The laws of economics are purely psychological, because money doesn't exist in nature. Economics is not a science; predictions of doom and gloom because of the debt have been consistently disproven since Alexander Hamilton's doctrine of assumption assumed the states' war debts at the very founding of the country.
Off the coast of Baja, California, scientists find gray whales are uncharacteristically social with humans, even allowing their faces, mouths and tongues to be massaged as they bump up beside boats.
Each animal is an individual. Some want to enter into collaborative relationships, like birds singing with other species (including humans). I just watched a documentary on Tesla; he had a special relationship with a (wild) white pigeon that came to him when he called.
"A virus destroyed most of my summer harvest, which fell this year from the usual 50 tons per acre to only 10 tons," Mohamed Khairy, a tomato farmer in the Nile Delta province of Beheira, some 200 km north of Cairo, told IPS. "I tried to get assistance from the agriculture ministry, but my pleas fell on deaf ears."
Critics further point out that shortages were exacerbated by exploitive merchants - and the government's seeming reluctance to regulate their activities.
"Unscrupulous traders took advantage of the shortage to raise retail prices through the roof, allowing them to realise enormous profits," said Sami. "And the government has continued to allow them to get away with it."
Abdelazim concurred, noting that Egypt's ruling regime was largely composed of businessmen and "monopolistic traders".
"The regime, which is characterised by economic corruption and chaos, doesn't regulate the local market or move to break up monopolies - it merely looks on as consumers are exploited," he said. "Meanwhile, Egypt's limited civil society plays a negligible role in protecting the consumer."
The Egyptian government, in close collaboration with USAID officials, began introducing a broad program of agricultural liberalization in the 1980s that aimed to limit state intervention--in the form of subsidies and controls on cropping patterns--and encourage a competitive market system based on private enterprise and export-led growth. These policies continued into the 1990s after Egypt concluded a structural adjustment agreement with the International Monetary Fund. A key component of these agrarian reforms was a new land law, known as Law 96, that revoked tenure rights for small peasants which had been in place for 40 years and allowed large landowners to charge market-based rents.
For government critics, Egypt's food inflation must be seen against the backdrop of these broader economic policies.
[...]
Ayeb explains that in the 1950s and 1960s Egyptian agricultural policies sought to protect small farmers and provide them with a respectable income. “In the pseudo-socialist period there was the idea of living on the land and surviving from it there was a guarantee of national agricultural security.”
Thus, as fertilizers and herbicides flooded the Egyptian market, the government provided subsidies to support small farmers and make food available locally.
Since the late 1970s, government subsidies have gradually receded and chemical fertilizers have instead been sold on the open market. Moreover, today Egypt is one of the biggest importers of fertilizers in the world and this dependency has in turn affected local prices.
“The state used to provide everything, from fertilizers to herbicides. Today, things have changed 180 degrees,” Haj Desouki reflects.
Another failure of free markets. Food is too important to be left to the free market!
" the market of people able to afford them has suddenly shrunk. Costs must be cut, more people laid off."
This only follows if you assume that only banks have some sort of unchallengeable, divine right to create money and keep it artificially scarce. If the govt prints money and gives it to ppl, standard of living rises; and if the govt encourages ppl to innovate through challenges, technology continues to increase so standard of living increases faster, and confidence in the currency remains strong.
Solution: govt prints money to provide a basic income to everyone (an idea that's been around since founding father Tom Paine's 1795 Agrarian Justice). Govt also funds challenges (biz can hold challenges too!) to stimulate the native ingenuity in each of us to innovate. As long as we keep producing things others want, the currency stays strong.
If your argument can be used to support very bad things (like "vegetarianism/abolition is bad for the economy") then present more arguments (especially since the prediction that slavery would be bad for the economy was proven false). Let's delve deeper, not be satisfied with superficialities.
The reason I don't eat meat is because I don't want to be eaten. Until I know that an animal wants to be eaten, I'm going to err on the side of safety.
Vegetables are a different matter, because it is their survival strategy to produce fruit that birds eat and fly to other places and excrete seeds that spread the vegetable's genes.
By this logic, root vegetables such as potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic are not ethically edible since you kill the plant. Jains have worked out a whole science of moral eating.
The ultimate goal is to stop eating. Gain energy directly from the sun, or die by self-starvation to demonstrate your mastery of bodily instincts.
But these are voluntary, self-imposed goals; Jainism includes lesser vows (anuvrata) for householders, who can choose to put off ultimate enlightenment until later in this life, or the next.
Reduce the harm. Stop buying as much meat, then wean yourself altogether. Maybe the animals as you say are happy to make the trade-off but until we're sure and give each one the choice we shouldn't assume. The same economic arguments were used against freeing slaves but the predictions didn't come true. Technology provided a better way of picking cotton and in the same way technology will give us meat without brains or nerves, let us focus on accelerating progress towards that goal!
plants have a different survival strategy, they want you to eat them, that's why their fruit is sweet so that birds will eat it and spread the seeds far and wide...
which shows that banks have over $1 trillion in excess of fractional reserve requirements; that's money that has effectively been taken out of the economy.
What's the trouble, exactly? Because the money isn't created by bankers? Why can't govt create money debt-free, like Japan finances its own deficit, and use it to invest in humans?
Sure, fund big and small stuff, the important thing is to keep innovation going. Fund lots of ideas, even if only a few survive testing it's worth it and essential to keep our creative edge advancing ever more rapidly in an increasingly competitive world where our main competitors (China and Japan) use state funding of research...
we still got ideas, we need to fund the research and testing of them. The fear that repubs are drumming up now about debt acts as a chilling force dampening the creative spirit.
