So long as we bleed manufacturing to the rest of the world, we're going to bleed money too, as credit that increasingly we've no means to repay other than from taxpayer wallets. Better to pay more for domestically-made goods (at least that is money that stays home) than to pay higher taxes in the name of paying off foreign-owned debt (a sort of broken-window economy).

Re:I think you may be confused

[tomhudson]

The plan, as I see it, is to devalue the currency so that paying those debts isn't as painful as it could be. Normally, you would do this via inflation. However, if you can keep interest rates pretty much at zero, even small "real" inflation (as opposed to the official inflation numbers) will have the same effect over the course of a decade - especially if you can somehow get real growth started w/o triggering inflation.

The best way to do that would be to stop artificially supporting the bubble-priced housing market. It still has another 20% to drop, and that drop is going to happen no matter what, so might as well take the hit, and the resulting low prices will trigger a recovery (just as low computer prices stimulates the computer market, and high gasoline prices killed the Hummer).

The problem is that the FIRE industries (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) currently own the legislators AND the regulators. This distorts the whole economy, because industries that could power a recovery are ignored, or worse, the resources that could be put into them are put elsewhere.

A good example of that is groupon. An insolvent business, a broken business model, huge unacknowledged fiscal liabilities (for example, many states don't allow the vendor - in this case groupon - to "own" unclaimed and unused vouchers for 5 years, and require them to make refunds) and yet the financial nutballs hype it on the basis that there's short-term profit to be made speculating on the stock.

The money that went into groupon is money that could have gone into something better. At the same time, because it went into groupon, it encourages others to continue to develop fraudulent and/or ineffective business models, in the hope of cashing in before the stench of the turd baking in the sun gets strong enough to overwhelm the smell of free money.

Re:I think you may be confused

[Reziac]

[reads groupon's tale of woe]

Sounds like legalized money-laundering to me :(

As to the real estate market drop, one of the problems is that it's not happening consistently. Lower-value properties and properties last sold before the spike have dropped by 50%-80%, but higher-value properties (at least as defined by their price during the spike) have not dropped nearly as much. This may help some buyers but is also hurting those saddled with pre-spike property taxes on older properties now worth essentially the price of the dirt under them.

[I know, I own one of 'em. :( ]

Re:I think you may be confused

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds awful.

It sounds like you went to the wrong country though. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/australia/unemployment-rate

The US has a free trade agreement with Australia, with special visas for people from one country to work in the other, that aren't that hard to get.

Work visa

[mr100percent]

Last I read on slashdot, getting a work visa for India is extremely hard, meaning Americans can't as easily go to India for work as the reverse. Anyone have more info?

Re:Work visa

[drinkypoo]

Last I heard, India was like every other country in that if they really want you they'll break all the rules and bring you in anyway. If you have the specialty that they need, all that is irrelevant. Just like here, where we actually have seminars on how to disqualify qualified applicants so that you can hire an H1-B.

Re:Work visa

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not that hard. I am in India currently and did not have much difficulty to obtain a visa. If a company wants you, you will have it, especially if it is an India based company (I was in a multinational and not officially hired by the Indian branch, so that created some complications).

I am quite sure it is *much* harder to go work in the States.

Re:Work visa

[sgt scrub]

They are looking for Indians to go back and run projects for them so they don't have to pay an agency that handles management. It is cheaper to send someone back and set them up with a $7/h crew.

Um, there are lots of these

[antifoidulus]

There are job fairs for jobs in Japan in the US, MIT does one for jobs in Europe, etc. Nothing all that unique about doing one for India.

Re:Um, there are lots of these

[funkatron]

It's a sign of economic growth in India that recruiting from the US is now a possibility. A couple of decades ago there weren't many jobs out there that would be attractive to Americans.

Re:Um, there are lots of these

[Anonymous Coward]

I think there is. India is particularly third world (unlike Europe or Japan). The fact that 'Americans' would even consider going to India to work is proof of the very very bad situation in the US

Re:I Work With Indian Talent

[msobkow]

Unfortunately my experience has been largely negative. It's clear that some of the so-called universities attended by Indian students are paper mills that don't do a decent job of educating them about programming.

There's also a cultural issue. For some reason, many of those I've worked with can't or won't search for internet howto's and help instructions on their own, though they'll follow those instructions if a senior developer sends them a link.

Obviously I've worked with a lot of good Indian developers as well, but there are clearly some cultural differences that can cause friction and frustration.

Wage War in India

[That_Dan_Guy]

You are more right than you know actually. I work for an Indian outsource company. I was outsourced 3+ years ago. I talk to a lot of the guys over there and from over there. These companies now pay their people the same to stay in India as to come to the US. They used to pay them a lot more to come here. But in the last year or more there has been a pretty major wage war as the different India tech companies pilfer talent from each other at an alarming rate. It has led to a lot of turnover.

