If I were IBM top brass, I'd do the same thing exactly.
Why hire and keep people in USA rather than anywhere in Asia, now in India, later in China, the in Mongolia, I don't care?
The USA has stupid income taxes, it has stupid payroll taxes, it has regulations that would force me to overpay the employees. The stupid regulations that would make me responsible for employees' healthcare! All the unions, etc.etc.
Of-course I'd get rid of as many people as possible in the shortest time frame and hire people all over the world where I wouldn't be faced with the same regulations and rules.
That's just pure common sense and pure liquidity.
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Now, of-course everybody is aware that large corporations have always enjoyed disproportionate access to gov't officials by buying politicians through campaign donations, fundraisers, lobbying, etc. IBM has gained plenty through all of this, so IBM is in a cushy place compared to any new start up that would aim at any part of IBM's business.
But now realize, that while IBM is a massive company, like most companies that are backed by gov't, protected by gov't from any new competition, and at the same time the same rules apply to small start ups, where they are in disproportionate disadvantage to the existing company because to an existing large compnay/monopoly, the rules and regulations are trivial cost of business, since they are established and have solid cash flow.
A start up does not have a cash flow. A start up would have to comply with rules and regulations that would make it impossible for a startup really to take off.
IBM is not even an interesting example of this, if you want to start your own hedge fund, you are screwed. You have to be a millionaire already to be able to pay all the compliance costs for all the new regulations that are constantly coming out.
Bills that force you to collect data about the customers, effectively turning you int an IRS and a CIA agent, an unpaid agent, an agent that has to pay out of his own pocket to set up all the system necessary to keep track of all transactions and report them to IRS and the rest of the gov't.
The Patriot act alone probably made start ups in hedge funding impossible.
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So honestly, USA is not a country that is conducive to new business and that's exactly what it needs - new business. But it's overloaded with bills and rules and laws and regulations and various expectations and lawsuits, it's just too much red tape.
Obviously it makes much more sense to start a business in Asia.
Today, ironically, China is a much more free place to start your own business and succeed than USA. People used to come to US to be more Free and to try and achieve something because the system was created to allow people to achieve success, now it's nowhere near anything like that. China now is more Free in an economic sense than the US.
Oh oh, and all this inflation, all this money printing, it's not helping at all. Inflation and eventual destruction of USD and US consumer, why start a business in US unless you are masochistic?
First of all my morals have nothing to do with anything.
You don't know my morals, they are nowhere in this discussion.
Secondly, my holdings are 50% gold and also some gold stocks. The rest are sunk in my business and some outstanding stuff is Asian equities.
I had a US business, I have a business in Canada, but I moved most of my business to Asia and Germany. -- You, on the other hand, you should follow your own advice and stick to US holdings, see how well that works out for you with all the commodity prices going through the roof and US dollar being destroyed by Helicopter Ben and all that spending and borrowing that your gov't is set on continuing forever, until US is wiped out.
AFAIC US is on the path of imminent destruction. Enjoy it.
I expected something short and sweet a response there, with absolute denial of the facts though reality is staring you right in the face.
Here is a setup for you:
5 guys fall onto a desert island. 4 Chinese and one American.
First Chinese goes fishing, second goes hunting, third goes building a house and finding fuel and fourth goes finding some edible vegetations.
At the end of the day they come back and also cook the food.
Then they feed the American, because clearly, without him all of their labor would have been pointless, somebody has to consume the fruits of their labor, right?
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It's time they kick the fat lazy American off the island, and you know what, the American found a printing press and starting printing dollars, 'buying' actual things produced by the Chinese with these printed papers.
For some time Chinese took the deal, whatever the reasons are. Eventually they'll recognize that in the economy, the American is not useful at all. If Chinese wanted pieces of paper to exchange with, they could also print them.
But in your deluded reality, the most important function is the function of the American - eating.
Japan has production. Japan had production all through nineties and now. Japan was destroying its own wealth by giving up the fruits of their labor to the fat, overeating American.
Japan would have never lost the decade in the nineties if it just kicked the American off the island.
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Oh, and by the way, kicking the American off the island would also benefit the American, he'd have to learn to work again, so he could participate in a real economy.
But you think utility is born from nothing, maybe it's even born in the lost corridors of gov't offices.
Good luck to you.
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here are some REAL numbers, as opposed to the ones you eat up from the gov't:
October 1 2010
Gold: new high Silver: new 30 year high Gold stocks hit 52 week high Oil: strong day and strong week Dollar: dropped 13 percent from peak 3 months ago
September is done, media says: this is best September in 71 years. Dow gained 7.7%, S&P gained 8.8%.
However this month of September.
CRB Index (commodities): gained 8.7% - beat DOW and just under S&P Soy beans: up 9.5% - beat S&P Copper: up 10% - beat S&P Rice: up 10% - beat S&P Oil: up 11% - beat S&P Corn: up 12% - beat S&P Silver: up 13% - beat S&P Frozen concentrated orange juice: up 13% - beat S&P Cotton: up 17.5% - beat S&P Sugar: up 19.3% - beat S&P
Currencies: Swiss Frank: up 4.6% Euro: up 7% Australian Dollar: up 9% - beat S&P - this is all inflation and the prices hikes will hit your local shelves too in not too distant future, your gov't is working on it.
Ha ha ha, you are showing me graphs by people who set inflation level at 0% from 1972 to almost now and that's AFTER the US got off the gold standard to be able to print even more money there were printing while on gold? People who are also showing improvement in various school achievements in US over time, like in Math? And would you look at their GDP numbers. That's straight from gov't website. So they are are as reliable as the GDP and CPI numbers from US gov't.
The growth of wealth in US in 19 century was done in a free market capitalism, so prices were consistently DROPPING. There was consistent price decrease. So cost of products went down over that time because there was no gov't inflation while at the same time the life clearly improved by supplying more and more variety of everything, from food and clothing to energy and machines and indoor plumbing.
The 20th century became the expensive century after 1913, thank the Fed for that.
