Well, I moved to Mint and I moved a number of clients to it as well (Mint Mate to be precise). I don't know if it's a vocal community or not, all I care about is that the desktop works for business use.
Of-course Madoff worked in a completely regulated environment, your point is backwards. Madoff was the product of the moral hazard created by the government, where people just assumed that gov't was all over his business, checking what's going on there, when in fact his previous ties to the government allowed him to be completely unregulated in an environment where everybody assumed he was.
That's what moral hazard does, that's what FDIC does, that's what Cyprus just went through (and will keep going through), that's how USA banking system collapsed (and was bailed out).
If I lose money with any business that is unregulated, don't worry about it, it's my money. Worry about yourself.
Regulations is what allows for "gambling and thievery", without regulations such behaviour would immediately be punished by the market.
Regulations, OTOH, prevent any competition while giving the thieves and gamblers enough rope to hang themselves and pretty much the rest of the economy with them. Government regulations, taxes, inflation is the biggest scam in history of this world and democracy is the biggest self-delusion that people accepted that is used to perpetrate that scam. Your comment is just a perfect example of that delusion.
Would you be comfortable with a completely unregulated company holding your money, even for a little while?
- I deal with a number of completely unregulated companies, I trust their owners based on the track record with them much more than I trust ANY regulated bank or government.
Try and start one and see how fast you are shut down because you are not complying with literally about fifty thousand regulations. It's not about one particular thing, it's about the fact of just how much you have to comply with before you can run your exchange. Obviously it does not do anything to make exchanges 'more safe' for anybody, what it does it prevents you from competing in that market.
The so called 'experts' are just as much experts at estimating requirements and timing as they are 'expert architects'.
Here is a thread where I argue that J2EE is a crutch given to people labelled as 'architects', turning them into typists while removing any real architectural thought from their activities. If you read through the thread you'll see some AC objecting to that notion and he does not realise that he is arguing my points there when he talks about architects.
He is mistaking what 'enterprise' means, he believes it has to do with some technology, with some instrument, a tool or a set of tools. He does not realise that 'enterprise' really means an approach, a process, set of processes and standards that a company forces itself to adhere to, be it in implementation details or documentation process (all of which are important of-course), but enterprise does not mean just some solution provided by some vendor even if it has the word "enterprise" in its name!
So with that in mind, realise that what we actually have for architects are most of the time not architects at all, they are copy pastors, they are typists, they are managers probably, but they are not actually designers.
Those are the same people that would be considered 'experts', who managers turn to for time estimates. I don't remember myself underestimating projects at all or overestimating by more than a factor of 2, because I have the entire process of what it takes to build a project in mind and I break it down into all the little pieces, put a number that comes from past experience in front of that little piece, then the numbers are added up and there is some adjustment based on the team, the people that are going to be working on this.
AFAIC overestimating is not as a big problem as underestimating but if you are bidding on a job, then it does present a challenge. In case of bidding you are actually not truly estimating a project, you are just trying to get it before the other guys get it, and I think that's where the real problem comes in. Managing client expectations is a serious matter, you better be able to do that and I think the more you way overestimate or way underestimate the less likely the clients are to trust you in the future, so be true to yourself.
But again, how can somebody be true to themselves, when they don't even understand themselves what it is they are doing in the first place?
Warren never connected the dots because she is not interested in the real answer, which is that the reason that prices went up since 1971 had nothing to do with the free market capitalism, but it was direct response to the government printing tons of fake money, which is why where of your complaints about the income inequality etc., should be directed at.
By the way, there was much more income inequality in 19th century than in the 20th, Rockefeller's wealth by the end of his life was equivalent of 600,000,000,000 USD, Carnegie had about 300,000,000,000 dollars by end of his life.
In fact out of 37 richest self-made people in USA, 27 were born prior to 1850. Only 3 were born in the 20th century - Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Sam Walton.
1870 to 1913 time period increased overall wealth of all the people in USA comparatively more than any time before or after. This was done without most of what is called 'government' today, including most departments, agencies, income taxes, money printing (inflation), regulations, etc.
Over the 19th century the value of the USD went up by 100%, prices were falling throughout the century while competition was growing. The real middle class (small business owners and professionals) were created in that century. Many in the US mistakenly think of the 1950s as the time when the middle class was created, but that is absolutely false. That wasn't the time of middle class, it was time of lower class being in a position of relative monopoly on production, while other countries were in a post-war destruction and rebuilding period, USA didn't suffer destruction of any infrastructure. Of-course as the productive output grew, so did the government and it was taking on more and more powers and taking away more and more liberties.
