I wrote a number of viruses, they never were released. Writing viruses is trivial, it's hard to write viruses that do something that gains some sort of profit for the author, but in this case the profit is very clear and it is lucrative, so don't be surprised over the insinuations here.
I do believe that at least in some cases this is true - antivirus companies do promote virus authors one way or another, but it's my personal belief, don't worry about it.
The tax payers will pay little? Why are they supposed to pay anything to save a company, that's first and that is the main point.
The other point is that the gov't owns GM, the original stock holders got wiped out, the gov't had an IPO to allow the top management of GM to unload their stock (and whoever bought GM stock at those 36-37 dollars is now in the red).
GM WILL go bankrupt again in maybe only 1-2 years, but the gov't will be going bankrupt soon itself, this is clear from the QE2, which is the lending by the Fed to the gov't because nobody else is buying US bonds and long term interest rates are rising.
This entire GM thing is a pyramid, don't be the fool stuck with the hot potato. (and this is true for both, the GM stock and US dollars - bonds.)
I have an uneasy feeling about Kaspersky in all sorts of situations, including this one. Just saying that the 3 ways to gain from this activity is either to be building the virus or to be building and selling the antivirus.
The third possibility is left to the imagination and that's the one that makes me uneasy.
Russia produces nothing and only exports raw materials, oil, gas, wood, aluminum, steel, it's a non-productive country.
I don't trust the Chinese gov't, when they say: we want to stop paying rebates on the taxes, on the goods that are going abroad in order to reign in over-production - I don't trust them. I think they want to reduce currency supply before unpegging their currency from the USD.
In any case, there is no such PROBLEM as over-production. It's not a problem if somebody is producing a lot of stuff, not a problem at all.
The moment an actor as large as China doesn't play ball... all the theories underlying free trade economics are just so much trash.
- not true. The underlying theories are sound and remain sound no matter what China does.
The reaction that will follow will display that the underlying economic principles are sound: somebody else will start producing and exporting whatever China will stop exporting. The market has signaled the producers in China information over the feed-back loop that the world is willing to consume all those products - that's free market working. Chinese gov't will cause trouble by not giving back the taxes they take - this simply will cause less exports, but doesn't negate the principles of economics.
Somebody else will supply the missing difference that China will stop supplying - market principles in action.
I justify the US money printing because it's a domestic affair.
First: it's international affair because US dollar is reserve currency. Second: you are justifying it because you gain from the justification, you are willing to justify what US does regardless of the fact that US currency is reserve. Third: you are saying US dollar printing is justified, even though it's reserve currency and not backed up by any production, but Chinese printing some money while their production is growing is manipulation. This is hypocrisy.
Yes, Chinese and everybody else should stop devaluing their currency. I think that's what the Chinese are trying to do - stop devaluing their currency and with the stop of the tax rebates, they are reducing the currency supply (who says that's not so? Gov't doesn't send back checks, looks like currency REDUCTION not printing! Yet you are arguing that they are printing currency AND that they are having higher taxes on exports all at the same time.)
Looks to me they are tightening a bit.
US manipulates the reserve currency of the world
China manipulates their own currency, nobody except China has their currency, so they are clearly not manipulating currency of other nations.
They are manipulating their own money and their reasons are foolish, but US is trying to manipulate the money of the entire world.
Export tariffs to avoid capital flight are pure pragmatism, not communism. As I said, China does it too
- you don't find it ironic at all that you are saying that it's not communism and then you are comparing this to the communist China? If you wanted to prove this wasn't communism then you should have chosen a different example. Countries that do this are having serious economic problems (no production of anything except raw materials, Russia for example) or communist countries, like China, that do this by design, because that's how they feed the gov't system.
Free trade is exactly what countries who are rebuilding their economy need, as long as they follow the free market principles as well of-course. China, for example, gains much from free trade. US is losing to free trade because US is uncompetitive.
Why would any raw materials be used in the US to rebuild it's industry instead of putting them to work in China? China could always pay a better price because it could get more productivity out of it.
- it would, if you get rid of the gov't regulations and gov't spending, because: A. It would return the capital (credit) to the private sector, B. The reduced gov't spending would make US more competitive, because income and payroll taxes would have to disappear C. Without wage controls and regulations, the US labor would become competitive to Chinese.
If I took your point of view of American industry then the US fundamentally can't rebuild it's industry in a free international trade world until China stops expanding or the US has a cost of labour advantage sufficient to offset it's lack of industry
- as I said, get rid of gov't spending, regulations and taxes and US becomes competitive. It has plenty of unused labor and resourced that could be used, and the world is big enough for both, China and US.
In a world with scarce resources any country who is looking to expand it's industrial base should never rely on free international trade
- that's not true at all.
Explain why does China need to have export taxes at all except to feed the expensive government system, which is only an impediment to the industrial development? It makes no sense.
if China stopped propping up the dollar and devaluing the Yuan. China's central bank doesn't have to buy the dollars flowing into China, it could simply change the peg sufficiently that companies chose to spend dollars instead.
- again, we disagree here fundamentally. I see that it is USA who manipulates currency by printing it, and China does not inflate the currency without backing it up with production increases *the way it should be.
How do you justify the US printing dollars but you are blaming China for printing dollars, while China is increasing production? In fact if China's production output is increasing faster than they are printing their currency, their prices should deflate! And that is what I am saying, I am SEEING that the prices on wholesale from China are becoming lower year to year. This means that they increasing production.
Now, they may be also printing their currency, but if their production is going up faster than that, then they are not even creating real inflation.
US on the other hand is only printing, but its production is falling all the time, so that's real inflation and real manipulation of currency, and when you are the owner of reserve currency, that's the worst type of manipulation, because you are forcing the rest of the world to bear the consequences of your inflation, thus everybody knows, USA's main export is inflation.
No, he violated the state secrets of states he is not citizen of, so they couldn't get him on anything, so they decided to get him on his 'leaked DNA'. *brrrr sorry
I just came to Russia, from Germany, didn't have a moment to see the reply.
Who are these mysterious people that are buying US bonds? Pension funds? Well, those are always at the end of the curve, buying at the high, selling at the low.
China increased the foreign reserves because it's selling crap to all these foreigners, that's not a surprise or a manipulation of any sort. However they are buying large portions of foreign companies that are resource exporters, they are investing into raw materials, into land (especially in Africa), they are THINKING about the future, unlike many others.
OBVIOUSLY US will implement export tariffs and it will implement windfall taxes on any companies that make money aimed at foreign customers and it just may end up doing the same thing it did before, stealing the gold of US citizens. Sure, they can do all of that. However imagine the life inside the US when this goes down - basically, it's immense nationalization of resources and the people become dole receivers as there are no jobs, everybody is hired by the government to do massive gov't projects, there are no freedoms, as people with no choice in how they do business have no freedoms. It's communism all of a sudden and as always, it's dictatorial communism. I hope you like that kind of life, my parents and grand parents and great grand parents have something to say about this, it's not pretty. In USSR in 1930s my mom's side great grandparents lost their land, out of 18 kids, 15 were killed or died from hunger as the communist regime took away the food from the Ukrainian farmers to sell it to the foreign countries and to industrialize by buying foreign machines, tools and factories, the people themselves were sent to far Siberian lands, most of the people died on the way.
This can and will happen again, the rulers who are there to 'feed you', will also kill you. You think that's not possible in USA? I believe history will repeat itself, maybe not in exact details, but I expect striking similarities.
As to US not allowing capital flight, well sure, US will implement windfall taxes, will nationalize resources and will close the borders to prevent emigration (not immigration at that point).
But that is going to be too late, so much capital has left the country already by NOW that your assertion that US will not allow capital flight is laughable. Where all the productive factories? Look up the list of Intel's factory locations, it's on the web, you can find it.
Oracle Corp. won a $1.3 billion jury verdict against rival SAP AG, the world’s largest maker of business application software, for copyright infringement by a now-defunct software maintenance unit.
The jury yesterday awarded the damages after an 11-day trial in federal court in Oakland, California. Oracle sued SAP in 2007 claiming its U.S.-based unit made hundreds of thousands of illegal downloads and several thousand copies of Oracle’s software to avoid paying licensing fees and steal customers.
I hate SAP as much as anybody else, but I also hate Oracle (if Larry Ellison was standing here now, I'd kick him in the balls so hard, no backup would ever fix the resulting problem for him in this life time)
But saying that SAP paying 1.3 BILLION is fair?