You seem to fear hyperinflation. Worry not, the US will end up like Japan: high debt, high unemployment, no inflation. Of course, it will be worse, because the social safety net in the US is much weaker. But hey, you approve of that, no?
- you are a joke. You don't understand how much of a joke you are.
Japan's problem was very stupid: their gov't followed the path of self-destruction by inflating their money but they had production.
Japan had production, they produced but they decided they will subsidize the US consumer and so they devalued their own currency so that USA could buy Japan made products. It was a terrible disaster. What they should have done is allow their manufacturers to restructure and instead of shipping to US they should have been building for themselves.
You think US consumer is god sent - US prints paper and sends it abroad, so that goods can be shipped back to US. That is lunacy and it's about to stop.
USA is nowhere near Japan. Both, USA and Japan print money, but USA prints much more money because it's so much easier to dilute the USD since it's 'reserve'. Saddam got killed partially because he was going to go off the USD and start trading in Euro and other currencies for his oil. The US economic collapse will be worse not because of gov't social programs, of which there are plenty. The US economic collapse will be worse because USA is not producing nearly enough to satisfy either its own demand or to return its debt in goods. USA is not producing much of anything except weapons on its own soil anymore, and it is turning around and biting US in the ass. And the reason for this jobless state is gov't and regulations and income/payroll taxes and subsidies of monopolies and destruction of free market and of competition.
You seem to think the gold standard is a good idea. It is not. There are no reason whatsoever to think that the availability of an ore can be magically adjusted to fit the economy's need.
- you are a joke. Gold standard is not a good idea? Sure, it's not a good idea if you want to inflate your money so that you can tax everybody's actual net worth, not only income.
You think the US gov't is going to announce that there will be no tax hikes and that's the truth? They don't need to tax your miserly income, they are printing money, they are taxing everything you own by printing money. Gold standard is unnecessary if gov't is not printing money, if monetary supply is not being inflated without some form of backing of the fiat currency.
However what history clearly shows is that every gov't ever printed and prints money when in fact what it must do is cut spending.
The US had a recession in 1920. The US gov't actually, amazingly enough, cut spending by some huge number over 70%. That's right. They cut spending, they didn't print money. That recession was over in 1 year. That was the last time a sane decision was made in terms of fighting a recession. The next recession, which was caused by gov't printing
We disagree on even the definition of progress, how much shorter can this get?
To me progress is what industrialization was through capital formation that was then applied to labor and caused revolutionary changes to the entire world, allowing its population to grow by a factor of about 7 since 1800.
That same capitalism allowed quick development of sciences required to maintain the necessary inflow of information into the engineering problems the world was met with. At the same time the ability of capitalism and industrialization to move 95% of people out of agrarian society and into urban environment created the framework for having all that time that was freed up from farming and harvesting to be directed at other pursuits, which gave us huge advancements in all aspects of life, from leisure and pursuit of arts to sciences and development of better understanding of biology and ability to fight disease in unprecedented manner to any earlier human history.
Now THAT is progress.
What you are for is destruction of the vary base of the economic system that provided the success story that the last 200 years were and clearly 19 century was more successful is the difference it provided from the beginning of the century to the end of it in terms of quality of life.
Beginning of 19 century: 3 staple foods, maybe 1 time a day, expensive and often bad quality. Expensive clothing and energy and housing. No indoor plumbing. No machines to help at home.
Beginning of 20 century: Plenty of various cheap food and clothing. Safe food due to market inventions like refrigeration and canning. Cheap energy. Cheap housing. Accessible medical attention - cheap.
Indoor plumbing. New medical advancements. Washing machines, sewing machines. New materials.
I am for progress. I am for progress that works.
You have an agenda that is incompatible with a working economy, an agenda that destabilizes economy and destroys it.
Of-course you will lose this agenda. China now is more free in terms of doing business than US is! It's unfortunate and it's true.
China now is the economic powerhouse and USA will go bankrupt and cause a hyper inflationary depression, which will take decades to recover from, but it will recover sometime in the future, but it's not going to be easy and it will take the return to sound economy and monetary policy.
Hopefully this will not cause too much bloodshed, but it might.
thus I believe a policy of disguised mass murder is expedient and fair.
- that's just nonsense disguised in a number of fallacies.
I have rarely seen a Libertarian so ready to admit to its bloodthirsty instincts.
- "its". Good luck with where you are going, it's not going to be pretty once the reality shows you what a desperate gov't is capable of. Now THAT is going to be bloodthirsty.
About the debt ceiling: any value given in absolute numbers is temporary and absurd. Enough damage has been done because it was thought that the T-word would be too frightening.
- I see that you can't even comprehend that US bonds are no longer bought but by US itself.
If you can't understand that simple fact, you are hopeless, it's going to ram right through you and you won't know what it was even then.
If I could borrow at the rates the US can, I would, because an investment which brings more than 2% is easy to find. In fact, it would criminal of the US gov not to borrow as much as it could given the current circumstances: people are literally paying to carry US debt.
- blind person. Very blind. US is lending to itself.
Which part of that is so hard to understand? At this point the Fed is going to lend to itself.
Also those 2% rates... Have you ever heard of teaser rates? Have you ever seen a foreclos
I am a libertarian priest then to you, I've been preaching libertarianism for over 20 years, how much more does it take to turn one into a priest?
shorter: business got the right to fuck up the market which it did. This proves government intervention is detrimental.
- correct.
By forbidding the gov't to change economic outcomes, the incentives to attempt and subvert gov't are removed. Sure, you can try, but if gov't is expressly disallowed from changing anything in economy, than any amount of money spent on a gov't would be a waste, it'd buy nothing of use.
For any corporation and individual it totally makes sense to lobby their gov't IF gov't is able to change the economic outcome for them. So it is rational to try and subvert the gov't to provide yourself with an unfair advantage provided by gov't force, since gov't has the ability to compel by threat of violence, the result is that any advantage provided by gov't immediately distorts the market.
a) Markets for health make no sense: your granny is sick, how much is her life worth to you? How many other grannies will you price out of the market?
