I want to know about battery life and how long it will actually remain at that level. I am not getting anything anymore that I cannot be sure will have battery that will actually last for more than 2 days at a time. I've got Samsung Note in the fall, initially the battery life was OK, now it's down to 2 days on standby! It's crazy, you can put everything into this thing but if it will only last for 5 minutes then it's not good. What's the battery life like after just 6 month?
As I said in the previous story about CISPA, the relationship between you and your government is not what you were brought up to believe it is.
Aaron Swartz wasn't attacked because of that nonsense copyright infringement charge, he was attacked because he was very instrumental in the fight against SOPA.
Bradley Manning was not attacked just because of the leaks of some documents, governments leak selective documents all the time. He was attacked because he showed part of the true face, part of the true cost to the military invasion - the US government is involved in destroying individuals, freedoms of individuals around the world.
These people are political dissidents in USA, the system is set to destroy them because they attacked the system.
Tried Plasma on Mint 13, it's quite pretty. Much prettier than Gnome based desktop for sure. Hopefully it just ends up with incremental improvements rather than complete redesigns and moving from one paradigm to another.
You know, it's nice to be able to rely on a desktop environment improving but mostly staying the same, so you don't have to bother re-learning all about it over and over with every release.
I moved away from Ubuntu because of Gnome 3 and of-course Unity, using Mint with Mate for now (not just for myself, suggest it to the clients), hopefully after a while I can start suggesting Plasma for business. I have to experiment and figure out all the parts needed to lock the desktop environment into a particular scheme, so that it could be easily set up for that scheme and locked enough, so that the user couldn't actually modify it and change what he sees on the desktop himself.
Wonder if there is a way to have a single text config file that could be dropped into a system and be read by some configuration tool to turn the desktop into exactly the desktop that the config file was exported from. Maybe there is a way to do it? Yes, this can be done by installing from an image, but that's a different situation.
Ah, the rule of the troll. You think you win because your comment is toxic, it contains various logical fallacies and other elements of personal attack.
Well, I don't disagree, it's a powerful way to 'argue'.
I know, chronos is so great, it will launch your app even if the machine is down itself! It'll supply the power that comes stored in a special file to do it.
Capitalism works, and within free market settings where there is actual competition it works to increase everybody's wealth by providing choices.
In absence of free market (as is the case with the United States of Monopolies, as you said), then capitalism is reduced to only a few capital holders that are working closely with the government. The government prints the money, 'insures' deposits and provides other forms of moral hazard. In USA at this point only the largest companies are still in business, they have the power to lobby against the rules, taxes and regulations, they have the power to get government sponsored credit.
You are attacking capitalism implying that capitalism and free market are synonymous, they are not. Capitalism is private ownership and operation of means of production, ability to own and operate private property. Free market ensures that everybody is on an equal ground when it comes to relationship with the government, nobody is the preferred capitalist to anybody else.
What you have today is a government system that picks winners and losers, that sponsors some at the expense of others, that transfers private property in any way it wants from some to others. Under this system capitalism is very limited and skewed. Blaming capitalism, which is a system of wealth generation for the failure of the people to ensure that they provide the same rules for all to work with is disingenuous.
Whether you prefer China to Afghanistan basically boils down to whether you prefer political freedoms to economic prosperity.
- right, because Afghanistan has so many more freedoms than China? Economic prosperity of China is entirely dependent on many individual freedoms, without which prosperity is impossible.
Aaron Swartz, not only was he very vocal about SOPA, he was at the centre of the fight against it.
I called all my friends, and we stayed up all night setting up a website for this new group, Demand Progress, with an online petition opposing this noxious billâ¦. We [got] ⦠300,000 signersâ¦. We met with the staff of members of Congress and pleaded with themâ¦. And then it passed unanimously.â¦
He won that fight, but then it meant he got the government's attention. That's how it works, you are just part of the crowd until they see you as one of the leaders and then they hammer you until you can't go any longer. He lost all of his money in that legal battle, obviously the government can just throw everything to defeat you if you are the enemy. He could have ended up in prison, just like Bradley Manning, but he went a different route.
You and your government, the relationship is not what you were brought up to believe it is.
Yes, Solyndra would have totally failed if some Chinese committee member decided to subsidise it because Chinese already have plenty of alternative energy equipment manufacturers that do it much cheaper than Solyndra could (by more than an order of magnitude), that's why Solyndra never stood a chance.
What the hell is Gore's CO2 market?