‘Fair Number’
The panel looked at “the scope, the duration and the timing” of TomorrowNow’s conduct, the foreman said. The $1.3 billion, which was less than the $1.7 billion Oracle’s expert had recommended, took into account all the elements of damages to Oracle that had occurred, he said.
“We thought that was a fair number,” the foreman said.
“If you take something from someone and you use it, you have to pay,” Bangay, 57, an auto body technician, said.
- Oh, man, I hope for the sake of this guy, he never takes anything and just uses it without any payment upfront. No video, no song, no book, no other mechanic's tools.
"cumulative inflation in China" - WHAT? The Chinese products are cheaper and cheaper every day, that's not inflation, that's production capacity increase and obviously it's also productivity increase. Ask me how I know, ask me how I know.
I'll tell you something, look up "A.S. Watson" and "Spektr" at the same time. If you find the link, I'll tell you why there is a connection between those 2 entities and myself.
The products that China is making are cheaper year to year on wholesales basis, just take it from me purely on trust, but I can back up this assertion with actual numbers, year to year. Actual real numbers.
China has a bubble, that is true, they have housing bubble as well as US, and that is because of the inflation. But it's because the US is pushing the inflation up, not China on their own.
China is showing that it can produce the stuff cheaper and cheaper year to year, they have DEFLATION in consumer goods.
--
As to muni bonds and the Fed 'not allowing them to go bankrupt', that is again, turning a completely blind eye to the fact that now it's just the Fed who is buying the bonds. 'People' are not buying, it's the Fed.
Anyway, as I said, QE3 this spring to bail out municipalities in US.
As to products from China becoming more expensive, oh, that's not going to be US problem. US problem will be that its dollar will buy nothing at all. It's going to be worse than toilet paper, because at least toilet paper can be used in a toilet.
As for oil, again, you think that your local reserves are going to be affordable in US dollars once this goes down, don't you? Here is how it will go: US will be selling raw materials including whatever oil it can get locally on the global markets to buy food and some every day products that it's not producing just to satisfy some basic demands.
communism and your ideals, all of this falls on the ground in the face of this simple question, which you have not answered:
Who and why should be supplying you with all these things you want to be supplied with if there is no profit motive in it for them?
Think about that.
You said that you didn't want a BMW (I had one for 3 years I leased it, hopefully can do it again some time later).
But OK, you don't want a BMW, you do want SOMETHING, right? Do you want to be able to move around in a car or even in public transit system?
So who is supposed to build it if they gain nothing from it?
If your answer is: communism will provide a method for people to define common goals and to work together towards them and all this nice jazz, remember this: people generally speaking DO NOT WANT TO WORK.
OK? If life taught me anything is that most people want a lot of stuff and they are not interested in really working for it. Most people do not start companies, most people are looking for 9-5 jobs. But there are those who start companies, many of them fail, some succeed and they provide employment opportunities for others in society and they produce what is actually wealth (all these BMWs and food and all the other stuff, that's wealth.)
In a communist society, there will be a bunch of people fighting to get to the top, to make sure they get the most privileges, and the top positions still count as work, but somebody needs to build something, somebody needs to grow food and somebody needs to clean toilets.
So tell me, who, in your estimations is more deserving than somebody else (as you have asked me a similar question about Ethiopians), who will be cleaning the toilets?
Who will be working on the top?
Or did you think that communist societies will not have top government, and everything will be completely democratic, without any management?
OK, so no management then, right? So who sets the goals of production capacity? Who makes the stuff? Who decides how much stuff to make?
You see, in a free market system all of these questions are DISCOVERED through trade. You try to sell me yourself as labor, I try to self myself to a lender as an entrepreneur, then I try to sell the products on the market, where people make choices whether to buy my product or not to buy.
Without the top management in a communist system, who will be making these decisions if the production is all based on an agreement just to work together without the profit motive?
If you can come up with a system, which allows the society to not split into the very TOP positions and the bottom and at the same time to provide the people in the society with EVERYTHING they want, then you know what, you will have found the answer to your question.
But the answer to your question is NOT about human evolution, it's a very simple question really, much simpler than evolution. It's a question of resources, question of work, question of trade, question of supply and demand. It's simple, it's just economics (and economics is very simple in reality.)
The point is that what you are looking for is not about some sort of 'evolution', it's not about achieving some higher level of morality, it's not about good or bad.
The point is that what you are actually looking for is a free market system, which sets the goals by trade and thus by choice of people to spend their efforts (expressed as money) on this or on that product. This means that SOME products will succeed and some will fail, but this means that there will be a failure as well as success in business, but this means that businesses will have to compete, but this means that there will be effort wasted by somebody, while somebody else's effort will not be wasted.
But then your question becomes: should those, with the effort that is wasted not be rewarded the SAME as those whose effort ended up in success?
Well there you go, that's the most basic question, should winners get more than losers OR can you have a system with
I believe people should work for society, not for personal gain, i have no interest in owning a Mercedes Benz or BMW
- oh, I see. So because you have no interest in whatever, it means nobody should be able to get it because it goes against your principles. Isn't that what 'communism' and other various such ideas start with: you should do what is good not for you but for everybody. Doesn't it always degenerate into a society of those on top and on the bottom with basically nobody in the middle, and you are talking about GOOD?
So i take it you have no problem with people starving in Ethiopia even though they might potentially be smarter then yo?
- no, I don't. If they are smarter, then they should do something and change those conditions. I bet many do and I bet that what many of them do you wouldn't approve of either.
But just because they were born in the wrong part of the world they can go rot?
- yes. Or they can do what I did and immigrate (and I moved many times, I moved from country to country more often than most end up moving from city to city.)
Sorry, but i find such a view repulsive.
- good. Diversity.
Society needs people with different skill sets, but what makes your skill better or worse then the others?
- only the ability to do something with those skills to get better life for yourself.
You want to 'change the world' on the back of various people, who in your mind should do what you think is best, that's is bad in my world, that's dictatorship.
I prefer free market of ideas, where people do what they can based on their abilities, based on what the market is willing to bear, based on choices, not based on ideology, that ended up on multiple occasions, and will end up again and again, costing millions of people's lives, millions of people's freedoms and retardation of progress.
You see, that's what happens when someone's particular idea of something good and moral is allowed to be trampling all over other people's choices.
This idea of yours is the one that is repulsive to me, and again, that's good, that's diversity.
-- PS. the ideas you hold look to me to be academic, I on the other hand have first and second hand experience with them, my relatives have gone through the genocide of Ukrainians in the thirties by the communist leaders, I was born in the USSR and lived there enough time as well, so to me this is very much practical, I am not only unwilling to subscribe to such ideas, I would really be standing on the way and would be violently preventing any such thing from happening to me again... so as I said, diversity is good.
China buys bonds because it has the same effect as buying dollars but gives interest on top.
- starting with Clinton administration, US has been funding all of its debt with short term bonds, it's all short term, thus it is all low interest, should US decide to try and sell long term debt, the interest will skyrocket (and it is rising on long term debt now, US can't buy that stuff, at 130-140Billion dollars per 1% of debt).
US will never give 100 cents on the dollar, it will keep printing them, they already lost 30% of value in the last 10 years just in other currencies, and the loss of value in commodities is in hundreds of percent.
So WHO is manipulating currency? It's not China, it's USA. They are manipulating currency to monetize debt, what is all the dollars worth? Well, they are worth at the minimum 30% less now than they were 10 years ago. This will keep up, so the fall of value will accelerate, so those measly couple of percentage points on that short term debt is nowhere near the inflation level, so people will stop rolling US bond debt over.
As for China selling US the crap it makes - takes 2 to tango. Don't buy it. You can't, cause you have no production capacity that can satisfy your demand, so talking about US industrial output is misleading. US has 50Billion/month trade deficit, so that's the amount US buys over one month in US dollars from manufacturers in other countries, you think US has 50Billion dollars/month worth of hot stand by production capacity? It does not. It produces military equipment that's overpriced, it's doing value added services and it assembles pre-built car parts. Good grief, just stop buying Chinese junk, see how fast the supplies deplete. I give US 6-12 weeks before there is nothing to buy at all.
China is NOT going to buy more US bonds, is that such a mystery? What do you think QE2 IS? It's the Fed being the lender of last resort to buy the same amount of bonds from US (through Goldman, good for them, what a racket) as the US gov't is going to borrow before June.
