Social Security has never cost the US Government a dime.
- a pyramid scheme, money from which were spent long time ago and which is now paid just like everything else is by borrowing and printing.
As to the military spending, you are correct, that's another huge debt based Government program designed to enrich a few. The Wall street financial institutions are bad, but at least they did not kill millions of people around the world as opposed to all of the US military invasions.
The issue is that Greece cannot devalue it's own currency, as the US can through the Fed. It is forced to keep the Euro, and France and Germany do not want their currency devalued. Fiat money systems are purposefully designed that way - the restrictions of gold based currencies were the cause of massive crashes in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
- except that it is the creation of Fed and the fiat money printing that caused the 'Great' depression rather than gold standard, and Nixon got rid of the gold standard to pay for more of his programs, you can't print gold. Saying that gold is responsible for massive crashes is basically insane.
They've been able to print money and control interest rates since the mid 1930s. America has had a good debt level for most of those years - only when taxes were cut for the wealthy in the 80s did real investment in production stop.
- Investment in production stopped because of tax cuts? Do you understand what income tax is? Income tax is a disincentive to reinvest, like a consumption tax would be the disincentive to consume. However the production decline in US has to do with Government propping up Monopolies by printing money (not gold) and giving it away at low interest rates and by creating regulation that reduce competition by creating barriers to entry. Only the biggest can survive when you have to comply with endless regulations. Monopolies though were bad in one specific way for US economy. As the USSR collapsed and the markets globalized, the Monopolies had the ability to move their production to places with low production costs (China).
Moving jobs away to China due to Globalization is done by Monopolies to escape the expensive regulations, the taxes, the minimum wage laws, the unions. It makes perfect sense to move production away to low costs zones especially when you gain from economy of scale and Monopolies do gain there. Middle size and small size business cannot gain as much from moving production as huge, Government created Monopolies.
Mid-thirties is mid-depression years that were ended by the WWII and then, because US has gained the most out of that war than any other country and because its home was not devastated by the war, the US was able to grow their economy the most.
The great FAILURE of the Keynesian ideas was that it predicted that once the war ends, the US would be in worse shape because of all of the men returning from the war would cause a huge unemployment in the minds of Keynesians. The Austrian school predicted correctly that there would be a boom following the war as the women would quit the work force but more importantly because there would be a huge supply of cheap labor and resources would free from fighting a war (which in case of Austrian school is seen as a burden, as opposed to the Keynesians, who see a war as just another huge Government consumption project.) Keynesians are shamans, not economists.
You call the printing, the borrowing and spending a success of Keynesian school?
Keynesian's main theme is that the normal economic cycles of Boom and Bust must be distorted by removing the Bust. Governments liked that because Governments shrink during a Bust and they can't have it. Government can be anything, but it cannot allow itself to shrink, that much is certain. So Keynesian ideas were perfect: never shrink anything, fight the business boom/bust cycle by creating artificial demand instead of allowing
Except that how do you suggest getting rid of it without getting rid of the entire Economy as it stands right now on the printing press of the Governments, who are in so much debt because they all need to be reelected and thus all of their efforts are about taking on more and more debt to continue the illusion of the good times.
Somebody will have to pay the debt. Question is: will anybody really pay it?
Greece has no ability to print Euro (not legal ability anyway, I am sure they can print it somehow somewhere in a basement), Greeks are used to their Government handing out a pretty sweet life there. The party will last as long as someone finances it.
US has all the ability to print the USD in the world, US is in worse shape than Greece is in terms of the total debt amount.
Greece decided to go the unpopular road and make good on the debt and this pissed off the Greeks something awful, they don't want to pay! Their Government decided to pay 100cents on the borrowed dollar + interest. Now, the people who were lending money to Greece did the same thing that the people who lent money for the sub-par mortgages. They lent the money to Greece and probably also repackaged the debt into some SIVs and sold it off.
This debt, all the debt of all the debtor nations, that's the stuff that fuels the markets. It's free money that is being printed, it's the crazy low interest rates that allow banks to borrow at almost nothing.
When you have all that insane cash around, it's easy to see how it becomes target of various schemes, like betting against certain SIVs, short bets against the debt that is known not to be payable.
However. Greece decided to bite the bullet and pay. This means cutting spending and increasing taxes.
Will US do that when it is cornered into the same question? No. Of-course it will not. Will ANY politician in US say to the 'voters': You have to bite the bullet. There is no money for Medicare. There is no money for Social Security checks. There is no money for any Government run program. However here is a nice new tax on anything that moves, all of that so we can make good our interest and principal payments to the lenders like China, Japan etc.
Do you believe that anybody in US will say: -Hell yes, let's bite the bullet and pay that debt!?
NOBODY.