Chinese mass produce every level of quality, you don't know what the heck you are talking about, I am providing retail chains in different parts of the world with supply chain management solutions among other things, and there are products that are exported out of China in different price categories and different quality categories for different markets. Everything, from very expensive perfume and cosmetics to machinery, luxury items of all types have production facilities in China (Burberry, Louis Vuitton, D&G, Prada, Armani, Bally, and more).
Unless you've been asleep at the wheel or you don't count Apple's products as high quality, then China makes that too.
I did not say that USA was NOT net energy importer, however USA is now selling refined products and this is what helped to reduce its monthly trade deficit a few months back.
However my point remains, USA energy consumption is lowest in at least a decade, you can find various data on this subject, like this here, and here
Also oil imports are very low, here is a 2013 story talking about lowest oil imports into USA in 25 year span.
My point is that USA is too poor to keep using more or even equal amount of fuel that it used to in the recent decade(s) and it's going to progress even faster from now and the fact that oil prices are going up has nothing to do with USA lack demand, it has everything to do with inflation, which eventually will allow foreign consumers to buy much more energy products than today as the inflation will hit USA home and USA MAY become a net energy exporter at least for a while.
The owners of the factories that are automated and running without people grow their productivity, that is true, but there are clearly not enough of those given the current trade and account deficits. The rest of the people who are not working, working part time, getting various subsidies are not productive, their productivity is very low given that there is so little investment capital applied to their work (for your productivity to grow you have to apply capital, you have to acquire/build tools that make you more productive by allowing you to do more with less effort).
Capital and labour are in competition with each other, as the cost of labour rises, it becomes more advantageous to apply capital to solve the problem of the rising cost (labour is a cost).
In China the labour costs are rising as the Chinese government creating all this inflation to absorb USA inflation, however if the inflation wasn't there, the Chinese labourers' rising productivity (given the extensive infusion of investment capital) is rising, so their purchasing power should be going up. Instead their purchasing power is transferred to the Americans and the rest, who are engaged in this vendor financed consumption binge.
There is very little manufacturing without the blue collar manufacturing jobs. All that is done somewhere else, so what is this 'manufacturing that is doing fine' exactly? Because USA is running a trade deficit of over half a trillion dollars a year for decades now. It means on a balance, US economy is producing half a trillion dollars less goods than it consumes. Now that number went down a bit because of raw energy exports, which was the point I made, but raw energy exports don't require all that many blue collar jobs either.
Chinese currency will float against US dollar and that will spell terrible short term (a few years) news for USA as it will be hit with all the inflation that it exported to China (and other places, that will go with China on the float) all at once.
This means US dollar won't buy all that much from China anymore, USA's saving grace IS the raw material, energy and food exports.
USA needs Chinese production, that's true, but China doesn't need USA markets, what does USA give China for its products? Paper. Paper and more paper. Paper that cannot be used to buy anything from USA, and whenever somebody even tries to buy assets inside the continental USA, Congress blocks the deals.
Chinese banks are not Chinese economy, by the way! Whether they fail or not is immaterial to the Chinese economy. While in USA and Europe banks are a gigantic portion of the economy, in China the real economy is productive - manufacturing, mining, agriculture, etc. To say that the banks will fail in China also means that banks will fail in USA and Europe FIRST, because at least China has USD and other currency reserves while America and most of Europe are running huge trade AND account deficits.
GDP is a meaningless number, it has nothing to do with productivity in USA anymore, it includes every bit of consumption and various gov't spending, military, whatever. You better take a look at the trade deficit numbers that USA has been running for over 2 decades now and true money supply.
BTW., whatever the inflation offset that the government numbers use is also completely meaningless, it's reverse engineered to fit the necessary propaganda to try and keep the interest rates low. Of-course the Fed has been buying all new and outstanding Treasury debt for too long now, it's also buying mortgages in USA straight out now (and it shifted the burden of 'insuring' bad mortgages from the bankrupt FHA to F&F at this point, with even more lax lending standards), so for example last month numbers showed that the Americans are spending 3/4 of 1% more on consumption. The silly 'market analysts' are saying this is good news supposedly, because of 'confidence. In reality this is consistent with the 3/4 of 1% increase in inflation in the last month.
Americans are given this line of free credit by the Fed to refinance their mortgages to the tune of 80Billion USD / month (and this number will be rising), and this is used to simply spend more on the goods as their prices are rising, but this puts Americans into more debt while the inflation is supposedly non-existing, however the people are buying less stuff at higher prices.
GDP is meaningless, in war times for example it includes all the bombs and tanks that nobody in their right mind would buy in the free market economy, so the prices are completely artificial, as the gov't basically nationalises the factories to build tanks and there is nothing else happening, as the real goods are rationed. However GDP goes up! So what does that mean? It means that Keynesians point at the war time spending and say: see? That's good economy! Let's do more!