By the way, MARK MY WORDS: there will be QE3 this spring to buy MUNI bonds. That's right, who the hell is going to buy US municipal bonds now? Nobody.
I don't think China is going to buy more bonds at all. Your FED doesn't think so, yet you do.
I think China is going to stop rolling them over, get ready either to pay higher interest or to print more dollars or you know, to do the honorable thing and default (well, that's not going to happen, so I expect more printing.)
China SHOULD want to see its internal market to grow and that's why it SHOULD stop rolling US debt over and stop printing and pegging their currency to American dollars.
What I do not understand is how is it that US gov't and apparently people here think it's going to help US right at this moment? There will be no products on the shelves.
What i would consider good is if we managed to actually evolve our society to the state that we are no longer motivated by personal gains and greed, and that we actually live in a peaceful world without starvation.
- that makes no sense. Who is supposed to freely supply everybody with all these free items you want? You want somebody to supply everybody with everything, I don't understand what the upside for the supplier is if there is no profit motive. Explain.
Once we get to that state, then we could consider defeating death, but until then, it'll only increase the inequities that exist in this world and cause even more conflicts.
- but that's good thing, at least SOMETHING for us to use for the next evolution step.
I don't believe in equality at all, not for a second. There is no equality, there should be no equality, there will never be equality. That's because some are always more capable than others in some sense of the word, whatever it is - physically, mentally, imaginatively, productively, whatever. There is no equality because the real world doesn't make carbon copies of people, do you understand? There are no clones, we are all different with different abilities and THAT is good, because it means that we have diversity.
Diversity is better than equality any day of the week, because when some shit hits some proverbial fan, many will die but some will survive. And it's a good thing that NOT everybody will get the 'immortality treatment', because you never know which traits of the genome will come in handy at what point in time.
No no no, I don't want equality, I want exceptional inequality displayed in all different ways, I want people to struggle and to fight to survive, not to live on a cloud and then not to see the proverbial train heading for them.
US government is PUSHING money offshore every single goddamn day. How many hundreds of billions of dollars are the wars costing exactly? How much of that money is pushed of-shore? All the bail outs and all the stimulus, what do you think happens to the printed money? It all goes offshore into foreign companies.
What about all those US bonds that are printed and sold, the QE, the QE2, the QE3 and 4 and 5 that will come after that?
When you say: China is printing money to buy US dollars.
First of all, China HAS US dollars through trade, it trades JUNK it produces for US dollars.
Secondly, US is not taking Chinese currency for their dollars, so saying this is just borderline insane, there is no such thing happening.
What IS happening is that China is getting all these dollars through trade and it buys US bonds with it, because what ELSE does US produce except for bonds?
Nothing.
Bonds and dollars is the US production capacity. (well, weapons too, but that's unproductive stuff, filling in and emptying cartridges, just like digging and filling in holes in the ground that Krugman suggests.)
Don't tell me things like: "yeah, if US didn't print money, China would still be buying US bonds." - that's bullshit. Where would China get the US dollars to buy bonds with if US stopped printing money?
What would US do if it stopped printing money, pay with WHAT? When the somebody in the Emirates wanted to buy a port or two in US with US dollars, they were DENIED. That's because US doesn't want to give anything for their dollars (non-trivial amounts) that's because US doesn't want its own money, it's because US is inflating it, it's because it's a hot-potato pyramid and the end is near.
When you say: China is willing to take IOUs (I presume US bonds) - what exactly SHOULD they be doing with US dollars, if they can't buy anything with them from US? They can buy nothing with those dollars, so they are stupidly keep pegging their currency to the ever inflating dollar, keep producing the junk US consumers want and keep subsidizing those consumers while neglecting their own people and you are saying China wants to see their own consumers purchasing power grow and that's why they are printing? What are you drinking? I want some! That makes no sense at all. I don't know what's the point of this debate, it's like talking into a black hole. Words go in, but none can be used to make any sense, they are all collapsed into nothingness.
American worker needs to get rid of its American government and then see the capital come back to the private sector, see deflation of good prices and labor and start competing on the global scale against all those productive Chinese, but talking to you makes me think that American worker is drunk and doesn't know what is what.
The US manipulates it's own inflation... but it doesn't manipulate the Yuan.
- by manipulating the reserve currency, USA is manipulating the entire world, there is a reason people see inflation as the largest export that US produces.
Buying foreign currency with printed money is a direct attack on the competitiveness of foreign exports on your internal market (this is what China does). The same is not true for plain money printing to monetize government debt (this is what the US does).
- first of all, this is pure nonsense. US prints money to buy the junk China produces, US doesn't COLLECT Chinese money!
So this is a nonsensical argument.
As to what happens to the US money that's printed for the honest reasons of 'monetizing debt', listen to yourself. No matter why the currency is printed, it's automatically inflation, that's what idiots like Krugman and all the 'mainstream morons economists' are missing. Well, that and a some gray matter. It doesn't matter if the money is just in a bank or in your pocket - it's inflation.
The US prints money and what do you think it DOES with it? That's right, it pushes it offshore, it's inflating the holdings of US currency/bonds for all the US dollar owners. Well that, and it's destroying the purchasing power of its own people.
What US is doing is 1000 times worse than what Chinese are doing. Chinese are trying to keep up with US inflation, US is CAUSING the inflation in the first place. The entire world is printing money to keep up with the 'reserve' bullshit currency that USD is. The Gig is up, everybody's onto US. It can't hide behind the status of reserve currency owner. Everybody knows US can't pay its debts back, US is admitting it every time some moron from Senate is on TV, spouting how the debt ceiling must be raised, or it's the world's economy that's going to suffer.
They don't get it. The world is producing, US is consuming. You kill your own currency, you end up with no junk you can buy from the producers, that's all. But of-course it's worse than that, the interest rates will skyrocket and not only you'll end up with no junk to buy, but you'll end up with no possible way of getting any credit to rebuild your manufacturing capacity. It's going to be TOUGH to save all the necessary money first without borrowing it to rebuild the production.
- and gov't can't do any of it and shouldn't be even trying.
but you can't run decades worth of trade surplus without currency manipulation.
- says who? More importantly, who is NOT manipulating their currency? Are you saying that China is manipulating its currency and USA is not?
US has been printing the dollar ever since the Fed was created and they ramped up the printing since Nixon's gold shock. Are you implying that US is not manipulating currency by printing it? US is accusing everybody of currency manipulation, while all it does is currency manipulation to export inflation to other nations, so I fail to see what is China doing that is so actually terrible compared to what US is doing. When these 2 a put side by side, US is clearly printing more and borrowing more. China is selling all this junk to US and US is printing to buy it all, obviously China is accumulating the dollars and that's why it's buying the bonds. It should stop though.
China didn't succeed by attracting capital.
- what? What does that mean? All these companies, who moved into China didn't bring their capital with them? They didn't move the factories? They didn't hire the workers? They didn't buy the tools? You are making no sense.
Business is done in China with Yuan, not with foreign capital.
- all the foreign companies, that moved into China, they all brought their foreign capital with them.
What they needed were entrepreneurs, dollars to buy raw materials, outsourced business from the US/EU to get know how. Capital they could simply print, which is what they did.
- what are you talking about? Entrepreneurs they got plenty, they are growing them in the country now, what they were missing all this time, while they were subsistence farming, was capital, and you can't print capital.
Capital doesn't come from printing, no matter what your favorite non-economist Keynesian shamans are telling you. Capital is SAVED. You can get a credit, but that's somebody's savings.
Capital cannot be printed, otherwise Zimbabwe would have been the most capital rich country, so would have Argentina and Germany before WWII. It's just pure unadulterated nonsense.
If the US removes minimum wage and welfare who exactly would buy the potential output from US factories using the trick of cheap labour?
- the welfare recipients, yes, those are the most powerful economic force. Do you know what makes somebody capable of buying stuff, what gives you purchasing power? It's production. If they produce, they can purchase. If they don't produce, they can't.
The minimum wage is just a small problem, but it is a problem, creating destroying a bunch of jobs that could have existed otherwise, not letting many people without experience and connections to get their first job. The statistics are that 50% of the black youth between ages of 16 and 25 are unemployed. Many of them would have preferred working, but they can't get a job. Get rid of the minimum wage and all of a sudden a job, that is a net loss to a capitalist at 8.55 but is a net gain at 5.50 is on the market and somebody is hired maybe between 3 and 5 bucks an hour. Surely that doesn't hurt anybody if someone, who otherwise would have been a welfare recipient gets a job all of a sudden. Sure it's a poor man's job, but it's a start, it's with understanding that not all jobs are equal, you can't raise a family on it, but you can jump-start your experience and exposure rather than sitting, doing nothing.