Eventually they destroyed the money completely, defaulted on it in 1971 and investment capital started moving out, which is the consequence of people with investment capital not willing to see it being destroyed by the government created inflation.
Inflation hurts the lower classes the most, as they can't really shift their income and assets from dollar denominated into something else, like commodities or other currencies and businesses across the world.
In case you didn't realise it, wealth is created by people that you believe "concentrate" it. Sam Walton created the wealth by creating the company that caters to the poorest of Americans, provides them with the goods they want to buy at prices they can afford. He doesn't transfer wealth from anybody, he creates it.
Of-course in case of current banks, that's not the reality, they are involved in wealth transfer and people should be upset about it. You can thank gov't for failing to adhere to principles that USA was built upon: rule of law, Constitution, individual freedoms, things of that nature that would not allow gov't to choose winners, to make winners out of losers and to force others to pay for that.
You want to complain about gov't stealing money? Be my guest. But I am not interested in ideas that promote theft and redistribution based on some misplaced notion of 'fairness' or 'justice', which is not fairness or justice at all, but is theft and discrimination.
There was no less regulations. The only one single regulation that was repealed that everybody is referencing is the part of the Glass Steagall that was repealed there is nothing else, which was the counter balance to the rest of FDIC, which is the moral hazard. This moral hazard is provided to the bank lenders (depositors) and it's a bailout to the banks, it makes the depositors complacent with what banks do with their money and it gives banks the green light not to have to compete for the lenders (depositors), because the assumption is that everybody gets bailed out.
Note that unlike in case of Cyprus, in USA when a large financial institution fails the precedent is that everybody gets bailed out regardless of the size of their account, so it's not just the first 150K or so, basically the FDIC promises to bail out everybody, of-course this is nonsense, FDIC cannot bail out anybody. They have no assets to bail anybody out, even the meagre 25Billion USD that they have is not actually money, it's Treasuries. Imagine a crisis where the gov't decides that banks need a bail out and what do people think happens to the US Treasuries at that point? Who will buy the Treasuries? The only one buying Treasuries now is the Fed, and 25Billion USD is not even beginning to address the issue, USA deposits are 10Trillion in size.
Of-course in exchange for one partially repealed regulation thousands more came into play, people don't even understand simple things, like the fact that every law that is aimed at "fighting terrorism" adds regulations to every major industry.
How about the Patriot Act (the most unpatriotic piece of legislation prior to Obama's NDAA), it turns banks and other financial institutions into FBI and IRS agents. Banks have at the minimum 100,000 regulations that apply to them in the regulation registry.
The reality is that all of those regulations do one thing: turn a free market economy into a command economy that destroys market pricing discovery mechanism, destroys the balance of market forces, props up monopolies, destroys competition and investment and causes people to look for ways to avoid government taxes, regulations and inflation rather than allowing people actually to build businesses and improve the economy.
HFT is just a perversion that the government is directly responsible for with all of its inflation, taxes and regulations that destroy normal markets, prevent financial institutions and banks from being able to invest into normal businesses that actually grow the economy and instead these institutions are propped up with fake money and given the understanding that tomorrow there will be even more fake money coming into the system. In that situation you are not thinking about business or long term, you are gambling, as the entire economy is based on gambling and fake credit.
How about you don't go around banning anything and instead you deregulate the industry enough for people to start their own competing exchanges, which may have different rules, that would allow or not allow HFTs? The retail investors are pushed out of the stock market by HFTs.
But if you REALLY want to solve the actual ROOT problem rather than attacking the causes, how about banning government from printing and handing out money to banks, banning federal reserve from monetising Treasury debt? Banning the Fed from trying to manipulate the interest rates?
See, that's what would take care of the gambling problem, couple that with dismantling the FDIC and all of a sudden you have people who actually would be worried about their banks and financial institutions and start evaluating risks and rewards based on real market signals.