The economic problem is a smaller problem, but we should be talking much more about the greater problems of innovation, how to stimulate it, how we can encourage it, how we can use economics to increase the pace of innovation. Instead of focusing on debt, we could be talking about how to improve 3D printers so we don't have to use China's cheap labor...
Saving removes money. Biz keeping money in the bank removes money from circulation. Paying off debt removes money from circulation. Japan proves this, with a debt-to-gdp of 200% and very little inflation.
Inflation is basically a psychological phenomenon. Why should something be worth less just because there's more of it? Is oxygen less important if there's more of it?
Slashdot Mirror
The laws of economics are purely psychological, because money doesn't exist in nature. Economics is not a science; predictions of doom and gloom because of the debt have been consistently disproven since Alexander Hamilton's doctrine of assumption assumed the states' war debts at the very founding of the country.
Govt is ppl. If we don't like what they're doing, they change. We don't like that they're filtering political web sites!
Their work is doing political stuff.
I can't fully explain the orbit of Mercury, but saying that means the Sun is the center of the solar system is just silly.
You don't go out in nature much, do you?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106541921
Each animal is an individual. Some want to enter into collaborative relationships, like birds singing with other species (including humans). I just watched a documentary on Tesla; he had a special relationship with a (wild) white pigeon that came to him when he called.
We want freedom FROM economics.
Some research indicates the contrary is true, Egyptians seem to blame their govt for NOT providing a solution:
From http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=53606:
From http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/news/egypts-recurring-food-price-crisis :
Another failure of free markets. Food is too important to be left to the free market!
The music swings!
I'm learning a lot from his posts.
but the eyes are at right angles to each other and so far apart :)
" the market of people able to afford them has suddenly shrunk. Costs must be cut, more people laid off."
This only follows if you assume that only banks have some sort of unchallengeable, divine right to create money and keep it artificially scarce. If the govt prints money and gives it to ppl, standard of living rises; and if the govt encourages ppl to innovate through challenges, technology continues to increase so standard of living increases faster, and confidence in the currency remains strong.
Solution: govt prints money to provide a basic income to everyone (an idea that's been around since founding father Tom Paine's 1795 Agrarian Justice). Govt also funds challenges (biz can hold challenges too!) to stimulate the native ingenuity in each of us to innovate. As long as we keep producing things others want, the currency stays strong.
If your argument can be used to support very bad things (like "vegetarianism/abolition is bad for the economy") then present more arguments (especially since the prediction that slavery would be bad for the economy was proven false). Let's delve deeper, not be satisfied with superficialities.
The reason I don't eat meat is because I don't want to be eaten. Until I know that an animal wants to be eaten, I'm going to err on the side of safety.
Vegetables are a different matter, because it is their survival strategy to produce fruit that birds eat and fly to other places and excrete seeds that spread the vegetable's genes.
By this logic, root vegetables such as potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic are not ethically edible since you kill the plant. Jains have worked out a whole science of moral eating.
The ultimate goal is to stop eating. Gain energy directly from the sun, or die by self-starvation to demonstrate your mastery of bodily instincts.
But these are voluntary, self-imposed goals; Jainism includes lesser vows (anuvrata) for householders, who can choose to put off ultimate enlightenment until later in this life, or the next.
Ask the animal first.
There are millions or billions of healthy vegatarians.
Your arguments have been used to justify what we now consider terrible crimes in the past, such as slavery, colonialism, castor oil, etc.
Reduce the harm. Stop buying as much meat, then wean yourself altogether. Maybe the animals as you say are happy to make the trade-off but until we're sure and give each one the choice we shouldn't assume. The same economic arguments were used against freeing slaves but the predictions didn't come true. Technology provided a better way of picking cotton and in the same way technology will give us meat without brains or nerves, let us focus on accelerating progress towards that goal!
plants have a different survival strategy, they want you to eat them, that's why their fruit is sweet so that birds will eat it and spread the seeds far and wide...
see how angry meat makes you!
Another reason to stop eating meat.
Let me make those links clickable:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h3/current/h3.htm
which shows that banks have over $1 trillion in excess of fractional reserve requirements; that's money that has effectively been taken out of the economy.
http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h3/20081030/
During the crisis, the banks had far less in reserve, and the non-borrowed figure was negative.
What's the trouble, exactly? Because the money isn't created by bankers? Why can't govt create money debt-free, like Japan finances its own deficit, and use it to invest in humans?
Sure, fund big and small stuff, the important thing is to keep innovation going. Fund lots of ideas, even if only a few survive testing it's worth it and essential to keep our creative edge advancing ever more rapidly in an increasingly competitive world where our main competitors (China and Japan) use state funding of research...
we still got ideas, we need to fund the research and testing of them. The fear that repubs are drumming up now about debt acts as a chilling force dampening the creative spirit.
The economic problem is a smaller problem, but we should be talking much more about the greater problems of innovation, how to stimulate it, how we can encourage it, how we can use economics to increase the pace of innovation. Instead of focusing on debt, we could be talking about how to improve 3D printers so we don't have to use China's cheap labor ...
Saving removes money. Biz keeping money in the bank removes money from circulation. Paying off debt removes money from circulation. Japan proves this, with a debt-to-gdp of 200% and very little inflation.
Inflation is basically a psychological phenomenon. Why should something be worth less just because there's more of it? Is oxygen less important if there's more of it?
That kind of thinking led to Sputnik being the first satellite in space, and we got scared because of the military implications, hence NASA :)