So why not run constant wars and just produce tanks and live on an extremely rationed supply of goods and call that 'economic growth'?
USA is exporting energy sources now, so it's exporting oil (refined, gasoline even), coal. While overall production of energy resources in USA is up and the demand is probably lowest in at least a decade because of the dying economy, the prices are also up and while this may seem as a paradox, it's not. It's inflation. Here is what is going to happen if China lets its currency float: renminbi will rise in USD terms and for the Chinese producers and consumers the prices for raw materials, energy and food will drop in their currency and in dollar terms they will rise. So for Americans (and Europeans) it will be increasingly more expensive to buy energy and food and but these resources will be cheaper and cheaper for the Chinese to acquire in the global market.
By the way that's the reason that I was always saying that the Japanese should not devalue their currency, but especially after the tsunami hit and their nuclear power plants were shut down - this only hurts the Japanese as they have to pay higher prices for energy and materials in real terms.
But don't become too excited about the USA having 'shifted its pollution elsewhere', here is the eventuality that is not understood in this by the majority: there is no difference between a pre-industrial economy and a post-industrial one. This concerns everything, from education levels to types of energy used. USA will be exporting high value energy sources and will be using much more polluting energy sources eventually if it doesn't turn around and let the markets work rather than thinking that the government will fix the economic problems that the government has created with all the taxes, regulations, money printing.
Basically this is a temporary effect that the pollution has gone somewhere else, because the production has gone there as well. But as the production goes, so does energy use but also so does value of the money (especially if you keep printing it).
The pollution will return in huge volumes to USA as it will have to re-industrialise, but now it will have to start from nothing again, there is no manufacturing. So there are no modern efficient factories, so much cheaper, less efficient means will be used for everything, from manufacturing to heating your houses and food.
The pollution will come back once the inflation comes out and kills the bonds and the dollar. For now the Americans should be happy that the current European problems are on the front pages of all the news stories. Those problems are immediate, but they are nowhere as big as the American story.
Obviously you are the one who can't see the obvious: all government programs have failed, all government programs are part of 1 government. The biggest programs failed on their own, like SS, Medicare, Medicaid, education, energy, food, FDA, EPA, FDIC and Fed (the moral hazard that caused the inevitable 'too big to fail problem), HUD and FHA and F&F.
Those are the programs that drove the entire economy into the gutter. Clearly government has millions of tiny things it does and pointing out something completely irrelevant does not negate my main point - the government has failed in totality as all of its biggest money draining programs have failed.
Even TCP/IP would have been completely IRRELEVANT and thus a part of this bigger failure (and USA military is also a failed program, because it cannot be paid for without foreign money! way to run your military)
The only single saving grace for TCP/IP was that it was picked up by the free market and used as a protocol, which again, was never worth a failed economy in the first place. The free market invented enough protocols without failing the economy.
So while you can say anything about me, the idiot here is the one who doesn't see the forest for the trees, that would be you.
Well, you think the Neanderthals have such discriminating exquisite taste that they would be able to tell the difference between cookies baked with Girl Scouts rather than with, let's say US Congressmen?
I hope the Neanderthals go for the Congressmen first and leave the Girl Scouts for dessert.
All government programs have failed. They have all failed as the total sum of what the government caused has failed. The US government has failed in totality. The country is bankrupt.
Now, yes, there are some things that government did that the free market picked up and used for some useful purpose. Why shouldn't that happen? The money is already spent, it's out there.
Was it worth the money? No. Just like the money should not have been spent on the moon landing program, it should not have been spent on any of these: SS, Medicare, Medicaid, dep't of energy, dep't of education, dep't of agriculture, dep't of interior, commerce, HUD, FHA, FDA, EPA, FBI, obviously FDIC, Fed, IRS, etc.
The country has failed because it went the wrong way, it gave the government the ability to completely go outside of its boundaries, of its limitations to the authorisation imposed by the Constitution.
The government has failed and you can't now say: oh, but that program resulted in something that became useful to somebody for a different purpose (obviously DARPA was just another MILITARY program).
One thing that USA Federal government DOES have authorisation to do is to provide security against foreign invasion, and so some level of military spending is what the government is supposed to do Constitutionally, so DARPA falls under that, under what the government should be doing in the first place. Basically the only thing that the Congress is authorised to raise taxes for.
Yes, China, the most terrible place. The place that pulled 350,000,000 people out of abject poverty in under 30 years by applying something that was very widely used to build the USA at some point... what was that thing.... oh yeah, a relatively free market given the size of Chinese government.