By the way, the fact that Singapore has 85% 'public housing' only means that Singapore sets price controls on housing, but that actually is a terrible thing to do, it means that there is a price floor on housing just as much as a price ceiling. Any company that bids on contracts with that gov't is getting much more money than it would in the free market of housing (which is about 15% of Singapore housing). A builder is like any other business, once you tell him how much he can actually make in a way that is guaranteed by gov't, you are now creating an artificial market for him where none existed. All he has to do is figure out how to lower his costs and his prices are set, so for him the way to increase profits is to ensure he keeps the monopoly intact and find more and more ways to reduce costs.
It's bad because while he reduces costs, that reduction is not forced by the competition to translate into reduction of house prices in the market, so what Singapore ends up with is a much more expensive housing market than it would be without that subsidy, that's how all gov't subsidies work, they waste money, which is the opposite of their stated goal.
Once all the menial jobs are replaced by robots, what do people that are only suited to menial jobs do? Not everyone can be a robot technician, and there will be fewer robot technicians than robots.
- economics 101, as the supply of something goes up, the market will clear at a different (lower) price point.
Understand? If there is a glut of supply of menial labour it means the prices should go do, and as they do, there will be buyers in the market for that labour at those lower prices.
Maybe you can hire some help if it costs you $4 an hour but not $12 an hour, so wait until the price of labour falls to $4 and buy it. This creates more opportunities for business that become economical at new price points, problem solved.
Context of the surrounding environment, that's wonderful, are you going to put context of the air that you are breathing into that and how much should you be taxed for breathing that air and what are those taxes supposed to go towards exactly?
- the 'reality' as you see it is quite depressing, you are denigrating people to living worthless lives of being subsidised, wards of the state, without ability to get above and beyond their own unfortunate circumstances.
People will from time to time need assistance. To deny that reality is insane.
- nobody says people don't sometimes need help, that's what private individuals are for, not government, not corruption of theft, not corruption of power.
To act as though business will not pollute, abuse workers and in general do anything to save a dollar this quarter is insane.
- that's a separate issue of private property ownership, ability to pollute is subsidised by the gov't, not reduced by it. Ability to pollute without facing consequences is the liability cap provided by gov't to companies, ability to do business on so called 'public land' is one of those types of subsidies.
I have no interest in depriving anyone of their will.
- you just want to deprive them of any meaning to their lives, of ability to be useful to the rest of the society and the economy.
Some public programs are always needed. Welcome to reality.
- no they are not, they happen, but they are not needed. It would be best if we could limit the gov't to only do what it can do best: provide protection against foreign invasion, everything else is none of its business. That we do have all these public programs is not a sign of need, it's sign of inevitable corruption.
Even if we limit ourselves to simply those who were injured or born mentally handicapped, someone will always be in need of public programs.
- no no no no no, no, no, there should be no gov't involvement in anything, including people born mentally handicapped, physically handicapped, etc.etc.
That's what private charity is for, that's all I have for you on this issue.
So long as there is 1 person in the situation we have to do something.
- yeah, it's our responsibility to ensure that everybody is treated exactly the same by the system of Laws, that all Laws apply equally to all people, that's what we owe everybody: a lawful society, nothing else.
There are a lot of people who will never get better jobs, who are not really capable of more. Surely, you yourself know of people like this.
- and if somebody is not capable of more, then it's unfortunate and he will be stuck in low paying jobs. If he is suffering, he can appeal to the private individuals, ask them for help. They'll be more inclined to help him if it's not imposed upon them by any force with a threat of imminent gov't violence. They will also be interested in seeing him being helped in a way that would in fact help him to unleash his real potential, I am not as pessimistic about people's abilities as you are.
85% of housing in Singapore is so called 'public housing', which in reality doesn't mean anything at all, it means that Singapore has a tax system that is used to build houses, 98.2% of all people who want to work in Singapore have jobs, they are paying the taxes and they are "subsidising" their own houses.
It is obviously a mistake for the country to take that route, nobody is perfect. But again, no minimum wage, almost no regulations on businesses, very low income taxes, mostly private health care (with a mandate to have a minimal insurance of about 1.5K a year, which most people supplement with their own private insurance).
However you are missing a very important point: Singapore does not borrow money to run their public programs, they HAVE the money, enough from the taxes they collect. They have no trade imbalance, they have trade surplus, they have current account surplus, their personal savings rate is one of the highest in the world, they are not stealing money from their own future generations either to run anything they do.
They are not printing money to do what they do, they allow the free market to work, tax enough of it to run some public programs (unfortunately, as I said, nobody is perfect), but they can afford it and then some.