But then, I've been approached by recruiters here who want to pay me more than I get now. They are just desperate to oversell my skills (fine, unless they oversell to the point the client thinks they're getting a triple CCIE when they're only getting a CCNP/MCSE), and I currently have the best schedule ever being able to work from home anytime I want. If only I didn't have kids I could be making 30% more than I am now.

Re:Wage War in India

[Anonymous Coward]

>> If only I didn't have kids I could be making 30% more than I am now.

And keeping 70% more of it!

Re:Wage War in India

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, of course, the money paid directly to you is a percentage of your total cost to the company. If your Indian workers are willing to stay local, you're still saving money (assuming remote working works for you).

Re:I Work With Indian Talent

[Anonymous Coward]

Some bit of frustration is to be expected. This happens with developers from most non-G7 countries. Think of it as the difference between made in China items and made in US items!

But for the savings in development costs - I can put up with these frustrations.

Best two years of my career

[java_dev]

I lved in India with my family setting up some engineering teams. Best two years of my career... but also the most challenging, simply because you have no idea how hard it is to adjust to living in a foreign culture until you have to do it.

Of course, if you have a crappy boss, it'll completely suck - like anywhere else..

So?

[Weezul]

We invented languages like PHP and VB because we need many poorly skilled developers for drudge work. If you don't do brain dead easy work, then don't hire people trained for brain dead easy development.

There are *many* shitty universities inside the U.S. too, heck fraudulent education is a growth industry. You'd never hire developers from University of Phoenix though, simply because you already know they suck. Did you ever try asking your skilled Indian colleges which Indian universities are actually good?

Re:I Work With Indian Talent

[sgt scrub]

It isn't about sending them back so there are more jobs here. It is about sending someone you have confidence in back so they can lead a team of low wage developers in India.
FTFA:
Indian companies need experienced people who can step into project management roles up to senior levels, said Bhushan.

The companies are typically looking for someone with eight or more years of experience and specific domain knowledge. The workers ahould have the ability to lead large project teams and run large Web sites, said Bhushan.

Nothing new

[tompaulco]

This is nothing new. The only difference is that the jobs themselves are in India. I get spam job offers every week from Indian companies advertising for consulting positions here in the United States, unfortunately, I am not qualified for them because I don't have an H1-B and I am not Indian. I am a natural born citizen of the United States and that is just not the sort of person these consulting firms are looking for.

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't it suck to be the sort who has immediate family who served in the US Military? How often does one see surnames like CHANDRASEKHAR, DESAI, PATEL, DAGA and the like on a uniform patch? The caste system is alive and well and Brahmins don't like to get their hands dirty. Three hundred million is enough in the USA.

Re:Nothing new

[shutdown -p now]

USA is a huge country with plenty resources, and can easily handle more than its current population. The trick is to make it work without deconstructing your existing society in the process.

flamebait on slashdot? OK!

[sgt scrub]

Globalism is failing because of a lack of minimum wage. Rich Republican cock suckers don't give a shit about one countries economy. All it means is wages drop in yet another country and the value of their investments in the global stock market go up. You dumb ass wrong wing radio listening morons can keep regurgitating bullshit from your born again bigot spin doctors or join the fight. Either watch the lying bastards suck down fat paychecks while leading you into the land of indentured servitude while the rest of us "liberals" fight from the land of reality or get a fucking clue. Vote for Perry. He knows how to hand the keys to corporations in other countries while the people that live in his state fall further into abject poverty. Globalism is going to happen whether we like it or not. The way we don't want it to happen, without something to level the playing field ie. minimum wages and expectations, is the way it is happening. Controlling how it happens is up to us people that work for a living, aka "liberals".

Re:flamebait on slashdot? OK!

[roman_mir]

Minimum wage is just a way to outlaw some people from getting job, I explained that.. It's also inflationary, as it creates a depended class that is put on a welfare dole and the money comes from printing.

Re:flamebait on slashdot? OK!

[sgt scrub]

No. You spun that. Minimum wage keeps rich fuckers from moving jobs to some place that has slave labor.

Re:flamebait on slashdot? OK!

[roman_mir]

No, minimum wage only outlaws some people from working.

NOBODY can FORCE me to hire someone, who is not producing more than minimum wage worth of value after all of the expenses for a higher than minimum wage salary.

If you hire a person, that person has to produce enough value to offset the cost of hiring, all of the associated expenses and he has to produce some profit.

So if somebody produces 6 dollars worth of revenue and he costs say 5 dollars, then the 1 dollar is profit. If the minimum wage is 7.25, then by hiring that person at that wage instead of generating 1 dollar worth of profit you generate 1.25 loss.

It makes no sense to hire somebody (unless you are a government), who costs your business money and generates a loss (well, there are instances where it may be a strategic hiring, something special, used to create a tax deduction or something).

But basically by setting minimum wage you outprice some people from the market.