Will Chinese economic success continue? Let's see, they are producing all the things that everybody in the world wants and they can stop subsidising the world with these products by consuming the output of the productive labour themselves. Clearly they are fucked!
No. But perhaps if they had stuck around the large eyes would help the Slashdot editors spot their dupes.
, yes but you are implying that the Neanderthals would do a better job than/. editors (not a hard thing to do obviously), but that means that the Neanderthals would outcompete the/. editors and then would there be a/. in the future, implying that smaller eyes of/. editors caused their demise and the victory for the Neanderthals? Unless of-course the Neanderthals are already running/. and are trying to hide in the open, by pretending not to see the dupes so that we would not think they have big eyes. But then they are only succeeding in turning the attention to their small eyes, so that we would ask these questions and suggest replacing the/. editors with the Neanderthals, but maybe that is what the Neanderthals that are/. editors want you to do.
Maybe the Neanderthals already own Dice and/. and their next move is to get into your government and to reduce human population with a breading program... This raises the question: what is Peter Joseph hiding under that beard and the glasses?
I think ad-hominem is beyond the scope of the study here, so while using derogatory language is covered in the topic and may in some cases 'win' the thread I suppose, ad-hominem is not derogatory language in abstract, it's a logical fallacy that loses arguments.
No it doesn't. We have tons of examples. Only when ordinary people unite and claw back some of their earning back, we sometimes have something that approaches a decent society.
- 2 wrongs.
1. By decent society you mean society that gives the power to the majority to enslave a minority. That's not decent at all.
2. We do have tons of examples where destruction of freedoms leads to fewer and fewer people in that minority that actually produce, because the majority punishes them by turning them into slaves. Over time you punish people enough, there are very few people left who produce anything, and it looks like at some point it becomes impossible to produce unless you are also part of the government. So by punishing successful people by stealing from them to create what you call 'decent' (and I call the thieving murderous mob), you end up with the toughest cases of the productive people left, who at this point are fighting for survival on the same terms, you can even create murderous thieving productive people, you can weed out the majority of productive people from society and be left only with a ridiculously tiny minority that are both, connected to the government and will not at anything to survive and given that they have productive capacity that the rest don't, that's quite a dangerous combination. Of-course on the bottom of the earning potential ladder you now have a giant number of very dissatisfied crowds, and at some point this leads to war.
As to tsarist Russia, I argue that a system under any king or tsar is FREER than any type of socialism or fascism, that's because a tsar is a singular entity and all the anger of the productive crowd can be aimed at him personally.
That's why tsars and kings never stole more than 10% of income from people, but under a democratic system, the system itself is not a singular person that can be punished. It's a faceless system of raw power exercised against an individual person. Under such system it is possible to steal EVERYTHING from people and the people still don't know who to turn their anger to, who to kill basically to stop this oppression and injustice.
Under that scenario the country has to fall apart, go through restructuring of the entire government system to get rid of the thieving murdering socialist or fascist thugs that run the place, and this takes power away from government and gives it back to the people.
No, the kings and tsars are not the paragons of freedom obviously, they can steal, kill, torture, but they can't do this to all the productive people in the population. Actually tsars had federal power while various feudals had regional and local power. So a feudal would even have his own slaves basically, and the king wouldn't exercise his own power over the slaves of the feudals. "Vassal of my vassal is not my vassal", so to speak.
A feudal owned the land and the people on it unless they could buy freedom from him, but again, this was a self-correcting system which never produced the bloody outcomes of socialism or fascism, it was not a completely centrally governed society. A feudal that treated his slaves with too much contempt could be taken down and killed and that happened. Of-course the people doing it better be prepared to fight off other neighbouring feudals, who would see that as a threat to themselves. OTOH it was possible to remove the injust government locally by killing them and the feudals knew it.
Again, they could not impose the same type of regulations and taxes on their own people that the people supposedly 'accept' under a socialist or a fascist system!
Socialism and fascism murdered tens to hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century and it's not over yet. It will continue in this century, as the socialists are losing grounds to their own desire for a subsidy, and in this global world they are not going to be able to enslave the productive people that easily anymore and so they will be left WITHOUT MEANS TO EAT basically, because they
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I want to know about battery life and how long it will actually remain at that level. I am not getting anything anymore that I cannot be sure will have battery that will actually last for more than 2 days at a time. I've got Samsung Note in the fall, initially the battery life was OK, now it's down to 2 days on standby! It's crazy, you can put everything into this thing but if it will only last for 5 minutes then it's not good. What's the battery life like after just 6 month?