That is absolutely not the way the rest of the world runs its finances and it's definitely not the way any socialist state runs its finances only by borrowing, printing, regulating and placing an undue burden on businesses.
If there were no welfare and you only made $10/day then we as a society have to deal with you living in our parks and on our streets. We have to deal with your inability to afford medical care or housing.
At some point we either subsidize you or let you die on the street.
- as if the universe is static and the person who finds his first job at $10 a day never an achieve growth, never grows his experience, his skill set, his confidence to search for a better job. Yes, that's how everything works.
Again, you are mistaken in your basic premise that workers who are not gaining higher wages are being more productive.
A company that fires its USA based employees and hires people in China is more productive, so the owners of the company, the investors are more productive and they do get the higher compensation for it as part of their stock value or dividends paid to them.
A worker that is let go from that company is not more productive just because the company he used to work at is more productive. Being fired means losing ALL productivity, the worker is completely unproductive. If he is eventually re-hired by somebody else to do something else, it does not mean he is now "sharing higher productivity" with his former boss. He is now as productive as he can be at his new place of work.
People who are actually productive are found in economies that are not bogged down by regulations, inflation and taxes, that's why Singapore workers, who don't even have minimum wage for example, have the highest per capita incomes in the world, lowest unemployment figures (about 1.8%, rate of turn over) and highest savings, lowest debt.
Those are productive people, not people living in an economy that is only growing government based on fake money that the Fed creates.
Also obviously you have no idea about all the regulations that actually exist today and how much they add to the cost of doing business in USA (which is why USA companies are so unproductive and increase their productivity by moving their operations abroad).
There are more regulations every year, not fewer, there was never any deregulations, the miserly deregulation was more than offset with thousands of new regulations that are added to the registry every year. Just in 2012 40,000 new laws came into effect. Saying that there was a period of deregulation completely dismisses the facts, the facts are: government never shrinks, it always grows and it grows much faster than the economy (and AFAIC USA economy has been in fact shrinking, not growing for about 15 years, so in reality the US gov't grows not only in absolute numbers, but as a percentage of the total economy at a very quick pace) and that's all we need to know about USA economy and so called 'deregulations'.
Patriot Act turned every financial type, every banker into an FBI agent, never mind an IRS agent as well. Deregulations.
You are getting the world where 1% are getting richer and 99% are getting poorer because of what you want, because of the ever growing government and destruction of capitalism.
Capitalism is the limiting factor to how much 'income inequality' can exist in a system, because capitalism in a free market creates competition, which eventually smoothes out any inefficiencies that arise periodically as some people find ways to grow their income very quickly, so there is an arbitrage opportunity for others to enter that market and offer the same product or service at lower prices to the customers, eventually the investor moves on to other business as the equilibrium is reached and compensation is not very high at all.
You think that you need government to solve problems where in fact government creates the problems that you are concerned about, you just don't understand that very principle.
There is no 'tragedy of commons', there is only the tragedy that 'commons' exists in the first place. Everything must be private, if something is not private, people shouldn't be able to do their bidding there, so no business should be able to profit from property that it's not paying for, renting or owning.
If you were getting $10 a day, you would still be relying on the government to feed,cloth and shelter you. While at the same time some employer would be benefitting from that government spending.
- no, my point is there shouldn't be any gov't subsidy. I would work for $10 a day if I didn't have a choice to rather be on welfare for example (which is obviously more profitable than working for $10 a day)
I don't see how feeding someone is a wasted life.
- wasted life is life of the person who is being subsidised. He is never his own person, he is never actually a person at all, he is nothing more than an animal, being fed, clothed and sheltered by the big people around him. He is never in a position to help anybody with his own productivity, his own productive output. His life has no purpose but to spend the calories allocated to him by the system and to perpetuate that system as part of the voting block that is bought with those calories.
We do not live to make money. We do not live to feed the market.
- we live to enjoy life, you are right, though I wouldn't be presumptuous enough to tell others why they live, I wouldn't force anybody to subsidise anybody else either.
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Well, I moved to Mint and I moved a number of clients to it as well (Mint Mate to be precise). I don't know if it's a vocal community or not, all I care about is that the desktop works for business use.
Moved to Mint sinse Unity. Competition in action.
USSR had a track record too.