If the entire world set a minimum wage of say 10 dollars per hour, then the result would be massive unemployment everywhere, as those people who were making under that amount and who are not producing enough revenue to cover and make some profit would all be fired.

Nobody can FORCE a company to hire somebody and nobody can force a company to hire somebody to make a loss. That's just weird misunderstanding of how economy works and why people start businesses.

In your world the total unemployment would be on the order of 30% total throughout the entire world.

Re:flamebait on slashdot? OK!

[cdrguru]

The only way "globalism" works is for there to be a single government with one set of rules for everyone. If you don't have that you will have China devaluing its currency to drive prices lower. You will have Mexican workers being paid $2 a day in Mexico and being paid $6 an hour in the US - of course there will be stream of people coming across for $6 an hour!

Whereever there is the possibility for arbitrage you are going to find someone to put a deal together. Arbitrage is simply taking advantage of dissimilar prices, so they only way to eliminate it is to make sure all the prices for labor and goods are the same. In the world today we cannot enforce all the rules being equal.

The solution is to cut back on the "globalism" in a big way. If the option simply does not exist to exploit African workers to do work for US entities then we no longer care that the Africans are being paid $0.30 a day for their labor - which may be appropriate for their cost of living. Similarly, if it costs $100 to ship a DVD player from China to the US then the fact that it cost $5 to manufacturer it in China is no longer relevant. So how do we get back there? War is probably the only reasonable way to do it. If every ship from China could be carrying a city-destroying nuclear weapon the US would block the ships. If every shipment of food from Africa to France could be poisoned, France would go back to supporting farmers and stop importing food at prices cheaper than French farmers can grow it.

The alternative is one tyrant that takes over the world. Soon I think the workers of the world will consider this to be a reasonable solution.

Re:flamebait on slashdot? OK!

[cdrguru]

Only if the minimum wage is universally enforced. If it isn't and one country has it and another one does not then it is meaningless.

Same thing goes if the US were to have a trade agreement with China, India or Chad that workers had to be paid $10 an hour. A French company could go in, get the goods produced with workers being paid $0.30 an hour and ship them to the US - there would be nothing wrong with that and it would not violate any trade agreements.

You see, if there is a possibility of arbitrage it will happen. You can't stop it without having one set of rules that equally applies the world over. Which means no more soverign governments - one world, one government, one set of rules. Of course in today's world that is absurd, right?

Except the "99%" might just decide it would be fun to try and vote it in. The fact that it would actually be unworkable long-term is meaningless to a mob and what we have today is a mob struggling mightily for mob rule.

Re:flamebait on slashdot? OK!

[Anonymous Coward]

Minimum wage is also just a way for unions to raise everybody's wages, not just the lowest rung. That is why it's one of the always sought after negotiations, and every minimum wage negotiation ends in an increase.

The other thing about minimum wages is that those jobs typically aren't (or at least weren't) jobs that heads of households held. Usually, it would be people like college students working in pizza delivery shifts, or retired people who work working @ such jobs. The idea behind such jobs is to increase the output of such operations by throwing more bodies @ it. However, raising the wages means raising the cost of the product, which in turn can often make the difference b/w buying and not buying. After a certain price treshold, woudln't you rather make your pizza @ home?

From an employee's standpoint, such jobs are useful as first jobs in order to get work experience that one can put on one's first resumes.

Re:flamebait on slashdot? OK!

[sgt scrub]

Agreed. They have to be global

Re:flamebait on slashdot? OK!

[sgt scrub]

You will have Mexican workers being paid $2 a day in Mexico and being paid $6 an hour in the US - of course there will be stream of people coming across for $6 an hour!

A global minimum wage doesn't require a global government only a global agreement. It is something the WTO could do but don't because they are a bunch of rich fucker's bitches.

Re:flamebait on slashdot? OK!

[sgt scrub]

If you don't hire people because you don't want to pay minimum wage you should be jailed for your protection. People not being hired for less than minimum wage should toss a tire around your head and burn you alive.

Re:flamebait on slashdot? OK!

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't post under my nick, it's that time of the day again, where they mod me down massively and prevent me from posting as myself.

But that's fine, no problem, but I can't figure out if you are kidding in your comment and it's sarcasm or if you are serious and then I can't really help you in any way.

Re:flamebait on slashdot? OK!

[Stiletto]

So if somebody produces 6 dollars worth of revenue and he costs say 5 dollars, then the 1 dollar is profit. If the minimum wage is 7.25, then by hiring that person at that wage instead of generating 1 dollar worth of profit you generate 1.25 loss.

Honestly, in the USA, you would not want to hire someone at $5 even if you could. What kind of work ethic, timeliness, reliability, problems, criminal record, etc. are you going to have to deal with from someone willing to work for that little? Where my wife works, they have people making $8/hr. The turn-over and people issues are ridiculous. You're lucky to find someone willing to get out of bed and come to work for that tiny a wage.

Re:flamebait on slashdot? OK!