Deflation is necessary, all the regulations need to be removed, all of a sudden prices drop and those $4/hour job are not such a terrible joke anymore, especially if they are exposing people to their first work experience.
The US is the consumer of last resort of the world productive o
You should read the article, it states clearly that a male mouse that was old and lost ability to reproduce, was given the treatment and actually was successfully reproducing after it.
Dude, they print money to stay pegged to US dollar artificially, but that is not how they got all the capital and production:)
If that was enough, just to print the dollars to be ahead of US printing dollars, then all the production would have been in Zimbabwe. They have hundreds of trillions of dollars per person.
The trick is not in printing money, the trick is in having an ecosystem that is conducive to inviting and keeping the capital, production. The trick is to have a lot of cheap (or relatively to others cheaper) labor. The trick is to free the credit by reducing gov't spending and to let the private sector have all that credit. The trick is to have very low taxes, very few regulations and relatively unemployed population.
US is getting there, in terms of unemployed population. The thing that's left to do is get gov't out of the way, reduce gov't spending and regulations and taxes and the capital will come back.
No way that's enough. Take it from somebody who merely moves from one country to another now and then, and also from city to city within countries. I travel, I 'immigrate' (I don't consider it to be immigration anymore, just movement, because I don't stick there for too long). 5 years is not enough even to understand what's going on. You only START to fall into society at that mark, takes closer to 10 years to 'integrate' whatever that is.
It's not going to work, and really, just how many times do you think you'll be able to do this cycle? Also again, you better have a LOT of money somehow, otherwise you are screwed. Also forget about friends or relationships, that out.
You already have 'eternal Senators', people like Barney Frank, he has been there for what, 30 years now? What was the point of that house, to have the same people become professionals there or what?
China wants to boost internal consumption, for that media wage has to rise (inflate).
- For now this is simply not true. If China actually wanted to see more internal consumption, all it would have to do is allow their currency to appreciate, which is the REVERSE of inflation. Inflation is money printing and it ends up in higher consumer prices. If you want to make your population be able to afford more (higher purchasing power), you do not inflate money supply, you reduce it. In case of China that would mean they'd have to stop printing money to keep up with US printing. For now that hasn't happened, they are keeping their currency pegged to US currency artificially and they don't need to, so I am sorry, your argument has no basis in reality for now. But China will decouple from USD, it's starting, that's what Chinese/Russian new trade deal is about.
running trade surpluses is no better than running trade deficits.
- did you type this on a Chinese made keyboard? Do you have more than one computer at home?
Saying that running trade surplus is bad, is like saying: people really want FEWER things, not more.
Again, this has no basis in reality. I see that people have capacity to consume unlimited number of things, no matter how much you throw at them, they will take it and ask for more.
It can only be accomplished by currency manipulation, which has required massive money printing...
:) No. The way that Chinese did it is not by printing currency, it's by getting the capital to leave other countries and to come to theirs, because they have very impressive economic conditions ripe for growing at increasing rates.
You get more production by inviting capital, by letting the private sector to flourish. You do that by reducing gov't spending, by letting the private sector to have that credit that gov't is not taking away, by letting the private sector to compete with as few laws regulating trade/production as possible, by letting the labor compete. I'd say China has much freer economic conditions than most of the rest of the 'civilized' world today, even though their top leadership is all 'communist' supposedly in nature.
Well sure, they have 'communist' party there, but it looks more like a real 'capitalist' party to me, which allows and invites and promotes the capital to COME into the country, not to leave it, the way US is doing it.
Without money printing (to buy dollars and US bonds) they could never have run a trade surplus for so long and attracted so much investment and industry.
- No. Without money printing, China would just have to consume more of their own products, because their currency would appreciate and become more expensive compared to other currencies and the purchasing power of Chinese would rise and they would be able to consume more (and this does not require any sort of wage inflation).
China is buying US bonds because it is still trying to prop up US consumer, it's all misguided of-course, they are slow to understand, but will.
Japan did the same thing in the nineties, they listened to Bernanke (what a ridiculous thing to do) and flooded their currency supply, it was a disaster. But Japan still had all that production capacity, so they had cheap money, they reduced the purchasing power of their own consumers and they propped up US consumer, none of it was necessary for Japan, all of it was very bad for their economy, they should have let the factories to restructure and prices to fall, they can buy their own products and they can trade with countries other than US.
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Keynes, I have nothing good to say here, so I'll skip it.
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Interest rates are low, even after servicing debts people in the US/EU/Japan/etc still have the highest disposable income in the world.
- what does that even mean? Is the 'mice-kind' better? Is 'wheat-kind' excellent?
Is 'frog-kind' the king?
Good from whose perspective? AFAIC I don't care much about definitions of good and bad here, but I do care about quality of life for myself and people I know at least (and the people I don't know are on a very very distant third there.)
I don't know what it means for you - 'good', but I do know that I don't particularly care about opinions of others when it comes to quality of life. The better the quality of life I can get the happier I am. Whether it's 'good' or 'bad' for somebody else, that's certainly irrelevant.
What does this mean: China is trying to inflate wages?
China is following US footsteps in terms of inflation (money printing), that I do understand. China shouldn't do that, they should decouple from the USD (and they are doing it gradually, they signed an agreement with Russia to trade in their own currencies, not in US dollars) and they should allow their currency to strengthen, because they are the world's producer and the should start behaving like one and start consuming the very goods they produce, they deserved it already.
They will eventually of-course allow this to happen, their own consumer will see prices drop (relative to their own currency) and they will be able to buy more, while their wages will go up gradually, because the population is becoming more productive, more educated, more experienced in production.
As to US having the highest median disposable income, is that on the TOP of consumer curve? Because actually US has the highest debt per family, so unless by 'disposable' you mean credit card debt, mortgages and other loans, then I don't see how that translates to being 'first world'.
To me 'first world' means first of all PRODUCTION. You can produce stuff that everybody wants? Then you are first world.
As to the free trade being 'race to the bottom', that's good, I want the race to be to the bottom.
I want the race force prices to drop. I want deflation. I want lower prices. I want more competition among everything. I welcome it and I will benefit from it. You will too, you just don't see it. The correct thing to do is actually to have free trade and free market, but this means that gov't should not spend money on anything beyond minimum military and the justice department, it should not get credit that it's stealing from the private sector, it should not have debt, because it means it cannot actually pay for anything, it should not tax income, because that's taxing production, and free trade only will work for you if you allow production to flourish, not consumption through artificial means, printing, borrowing and artificially low interest rates.
In any case, the question was: where should Reziac go, how should he restructure his business not to die out and still to make profit and to provide whatever benefit he provides to the society while making that profit.
The answer of-course is clear: Asia and some places in Europe and probably South America, but it's obviously not USA, UK or France at this point in time.
You are missing a point by the way, an important point.
People, who are short-lived, do not care about the long term consequences. It's like politicians, who are elected only for a few years and all they try to do is to get reelected, they don't care about actually working that much. Same with non-owners of corporations, who are nevertheless on top of them, like seagull CEOs for example, they come in, make a lot of noise, crap all over the place, collect the severance and leave.
People who live longer than our very limited life-spans, and people who have more active life-styles by being healthier, would probably end up thinking a bit more long-term, which may end up being good for the population in the long run.
I do not buy the argument that the natural order of things is GOOD. I think the natural order is actually pretty bad, considering that evolution basically cares about procreation first of all, doesn't care about your quality of life past certain age-point, so it elects the traits in populations that are better suited for the young people, not for those who are maybe 20 years older than 'the young'. But in today's society being 20 years older than 'the young' also has a positive effect (well, with some). They are experienced, they are very knowledgeable and specialized, they are trained, a lot of resources went to their training, they are still useful, but their health is deteriorating and they do become an increasing burden.
If this particular treatment prolongs the life of people by say 40 years, yet makes them younger in the process, it would end up as a net positive for society, because those resources would be available longer and without the downside of being sicker.
Basically sign me up (I am almost sure I will never see this treatment, but I would like to.)