Of-course Madoff worked in a completely regulated environment, your point is backwards. Madoff was the product of the moral hazard created by the government, where people just assumed that gov't was all over his business, checking what's going on there, when in fact his previous ties to the government allowed him to be completely unregulated in an environment where everybody assumed he was.
That's what moral hazard does, that's what FDIC does, that's what Cyprus just went through (and will keep going through), that's how USA banking system collapsed (and was bailed out).
If I lose money with any business that is unregulated, don't worry about it, it's my money. Worry about yourself.
Obviously there is no glut of supply of cheap labour in the business of noodle cutting, so yes, it is eco 101 and you failed it.
Regulations is what allows for "gambling and thievery", without regulations such behaviour would immediately be punished by the market.
Regulations, OTOH, prevent any competition while giving the thieves and gamblers enough rope to hang themselves and pretty much the rest of the economy with them. Government regulations, taxes, inflation is the biggest scam in history of this world and democracy is the biggest self-delusion that people accepted that is used to perpetrate that scam. Your comment is just a perfect example of that delusion.
Would you be comfortable with a completely unregulated company holding your money, even for a little while?
- I deal with a number of completely unregulated companies, I trust their owners based on the track record with them much more than I trust ANY regulated bank or government.
, I don't even want to imagine what would have occured had the bailouts not been given.
- nothing, banks weren't even compromised.
Try and start one and see how fast you are shut down because you are not complying with literally about fifty thousand regulations. It's not about one particular thing, it's about the fact of just how much you have to comply with before you can run your exchange. Obviously it does not do anything to make exchanges 'more safe' for anybody, what it does it prevents you from competing in that market.
5. We're moral and WE make a lot of mistakes along the way
- can I make a suggestion then, try to be less moral?
If you meant 'mortal', then try to be less of that as well.
The so called 'experts' are just as much experts at estimating requirements and timing as they are 'expert architects'.
Here is a thread where I argue that J2EE is a crutch given to people labelled as 'architects', turning them into typists while removing any real architectural thought from their activities. If you read through the thread you'll see some AC objecting to that notion and he does not realise that he is arguing my points there when he talks about architects.
He is mistaking what 'enterprise' means, he believes it has to do with some technology, with some instrument, a tool or a set of tools. He does not realise that 'enterprise' really means an approach, a process, set of processes and standards that a company forces itself to adhere to, be it in implementation details or documentation process (all of which are important of-course), but enterprise does not mean just some solution provided by some vendor even if it has the word "enterprise" in its name!
So with that in mind, realise that what we actually have for architects are most of the time not architects at all, they are copy pastors, they are typists, they are managers probably, but they are not actually designers.
Those are the same people that would be considered 'experts', who managers turn to for time estimates. I don't remember myself underestimating projects at all or overestimating by more than a factor of 2, because I have the entire process of what it takes to build a project in mind and I break it down into all the little pieces, put a number that comes from past experience in front of that little piece, then the numbers are added up and there is some adjustment based on the team, the people that are going to be working on this.
AFAIC overestimating is not as a big problem as underestimating but if you are bidding on a job, then it does present a challenge. In case of bidding you are actually not truly estimating a project, you are just trying to get it before the other guys get it, and I think that's where the real problem comes in. Managing client expectations is a serious matter, you better be able to do that and I think the more you way overestimate or way underestimate the less likely the clients are to trust you in the future, so be true to yourself.
But again, how can somebody be true to themselves, when they don't even understand themselves what it is they are doing in the first place?
Warren never connected the dots because she is not interested in the real answer, which is that the reason that prices went up since 1971 had nothing to do with the free market capitalism, but it was direct response to the government printing tons of fake money, which is why where of your complaints about the income inequality etc., should be directed at.
By the way, there was much more income inequality in 19th century than in the 20th, Rockefeller's wealth by the end of his life was equivalent of 600,000,000,000 USD, Carnegie had about 300,000,000,000 dollars by end of his life.
In fact out of 37 richest self-made people in USA, 27 were born prior to 1850. Only 3 were born in the 20th century - Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Sam Walton.
1870 to 1913 time period increased overall wealth of all the people in USA comparatively more than any time before or after. This was done without most of what is called 'government' today, including most departments, agencies, income taxes, money printing (inflation), regulations, etc.