[roman_mir]

Actually it's even more complicated than that. There are too many liabilities associated with hiring people. The taxes are only part of the story, there are also all the various rules and regulations, such as Equal Opportunity stuff, the 'civil rights' stuff, anything that can cause an employer to suffer a lawsuit.

Even if the employer himself cannot be argued to be say sexist/racist/'discriminating' on whatever grounds, if another employee can be somehow charged, then too often the employer is the one who is taken to court.

The government comes out with rules such as 'civil rights' (which are in reality entitlements for some at the expense of obligations to others) and all of a sudden an employer hiring a 'racial minority' stands a chance of being dragged through an expensive court procedure, can be fined, the lawyers cost money, it all costs time, etc.

Anything that government regulates, like special access for wheelchairs for example, even where it makes no sense, any kind of a rule that says one cannot discriminate while hiring somebody, now they are even coming out with a rule that says: you can't discriminate against somebody who has been out of work for 6 or more months or somebody who has no credentials from a college for example, all of those things raise the cost of hiring Americans (and other Westerners).

The problem with the government is that it prefers large companies - monopolies, that have large legal departments, those firms that have enough revenue to cover all sorts of liabilities and compliance people. This stuff costs a lot of money.

Same with any mandates for pension plans, medical plans, anything that requires an employer to do something because government says so - this raises cost of doing business.

Any sort of collaboration between the government and any union is destructive to the job market. Any amount of money that government spends is a tax to be collected now or in the future or through inflation. All of this again, raises cost of doing business.

Any license fees, any franchise licenses only granted by government, any special treatment by 'professional organizations' such as FINRA for example, where government requires that somebody doing a work in that field is certified with that agency. Any time a cab driver has to buy a license (medallion), all of this destroys competition, all of this creates barriers to entry, all of this raises prices, all of this destroys opportunities for people to start their own businesses in those areas, all of this makes US workers uncompetitive and USA unattractive to the investment capital.

Re:flamebait on slashdot? OK!

[roman_mir]

By the way, how many jobs have YOU created? How many people do YOU hire?

How many people do you hire even if they cost you more money than they generate in revenue?

If you are not doing those things, aren't you eligible for that "tire around your head and burn alive" treatment that you are advocating here, buddy?

Re:flamebait on slashdot? OK!

[ChrisMaple]

If I hire people who aren't worth the minimum wage I pay them, I go broke, I go out of business, and then once again they don't have a job. Then everybody's worse off than they were in the first place. It isn't a question of "wanting", it's a question of not acting like an idiot.

Re:flamebait on slashdot? OK!

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

And that's one thing China has advantage over the U.S. ... no regulation in terms of hiring, thus much higher efficiencies.

They don't have to maintain a certain % of people from the inferior races.

Re:flamebait on slashdot? OK!

[roman_mir]

he promises to burn you with a tire around your neck if you don't hire people at above the rate that they would produce value at. But I asked him the question, whether he hires anybody above the amount they are worth, or anybody at all for that matter - no response. If he doesn't hire anybody like that, would he be all for burning with a tire around his neck, that's the question.

Re:flamebait on slashdot? OK!

[roman_mir]

Hey, you still didn't answer the question: how many people do you hire, how many of them generate a loss, and if you don't hire people who generate a loss just to hire them, aren't you supposed to have a burning tire on your head right now?

Re:flamebait on slashdot? OK!

[shutdown -p now]

Or you add tariffs to imported goods to compensate for the disparity, such that using cheap labor in manufacturing does not result in a lower end price.

Of course, to do so, you need to have a large enough market for importers to care about. But U.S. certainly is one, and if you also get EU signed up for this - basically make it an open treaty where any country with a minimum living wage above a certain amount (not absolute, but translated to a given life quality in that country - food, education, healthcare etc) can join.

It's time to build walls.

Re:flamebait on slashdot? OK!

[sgt scrub]

You just described the WTO with minimum wage. You don't apply tariffs to their trade. One of the reasons so many people hate the WTO is because they don't want to apply a minimum wage.

Developers Wanted!

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly when it comes to good talent right here in the US finding well qualified and talented Software Development people has remained very tough through out this downturn.

There are areas within our economy that have continued to perform quite well throughout this mess and software is one of them. We (The United States) are not creating nearly enough high tech talent that can think and are self-motivated.

There ARE jobs for those sorts of people. Good luck finding them.

Long Term Contracts

[jmrives]

Perhaps, this is off topic. For that, I apologize. I see no reason that long term, multi-year contracts should not be normal. I am an independent software development contractor and have been for many years. I prefer to work for myself. I also prefer long-term contracts. I have had several. One lasted for 4.5 years. I was there longer than some of their employees.

Ron Paul? Isn't he the guy that

[Anonymous Coward]

Invented Almond Joy?

Re:Ron Paul? Isn't he the guy that

[TechNit]

Invented Almond Joy?