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote a number of viruses, they never were released. Writing viruses is trivial, it's hard to write viruses that do something that gains some sort of profit for the author, but in this case the profit is very clear and it is lucrative, so don't be surprised over the insinuations here.
I do believe that at least in some cases this is true - antivirus companies do promote virus authors one way or another, but it's my personal belief, don't worry about it.
vaporized out of gold?
In Soviet Russia Leaky Wiks you
The tax payers will pay little? Why are they supposed to pay anything to save a company, that's first and that is the main point.
The other point is that the gov't owns GM, the original stock holders got wiped out, the gov't had an IPO to allow the top management of GM to unload their stock (and whoever bought GM stock at those 36-37 dollars is now in the red).
GM WILL go bankrupt again in maybe only 1-2 years, but the gov't will be going bankrupt soon itself, this is clear from the QE2, which is the lending by the Fed to the gov't because nobody else is buying US bonds and long term interest rates are rising.
This entire GM thing is a pyramid, don't be the fool stuck with the hot potato. (and this is true for both, the GM stock and US dollars - bonds.)
I have an uneasy feeling about Kaspersky in all sorts of situations, including this one. Just saying that the 3 ways to gain from this activity is either to be building the virus or to be building and selling the antivirus.
The third possibility is left to the imagination and that's the one that makes me uneasy.
Russia produces nothing and only exports raw materials, oil, gas, wood, aluminum, steel, it's a non-productive country.
I don't trust the Chinese gov't, when they say: we want to stop paying rebates on the taxes, on the goods that are going abroad in order to reign in over-production - I don't trust them. I think they want to reduce currency supply before unpegging their currency from the USD.
In any case, there is no such PROBLEM as over-production. It's not a problem if somebody is producing a lot of stuff, not a problem at all.
The moment an actor as large as China doesn't play ball ... all the theories underlying free trade economics are just so much trash.
- not true. The underlying theories are sound and remain sound no matter what China does.
The reaction that will follow will display that the underlying economic principles are sound: somebody else will start producing and exporting whatever China will stop exporting. The market has signaled the producers in China information over the feed-back loop that the world is willing to consume all those products - that's free market working. Chinese gov't will cause trouble by not giving back the taxes they take - this simply will cause less exports, but doesn't negate the principles of economics.
Somebody else will supply the missing difference that China will stop supplying - market principles in action.
I justify the US money printing because it's a domestic affair.
First: it's international affair because US dollar is reserve currency.
Second: you are justifying it because you gain from the justification, you are willing to justify what US does regardless of the fact that US currency is reserve.
Third: you are saying US dollar printing is justified, even though it's reserve currency and not backed up by any production, but Chinese printing some money while their production is growing is manipulation. This is hypocrisy.
Yes, Chinese and everybody else should stop devaluing their currency. I think that's what the Chinese are trying to do - stop devaluing their currency and with the stop of the tax rebates, they are reducing the currency supply (who says that's not so? Gov't doesn't send back checks, looks like currency REDUCTION not printing! Yet you are arguing that they are printing currency AND that they are having higher taxes on exports all at the same time.)
Looks to me they are tightening a bit.
US manipulates the reserve currency of the world
China manipulates their own currency, nobody except China has their currency, so they are clearly not manipulating currency of other nations.
They are manipulating their own money and their reasons are foolish, but US is trying to manipulate the money of the entire world.
Export tariffs to avoid capital flight are pure pragmatism, not communism. As I said, China does it too
- you don't find it ironic at all that you are saying that it's not communism and then you are comparing this to the communist China? If you wanted to prove this wasn't communism then you should have chosen a different example. Countries that do this are having serious economic problems (no production of anything except raw materials, Russia for example) or communist countries, like China, that do this by design, because that's how they feed the gov't system.
Free trade is exactly what countries who are rebuilding their economy need, as long as they follow the free market principles as well of-course. China, for example, gains much from free trade. US is losing to free trade because US is uncompetitive.
Why would any raw materials be used in the US to rebuild it's industry instead of putting them to work in China? China could always pay a better price because it could get more productivity out of it.
- it would, if you get rid of the gov't regulations and gov't spending, because:
A. It would return the capital (credit) to the private sector,
B. The reduced gov't spending would make US more competitive, because income and payroll taxes would have to disappear
C. Without wage controls and regulations, the US labor would become competitive to Chinese.
If I took your point of view of American industry then the US fundamentally can't rebuild it's industry in a free international trade world until China stops expanding or the US has a cost of labour advantage sufficient to offset it's lack of industry
- as I said, get rid of gov't spending, regulations and taxes and US becomes competitive. It has plenty of unused labor and resourced that could be used, and the world is big enough for both, China and US.
In a world with scarce resources any country who is looking to expand it's industrial base should never rely on free international trade
- that's not true at all.
Explain why does China need to have export taxes at all except to feed the expensive government system, which is only an impediment to the industrial development? It makes no sense.
if China stopped propping up the dollar and devaluing the Yuan. China's central bank doesn't have to buy the dollars flowing into China, it could simply change the peg sufficiently that companies chose to spend dollars instead.
- again, we disagree here fundamentally. I see that it is USA who manipulates currency by printing it, and China does not inflate the currency without backing it up with production increases *the way it should be.
How do you justify the US printing dollars but you are blaming China for printing dollars, while China is increasing production? In fact if China's production output is increasing faster than they are printing their currency, their prices should deflate! And that is what I am saying, I am SEEING that the prices on wholesale from China are becoming lower year to year. This means that they increasing production.
Now, they may be also printing their currency, but if their production is going up faster than that, then they are not even creating real inflation.
US on the other hand is only printing, but its production is falling all the time, so that's real inflation and real manipulation of currency, and when you are the owner of reserve currency, that's the worst type of manipulation, because you are forcing the rest of the world to bear the consequences of your inflation, thus everybody knows, USA's main export is inflation.
No, he violated the state secrets of states he is not citizen of, so they couldn't get him on anything, so they decided to get him on his 'leaked DNA'. *brrrr sorry
I just came to Russia, from Germany, didn't have a moment to see the reply.
Who are these mysterious people that are buying US bonds? Pension funds? Well, those are always at the end of the curve, buying at the high, selling at the low.
China increased the foreign reserves because it's selling crap to all these foreigners, that's not a surprise or a manipulation of any sort. However they are buying large portions of foreign companies that are resource exporters, they are investing into raw materials, into land (especially in Africa), they are THINKING about the future, unlike many others.
OBVIOUSLY US will implement export tariffs and it will implement windfall taxes on any companies that make money aimed at foreign customers and it just may end up doing the same thing it did before, stealing the gold of US citizens. Sure, they can do all of that. However imagine the life inside the US when this goes down - basically, it's immense nationalization of resources and the people become dole receivers as there are no jobs, everybody is hired by the government to do massive gov't projects, there are no freedoms, as people with no choice in how they do business have no freedoms. It's communism all of a sudden and as always, it's dictatorial communism. I hope you like that kind of life, my parents and grand parents and great grand parents have something to say about this, it's not pretty. In USSR in 1930s my mom's side great grandparents lost their land, out of 18 kids, 15 were killed or died from hunger as the communist regime took away the food from the Ukrainian farmers to sell it to the foreign countries and to industrialize by buying foreign machines, tools and factories, the people themselves were sent to far Siberian lands, most of the people died on the way.
This can and will happen again, the rulers who are there to 'feed you', will also kill you. You think that's not possible in USA? I believe history will repeat itself, maybe not in exact details, but I expect striking similarities.
As to US not allowing capital flight, well sure, US will implement windfall taxes, will nationalize resources and will close the borders to prevent emigration (not immigration at that point).
But that is going to be too late, so much capital has left the country already by NOW that your assertion that US will not allow capital flight is laughable. Where all the productive factories? Look up the list of Intel's factory locations, it's on the web, you can find it.
Oracle Corp. won a $1.3 billion jury verdict against rival SAP AG, the world’s largest maker of business application software, for copyright infringement by a now-defunct software maintenance unit.
The jury yesterday awarded the damages after an 11-day trial in federal court in Oakland, California. Oracle sued SAP in 2007 claiming its U.S.-based unit made hundreds of thousands of illegal downloads and several thousand copies of Oracle’s software to avoid paying licensing fees and steal customers.
I hate SAP as much as anybody else, but I also hate Oracle (if Larry Ellison was standing here now, I'd kick him in the balls so hard, no backup would ever fix the resulting problem for him in this life time)
But saying that SAP paying 1.3 BILLION is fair?