Over the 19th century the value of the USD went up by 100%, prices were falling throughout the century while competition was growing. The real middle class (small business owners and professionals) were created in that century. Many in the US mistakenly think of the 1950s as the time when the middle class was created, but that is absolutely false. That wasn't the time of middle class, it was time of lower class being in a position of relative monopoly on production, while other countries were in a post-war destruction and rebuilding period, USA didn't suffer destruction of any infrastructure. Of-course as the productive output grew, so did the government and it was taking on more and more powers and taking away more and more liberties.
Eventually they destroyed the money completely, defaulted on it in 1971 and investment capital started moving out, which is the consequence of people with investment capital not willing to see it being destroyed by the government created inflation.
Inflation hurts the lower classes the most, as they can't really shift their income and assets from dollar denominated into something else, like commodities or other currencies and businesses across the world.
In case you didn't realise it, wealth is created by people that you believe "concentrate" it. Sam Walton created the wealth by creating the company that caters to the poorest of Americans, provides them with the goods they want to buy at prices they can afford. He doesn't transfer wealth from anybody, he creates it.
Of-course in case of current banks, that's not the reality, they are involved in wealth transfer and people should be upset about it. You can thank gov't for failing to adhere to principles that USA was built upon: rule of law, Constitution, individual freedoms, things of that nature that would not allow gov't to choose winners, to make winners out of losers and to force others to pay for that.
You want to complain about gov't stealing money? Be my guest. But I am not interested in ideas that promote theft and redistribution based on some misplaced notion of 'fairness' or 'justice', which is not fairness or justice at all, but is theft and discrimination.
There was no less regulations. The only one single regulation that was repealed that everybody is referencing is the part of the Glass Steagall that was repealed there is nothing else, which was the counter balance to the rest of FDIC, which is the moral hazard. This moral hazard is provided to the bank lenders (depositors) and it's a bailout to the banks, it makes the depositors complacent with what banks do with their money and it gives banks the green light not to have to compete for the lenders (depositors), because the assumption is that everybody gets bailed out.
Note that unlike in case of Cyprus, in USA when a large financial institution fails the precedent is that everybody gets bailed out regardless of the size of their account, so it's not just the first 150K or so, basically the FDIC promises to bail out everybody, of-course this is nonsense, FDIC cannot bail out anybody. They have no assets to bail anybody out, even the meagre 25Billion USD that they have is not actually money, it's Treasuries. Imagine a crisis where the gov't decides that banks need a bail out and what do people think happens to the US Treasuries at that point? Who will buy the Treasuries? The only one buying Treasuries now is the Fed, and 25Billion USD is not even beginning to address the issue, USA deposits are 10Trillion in size.
Of-course in exchange for one partially repealed regulation thousands more came into play, people don't even understand simple things, like the fact that every law that is aimed at "fighting terrorism" adds regulations to every major industry.
How about the Patriot Act (the most unpatriotic piece of legislation prior to Obama's NDAA), it turns banks and other financial institutions into FBI and IRS agents. Banks have at the minimum 100,000 regulations that apply to them in the regulation registry.
The reality is that all of those regulations do one thing: turn a free market economy into a command economy that destroys market pricing discovery mechanism, destroys the balance of market forces, props up monopolies, destroys competition and investment and causes people to look for ways to avoid government taxes, regulations and inflation rather than allowing people actually to build businesses and improve the economy.
HFT is just a perversion that the government is directly responsible for with all of its inflation, taxes and regulations that destroy normal markets, prevent financial institutions and banks from being able to invest into normal businesses that actually grow the economy and instead these institutions are propped up with fake money and given the understanding that tomorrow there will be even more fake money coming into the system. In that situation you are not thinking about business or long term, you are gambling, as the entire economy is based on gambling and fake credit.
How about you don't go around banning anything and instead you deregulate the industry enough for people to start their own competing exchanges, which may have different rules, that would allow or not allow HFTs? The retail investors are pushed out of the stock market by HFTs.
But if you REALLY want to solve the actual ROOT problem rather than attacking the causes, how about banning government from printing and handing out money to banks, banning federal reserve from monetising Treasury debt? Banning the Fed from trying to manipulate the interest rates?
See, that's what would take care of the gambling problem, couple that with dismantling the FDIC and all of a sudden you have people who actually would be worried about their banks and financial institutions and start evaluating risks and rewards based on real market signals.