Please spare us the insipid plugs for Almond Joy's! Mounds are infinitely better! Mounds forever!!

Re:Ron Paul? Isn't he the guy that

[Scarletdown]

Invented Almond Joy?

Please spare us the insipid plugs for Almond Joy's! Mounds are infinitely better! Mounds forever!!

That all depends. Becaaauuuuussseeeee...

Sometimes you feel like a nut; sometimes you don't.

There have been China job fairs for years

[erice]

Periodic fairs for jobs in China have been held in the SF Bay Area going back to at least early 2009 so this is nothing all that new. The Chinese jobs usually required fluent Mandarin. The Indian jobs might be more approachable for non-Indians since English is the language of the educated class. Not that it matters much to me. I traveled in India for six months and while it is a fascinating place to visit, I don't want to live there.

Re:Can you handle the truth? - If it makes sense!

[Anonymous Coward]

The truth is that economy depends on production and not on consumption, consumption is a trivial consequence of production,....

What? That makes no sense.

Without consumption, production leads to oversupply. And of course without production, there's nothing to consume.

Re:Can you handle the truth? - If it makes sense!

[roman_mir]

There is no such thing as an oversupply. That's just a political ruse to ensure higher prices than should exist (thus franchise licenses are given out for example to utility companies or medallions to cab drivers).

Re:I Work With American Talent

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately my experience has been largely negative. It's clear that some of the so-called universities attended by American students are paper mills that don't do a decent job of educating them about programming.

There's also a personality issue. For some reason, many of those I've worked with can't or won't search for internet howto's and help instructions on their own, though they'll follow those instructions if a senior developer sends them a link.

Obviously I've worked with a lot of good American developers as well, but there are clearly some personality differences that can cause friction and frustration.

FTFY

Honestly, this is the case everywhere. I'm not in programming, I'm in networking and security, but it's exactly the same thing with >90% of new people in my field.

about H1Bs

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always said I'd rather compete against H1B's a few cubes over, each making maybe 60 to 80 percent of what I'm making, than the same folks in India making 8 bucks an hour. Eight bucks an hour is tough to compete against, if the guy is a decent programmer. The big boss will be able to put up with a lot of deficiencies at that price.

Re:about H1Bs

[shutdown -p now]

I've always said I'd rather compete against H1B's a few cubes over, each making maybe 60 to 80 percent of what I'm making

Depending on where you actually work, that myth - that H1-Bs are paid lower - may or may not be true, actually. It's definitely not true in the big three software corps (Apple, Google, Microsoft) - at least not from first-hand observation and comments from other people I know in those companies.

In addition, when H1-B is on a track to green card / citizenship, as soon as he gets it - meaning that he can now change jobs at will, and therefore has leverage against his employer to negotiate his salary, same as any other American - he'll be asking for more $$$. The sole reason why lower wages are tolerated is because it's seen as a kind of "stay in U.S. tax".

so soon

[Anonymous Coward]

I always read that India and Chin etc. were going to grow and one day be powers but that it's happening so fast and at the expense of the West was never mentioned.

Definitely Qualifies as The Great Depression Redux

[tomhudson]

First, Take out the REAL inflation numbers, and GDP was negative.

Second, the only reason that this depression isn't having the same "misery index" as the first one is because of the greater safety net, and because we caught a lucky break with the weather. Without unemployment insurance and welfare, and the dust-bowl conditions of the 30s, it would already be just as bad as the first one.

The "real" unemployment rate - when you take into account those who are heaping on debt by staying in school because they can't find a job, those who have given up, etc. (the U6 measure), and we're into the same range as the Great Depression. The real rate of unemployment in California, for example, is now 20%. Another 5% and it will be equal to the peak in 1933 ... and it's heading there, as cities and states struggle with their own ongoing debt crisis.

There's almost 50 million people on food stamps. And housing is now already officially worse than the great depression (and it's going to get wors)

It's official: The housing crisis that began in 2006 and has recently entered a double dip is now worse than the Great Depression.

Prices have fallen some 33 percent since the market began its collapse, greater than the 31 percent fall that began in the late 1920s and culminated in the early 1930s, according to Case-Shiller data.

Half of all homes now have a mortgage that makes them unsellable - if there is equity left, it's not sufficient to cover the additional costs of the sale (real estate commission fees, etc). Strategic default is a problem, but another problem is that, without jobs (or only part-time or low-paying jobs), even people whose mortgages are now "ok" are in trouble.

The fact is that any rise in GDP is not being seen by the workers, and hasn't been for more than a decade. Ask anyone who's had to take a major pay cut, or simply can't find a job because for every opening, there are 100 or 1,000 applicants.

Re:I Work With Indian Talent

[adamchou]

A few years back, I hired a recent Indian graduate without given him any kind of programming test. This was the first time I hired someone and I guess I was too naive to think what he had on paper could possibly mean he didn't know how to program.