- your granny is not my problem obviously, but my point is that your average granny could AFFORD to pay for doctor visits and could definitely afford health insurance for serious medical conditions with very little money.
Since the gov't screwed up the insurance system and turned it into NHS, fewer and fewer people remained that could actually afford their treatment out of pocket, because gov't intervention distorted the market and provided a great reason for medical and drug providers to raise prices.
Clearly this is a vicious cycle - the more money medical treatment costs, the more money NHS will cost and the more money NHS takes in (because it will keep raising premiums because it can due to gov't regulations forcing employers to provide health insurance) and due to medicare costs rising, the medical treatment will continue costing more and so will insurance and medicare in a circle. Obviously any new 'solutions' from gov't only make things worse, thus the new health bill will only ensure that prices go up faster.
Saying that the "NHS provides the same thing for a lower price" as an argument in favour of the free market makes no sense.
- Oh yes it does.
The gov't provided medicare and other types of insurances will also drain the system of money, not as fast as 'private insurance' turned into NHS, but it will. Clearly this is what's happening in Europe and in Canada as well, the prices are going up, the amount collected in taxes is going up, but because many of these countries don't produce anything and have a negative trade balance (US has -50B/month now) they end up borrowing and printing the difference.
Clearly printing and borrowing is even worse than collecting taxes, with collecting taxes there is a limit on how much can be taken before gov't is forced to stop.
With printing and borrowing there is no limit. The US gov't is constantly raising its debt ceiling, the idiots in senate and the white house and the evil of the Fed and the morons on TV are saying this: if gov't can't raise the debt ceiling, the result will be a global economic crash.
This obviously is moronic on at least 2 levels:
1. Anybody in their right mind who lent money to US should listen to this and understand that USA is saying it cannot pay the money it owes back at all. More than that, not only it won't print the money, it'll cause a global crash if it's not given more money!
Give us money or else?
2. Anybody in their right mind should understand that USA will end up in a hyper-inflationary depression the way things are going.
The Fed just came out with QE2. They'll print 600 Billion over the next 7 months.
Ironically, that's the amount the US gov't is planning to borrow before June. That's right, the Fed is now the official lender of last resort to US gov't.
It's done.
It's not libertarians who live in a fantasy world, it's the world of Keynesian economics and politics that is fantasy and it's unraveling.
Fuck anybody ever for suggesting that people should be getting money for doing nothing.
There are enough leeches, fuck in the ass anybody who wants to create ANY opportunity for people to live doing nothing. I'd shoot anybody in the head for this proposal alone.
Private system that changed the rules of the game during Nixon administration now is less efficient.
The reason it is less efficient is because it is designed to be exactly that. There is no market arbitration for prices and the insurance is supposed to cover all doctor visits, like NHS.
Clearly when private insurance is used to do what NHS does, it will cost more, because it is private, so there are obviously extra costs associated with that.
But the entire point is that before Nixon, private health insurance in USA was precisely insurance and not NHS.
It was possible to cover a family of 4 people for $25/year with $500 deductible and covering up to $50,000/year.
$50K/year was 2.5 times the amount needed for the most expensive cancer treatment available at prices of those years by hospitals, which was $20K/year.
Of-course doctor visits were cheap. $5/visit. Medications were cheap. The reason was simple: market was the deciding factor for prices, not gov't intrusion and controls and subsidies.
So market was doing a good job at providing health coverage (that was mostly done out of pocket) but also very cheap insurance, which still was insurance (like your car insurance, you don't use your car insurance to put fuel into your gas tank every time it empties, you don't use your car insurance to change tires and buff some scratches out etc.)
Insurance companies and hospitals/clinics and pharma dealers decided they wanted to make much more money, they approached Nixon and he changed the rules. He framed it this way: "we have 10% uninsured people, we'll make sure nobody goes without insurance".
Obviously the same 10%-15% of people were still uninsured 30 years later but the difference became this:
Insurance became sort of an NHS program, it was still private and doctor visits now were covered by it (and Medicare, which is another disaster). This provided a very clear opportunity to raise medical and drug prices.
It's very simple: The market worked and there was competition, prices were low. Gov't together with big business colluded and destroyed the market. People suffered, but more money was put into pockets of executives and more money was given to politicians as kick backs. Politicians don't care, they are all on public system, so no problem.
Also note, that this made cost of employing people in US go up, because the medical insurance became an expectation from employers, which is another idiocy and part of the cost of doing business in US, and partly responsible for jobs moving out of the country.
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But as a libertarian, my solution is this: forbid the gov't from mixing with business.
Forbid the gov't from making economic decisions, from being able to change economic outcomes for corporations or unions or private individuals.
I am against income and payroll taxes (that's my bias) I am also pretty much against all government.
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Realize that taxes are going up. Not only taxes on your income, don't you worry about your income, taxes are going up on your entire net worth.
Gov't is printing money.
Fed is printing hundreds of billions of dollars.
This automatically takes away your purchasing power.
Inflation is rampant.
Fed is causing rampant inflation by printing money. By printing money they are taking away your savings in form of dilution of your purchasing power.
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Your purchasing power is going down with every new dollar the Fed is printing.
Note, that the Fed came out (helicopter Ben) with a promise to print 600 Billion dollars more over the next 7 months.
That's just by June and it's about equal to the amount that the Federal gov't will borrow over the same amount of time. This means they are the lender of last resort to themselves. This also means that they know the US bond is on its last legs - nobody wants to buy more.
US gov't is broke. It's monetizing its debt and it's trying to cover that they are doing it, but it's not working as a cover, it's too "in your face".
Abandon ship, get rid of your US holdings, they are becoming worthless fast.
by the way, looks to me that you are not very good at observing the fact that you are getting a terrible 'bargain' at this point.
I don't know what your background is at all, what you do, etc., but saying that gov't that again, just came out with another terrible idea named 'QE2', which is clearly not the same thing as the earlier bail-outs, but instead a recognition that the market for US bonds is disappearing, so the Fed is acting as the lender of last resort to ITSELF, looks to me that instead of seeing that and recognizing that in fact you ARE getting a terrible bargain there, you are closing your eyes and ears and yelling 'Not Listening!', because if you were listening, you would have heard by now that US economy is being destroyed every day and now much faster by the US gov't, worse, the USD itself is being devalued, inflated and destroyed.