By the way, the fact that Singapore has 85% 'public housing' only means that Singapore sets price controls on housing, but that actually is a terrible thing to do, it means that there is a price floor on housing just as much as a price ceiling. Any company that bids on contracts with that gov't is getting much more money than it would in the free market of housing (which is about 15% of Singapore housing). A builder is like any other business, once you tell him how much he can actually make in a way that is guaranteed by gov't, you are now creating an artificial market for him where none existed. All he has to do is figure out how to lower his costs and his prices are set, so for him the way to increase profits is to ensure he keeps the monopoly intact and find more and more ways to reduce costs.
It's bad because while he reduces costs, that reduction is not forced by the competition to translate into reduction of house prices in the market, so what Singapore ends up with is a much more expensive housing market than it would be without that subsidy, that's how all gov't subsidies work, they waste money, which is the opposite of their stated goal.
Once all the menial jobs are replaced by robots, what do people that are only suited to menial jobs do? Not everyone can be a robot technician, and there will be fewer robot technicians than robots.
- economics 101, as the supply of something goes up, the market will clear at a different (lower) price point.
Understand? If there is a glut of supply of menial labour it means the prices should go do, and as they do, there will be buyers in the market for that labour at those lower prices.
Maybe you can hire some help if it costs you $4 an hour but not $12 an hour, so wait until the price of labour falls to $4 and buy it. This creates more opportunities for business that become economical at new price points, problem solved.
Context of the surrounding environment, that's wonderful, are you going to put context of the air that you are breathing into that and how much should you be taxed for breathing that air and what are those taxes supposed to go towards exactly?
Go ahead, calculate.
The person manning an excavator makes more money than a person digging with a shovel, so your point is valid and it is addressed by the market.
I am not depressed, I am simply facing reality.
- the 'reality' as you see it is quite depressing, you are denigrating people to living worthless lives of being subsidised, wards of the state, without ability to get above and beyond their own unfortunate circumstances.
People will from time to time need assistance. To deny that reality is insane.
- nobody says people don't sometimes need help, that's what private individuals are for, not government, not corruption of theft, not corruption of power.
To act as though business will not pollute, abuse workers and in general do anything to save a dollar this quarter is insane.
- that's a separate issue of private property ownership, ability to pollute is subsidised by the gov't, not reduced by it. Ability to pollute without facing consequences is the liability cap provided by gov't to companies, ability to do business on so called 'public land' is one of those types of subsidies.
I have no interest in depriving anyone of their will.
- you just want to deprive them of any meaning to their lives, of ability to be useful to the rest of the society and the economy.
Some public programs are always needed. Welcome to reality.
- no they are not, they happen, but they are not needed. It would be best if we could limit the gov't to only do what it can do best: provide protection against foreign invasion, everything else is none of its business. That we do have all these public programs is not a sign of need, it's sign of inevitable corruption.
Even if we limit ourselves to simply those who were injured or born mentally handicapped, someone will always be in need of public programs.
- no no no no no, no, no, there should be no gov't involvement in anything, including people born mentally handicapped, physically handicapped, etc.etc.
That's what private charity is for, that's all I have for you on this issue.
So long as there is 1 person in the situation we have to do something.
- yeah, it's our responsibility to ensure that everybody is treated exactly the same by the system of Laws, that all Laws apply equally to all people, that's what we owe everybody: a lawful society, nothing else.
There are a lot of people who will never get better jobs, who are not really capable of more. Surely, you yourself know of people like this.
- and if somebody is not capable of more, then it's unfortunate and he will be stuck in low paying jobs. If he is suffering, he can appeal to the private individuals, ask them for help. They'll be more inclined to help him if it's not imposed upon them by any force with a threat of imminent gov't violence. They will also be interested in seeing him being helped in a way that would in fact help him to unleash his real potential, I am not as pessimistic about people's abilities as you are.
85% of housing in Singapore is so called 'public housing', which in reality doesn't mean anything at all, it means that Singapore has a tax system that is used to build houses, 98.2% of all people who want to work in Singapore have jobs, they are paying the taxes and they are "subsidising" their own houses.
It is obviously a mistake for the country to take that route, nobody is perfect. But again, no minimum wage, almost no regulations on businesses, very low income taxes, mostly private health care (with a mandate to have a minimal insurance of about 1.5K a year, which most people supplement with their own private insurance).