‘Fair Number’
The panel looked at “the scope, the duration and the timing” of TomorrowNow’s conduct, the foreman said. The $1.3 billion, which was less than the $1.7 billion Oracle’s expert had recommended, took into account all the elements of damages to Oracle that had occurred, he said.
“We thought that was a fair number,” the foreman said.
“If you take something from someone and you use it, you have to pay,” Bangay, 57, an auto body technician, said.
- Oh, man, I hope for the sake of this guy, he never takes anything and just uses it without any payment upfront. No video, no song, no book, no other mechanic's tools.
"cumulative inflation in China" - WHAT? The Chinese products are cheaper and cheaper every day, that's not inflation, that's production capacity increase and obviously it's also productivity increase. Ask me how I know, ask me how I know.
I'll tell you something, look up "A.S. Watson" and "Spektr" at the same time. If you find the link, I'll tell you why there is a connection between those 2 entities and myself.
The products that China is making are cheaper year to year on wholesales basis, just take it from me purely on trust, but I can back up this assertion with actual numbers, year to year. Actual real numbers.
China has a bubble, that is true, they have housing bubble as well as US, and that is because of the inflation. But it's because the US is pushing the inflation up, not China on their own.
China is showing that it can produce the stuff cheaper and cheaper year to year, they have DEFLATION in consumer goods.
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As to muni bonds and the Fed 'not allowing them to go bankrupt', that is again, turning a completely blind eye to the fact that now it's just the Fed who is buying the bonds. 'People' are not buying, it's the Fed.
Anyway, as I said, QE3 this spring to bail out municipalities in US.
As to products from China becoming more expensive, oh, that's not going to be US problem. US problem will be that its dollar will buy nothing at all. It's going to be worse than toilet paper, because at least toilet paper can be used in a toilet.
As for oil, again, you think that your local reserves are going to be affordable in US dollars once this goes down, don't you? Here is how it will go: US will be selling raw materials including whatever oil it can get locally on the global markets to buy food and some every day products that it's not producing just to satisfy some basic demands.
communism and your ideals, all of this falls on the ground in the face of this simple question, which you have not answered:
Who and why should be supplying you with all these things you want to be supplied with if there is no profit motive in it for them?
Think about that.
You said that you didn't want a BMW (I had one for 3 years I leased it, hopefully can do it again some time later).
But OK, you don't want a BMW, you do want SOMETHING, right? Do you want to be able to move around in a car or even in public transit system?
So who is supposed to build it if they gain nothing from it?
If your answer is: communism will provide a method for people to define common goals and to work together towards them and all this nice jazz, remember this: people generally speaking DO NOT WANT TO WORK.
OK? If life taught me anything is that most people want a lot of stuff and they are not interested in really working for it. Most people do not start companies, most people are looking for 9-5 jobs. But there are those who start companies, many of them fail, some succeed and they provide employment opportunities for others in society and they produce what is actually wealth (all these BMWs and food and all the other stuff, that's wealth.)
In a communist society, there will be a bunch of people fighting to get to the top, to make sure they get the most privileges, and the top positions still count as work, but somebody needs to build something, somebody needs to grow food and somebody needs to clean toilets.
So tell me, who, in your estimations is more deserving than somebody else (as you have asked me a similar question about Ethiopians), who will be cleaning the toilets?
Who will be working on the top?
Or did you think that communist societies will not have top government, and everything will be completely democratic, without any management?
OK, so no management then, right? So who sets the goals of production capacity? Who makes the stuff? Who decides how much stuff to make?
You see, in a free market system all of these questions are DISCOVERED through trade. You try to sell me yourself as labor, I try to self myself to a lender as an entrepreneur, then I try to sell the products on the market, where people make choices whether to buy my product or not to buy.
Without the top management in a communist system, who will be making these decisions if the production is all based on an agreement just to work together without the profit motive?
If you can come up with a system, which allows the society to not split into the very TOP positions and the bottom and at the same time to provide the people in the society with EVERYTHING they want, then you know what, you will have found the answer to your question.
But the answer to your question is NOT about human evolution, it's a very simple question really, much simpler than evolution. It's a question of resources, question of work, question of trade, question of supply and demand. It's simple, it's just economics (and economics is very simple in reality.)
The point is that what you are looking for is not about some sort of 'evolution', it's not about achieving some higher level of morality, it's not about good or bad.
The point is that what you are actually looking for is a free market system, which sets the goals by trade and thus by choice of people to spend their efforts (expressed as money) on this or on that product. This means that SOME products will succeed and some will fail, but this means that there will be a failure as well as success in business, but this means that businesses will have to compete, but this means that there will be effort wasted by somebody, while somebody else's effort will not be wasted.
But then your question becomes: should those, with the effort that is wasted not be rewarded the SAME as those whose effort ended up in success?
Well there you go, that's the most basic question, should winners get more than losers OR can you have a system with
I believe people should work for society, not for personal gain, i have no interest in owning a Mercedes Benz or BMW
- oh, I see. So because you have no interest in whatever, it means nobody should be able to get it because it goes against your principles. Isn't that what 'communism' and other various such ideas start with: you should do what is good not for you but for everybody. Doesn't it always degenerate into a society of those on top and on the bottom with basically nobody in the middle, and you are talking about GOOD?
So i take it you have no problem with people starving in Ethiopia even though they might potentially be smarter then yo?
- no, I don't. If they are smarter, then they should do something and change those conditions. I bet many do and I bet that what many of them do you wouldn't approve of either.
But just because they were born in the wrong part of the world they can go rot?
- yes. Or they can do what I did and immigrate (and I moved many times, I moved from country to country more often than most end up moving from city to city.)
Sorry, but i find such a view repulsive.
- good. Diversity.
Society needs people with different skill sets, but what makes your skill better or worse then the others?
- only the ability to do something with those skills to get better life for yourself.
You want to 'change the world' on the back of various people, who in your mind should do what you think is best, that's is bad in my world, that's dictatorship.
I prefer free market of ideas, where people do what they can based on their abilities, based on what the market is willing to bear, based on choices, not based on ideology, that ended up on multiple occasions, and will end up again and again, costing millions of people's lives, millions of people's freedoms and retardation of progress.
You see, that's what happens when someone's particular idea of something good and moral is allowed to be trampling all over other people's choices.
This idea of yours is the one that is repulsive to me, and again, that's good, that's diversity.
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PS. the ideas you hold look to me to be academic, I on the other hand have first and second hand experience with them, my relatives have gone through the genocide of Ukrainians in the thirties by the communist leaders, I was born in the USSR and lived there enough time as well, so to me this is very much practical, I am not only unwilling to subscribe to such ideas, I would really be standing on the way and would be violently preventing any such thing from happening to me again... so as I said, diversity is good.
Cheers.
China buys bonds because it has the same effect as buying dollars but gives interest on top.
- starting with Clinton administration, US has been funding all of its debt with short term bonds, it's all short term, thus it is all low interest, should US decide to try and sell long term debt, the interest will skyrocket (and it is rising on long term debt now, US can't buy that stuff, at 130-140Billion dollars per 1% of debt).
US will never give 100 cents on the dollar, it will keep printing them, they already lost 30% of value in the last 10 years just in other currencies, and the loss of value in commodities is in hundreds of percent.
So WHO is manipulating currency? It's not China, it's USA. They are manipulating currency to monetize debt, what is all the dollars worth? Well, they are worth at the minimum 30% less now than they were 10 years ago. This will keep up, so the fall of value will accelerate, so those measly couple of percentage points on that short term debt is nowhere near the inflation level, so people will stop rolling US bond debt over.
As for China selling US the crap it makes - takes 2 to tango. Don't buy it. You can't, cause you have no production capacity that can satisfy your demand, so talking about US industrial output is misleading. US has 50Billion/month trade deficit, so that's the amount US buys over one month in US dollars from manufacturers in other countries, you think US has 50Billion dollars/month worth of hot stand by production capacity? It does not. It produces military equipment that's overpriced, it's doing value added services and it assembles pre-built car parts. Good grief, just stop buying Chinese junk, see how fast the supplies deplete. I give US 6-12 weeks before there is nothing to buy at all.
China is NOT going to buy more US bonds, is that such a mystery? What do you think QE2 IS? It's the Fed being the lender of last resort to buy the same amount of bonds from US (through Goldman, good for them, what a racket) as the US gov't is going to borrow before June.