As I said in the previous story about CISPA, the relationship between you and your government is not what you were brought up to believe it is.
Aaron Swartz wasn't attacked because of that nonsense copyright infringement charge, he was attacked because he was very instrumental in the fight against SOPA.
Bradley Manning was not attacked just because of the leaks of some documents, governments leak selective documents all the time. He was attacked because he showed part of the true face, part of the true cost to the military invasion - the US government is involved in destroying individuals, freedoms of individuals around the world.
These people are political dissidents in USA, the system is set to destroy them because they attacked the system.
Tried Plasma on Mint 13, it's quite pretty. Much prettier than Gnome based desktop for sure. Hopefully it just ends up with incremental improvements rather than complete redesigns and moving from one paradigm to another.
You know, it's nice to be able to rely on a desktop environment improving but mostly staying the same, so you don't have to bother re-learning all about it over and over with every release.
I moved away from Ubuntu because of Gnome 3 and of-course Unity, using Mint with Mate for now (not just for myself, suggest it to the clients), hopefully after a while I can start suggesting Plasma for business. I have to experiment and figure out all the parts needed to lock the desktop environment into a particular scheme, so that it could be easily set up for that scheme and locked enough, so that the user couldn't actually modify it and change what he sees on the desktop himself.
Wonder if there is a way to have a single text config file that could be dropped into a system and be read by some configuration tool to turn the desktop into exactly the desktop that the config file was exported from. Maybe there is a way to do it? Yes, this can be done by installing from an image, but that's a different situation.
Ah, the rule of the troll. You think you win because your comment is toxic, it contains various logical fallacies and other elements of personal attack.
Well, I don't disagree, it's a powerful way to 'argue'.
One of the 2 starts got a bit too greedy and bit more than it could chew. It's the ironic Universal response to this type of behaviour.
I know, chronos is so great, it will launch your app even if the machine is down itself! It'll supply the power that comes stored in a special file to do it.
Capitalism works, and within free market settings where there is actual competition it works to increase everybody's wealth by providing choices.
In absence of free market (as is the case with the United States of Monopolies, as you said), then capitalism is reduced to only a few capital holders that are working closely with the government. The government prints the money, 'insures' deposits and provides other forms of moral hazard. In USA at this point only the largest companies are still in business, they have the power to lobby against the rules, taxes and regulations, they have the power to get government sponsored credit.
You are attacking capitalism implying that capitalism and free market are synonymous, they are not. Capitalism is private ownership and operation of means of production, ability to own and operate private property. Free market ensures that everybody is on an equal ground when it comes to relationship with the government, nobody is the preferred capitalist to anybody else.
What you have today is a government system that picks winners and losers, that sponsors some at the expense of others, that transfers private property in any way it wants from some to others. Under this system capitalism is very limited and skewed. Blaming capitalism, which is a system of wealth generation for the failure of the people to ensure that they provide the same rules for all to work with is disingenuous.
Whether you prefer China to Afghanistan basically boils down to whether you prefer political freedoms to economic prosperity.
- right, because Afghanistan has so many more freedoms than China? Economic prosperity of China is entirely dependent on many individual freedoms, without which prosperity is impossible.
Aaron Swartz, not only was he very vocal about SOPA, he was at the centre of the fight against it.
I called all my friends, and we stayed up all night setting up a website for this new group, Demand Progress, with an online petition opposing this noxious billâ¦. We [got] ⦠300,000 signersâ¦. We met with the staff of members of Congress and pleaded with themâ¦. And then it passed unanimously.â¦
He won that fight, but then it meant he got the government's attention. That's how it works, you are just part of the crowd until they see you as one of the leaders and then they hammer you until you can't go any longer. He lost all of his money in that legal battle, obviously the government can just throw everything to defeat you if you are the enemy. He could have ended up in prison, just like Bradley Manning, but he went a different route.
You and your government, the relationship is not what you were brought up to believe it is.
Yes, Solyndra would have totally failed if some Chinese committee member decided to subsidise it because Chinese already have plenty of alternative energy equipment manufacturers that do it much cheaper than Solyndra could (by more than an order of magnitude), that's why Solyndra never stood a chance.
What the hell is Gore's CO2 market?
Chinese mass produce every level of quality, you don't know what the heck you are talking about, I am providing retail chains in different parts of the world with supply chain management solutions among other things, and there are products that are exported out of China in different price categories and different quality categories for different markets. Everything, from very expensive perfume and cosmetics to machinery, luxury items of all types have production facilities in China (Burberry, Louis Vuitton, D&G, Prada, Armani, Bally, and more).