However you are missing a very important point: Singapore does not borrow money to run their public programs, they HAVE the money, enough from the taxes they collect. They have no trade imbalance, they have trade surplus, they have current account surplus, their personal savings rate is one of the highest in the world, they are not stealing money from their own future generations either to run anything they do.
They are not printing money to do what they do, they allow the free market to work, tax enough of it to run some public programs (unfortunately, as I said, nobody is perfect), but they can afford it and then some.
That is absolutely not the way the rest of the world runs its finances and it's definitely not the way any socialist state runs its finances only by borrowing, printing, regulating and placing an undue burden on businesses.
If there were no welfare and you only made $10/day then we as a society have to deal with you living in our parks and on our streets. We have to deal with your inability to afford medical care or housing.
At some point we either subsidize you or let you die on the street.
- as if the universe is static and the person who finds his first job at $10 a day never an achieve growth, never grows his experience, his skill set, his confidence to search for a better job. Yes, that's how everything works.
Again, you are mistaken in your basic premise that workers who are not gaining higher wages are being more productive.
A company that fires its USA based employees and hires people in China is more productive, so the owners of the company, the investors are more productive and they do get the higher compensation for it as part of their stock value or dividends paid to them.
A worker that is let go from that company is not more productive just because the company he used to work at is more productive. Being fired means losing ALL productivity, the worker is completely unproductive. If he is eventually re-hired by somebody else to do something else, it does not mean he is now "sharing higher productivity" with his former boss. He is now as productive as he can be at his new place of work.
People who are actually productive are found in economies that are not bogged down by regulations, inflation and taxes, that's why Singapore workers, who don't even have minimum wage for example, have the highest per capita incomes in the world, lowest unemployment figures (about 1.8%, rate of turn over) and highest savings, lowest debt.
Those are productive people, not people living in an economy that is only growing government based on fake money that the Fed creates.
Also obviously you have no idea about all the regulations that actually exist today and how much they add to the cost of doing business in USA (which is why USA companies are so unproductive and increase their productivity by moving their operations abroad).
There are more regulations every year, not fewer, there was never any deregulations, the miserly deregulation was more than offset with thousands of new regulations that are added to the registry every year. Just in 2012 40,000 new laws came into effect. Saying that there was a period of deregulation completely dismisses the facts, the facts are: government never shrinks, it always grows and it grows much faster than the economy (and AFAIC USA economy has been in fact shrinking, not growing for about 15 years, so in reality the US gov't grows not only in absolute numbers, but as a percentage of the total economy at a very quick pace) and that's all we need to know about USA economy and so called 'deregulations'.
Patriot Act turned every financial type, every banker into an FBI agent, never mind an IRS agent as well. Deregulations.
You are getting the world where 1% are getting richer and 99% are getting poorer because of what you want, because of the ever growing government and destruction of capitalism.
Capitalism is the limiting factor to how much 'income inequality' can exist in a system, because capitalism in a free market creates competition, which eventually smoothes out any inefficiencies that arise periodically as some people find ways to grow their income very quickly, so there is an arbitrage opportunity for others to enter that market and offer the same product or service at lower prices to the customers, eventually the investor moves on to other business as the equilibrium is reached and compensation is not very high at all.
You think that you need government to solve problems where in fact government creates the problems that you are concerned about, you just don't understand that very principle.
There is no 'tragedy of commons', there is only the tragedy that 'commons' exists in the first place. Everything must be private, if something is not private, people shouldn't be able to do their bidding there, so no business should be able to profit from property that it's not paying for, renting or owning.
If you were getting $10 a day, you would still be relying on the government to feed,cloth and shelter you. While at the same time some employer would be benefitting from that government spending.
- no, my point is there shouldn't be any gov't subsidy. I would work for $10 a day if I didn't have a choice to rather be on welfare for example (which is obviously more profitable than working for $10 a day)
I don't see how feeding someone is a wasted life.
- wasted life is life of the person who is being subsidised. He is never his own person, he is never actually a person at all, he is nothing more than an animal, being fed, clothed and sheltered by the big people around him. He is never in a position to help anybody with his own productivity, his own productive output. His life has no purpose but to spend the calories allocated to him by the system and to perpetuate that system as part of the voting block that is bought with those calories.
We do not live to make money. We do not live to feed the market.
- we live to enjoy life, you are right, though I wouldn't be presumptuous enough to tell others why they live, I wouldn't force anybody to subsidise anybody else either.