By the way, MARK MY WORDS: there will be QE3 this spring to buy MUNI bonds. That's right, who the hell is going to buy US municipal bonds now? Nobody.
I don't think China is going to buy more bonds at all. Your FED doesn't think so, yet you do.
I think China is going to stop rolling them over, get ready either to pay higher interest or to print more dollars or you know, to do the honorable thing and default (well, that's not going to happen, so I expect more printing.)
China SHOULD want to see its internal market to grow and that's why it SHOULD stop rolling US debt over and stop printing and pegging their currency to American dollars.
What I do not understand is how is it that US gov't and apparently people here think it's going to help US right at this moment? There will be no products on the shelves.
What i would consider good is if we managed to actually evolve our society to the state that we are no longer motivated by personal gains and greed, and that we actually live in a peaceful world without starvation.
- that makes no sense. Who is supposed to freely supply everybody with all these free items you want? You want somebody to supply everybody with everything, I don't understand what the upside for the supplier is if there is no profit motive. Explain.
Once we get to that state, then we could consider defeating death, but until then, it'll only increase the inequities that exist in this world and cause even more conflicts.
- but that's good thing, at least SOMETHING for us to use for the next evolution step.
I don't believe in equality at all, not for a second. There is no equality, there should be no equality, there will never be equality. That's because some are always more capable than others in some sense of the word, whatever it is - physically, mentally, imaginatively, productively, whatever. There is no equality because the real world doesn't make carbon copies of people, do you understand? There are no clones, we are all different with different abilities and THAT is good, because it means that we have diversity.
Diversity is better than equality any day of the week, because when some shit hits some proverbial fan, many will die but some will survive. And it's a good thing that NOT everybody will get the 'immortality treatment', because you never know which traits of the genome will come in handy at what point in time.
No no no, I don't want equality, I want exceptional inequality displayed in all different ways, I want people to struggle and to fight to survive, not to live on a cloud and then not to see the proverbial train heading for them.
US government is PUSHING money offshore every single goddamn day. How many hundreds of billions of dollars are the wars costing exactly? How much of that money is pushed of-shore? All the bail outs and all the stimulus, what do you think happens to the printed money? It all goes offshore into foreign companies.
What about all those US bonds that are printed and sold, the QE, the QE2, the QE3 and 4 and 5 that will come after that?
When you say: China is printing money to buy US dollars.
First of all, China HAS US dollars through trade, it trades JUNK it produces for US dollars.
Secondly, US is not taking Chinese currency for their dollars, so saying this is just borderline insane, there is no such thing happening.
What IS happening is that China is getting all these dollars through trade and it buys US bonds with it, because what ELSE does US produce except for bonds?
Nothing.
Bonds and dollars is the US production capacity. (well, weapons too, but that's unproductive stuff, filling in and emptying cartridges, just like digging and filling in holes in the ground that Krugman suggests.)
Don't tell me things like: "yeah, if US didn't print money, China would still be buying US bonds." - that's bullshit. Where would China get the US dollars to buy bonds with if US stopped printing money?
What would US do if it stopped printing money, pay with WHAT? When the somebody in the Emirates wanted to buy a port or two in US with US dollars, they were DENIED. That's because US doesn't want to give anything for their dollars (non-trivial amounts) that's because US doesn't want its own money, it's because US is inflating it, it's because it's a hot-potato pyramid and the end is near.
When you say: China is willing to take IOUs (I presume US bonds) - what exactly SHOULD they be doing with US dollars, if they can't buy anything with them from US? They can buy nothing with those dollars, so they are stupidly keep pegging their currency to the ever inflating dollar, keep producing the junk US consumers want and keep subsidizing those consumers while neglecting their own people and you are saying China wants to see their own consumers purchasing power grow and that's why they are printing? What are you drinking? I want some! That makes no sense at all. I don't know what's the point of this debate, it's like talking into a black hole. Words go in, but none can be used to make any sense, they are all collapsed into nothingness.
American worker needs to get rid of its American government and then see the capital come back to the private sector, see deflation of good prices and labor and start competing on the global scale against all those productive Chinese, but talking to you makes me think that American worker is drunk and doesn't know what is what.
The US manipulates it's own inflation ... but it doesn't manipulate the Yuan.
- by manipulating the reserve currency, USA is manipulating the entire world, there is a reason people see inflation as the largest export that US produces.
Buying foreign currency with printed money is a direct attack on the competitiveness of foreign exports on your internal market (this is what China does). The same is not true for plain money printing to monetize government debt (this is what the US does).
- first of all, this is pure nonsense. US prints money to buy the junk China produces, US doesn't COLLECT Chinese money!
So this is a nonsensical argument.
As to what happens to the US money that's printed for the honest reasons of 'monetizing debt', listen to yourself. No matter why the currency is printed, it's automatically inflation, that's what idiots like Krugman and all the 'mainstream morons economists' are missing. Well, that and a some gray matter. It doesn't matter if the money is just in a bank or in your pocket - it's inflation.
The US prints money and what do you think it DOES with it? That's right, it pushes it offshore, it's inflating the holdings of US currency/bonds for all the US dollar owners. Well that, and it's destroying the purchasing power of its own people.
What US is doing is 1000 times worse than what Chinese are doing. Chinese are trying to keep up with US inflation, US is CAUSING the inflation in the first place. The entire world is printing money to keep up with the 'reserve' bullshit currency that USD is. The Gig is up, everybody's onto US. It can't hide behind the status of reserve currency owner. Everybody knows US can't pay its debts back, US is admitting it every time some moron from Senate is on TV, spouting how the debt ceiling must be raised, or it's the world's economy that's going to suffer.
They don't get it. The world is producing, US is consuming. You kill your own currency, you end up with no junk you can buy from the producers, that's all. But of-course it's worse than that, the interest rates will skyrocket and not only you'll end up with no junk to buy, but you'll end up with no possible way of getting any credit to rebuild your manufacturing capacity. It's going to be TOUGH to save all the necessary money first without borrowing it to rebuild the production.
You do need decent education and infrastructure
- and gov't can't do any of it and shouldn't be even trying.
but you can't run decades worth of trade surplus without currency manipulation.
- says who? More importantly, who is NOT manipulating their currency? Are you saying that China is manipulating its currency and USA is not?
US has been printing the dollar ever since the Fed was created and they ramped up the printing since Nixon's gold shock. Are you implying that US is not manipulating currency by printing it? US is accusing everybody of currency manipulation, while all it does is currency manipulation to export inflation to other nations, so I fail to see what is China doing that is so actually terrible compared to what US is doing. When these 2 a put side by side, US is clearly printing more and borrowing more. China is selling all this junk to US and US is printing to buy it all, obviously China is accumulating the dollars and that's why it's buying the bonds. It should stop though.
China didn't succeed by attracting capital.
- what? What does that mean? All these companies, who moved into China didn't bring their capital with them? They didn't move the factories? They didn't hire the workers? They didn't buy the tools? You are making no sense.
Business is done in China with Yuan, not with foreign capital.
- all the foreign companies, that moved into China, they all brought their foreign capital with them.
What they needed were entrepreneurs, dollars to buy raw materials, outsourced business from the US/EU to get know how. Capital they could simply print, which is what they did.
- what are you talking about? Entrepreneurs they got plenty, they are growing them in the country now, what they were missing all this time, while they were subsistence farming, was capital, and you can't print capital.
Capital doesn't come from printing, no matter what your favorite non-economist Keynesian shamans are telling you. Capital is SAVED. You can get a credit, but that's somebody's savings.
Capital cannot be printed, otherwise Zimbabwe would have been the most capital rich country, so would have Argentina and Germany before WWII. It's just pure unadulterated nonsense.
If the US removes minimum wage and welfare who exactly would buy the potential output from US factories using the trick of cheap labour?
- the welfare recipients, yes, those are the most powerful economic force. Do you know what makes somebody capable of buying stuff, what gives you purchasing power? It's production. If they produce, they can purchase. If they don't produce, they can't.