What are you getting as a 'bargain' exactly anymore?
But hey, maybe I am completely misreading this entire situation and maybe I've moved into commodities and foreign equities for no good reason.
You are right, but it's not about 'google fu', it's about me paying attention to the article, which I actually opened. It does say 50M, but later adds it's for a quarter. That makes more sense then, though market capitalization is still a lousy indicator about the company, what was capitalization of Nortel or GM before their steep declines?
Also, while the revenue is 50M for the last quarter, what's their profit out of that? 50M revenue with profit under 5M, so profit under 20M/year (probably closer to 10M per year), is that worth 1Billion in immediate cash? I mean, 20M is 2% of 1Billion, so there has to be more reason than profit here to buy the company for that money.
so for a cool billion Ellison got himself a bunch of generic patents (such as "Flexible order structure", "Method and system for constructing personalized result sets" and "System and method for interfacing and separating formatted content and program code", you get the picture) and he also now is a proud owner of some sort of 'in house' web based IM system and some sort of a rules engine on top of a knowledge base.
Obviously I am not mentioning the 1000 or so clients that ATG supposedly has.
I suppose this is a somewhat meaningful purchase, though obviously the company in question has over 942M market capitalization (per Yahoo) and this year revenue is just over $50 million, which doesn't say much about their profit. Ellison can do whatever he wants with his money but I think he is overpaying for this company by at least a factor of 2.
I don't have a problem with people drinking coffee while working, but I do have a problem with having pot/alcohol/opiates/hallucinogens/other types of narcotics while at work or behind the wheel. So if you are a 'daily user' that means you are doing all of that while working/driving.
I am for legalization of all drugs but legalization does not mean that your employer has to tolerate you being high at work and definitely being high is just as much of a crime as being drunk while driving.
So while I think all drugs must be legal, it cannot be legal to be under influence where it matters, so just like a drunk person behind the wheel, a drugged person behind the wheel needs to be stopped and prosecuted as harshly as possible (IMNSHO)
There are actually things that ARE harmful and already legal that people should be worried about.
- precisely.
These include in no particular order:
*gov't passing bills like the 'Patriot Act' *gov't reaching up one's anus (probably literally) before an airplane takes off. *gov't being allowed to change rules in free market and thus it destroying the economy by:
-creating the Fed, which prints money/bonds and sets interest rates, creating inflation, which only benefits the gov't, because of it's enormous debt and is aimed at killing off price deflation, which is what consumer need.
-creating regulations, which destroy competition and promote monopolies
-subsidizing any business at all ever and thus killing competitive nature of the market
-setting wage laws
-fixing prices
-taxing income (so taxing work rather than leisure), so income and payroll taxes. Obviously taking away people's ability to fend for themselves, to save and invest and taking money away in pyramid schemes like SS, not investing but spending all that money on gov't friends and wars
-spending money on anything at all but minimum military and the justice system
-turning private health insurance into NHS and causing health care costs to skyrocket (thank's Nixon)
-causing obesity by fixing food prices all while subsidizing things like corn/soy/wheat/rice and causing food to be stable in price but worsening in terms of quality and containing too much pure fructose
-starting drug wars and jailing millions, while creating gangs and indirectly causing deaths and suffering
. Many people are confused about it, that's what they think when they think of math and it's very very far away from the truth.
Not arithmetic of-course, but math. Math is an abstract idea that is far removed from our 'reality' and 'universe'. Math is a closed system with its own rules, which is self-consistent and it has a small number of properties, which can be combined and recombined together to build abstract formulations of ideas that are exactly the opposite of what you believe - these are ideas that are removed as far from describing anything outside of that closed set as possible.
Math is USED to build approximations and algorithms and theories that are SIMILAR to what is found in the Universe, but ideas in math are not attached to any actual factual events that are bound by the Universe at all.
That should become apparent to you when you realize that ideas in Mathematics that become useful in building models and theories about real facts, can far precede any actual physical observations made about the Universe.
If Math was actually just a system for describing the Universe, then the facts would always have to be observed before they could be described. However Math allows building abstract notions and theorize about patterns and combinations of patterns that are very much detached from reality and then later it can appear that these Math descriptions can be actually applied to events that are later observed in life and can be used to approximate and hypothesize about workings of natural phenomena.
Math is much stronger than what you give it credit for, because Math can be used to talk about things that actually do not happen in Universe. Math can lead somebody to come up with ideas that are completely outside of the boundaries that our Universe sets. Mathematics is all about imagination.
Math is only bound by our ability to imagine and not by the physical structure of the Universe we live in.
First: Rand was an objectivist, not a libertarian.
Second: Mexico is as far away from being libertarian in any sense of the word as USA or China or Russia or France or Germany are. Mexico is a country suffering from gov't intervention, though it's not its own gov't that is causing the suffering. US war on drugs has far reaching consequences for populations of entire countries (US population included)
That's just stupid, you are not forced to stick to a company you are working for if it's bought out. That's retarded and a flamebait, not 'interesting'.
Obviously real men post all of their life information onto the web and let the others back it up and then use Google to look up what the heck happened to them in their lives.
Slashdot Mirror
If I were IBM top brass, I'd do the same thing exactly.
Why hire and keep people in USA rather than anywhere in Asia, now in India, later in China, the in Mongolia, I don't care?
The USA has stupid income taxes, it has stupid payroll taxes, it has regulations that would force me to overpay the employees. The stupid regulations that would make me responsible for employees' healthcare! All the unions, etc.etc.
Of-course I'd get rid of as many people as possible in the shortest time frame and hire people all over the world where I wouldn't be faced with the same regulations and rules.
That's just pure common sense and pure liquidity.
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Now, of-course everybody is aware that large corporations have always enjoyed disproportionate access to gov't officials by buying politicians through campaign donations, fundraisers, lobbying, etc. IBM has gained plenty through all of this, so IBM is in a cushy place compared to any new start up that would aim at any part of IBM's business.