Unless you've been asleep at the wheel or you don't count Apple's products as high quality, then China makes that too.
I did not say that USA was NOT net energy importer, however USA is now selling refined products and this is what helped to reduce its monthly trade deficit a few months back.
Bloomberg: Oil Exports Trim U.S. Deficit as Fuel Gap Shrinks: Economy
Energy exports boosting US trade position
However my point remains, USA energy consumption is lowest in at least a decade, you can find various data on this subject, like this here, and here
Also oil imports are very low, here is a 2013 story talking about lowest oil imports into USA in 25 year span.
My point is that USA is too poor to keep using more or even equal amount of fuel that it used to in the recent decade(s) and it's going to progress even faster from now and the fact that oil prices are going up has nothing to do with USA lack demand, it has everything to do with inflation, which eventually will allow foreign consumers to buy much more energy products than today as the inflation will hit USA home and USA MAY become a net energy exporter at least for a while.
The owners of the factories that are automated and running without people grow their productivity, that is true, but there are clearly not enough of those given the current trade and account deficits. The rest of the people who are not working, working part time, getting various subsidies are not productive, their productivity is very low given that there is so little investment capital applied to their work (for your productivity to grow you have to apply capital, you have to acquire/build tools that make you more productive by allowing you to do more with less effort).
Capital and labour are in competition with each other, as the cost of labour rises, it becomes more advantageous to apply capital to solve the problem of the rising cost (labour is a cost).
In China the labour costs are rising as the Chinese government creating all this inflation to absorb USA inflation, however if the inflation wasn't there, the Chinese labourers' rising productivity (given the extensive infusion of investment capital) is rising, so their purchasing power should be going up. Instead their purchasing power is transferred to the Americans and the rest, who are engaged in this vendor financed consumption binge.
Far too many powerful people in positions to enforce 'I never lose money'.
- and where is mentality of people in power different exactly?
Clearly they do manufacture a _lot_ of very low quality stuff.
- wrong. They manufacture every level of quality, you are buying what you can best afford, so you should think about that.
There is very little manufacturing without the blue collar manufacturing jobs. All that is done somewhere else, so what is this 'manufacturing that is doing fine' exactly? Because USA is running a trade deficit of over half a trillion dollars a year for decades now. It means on a balance, US economy is producing half a trillion dollars less goods than it consumes. Now that number went down a bit because of raw energy exports, which was the point I made, but raw energy exports don't require all that many blue collar jobs either.
Chinese currency will float against US dollar and that will spell terrible short term (a few years) news for USA as it will be hit with all the inflation that it exported to China (and other places, that will go with China on the float) all at once.
This means US dollar won't buy all that much from China anymore, USA's saving grace IS the raw material, energy and food exports.
USA needs Chinese production, that's true, but China doesn't need USA markets, what does USA give China for its products? Paper. Paper and more paper. Paper that cannot be used to buy anything from USA, and whenever somebody even tries to buy assets inside the continental USA, Congress blocks the deals.
Chinese banks are not Chinese economy, by the way! Whether they fail or not is immaterial to the Chinese economy. While in USA and Europe banks are a gigantic portion of the economy, in China the real economy is productive - manufacturing, mining, agriculture, etc. To say that the banks will fail in China also means that banks will fail in USA and Europe FIRST, because at least China has USD and other currency reserves while America and most of Europe are running huge trade AND account deficits.
GDP is a meaningless number, it has nothing to do with productivity in USA anymore, it includes every bit of consumption and various gov't spending, military, whatever. You better take a look at the trade deficit numbers that USA has been running for over 2 decades now and true money supply.
BTW., whatever the inflation offset that the government numbers use is also completely meaningless, it's reverse engineered to fit the necessary propaganda to try and keep the interest rates low. Of-course the Fed has been buying all new and outstanding Treasury debt for too long now, it's also buying mortgages in USA straight out now (and it shifted the burden of 'insuring' bad mortgages from the bankrupt FHA to F&F at this point, with even more lax lending standards), so for example last month numbers showed that the Americans are spending 3/4 of 1% more on consumption. The silly 'market analysts' are saying this is good news supposedly, because of 'confidence. In reality this is consistent with the 3/4 of 1% increase in inflation in the last month.
Americans are given this line of free credit by the Fed to refinance their mortgages to the tune of 80Billion USD / month (and this number will be rising), and this is used to simply spend more on the goods as their prices are rising, but this puts Americans into more debt while the inflation is supposedly non-existing, however the people are buying less stuff at higher prices.