The minimum wage is just a small problem, but it is a problem, creating destroying a bunch of jobs that could have existed otherwise, not letting many people without experience and connections to get their first job. The statistics are that 50% of the black youth between ages of 16 and 25 are unemployed. Many of them would have preferred working, but they can't get a job. Get rid of the minimum wage and all of a sudden a job, that is a net loss to a capitalist at 8.55 but is a net gain at 5.50 is on the market and somebody is hired maybe between 3 and 5 bucks an hour. Surely that doesn't hurt anybody if someone, who otherwise would have been a welfare recipient gets a job all of a sudden. Sure it's a poor man's job, but it's a start, it's with understanding that not all jobs are equal, you can't raise a family on it, but you can jump-start your experience and exposure rather than sitting, doing nothing.
Deflation is necessary, all the regulations need to be removed, all of a sudden prices drop and those $4/hour job are not such a terrible joke anymore, especially if they are exposing people to their first work experience.
The US is the consumer of last resort of the world productive o
You should read the article, it states clearly that a male mouse that was old and lost ability to reproduce, was given the treatment and actually was successfully reproducing after it.
Dude, they print money to stay pegged to US dollar artificially, but that is not how they got all the capital and production :)
If that was enough, just to print the dollars to be ahead of US printing dollars, then all the production would have been in Zimbabwe. They have hundreds of trillions of dollars per person.
The trick is not in printing money, the trick is in having an ecosystem that is conducive to inviting and keeping the capital, production. The trick is to have a lot of cheap (or relatively to others cheaper) labor. The trick is to free the credit by reducing gov't spending and to let the private sector have all that credit. The trick is to have very low taxes, very few regulations and relatively unemployed population.
US is getting there, in terms of unemployed population. The thing that's left to do is get gov't out of the way, reduce gov't spending and regulations and taxes and the capital will come back.
No way that's enough. Take it from somebody who merely moves from one country to another now and then, and also from city to city within countries. I travel, I 'immigrate' (I don't consider it to be immigration anymore, just movement, because I don't stick there for too long). 5 years is not enough even to understand what's going on. You only START to fall into society at that mark, takes closer to 10 years to 'integrate' whatever that is.
It's not going to work, and really, just how many times do you think you'll be able to do this cycle? Also again, you better have a LOT of money somehow, otherwise you are screwed. Also forget about friends or relationships, that out.
You already have 'eternal Senators', people like Barney Frank, he has been there for what, 30 years now? What was the point of that house, to have the same people become professionals there or what?
China wants to boost internal consumption, for that media wage has to rise (inflate).
- For now this is simply not true. If China actually wanted to see more internal consumption, all it would have to do is allow their currency to appreciate, which is the REVERSE of inflation. Inflation is money printing and it ends up in higher consumer prices. If you want to make your population be able to afford more (higher purchasing power), you do not inflate money supply, you reduce it. In case of China that would mean they'd have to stop printing money to keep up with US printing. For now that hasn't happened, they are keeping their currency pegged to US currency artificially and they don't need to, so I am sorry, your argument has no basis in reality for now. But China will decouple from USD, it's starting, that's what Chinese/Russian new trade deal is about.
running trade surpluses is no better than running trade deficits.
- did you type this on a Chinese made keyboard? Do you have more than one computer at home?
Saying that running trade surplus is bad, is like saying: people really want FEWER things, not more.
Again, this has no basis in reality. I see that people have capacity to consume unlimited number of things, no matter how much you throw at them, they will take it and ask for more.
It can only be accomplished by currency manipulation, which has required massive money printing ...
You get more production by inviting capital, by letting the private sector to flourish. You do that by reducing gov't spending, by letting the private sector to have that credit that gov't is not taking away, by letting the private sector to compete with as few laws regulating trade/production as possible, by letting the labor compete. I'd say China has much freer economic conditions than most of the rest of the 'civilized' world today, even though their top leadership is all 'communist' supposedly in nature.
Well sure, they have 'communist' party there, but it looks more like a real 'capitalist' party to me, which allows and invites and promotes the capital to COME into the country, not to leave it, the way US is doing it.
Without money printing (to buy dollars and US bonds) they could never have run a trade surplus for so long and attracted so much investment and industry.
- No. Without money printing, China would just have to consume more of their own products, because their currency would appreciate and become more expensive compared to other currencies and the purchasing power of Chinese would rise and they would be able to consume more (and this does not require any sort of wage inflation).
China is buying US bonds because it is still trying to prop up US consumer, it's all misguided of-course, they are slow to understand, but will.
Japan did the same thing in the nineties, they listened to Bernanke (what a ridiculous thing to do) and flooded their currency supply, it was a disaster. But Japan still had all that production capacity, so they had cheap money, they reduced the purchasing power of their own consumers and they propped up US consumer, none of it was necessary for Japan, all of it was very bad for their economy, they should have let the factories to restructure and prices to fall, they can buy their own products and they can trade with countries other than US.
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Keynes, I have nothing good to say here, so I'll skip it.
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Interest rates are low, even after servicing debts people in the US/EU/Japan/etc still have the highest disposable income in the world.
- Interest rates are low, ha?
Interest rates are r
but i do not consider mankind to be good as well
- what does that even mean? Is the 'mice-kind' better? Is 'wheat-kind' excellent?
Is 'frog-kind' the king?
Good from whose perspective? AFAIC I don't care much about definitions of good and bad here, but I do care about quality of life for myself and people I know at least (and the people I don't know are on a very very distant third there.)
I don't know what it means for you - 'good', but I do know that I don't particularly care about opinions of others when it comes to quality of life. The better the quality of life I can get the happier I am. Whether it's 'good' or 'bad' for somebody else, that's certainly irrelevant.
What does this mean: China is trying to inflate wages?
China is following US footsteps in terms of inflation (money printing), that I do understand. China shouldn't do that, they should decouple from the USD (and they are doing it gradually, they signed an agreement with Russia to trade in their own currencies, not in US dollars) and they should allow their currency to strengthen, because they are the world's producer and the should start behaving like one and start consuming the very goods they produce, they deserved it already.
They will eventually of-course allow this to happen, their own consumer will see prices drop (relative to their own currency) and they will be able to buy more, while their wages will go up gradually, because the population is becoming more productive, more educated, more experienced in production.
As to US having the highest median disposable income, is that on the TOP of consumer curve? Because actually US has the highest debt per family, so unless by 'disposable' you mean credit card debt, mortgages and other loans, then I don't see how that translates to being 'first world'.
To me 'first world' means first of all PRODUCTION. You can produce stuff that everybody wants? Then you are first world.
As to the free trade being 'race to the bottom', that's good, I want the race to be to the bottom.
I want the race force prices to drop. I want deflation. I want lower prices. I want more competition among everything. I welcome it and I will benefit from it. You will too, you just don't see it. The correct thing to do is actually to have free trade and free market, but this means that gov't should not spend money on anything beyond minimum military and the justice department, it should not get credit that it's stealing from the private sector, it should not have debt, because it means it cannot actually pay for anything, it should not tax income, because that's taxing production, and free trade only will work for you if you allow production to flourish, not consumption through artificial means, printing, borrowing and artificially low interest rates.
In any case, the question was: where should Reziac go, how should he restructure his business not to die out and still to make profit and to provide whatever benefit he provides to the society while making that profit.
The answer of-course is clear: Asia and some places in Europe and probably South America, but it's obviously not USA, UK or France at this point in time.
You are missing a point by the way, an important point.
People, who are short-lived, do not care about the long term consequences. It's like politicians, who are elected only for a few years and all they try to do is to get reelected, they don't care about actually working that much. Same with non-owners of corporations, who are nevertheless on top of them, like seagull CEOs for example, they come in, make a lot of noise, crap all over the place, collect the severance and leave.
People who live longer than our very limited life-spans, and people who have more active life-styles by being healthier, would probably end up thinking a bit more long-term, which may end up being good for the population in the long run.
I do not buy the argument that the natural order of things is GOOD. I think the natural order is actually pretty bad, considering that evolution basically cares about procreation first of all, doesn't care about your quality of life past certain age-point, so it elects the traits in populations that are better suited for the young people, not for those who are maybe 20 years older than 'the young'. But in today's society being 20 years older than 'the young' also has a positive effect (well, with some). They are experienced, they are very knowledgeable and specialized, they are trained, a lot of resources went to their training, they are still useful, but their health is deteriorating and they do become an increasing burden.
If this particular treatment prolongs the life of people by say 40 years, yet makes them younger in the process, it would end up as a net positive for society, because those resources would be available longer and without the downside of being sicker.
Basically sign me up (I am almost sure I will never see this treatment, but I would like to.)