But now realize, that while IBM is a massive company, like most companies that are backed by gov't, protected by gov't from any new competition, and at the same time the same rules apply to small start ups, where they are in disproportionate disadvantage to the existing company because to an existing large compnay/monopoly, the rules and regulations are trivial cost of business, since they are established and have solid cash flow.
A start up does not have a cash flow. A start up would have to comply with rules and regulations that would make it impossible for a startup really to take off.
IBM is not even an interesting example of this, if you want to start your own hedge fund, you are screwed. You have to be a millionaire already to be able to pay all the compliance costs for all the new regulations that are constantly coming out.
Bills that force you to collect data about the customers, effectively turning you int an IRS and a CIA agent, an unpaid agent, an agent that has to pay out of his own pocket to set up all the system necessary to keep track of all transactions and report them to IRS and the rest of the gov't.
The Patriot act alone probably made start ups in hedge funding impossible.
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So honestly, USA is not a country that is conducive to new business and that's exactly what it needs - new business. But it's overloaded with bills and rules and laws and regulations and various expectations and lawsuits, it's just too much red tape.
Obviously it makes much more sense to start a business in Asia.
Today, ironically, China is a much more free place to start your own business and succeed than USA. People used to come to US to be more Free and to try and achieve something because the system was created to allow people to achieve success, now it's nowhere near anything like that. China now is more Free in an economic sense than the US.
Oh oh, and all this inflation, all this money printing, it's not helping at all. Inflation and eventual destruction of USD and US consumer, why start a business in US unless you are masochistic?
First of all my morals have nothing to do with anything.
You don't know my morals, they are nowhere in this discussion.
Secondly, my holdings are 50% gold and also some gold stocks. The rest are sunk in my business and some outstanding stuff is Asian equities.
I had a US business, I have a business in Canada, but I moved most of my business to Asia and Germany.
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You, on the other hand, you should follow your own advice and stick to US holdings, see how well that works out for you with all the commodity prices going through the roof and US dollar being destroyed by Helicopter Ben and all that spending and borrowing that your gov't is set on continuing forever, until US is wiped out.
AFAIC US is on the path of imminent destruction. Enjoy it.
I expected something short and sweet a response there, with absolute denial of the facts though reality is staring you right in the face.
Here is a setup for you:
5 guys fall onto a desert island. 4 Chinese and one American.
First Chinese goes fishing, second goes hunting, third goes building a house and finding fuel and fourth goes finding some edible vegetations.
At the end of the day they come back and also cook the food.
Then they feed the American, because clearly, without him all of their labor would have been pointless, somebody has to consume the fruits of their labor, right?
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It's time they kick the fat lazy American off the island, and you know what, the American found a printing press and starting printing dollars, 'buying' actual things produced by the Chinese with these printed papers.
For some time Chinese took the deal, whatever the reasons are. Eventually they'll recognize that in the economy, the American is not useful at all. If Chinese wanted pieces of paper to exchange with, they could also print them.
But in your deluded reality, the most important function is the function of the American - eating.
Japan has production. Japan had production all through nineties and now. Japan was destroying its own wealth by giving up the fruits of their labor to the fat, overeating American.
Japan would have never lost the decade in the nineties if it just kicked the American off the island.
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Oh, and by the way, kicking the American off the island would also benefit the American, he'd have to learn to work again, so he could participate in a real economy.
But you think utility is born from nothing, maybe it's even born in the lost corridors of gov't offices.
Good luck to you.
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here are some REAL numbers, as opposed to the ones you eat up from the gov't:
October 1 2010
Gold: new high
Silver: new 30 year high
Gold stocks hit 52 week high
Oil: strong day and strong week
Dollar: dropped 13 percent from peak 3 months ago
September is done, media says: this is best September in 71 years. Dow gained 7.7%, S&P gained 8.8%.
However this month of September.
CRB Index (commodities): gained 8.7% - beat DOW and just under S&P
Soy beans: up 9.5% - beat S&P
Copper: up 10% - beat S&P
Rice: up 10% - beat S&P
Oil: up 11% - beat S&P
Corn: up 12% - beat S&P
Silver: up 13% - beat S&P
Frozen concentrated orange juice: up 13% - beat S&P
Cotton: up 17.5% - beat S&P
Sugar: up 19.3% - beat S&P
Currencies:
Swiss Frank: up 4.6%
Euro: up 7%
Australian Dollar: up 9% - beat S&P
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this is all inflation and the prices hikes will hit your local shelves too in not too distant future, your gov't is working on it.
Ha ha ha, you are showing me graphs by people who set inflation level at 0% from 1972 to almost now and that's AFTER the US got off the gold standard to be able to print even more money there were printing while on gold? People who are also showing improvement in various school achievements in US over time, like in Math? And would you look at their GDP numbers. That's straight from gov't website. So they are are as reliable as the GDP and CPI numbers from US gov't.
The growth of wealth in US in 19 century was done in a free market capitalism, so prices were consistently DROPPING. There was consistent price decrease. So cost of products went down over that time because there was no gov't inflation while at the same time the life clearly improved by supplying more and more variety of everything, from food and clothing to energy and machines and indoor plumbing.
The 20th century became the expensive century after 1913, thank the Fed for that.
You seem to fear hyperinflation. Worry not, the US will end up like Japan: high debt, high unemployment, no inflation. Of course, it will be worse, because the social safety net in the US is much weaker. But hey, you approve of that, no?
- you are a joke. You don't understand how much of a joke you are.
Japan's problem was very stupid: their gov't followed the path of self-destruction by inflating their money but they had production.
Japan had production, they produced but they decided they will subsidize the US consumer and so they devalued their own currency so that USA could buy Japan made products. It was a terrible disaster. What they should have done is allow their manufacturers to restructure and instead of shipping to US they should have been building for themselves.
You think US consumer is god sent - US prints paper and sends it abroad, so that goods can be shipped back to US. That is lunacy and it's about to stop.