His first day on the job, I was showing him our code base and asked him to do something with a for loop. Granted he's never programmed in PHP but come on, constructing a for loop in PHP is about as simple as can be. He didn't know how to do it, even after reading the manuals

He graduated from USC with a Masters in Computer Science

Send them back

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a good thing some are going back to India, it would be better if most of them went back. It is criminal that we continue to import workers, mainly through the H1 B visa program when we have 20 percent unemployment and when a huge number of our young veterans are currently unemployed. Many of the jobs that these imported workers are filling are nuts and bolt tech jobs like customer support, software testing, could easily be staffed by our own citizens. It is appalling the extent to which we have undermined and destroyed our domestic labor force, and it is time for this nonsense to end. Get rid of the H1 B visa program and put our people, especially our young veterans back to work!

Re:I Work With Indian Talent

[Anonymous Coward]

I've worked with a lot of Indians, referring to them as 'talent' would be giving them way too much credit !

Re:I Work With Indian Talent

[Skuld-Chan]

I work in a university (in IT no less) and I can attest to this. It never ceases to surprise me how many students we hire that are computer science majors and know little to nothing about computers never mind how to program one.

That and it seems like anyone can get a masters degree or even a phd if they read enough books and write enough papers.

Indians returning to India is old news

[stewartm0205]

Indians returning to India is old news. Not all Indians who come to America stay. Many return because they get home sick or they can't adjust. Many also return to India because they can get a better deal in India. For the same set of skills they can live better in India.

Re:Indians returning to India is old news

[ghee22]

Indians returning to India is old news. Not all Indians who come to America stay. Many return because they get home sick or they can't adjust. Many also return to India because they can get a better deal in India. For the same set of skills they can live better in India.

Bingo. Parent is right about the "better deal". Middle class in India is not the same as middle class in America. Maids and cooks are common for middle class in India. In metro NYC, you are looking at $60/hour for a decent maid team, costing you at least $180 for a decent cleaning of a 1 bedroom apartment.

Can we have one like this here in the UK?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indian Offshoring companies (TATA, Wipro etc) are seriously undercutting local wage rates.
They send indentured workers to the UK and pay them Indian rates. This is less than the UK Minimum wage.

some of them are good but most are IMHO are a waste of time.

Bitter? Yep. I got replaced by and Indian IT worker on $10K a year. That same worker screwed up the live servers and cost the business a lot more than what it sould have cost them to employ me.

Re:Can we have one like this here in the UK?

[shutdown -p now]

In U.S., at least, laws regulating visas for skilled workers require their salary to be "above the prevailing market wage" for the position they're hired to fill. Now there are many sleazy ways in which one can fudge that number, but definitely not to the point of $10k/year, or less than minimum wage (why is the latter even legal?). Don't you have something similar in UK?

Re:I Work With Indian Talent

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Indian, I agree. I have same experience working with Chinese.

Indians are not available

[vencs]

for comments - they are all at the job fair.

US response to the fair

[Anonymous Coward]

Donna Conroy, of Bright Future Jobs, a group that has been critical of companies that offshore jobs, was upset by the efforts of U.S.-based companies to try fill jobs in India. This is what she had to say "Waaaa Waaaaa Waaaaaa!!"

Bystanders were quick to call a waaambulance for Ms Conroy.

The Fruits Of Freedom Baby

[Anonymous Coward]

Freedom Baby demanded that the Financial Sector (Banks, insurance companies, hedge fonds etc) should be deregulated and as free as any small enterprise in their decisions. America now reaps the poisoned fruits of this stupidity and it seems America is hungry for more of the poison.

Re:I Work With Indian Talent

[Anonymous Coward]

"Specific domain knowledge", in all likelihood, means "knows someone stateside who is in marketing/sales, has poor ethics, is indigenous, and is willing to sell your shitty services to unassuming people with shyster contracts that hide where the expenses will be in conditionals".

I'm watching it happen as we speak.

Handling the truth.

[udachny]

Can anybody handle the truth nowadays? Judging by that moderation pattern it seems unlikely.

Re:Handling the truth.

[Rennt]

Opinion presented as "truth" always smells like shit.

Re:I Work With Indian Talent

[perryizgr8]

cs in indian universities is a huge joke. hell, even other engineering degrees are usually shit. they don't tell you anything about the person than the fact that this guy can work real hard and follow orders. that's the way it is here, i'm afraid. for eg, i'm studying electronics in an indian university (its one of the better ones), and i know more and have more experience in programming than most of the cs faculty here.
i dunno what kind of an issue this is. people here (in my uni) are very smart, they do exceedingly well when they do something on their own (for eg, our uni was in teh top 13 list of colleges in the world that added most number of students to gsoc 2011), but anything course related is just neglected until the last moment. also, there is a severe lack of good teachers. anybody who is any good is out there actually doing stuff.

hey hey sloppy joes

[negRo_slim]

Unemployment was upwards of 50%

No it wasn't.