GDP is meaningless, in war times for example it includes all the bombs and tanks that nobody in their right mind would buy in the free market economy, so the prices are completely artificial, as the gov't basically nationalises the factories to build tanks and there is nothing else happening, as the real goods are rationed. However GDP goes up! So what does that mean? It means that Keynesians point at the war time spending and say: see? That's good economy! Let's do more!
So why not run constant wars and just produce tanks and live on an extremely rationed supply of goods and call that 'economic growth'?
USA is exporting energy sources now, so it's exporting oil (refined, gasoline even), coal. While overall production of energy resources in USA is up and the demand is probably lowest in at least a decade because of the dying economy, the prices are also up and while this may seem as a paradox, it's not. It's inflation. Here is what is going to happen if China lets its currency float: renminbi will rise in USD terms and for the Chinese producers and consumers the prices for raw materials, energy and food will drop in their currency and in dollar terms they will rise. So for Americans (and Europeans) it will be increasingly more expensive to buy energy and food and but these resources will be cheaper and cheaper for the Chinese to acquire in the global market.
By the way that's the reason that I was always saying that the Japanese should not devalue their currency, but especially after the tsunami hit and their nuclear power plants were shut down - this only hurts the Japanese as they have to pay higher prices for energy and materials in real terms.
But don't become too excited about the USA having 'shifted its pollution elsewhere', here is the eventuality that is not understood in this by the majority: there is no difference between a pre-industrial economy and a post-industrial one. This concerns everything, from education levels to types of energy used. USA will be exporting high value energy sources and will be using much more polluting energy sources eventually if it doesn't turn around and let the markets work rather than thinking that the government will fix the economic problems that the government has created with all the taxes, regulations, money printing.
Basically this is a temporary effect that the pollution has gone somewhere else, because the production has gone there as well. But as the production goes, so does energy use but also so does value of the money (especially if you keep printing it).
The pollution will return in huge volumes to USA as it will have to re-industrialise, but now it will have to start from nothing again, there is no manufacturing. So there are no modern efficient factories, so much cheaper, less efficient means will be used for everything, from manufacturing to heating your houses and food.
The pollution will come back once the inflation comes out and kills the bonds and the dollar. For now the Americans should be happy that the current European problems are on the front pages of all the news stories. Those problems are immediate, but they are nowhere as big as the American story.
Obviously you are the one who can't see the obvious: all government programs have failed, all government programs are part of 1 government. The biggest programs failed on their own, like SS, Medicare, Medicaid, education, energy, food, FDA, EPA, FDIC and Fed (the moral hazard that caused the inevitable 'too big to fail problem), HUD and FHA and F&F.
Those are the programs that drove the entire economy into the gutter. Clearly government has millions of tiny things it does and pointing out something completely irrelevant does not negate my main point - the government has failed in totality as all of its biggest money draining programs have failed.
Even TCP/IP would have been completely IRRELEVANT and thus a part of this bigger failure (and USA military is also a failed program, because it cannot be paid for without foreign money! way to run your military)
The only single saving grace for TCP/IP was that it was picked up by the free market and used as a protocol, which again, was never worth a failed economy in the first place. The free market invented enough protocols without failing the economy.
So while you can say anything about me, the idiot here is the one who doesn't see the forest for the trees, that would be you.
Well, you think the Neanderthals have such discriminating exquisite taste that they would be able to tell the difference between cookies baked with Girl Scouts rather than with, let's say US Congressmen?
I hope the Neanderthals go for the Congressmen first and leave the Girl Scouts for dessert.
All government programs have failed. They have all failed as the total sum of what the government caused has failed. The US government has failed in totality. The country is bankrupt.
Now, yes, there are some things that government did that the free market picked up and used for some useful purpose. Why shouldn't that happen? The money is already spent, it's out there.
Was it worth the money? No. Just like the money should not have been spent on the moon landing program, it should not have been spent on any of these: SS, Medicare, Medicaid, dep't of energy, dep't of education, dep't of agriculture, dep't of interior, commerce, HUD, FHA, FDA, EPA, FBI, obviously FDIC, Fed, IRS, etc.
The country has failed because it went the wrong way, it gave the government the ability to completely go outside of its boundaries, of its limitations to the authorisation imposed by the Constitution.
The government has failed and you can't now say: oh, but that program resulted in something that became useful to somebody for a different purpose (obviously DARPA was just another MILITARY program).
One thing that USA Federal government DOES have authorisation to do is to provide security against foreign invasion, and so some level of military spending is what the government is supposed to do Constitutionally, so DARPA falls under that, under what the government should be doing in the first place. Basically the only thing that the Congress is authorised to raise taxes for.