USA is nowhere near Japan. Both, USA and Japan print money, but USA prints much more money because it's so much easier to dilute the USD since it's 'reserve'. Saddam got killed partially because he was going to go off the USD and start trading in Euro and other currencies for his oil.
The US economic collapse will be worse not because of gov't social programs, of which there are plenty.
The US economic collapse will be worse because USA is not producing nearly enough to satisfy either its own demand or to return its debt in goods. USA is not producing much of anything except weapons on its own soil anymore, and it is turning around and biting US in the ass. And the reason for this jobless state is gov't and regulations and income/payroll taxes and subsidies of monopolies and destruction of free market and of competition.
You seem to think the gold standard is a good idea. It is not. There are no reason whatsoever to think that the availability of an ore can be magically adjusted to fit the economy's need.
- you are a joke. Gold standard is not a good idea? Sure, it's not a good idea if you want to inflate your money so that you can tax everybody's actual net worth, not only income.
You think the US gov't is going to announce that there will be no tax hikes and that's the truth? They don't need to tax your miserly income, they are printing money, they are taxing everything you own by printing money. Gold standard is unnecessary if gov't is not printing money, if monetary supply is not being inflated without some form of backing of the fiat currency.
However what history clearly shows is that every gov't ever printed and prints money when in fact what it must do is cut spending.
The US had a recession in 1920. The US gov't actually, amazingly enough, cut spending by some huge number over 70%. That's right. They cut spending, they didn't print money. That recession was over in 1 year. That was the last time a sane decision was made in terms of fighting a recession. The next recession, which was caused by gov't printing
Shorter: I don't believe in progress,
- there is no progress in your ideas.
We disagree on even the definition of progress, how much shorter can this get?
To me progress is what industrialization was through capital formation that was then applied to labor and caused revolutionary changes to the entire world, allowing its population to grow by a factor of about 7 since 1800.
That same capitalism allowed quick development of sciences required to maintain the necessary inflow of information into the engineering problems the world was met with. At the same time the ability of capitalism and industrialization to move 95% of people out of agrarian society and into urban environment created the framework for having all that time that was freed up from farming and harvesting to be directed at other pursuits, which gave us huge advancements in all aspects of life, from leisure and pursuit of arts to sciences and development of better understanding of biology and ability to fight disease in unprecedented manner to any earlier human history.
Now THAT is progress.
What you are for is destruction of the vary base of the economic system that provided the success story that the last 200 years were and clearly 19 century was more successful is the difference it provided from the beginning of the century to the end of it in terms of quality of life.
Beginning of 19 century:
3 staple foods, maybe 1 time a day, expensive and often bad quality. Expensive clothing and energy and housing. No indoor plumbing. No machines to help at home.
Beginning of 20 century:
Plenty of various cheap food and clothing. Safe food due to market inventions like refrigeration and canning. Cheap energy. Cheap housing. Accessible medical attention - cheap.
Indoor plumbing. New medical advancements. Washing machines, sewing machines. New materials.
I am for progress. I am for progress that works.
You have an agenda that is incompatible with a working economy, an agenda that destabilizes economy and destroys it.
Of-course you will lose this agenda. China now is more free in terms of doing business than US is! It's unfortunate and it's true.
China now is the economic powerhouse and USA will go bankrupt and cause a hyper inflationary depression, which will take decades to recover from, but it will recover sometime in the future, but it's not going to be easy and it will take the return to sound economy and monetary policy.
Hopefully this will not cause too much bloodshed, but it might.
thus I believe a policy of disguised mass murder is expedient and fair.
- that's just nonsense disguised in a number of fallacies.
I have rarely seen a Libertarian so ready to admit to its bloodthirsty instincts.
- "its". Good luck with where you are going, it's not going to be pretty once the reality shows you what a desperate gov't is capable of. Now THAT is going to be bloodthirsty.
About the debt ceiling: any value given in absolute numbers is temporary and absurd. Enough damage has been done because it was thought that the T-word would be too frightening.
- I see that you can't even comprehend that US bonds are no longer bought but by US itself.
If you can't understand that simple fact, you are hopeless, it's going to ram right through you and you won't know what it was even then.
If I could borrow at the rates the US can, I would, because an investment which brings more than 2% is easy to find. In fact, it would criminal of the US gov not to borrow as much as it could given the current circumstances: people are literally paying to carry US debt.
- blind person. Very blind. US is lending to itself.
Which part of that is so hard to understand? At this point the Fed is going to lend to itself.
Also those 2% rates... Have you ever heard of teaser rates? Have you ever seen a foreclos
Wonderful, you should sit there and do nothing, otherwise if you do something shoot yourself in the head first.
If you suggest that you should be paid for doing nothing, I should then shoot you in the head.
Either way, you should die.
I am a libertarian priest then to you, I've been preaching libertarianism for over 20 years, how much more does it take to turn one into a priest?
shorter: business got the right to fuck up the market which it did. This proves government intervention is detrimental.
- correct.
By forbidding the gov't to change economic outcomes, the incentives to attempt and subvert gov't are removed. Sure, you can try, but if gov't is expressly disallowed from changing anything in economy, than any amount of money spent on a gov't would be a waste, it'd buy nothing of use.
For any corporation and individual it totally makes sense to lobby their gov't IF gov't is able to change the economic outcome for them. So it is rational to try and subvert the gov't to provide yourself with an unfair advantage provided by gov't force, since gov't has the ability to compel by threat of violence, the result is that any advantage provided by gov't immediately distorts the market.
a) Markets for health make no sense: your granny is sick, how much is her life worth to you? How many other grannies will you price out of the market?
- your granny is not my problem obviously, but my point is that your average granny could AFFORD to pay for doctor visits and could definitely afford health insurance for serious medical conditions with very little money.
Since the gov't screwed up the insurance system and turned it into NHS, fewer and fewer people remained that could actually afford their treatment out of pocket, because gov't intervention distorted the market and provided a great reason for medical and drug providers to raise prices.