Aimed at expats?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Indian economy is improving and so are the opportunities for those skilled enough to live and work in the USA. The improvements in India are making it a viable alternative for those considering emigrating.

For me, it would not be a consideration, but for all those Indians in SFBA that are away from family and friends ...

A question...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've worked with plenty of Indians here in the US and they're generally good people, usually even have more of a sense of humor than most Americans do.

But I'm wondering -- how are Indians in India? Do they tend to be xenophobic toward non-Indians? The idea of working in India, if but for a year or two, sounds interesting (I just want some foreign experience because it seems neat), but India is a big unknown to me and I don't know enough about its native culture to determine if I'd have a hard time living there or not...

Re:A question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends who you are. White mans are treated as superior, and blonde Caucasian woman are treated like goddess, every indian wants to marry one.

If you are other form of "Americans" i.e. minorities they don't give a shit about you. They treat black people and Hispanics like dirt. All east Asians are look alike to them and they treat those as enemies (because of the numerous conflict between China and India and the mid 20th century).

Re:A question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends who you are. White mans are treated as superior, and blonde Caucasian woman are treated like goddess, every indian wants to marry one.

If you are other form of "Americans" i.e. minorities they don't give a shit about you. They treat black people and Hispanics like dirt. All east Asians are look alike to them and they treat those as enemies (because of the numerous conflict between China and India and the mid 20th century).

wow! I appreciate your ability to sum up a billion people!

Is this the ultimate insult to the USA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or am I missing something?

Re:Can you handle the truth? - If it makes sense!

[ChrisMaple]

There is such a thing as oversupply, but it's not common because it's a problem. At one time, overproduction and hence oversupply of Hula Hoops put the Whamo Corporation in financial trouble (i.e. they couldn't sell enough of what they made.) If there weren't oversupply, there wouldn't be surplus and overstock stores, liquidation sales, and junkyards.

No software engineering taught in India

[Anonymous Coward]

In Indian computer science education, programming is taught, but not software engineering. I did my BS in an Indian college, and my MS in an US university. In the former, we were taught basic electronics, logic gates, 8085 microprocessor programming, and TTL circuits. In my MS, one of my subjects, aside from VLSI design and computer system design, among others, was Software Engineering. There, the concept of how to break a program into its functional parts so that each can be independently engineered was taught.

Talking years later to students in India, I found out that software engineering is not taught in India at all, only programming. They know the syntax & constructs of the language, and maybe even the flowcharts, but breaking up the entire task into managable functional units and dividing it amongst project members is totally alien to them. Hence the results that a lot of you see while dealing with Indian programmers.

Mod Parent Up

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

I suggest you to read this:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2442898&cid=37491808

Affirmative action is what keeps efficiency low. All department in our university requires to carry x amount of international students as workers, and as a IT job most resumes comes from Indian graduate students. The only chance to bypass this requirement is when you have a budget issue, and this year our department has a chance to get rid of all lazy int'l student workers and keep the hard-working, more motivated domestic undergrads.

Can /. distinguish between opinions & fact?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how everyone modded this thing down to troll just because of a difference of opinion! While all the Leftards above were busy posting as AC to ensure that they didn't get modded down themselves. But had they posted as themselves, such as sgt scrub above, they'd probably have ended up with karmas of 'Terrific'! The moderation standards @ /. are arbitary and piss poor, when this can happen. Also, I've noticed that political stories get something like 1000+ posts, while some deeply serious tech stories, like those about Raspberry Pi just get a handful. Is this /. or HuffPo? And while the FAQ on karmas claims that they're not censorship since they leave the posts up, fact is that a bad karma incurred within a day automatically limits one's posts to 10 a day, so that others can pile on, while the person getting modded down can't defend himself.

Note that I disagree with Roman on Ron Paul himself, not merely because of the latter's conspiracy theories, which I can barely digest, but also because he has no clue about the biggest threat to the US coming from Muslim countries. His explanation that the current Muslim hatred of the US was because of the ouster of an Iranian prime minister Mossadegh some 50 years ago reveals how clueless he is. Plus he too has the backing of Hamas, and a lot of his supporters are down & out anti-Semitic. Given those ugly realities about him, there is no way I can support him, no matter how accurate he may be about other things, such as the Federal Reserve. If he is such a fiscal conservative, why did he vote to continue US payments of billions of $$$ to the Palestinian Authority a.k.a. Hamas, and decline to condemn a Pali state which won't recognize Israel? I'm referring to his vote against 268. Unfortunately, the Tea Party has embraced a lot of anti-Semites, such as him, and MI congressman Justin Amash, CA congressman Darryl Issa. Funny how someone who is an isolationist and don't think that the US should be involved in foreign funding (which I partly agree with - end all aid to Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan & Iraq) has no problems with Hamas continuing to get American taxpayer $$$ - like it isn't needed here. Either he's an anti-Semite, or he has been well padded by some sheikhs from the Arabian peninsula or some mullahs from Iran.