Yes, China, the most terrible place. The place that pulled 350,000,000 people out of abject poverty in under 30 years by applying something that was very widely used to build the USA at some point... what was that thing.... oh yeah, a relatively free market given the size of Chinese government.
Will Chinese economic success continue? Let's see, they are producing all the things that everybody in the world wants and they can stop subsidising the world with these products by consuming the output of the productive labour themselves. Clearly they are fucked!
obviously that's "breeding" program not "breading" program, unless the Neanderthals want to bake bread and cookies out of humans.
No. But perhaps if they had stuck around the large eyes would help the Slashdot editors spot their dupes.
, yes but you are implying that the Neanderthals would do a better job than /. editors (not a hard thing to do obviously), but that means that the Neanderthals would outcompete the /. editors and then would there be a /. in the future, implying that smaller eyes of /. editors caused their demise and the victory for the Neanderthals? Unless of-course the Neanderthals are already running /. and are trying to hide in the open, by pretending not to see the dupes so that we would not think they have big eyes. But then they are only succeeding in turning the attention to their small eyes, so that we would ask these questions and suggest replacing the /. editors with the Neanderthals, but maybe that is what the Neanderthals that are /. editors want you to do.
Maybe the Neanderthals already own Dice and /. and their next move is to get into your government and to reduce human population with a breading program... This raises the question: what is Peter Joseph hiding under that beard and the glasses?
I think ad-hominem is beyond the scope of the study here, so while using derogatory language is covered in the topic and may in some cases 'win' the thread I suppose, ad-hominem is not derogatory language in abstract, it's a logical fallacy that loses arguments.
No it doesn't. We have tons of examples. Only when ordinary people unite and claw back some of their earning back, we sometimes have something that approaches a decent society.
- 2 wrongs.
1. By decent society you mean society that gives the power to the majority to enslave a minority. That's not decent at all.
2. We do have tons of examples where destruction of freedoms leads to fewer and fewer people in that minority that actually produce, because the majority punishes them by turning them into slaves. Over time you punish people enough, there are very few people left who produce anything, and it looks like at some point it becomes impossible to produce unless you are also part of the government. So by punishing successful people by stealing from them to create what you call 'decent' (and I call the thieving murderous mob), you end up with the toughest cases of the productive people left, who at this point are fighting for survival on the same terms, you can even create murderous thieving productive people, you can weed out the majority of productive people from society and be left only with a ridiculously tiny minority that are both, connected to the government and will not at anything to survive and given that they have productive capacity that the rest don't, that's quite a dangerous combination. Of-course on the bottom of the earning potential ladder you now have a giant number of very dissatisfied crowds, and at some point this leads to war.
As to tsarist Russia, I argue that a system under any king or tsar is FREER than any type of socialism or fascism, that's because a tsar is a singular entity and all the anger of the productive crowd can be aimed at him personally.
That's why tsars and kings never stole more than 10% of income from people, but under a democratic system, the system itself is not a singular person that can be punished. It's a faceless system of raw power exercised against an individual person. Under such system it is possible to steal EVERYTHING from people and the people still don't know who to turn their anger to, who to kill basically to stop this oppression and injustice.
Under that scenario the country has to fall apart, go through restructuring of the entire government system to get rid of the thieving murdering socialist or fascist thugs that run the place, and this takes power away from government and gives it back to the people.
No, the kings and tsars are not the paragons of freedom obviously, they can steal, kill, torture, but they can't do this to all the productive people in the population. Actually tsars had federal power while various feudals had regional and local power. So a feudal would even have his own slaves basically, and the king wouldn't exercise his own power over the slaves of the feudals. "Vassal of my vassal is not my vassal", so to speak.
A feudal owned the land and the people on it unless they could buy freedom from him, but again, this was a self-correcting system which never produced the bloody outcomes of socialism or fascism, it was not a completely centrally governed society. A feudal that treated his slaves with too much contempt could be taken down and killed and that happened. Of-course the people doing it better be prepared to fight off other neighbouring feudals, who would see that as a threat to themselves. OTOH it was possible to remove the injust government locally by killing them and the feudals knew it.
Again, they could not impose the same type of regulations and taxes on their own people that the people supposedly 'accept' under a socialist or a fascist system!
Socialism and fascism murdered tens to hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century and it's not over yet. It will continue in this century, as the socialists are losing grounds to their own desire for a subsidy, and in this global world they are not going to be able to enslave the productive people that easily anymore and so they will be left WITHOUT MEANS TO EAT basically, because they
what didn't give us civilization
- herpes?
By the way if beer gives us civilisation, vodka takes it away.