Clearly this is a vicious cycle - the more money medical treatment costs, the more money NHS will cost and the more money NHS takes in (because it will keep raising premiums because it can due to gov't regulations forcing employers to provide health insurance) and due to medicare costs rising, the medical treatment will continue costing more and so will insurance and medicare in a circle. Obviously any new 'solutions' from gov't only make things worse, thus the new health bill will only ensure that prices go up faster.
Saying that the "NHS provides the same thing for a lower price" as an argument in favour of the free market makes no sense.
- Oh yes it does.
The gov't provided medicare and other types of insurances will also drain the system of money, not as fast as 'private insurance' turned into NHS, but it will. Clearly this is what's happening in Europe and in Canada as well, the prices are going up, the amount collected in taxes is going up, but because many of these countries don't produce anything and have a negative trade balance (US has -50B/month now) they end up borrowing and printing the difference.
Clearly printing and borrowing is even worse than collecting taxes, with collecting taxes there is a limit on how much can be taken before gov't is forced to stop.
With printing and borrowing there is no limit. The US gov't is constantly raising its debt ceiling, the idiots in senate and the white house and the evil of the Fed and the morons on TV are saying this: if gov't can't raise the debt ceiling, the result will be a global economic crash.
This obviously is moronic on at least 2 levels:
1. Anybody in their right mind who lent money to US should listen to this and understand that USA is saying it cannot pay the money it owes back at all. More than that, not only it won't print the money, it'll cause a global crash if it's not given more money!
Give us money or else?
2. Anybody in their right mind should understand that USA will end up in a hyper-inflationary depression the way things are going.
The Fed just came out with QE2. They'll print 600 Billion over the next 7 months.
Ironically, that's the amount the US gov't is planning to borrow before June. That's right, the Fed is now the official lender of last resort to US gov't.
It's done.
It's not libertarians who live in a fantasy world, it's the world of Keynesian economics and politics that is fantasy and it's unraveling.
I am amused by it.
I agree with Fair Tax completely except this:
you get money for doing nothing
- how about NO!
Fuck anybody ever for suggesting that people should be getting money for doing nothing.
There are enough leeches, fuck in the ass anybody who wants to create ANY opportunity for people to live doing nothing. I'd shoot anybody in the head for this proposal alone.
Correction.
Private system that changed the rules of the game during Nixon administration now is less efficient.
The reason it is less efficient is because it is designed to be exactly that. There is no market arbitration for prices and the insurance is supposed to cover all doctor visits, like NHS.
Clearly when private insurance is used to do what NHS does, it will cost more, because it is private, so there are obviously extra costs associated with that.
But the entire point is that before Nixon, private health insurance in USA was precisely insurance and not NHS.
It was possible to cover a family of 4 people for $25/year with $500 deductible and covering up to $50,000/year.
$50K/year was 2.5 times the amount needed for the most expensive cancer treatment available at prices of those years by hospitals, which was $20K/year.
Of-course doctor visits were cheap. $5/visit. Medications were cheap. The reason was simple: market was the deciding factor for prices, not gov't intrusion and controls and subsidies.
So market was doing a good job at providing health coverage (that was mostly done out of pocket) but also very cheap insurance, which still was insurance (like your car insurance, you don't use your car insurance to put fuel into your gas tank every time it empties, you don't use your car insurance to change tires and buff some scratches out etc.)
Insurance companies and hospitals/clinics and pharma dealers decided they wanted to make much more money, they approached Nixon and he changed the rules. He framed it this way: "we have 10% uninsured people, we'll make sure nobody goes without insurance".
Obviously the same 10%-15% of people were still uninsured 30 years later but the difference became this:
Insurance became sort of an NHS program, it was still private and doctor visits now were covered by it (and Medicare, which is another disaster). This provided a very clear opportunity to raise medical and drug prices.
It's very simple: The market worked and there was competition, prices were low. Gov't together with big business colluded and destroyed the market. People suffered, but more money was put into pockets of executives and more money was given to politicians as kick backs. Politicians don't care, they are all on public system, so no problem.
Also note, that this made cost of employing people in US go up, because the medical insurance became an expectation from employers, which is another idiocy and part of the cost of doing business in US, and partly responsible for jobs moving out of the country.
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But as a libertarian, my solution is this: forbid the gov't from mixing with business.
Forbid the gov't from making economic decisions, from being able to change economic outcomes for corporations or unions or private individuals.
Stop the gov't from destroying economy.
Don't you worry about income taxes.
I am against income and payroll taxes (that's my bias) I am also pretty much against all government.
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Realize that taxes are going up. Not only taxes on your income, don't you worry about your income, taxes are going up on your entire net worth.
Gov't is printing money.
Fed is printing hundreds of billions of dollars.
This automatically takes away your purchasing power.
Inflation is rampant.
Fed is causing rampant inflation by printing money. By printing money they are taking away your savings in form of dilution of your purchasing power.
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Your purchasing power is going down with every new dollar the Fed is printing.
Note, that the Fed came out (helicopter Ben) with a promise to print 600 Billion dollars more over the next 7 months.
That's just by June and it's about equal to the amount that the Federal gov't will borrow over the same amount of time. This means they are the lender of last resort to themselves. This also means that they know the US bond is on its last legs - nobody wants to buy more.
US gov't is broke. It's monetizing its debt and it's trying to cover that they are doing it, but it's not working as a cover, it's too "in your face".
Abandon ship, get rid of your US holdings, they are becoming worthless fast.
by the way, looks to me that you are not very good at observing the fact that you are getting a terrible 'bargain' at this point.
I don't know what your background is at all, what you do, etc., but saying that gov't that again, just came out with another terrible idea named 'QE2', which is clearly not the same thing as the earlier bail-outs, but instead a recognition that the market for US bonds is disappearing, so the Fed is acting as the lender of last resort to ITSELF, looks to me that instead of seeing that and recognizing that in fact you ARE getting a terrible bargain there, you are closing your eyes and ears and yelling 'Not Listening!', because if you were listening, you would have heard by now that US economy is being destroyed every day and now much faster by the US gov't, worse, the USD itself is being devalued, inflated and destroyed.
What are you getting as a 'bargain' exactly anymore?