None of the above disagreements imply that I think Roman is a troll. It's a legitimate opinion, that's just different from what's apparently the mainstream @ /.

Re:Can /. distinguish between opinions & fact?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm referring to his vote against House Resolution 268.

Indian is Everywhere worldwide

[Anonymous Coward]

Indian is everywhere and they need so many job to meet the target of population, that's why we can find Indian everywhere worldwide, working in all aspect of Industry

GOP != Conservative

[Anonymous Coward]

If only a GOP candidate was running on the platform of limited government, personal liberty, deregulation, ending the federal reserve, and had a firm understanding of Austrian economics. Capitalism’s about profit and loss You bail out the losers there’s no end to the cost

After 8 years, 6 of which the GOP had the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives to themselves, in which both the debt and the size of government just grew, despite a shrinking economy, where an Eminent Domain judgement went unchallenged in Congress (in sharp contrast to the bi-partisan reaction to the 'Do-not-call' judgement of the Supreme Court), federalizing the airport security which had failed and brought us 9/11, passing McCain's Campaign Finance Reform, et al, the GOP has no credibility on these issues anymore. And even if you did get a Michelle Bachmann to be the candidate, which is unlikely, and even if she did get elected, which is even less likely, you'd still have the McCains, the Lindsey Gramms, the Chuck Hagels and any number of GOP senators who would sabotage any attempts to restore sanity to the above items, so things wouldn't be any better. Good luck finding GOP primary challengers to these guys who can take on them and win. When one did run - Pat Toomey against Arlen Specter in PA, both Bush & Santorum opposed him, and he lost. Of course, today Specter is a Democrat. Opposing McCain or Gramm will be even more difficult, if not downright impossible.

Also, what exactly did you mean by 'Austrian economics'? I concede that I've not been following the Austrian economy, but I didn't know that there was a boom there. Or a crisis. The more resurgent economies in Eastern Europe are Poland, the Czech republic and Bulgaria.

Re:Can you handle the truth? - If it makes sense!

[Anonymous Coward]

(account locked again, so posting as AC, it just shows that people cannot really handle the truth.).

There is no such thing as oversupply. If a company doesn't have enough sense to listen to the market, and not to see that its products are not being bought and it keeps producing them, then it's a problem with that particular company. However that's not how the manufacturing even works today, my work involves understanding of retail processes, so I know that today manufacturing only allows small amount of stock and it has the finger on the pulse of the market.

It's all about price discovery though. If there are very many products of the same type produced and people aren't buying, it means the price is too high. If driving sales means lowering the price below the cost of manufacturing of the goods, then it's a bad business model for that company.

That a way for the market to indicate to the company that it is wasting its time and resources. That's a GOOD thing, that means the resources and capital must be freed up to do something else. It's a big red sign: cease what you are doing immediately, you are not making any sense. Redirect your production capacity to something else.

There is no such thing as overproduction in a normal market with companies that pay any attention to the stocks and sales. And even when there is some overproduction prices can be lowered. If amount of overproduction is such that the company can no longer exist - it's a local problem of that stupid company.

Government shouldn't be bailing out anybody, so it's not anybody else's problem but that company's. And so what is the big fucking deal? Let them restructure. Companies fail, it happens all the time and it's a good thing. A cleansing thing that prevents stupid bubbles.

GOVERNMENT causes unmitigated oversupply and bubbles. Gov't policies of pushing interest rates down and creating inflation is where the real oversupply comes from - like the housing bubble and later the currency and sovereign debt bubbles.

Re:Definitely Qualifies as The Great Depression Re

[sjames]

The GDP hasn't been seem by workers for ages. Since 1960, the inflation adjusted GDP/capita has increased sixfold but income has been stagnant. It all goes to the 1%.

Re:I Work With Indian Talent

[shutdown -p now]

What can be said is that the more that return home for employment, the more jobs that open up stateside. This is *NOT* a bad thing.

Is it? Keep in mind that the guy who returns to India will likely end up working on some outsourced project, except that he'll ask for a salary that's good for India. If he's in US, he'll ask for a salary that's good for US. You'll be competing with him in either case, but when both of you are in US, price disparity is lower.

Leave Jobs be, already!

[Anonymous Coward]

For God's sake, the man is dead. Let him rest in peace.

Poor nonholiday spirtians

[Anonymous Coward]

I say we talk about this after the holidays.......k? I am planning on getting something really, really cool and I dont want this talk to spoil it. Now lets get to it PEOPLE! Dont worry, be happy crap, shit! Wee, laaa, weeee, la de da!

Who wants to live in India?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would anyone want to live in India? Its extremely overcrowded.... the trains are scary, people die all the time... most of the country lives without any plumbing or bathrooms. You can't drive without an escort. The weather can be scalding. And all this is worth it? On top of it all, are they offering US salary rate to jobs in India? I doubt it.