But hey, maybe I am completely misreading this entire situation and maybe I've moved into commodities and foreign equities for no good reason.
I shop around plenty, I have a 5 flag way of running life and business and pleasure, works so far.
The state now is the lord and you are the serf.
Only serfs had it better, they only had to give 25% of what they earned to their lord.
In today's world, even in USA, many people are paying way North of 50% to their lord, I mean the state if you count all taxes.
It'd be nice just to be a serf, serfs still didn't get any rights, just like now but at least they paid less.
I'll keep my libertarian agenda, you can keep your Marxist one.
You are right, but it's not about 'google fu', it's about me paying attention to the article, which I actually opened. It does say 50M, but later adds it's for a quarter. That makes more sense then, though market capitalization is still a lousy indicator about the company, what was capitalization of Nortel or GM before their steep declines?
Also, while the revenue is 50M for the last quarter, what's their profit out of that? 50M revenue with profit under 5M, so profit under 20M/year (probably closer to 10M per year), is that worth 1Billion in immediate cash? I mean, 20M is 2% of 1Billion, so there has to be more reason than profit here to buy the company for that money.
so for a cool billion Ellison got himself a bunch of generic patents (such as "Flexible order structure", "Method and system for constructing personalized result sets" and "System and method for interfacing and separating formatted content and program code", you get the picture) and he also now is a proud owner of some sort of 'in house' web based IM system and some sort of a rules engine on top of a knowledge base.
Obviously I am not mentioning the 1000 or so clients that ATG supposedly has.
I suppose this is a somewhat meaningful purchase, though obviously the company in question has over 942M market capitalization (per Yahoo) and this year revenue is just over $50 million, which doesn't say much about their profit. Ellison can do whatever he wants with his money but I think he is overpaying for this company by at least a factor of 2.
I have gone through math, astrophysics and com sci at UofT so I probably have enough math background to be able to make some statements about it.
I don't have a problem with people drinking coffee while working, but I do have a problem with having pot/alcohol/opiates/hallucinogens/other types of narcotics while at work or behind the wheel. So if you are a 'daily user' that means you are doing all of that while working/driving.
I am for legalization of all drugs but legalization does not mean that your employer has to tolerate you being high at work and definitely being high is just as much of a crime as being drunk while driving.
So while I think all drugs must be legal, it cannot be legal to be under influence where it matters, so just like a drunk person behind the wheel, a drugged person behind the wheel needs to be stopped and prosecuted as harshly as possible (IMNSHO)
There are actually things that ARE harmful and already legal that people should be worried about.
- precisely.
These include in no particular order:
*gov't passing bills like the 'Patriot Act'
*gov't reaching up one's anus (probably literally) before an airplane takes off.
*gov't being allowed to change rules in free market and thus it destroying the economy by:
-creating the Fed, which prints money/bonds and sets interest rates, creating inflation, which only benefits the gov't, because of it's enormous debt and is aimed at killing off price deflation, which is what consumer need.
-creating regulations, which destroy competition and promote monopolies
-subsidizing any business at all ever and thus killing competitive nature of the market
-setting wage laws
-fixing prices
-taxing income (so taxing work rather than leisure), so income and payroll taxes. Obviously taking away people's ability to fend for themselves, to save and invest and taking money away in pyramid schemes like SS, not investing but spending all that money on gov't friends and wars
-spending money on anything at all but minimum military and the justice system
-turning private health insurance into NHS and causing health care costs to skyrocket (thank's Nixon)
-causing obesity by fixing food prices all while subsidizing things like corn/soy/wheat/rice and causing food to be stable in price but worsening in terms of quality and containing too much pure fructose
-starting drug wars and jailing millions, while creating gangs and indirectly causing deaths and suffering
etc.
Except that you are completely wrong on this:
Math is the language that describes the universe.
. Many people are confused about it, that's what they think when they think of math and it's very very far away from the truth.
Not arithmetic of-course, but math. Math is an abstract idea that is far removed from our 'reality' and 'universe'. Math is a closed system with its own rules, which is self-consistent and it has a small number of properties, which can be combined and recombined together to build abstract formulations of ideas that are exactly the opposite of what you believe - these are ideas that are removed as far from describing anything outside of that closed set as possible.
Math is USED to build approximations and algorithms and theories that are SIMILAR to what is found in the Universe, but ideas in math are not attached to any actual factual events that are bound by the Universe at all.
That should become apparent to you when you realize that ideas in Mathematics that become useful in building models and theories about real facts, can far precede any actual physical observations made about the Universe.
If Math was actually just a system for describing the Universe, then the facts would always have to be observed before they could be described. However Math allows building abstract notions and theorize about patterns and combinations of patterns that are very much detached from reality and then later it can appear that these Math descriptions can be actually applied to events that are later observed in life and can be used to approximate and hypothesize about workings of natural phenomena.
Math is much stronger than what you give it credit for, because Math can be used to talk about things that actually do not happen in Universe. Math can lead somebody to come up with ideas that are completely outside of the boundaries that our Universe sets. Mathematics is all about imagination.
Math is only bound by our ability to imagine and not by the physical structure of the Universe we live in.
First: Rand was an objectivist, not a libertarian.
Second: Mexico is as far away from being libertarian in any sense of the word as USA or China or Russia or France or Germany are. Mexico is a country suffering from gov't intervention, though it's not its own gov't that is causing the suffering. US war on drugs has far reaching consequences for populations of entire countries (US population included)
That's just stupid, you are not forced to stick to a company you are working for if it's bought out. That's retarded and a flamebait, not 'interesting'.
Free Nelson Mandela AND Willy!
This gave me an idea for a new type of language.
"Hello, wo..."
"FUCK YOU. You are a prick and you should rot in hell, I am not running that shit. You call yourself a programmer?".
Obviously real men post all of their life information onto the web and let the others back it up and then use Google to look up what the heck happened to them in their lives.
It's mostly a sad picture.
and what is the percentage of their users actually USE oracle GUIs on Macs?
It just maybe unprofitable to address these users when compared to the cost of maintaining Java for yet another platform.