Nobody will say that. The US will end up doing what it does: it will monetize the debt, print more and more USD to buy back the bonds and treasuries that will be sold off at an increasing rate, who wants the useless USD, who wants to hold the debt that is known to be paid in useless money that will inflate faster than the interest payments can ever make up for?
This. This is caused by the Government borrowing and spending without any production to back up the transactions. Do you really think that Governments can do anything at all to stop the markets, to stop the wheel turning? The Government is NOT interested in stopping anything because it WILL trigger the sell off and decline of USD.
However the BIG Sell Off is coming whether the Governments do anything or not.
The difference between US and Greece is this: Greece is in Euro and cannot print, so it either quits Euro and goes back to Drachma and prints the money into oblivion causing a crash of its bonds/treasuries/currency OR Greece bites the bullet. Greek's Government for some reason decided to go the High Road and to be Honest for some reason, I need to figure it out.
US will NEVER do this, it's impossible. It will print and print USD into hyper-inflation.
So when you say:
work has ceased to become a rewarded function.
, just understand that for a Government work has ceased being a rewarded function long time ago, when the government decided it can print money and set interest rates. That's the primary problem.
Why would anyone want to own a US stock now if they are not a speculator but actually an investor? That is really not where you want to be and not where you wanted to be or the past 5 years for sure.
As a speculator you may win a lot of money you can also lose a lot of money, but as an investor you want to be in a market that actually produces something and in stocks that pay dividends, such as agriculture/mining, but don't be in any currency, they are all going to be printed into non-existence, it's definitely better to be in gold than in a currency. But it is crazy to be in US stock markets if you just want an investment.
so I see. A giant 'catch a bug' party for everyone? Do you think majority would do this to themselves maybe to solve the problem for the future generations? Why would anyone sacrifice themselves for the future generations ever, that's a stupid thing to do.
When in Canada, I always vote Conservative or Libertarian, no way in Hell will I ever vote for the Liberals, Green or whatever, and you cannot stab me enough times with a knife for me to ever vote NDP, it's just impossible.
However I do not like Harper for this kind of behavior, but at least he is an accountant or economist of some sort, that at least is better than a lawyer, he knows something about money.
I tried your approach with the balls that I couldn't play...
- took me a while to come back into my senses after the cold feelings of horror have gone through my spine column and I forced myself to reread that statement.
Oh Your God, I can sell Moderation Points for Money? Where where, how to who?
Mod Points, Mod Points, Fresh out of the/. bakery! Get them here, get them now! Now with only 4 easy payments of 19.99!!!!
Seriously though, I think the time pressure is worse than the money pressure. Also take into account that money pressure is relative: if you are making $100/hour, then $120 is not such an outrageous amount for you to panic, but if you are offered $1000/hour after only making $100/hour, that's a different story.
Well, I did the sacrilegious thing, I read TFA:( Sorry.
So that's not what the thesis is. The thesis is that by offering to receive a very large reward as opposed to offering to receive a small reward without paying attention to the time, the people were driven to enter this mode of behavior, where they stopped thinking creatively and tried to solve the problem by brute force, without any regard the real question at hand. People who were offered large reward if they solved the problem quicker, actually did worse (took more time and did not come up with the optimal solution) on average than those, who were offered a small reward and where time did not matter (they saved about a third of time it looks like and came up with the optimal solution that corresponded to the actual requirements correctly.)
So what TFA is saying is that offering a lot of money quickly prevents people from actually doing a good job quickly and that they take on average more time then to do a worse job. It's like TFA is saying that people enter some sort of a panic mode and cannot think straight because of the money involved.
This is a disaster! Flash must be made into a pariah or maybe just a piranha of the Internet. It became a de-facto standard for playing video in a browser and supplanted development of an open standard, which was so late to arrive obviously, it only has appeared in html5. It is insane, if the rest of the Internet was based on similar technology, closed down, depending on a single company, there would have been no Internet, and now Android doing this (probably just to show itself as a more 'competitive' platform to iPhone).
I just had a tear I think, well somewhere on the inside of my mind...:(
more importantly, what happens if there is an asteroid that is about to hit the Earth in a year's time, can we still rely on the ocean Oil drillers to help out, was Bruce Willis available for a comment?
There is the fundamental problem of drilling in the ocean, never mind what government thinks it can regulate and what an Oil driller thinks they can handle, the pressure from the 5000 feet of water/soil is huge, it pushes the light Oil out of the reserve and up, I wonder if it is not possible for the opening to widen into something gigantic, like a crater that doesn't just trickle the oil as it is doing now but is gushing it out through some enormous opening a few hundred meters wide.
How much Oil is there underneath that water and rock right now, does anybody know? What is the worst case scenario if all of it is pushed to the top?
I just had a tear I think, well somewhere on the inside of my mind...:)
finally, finally, man I hate Flash, I want everyone who used flash on their sites to suffer from this decision:) Sorry, just can't control my feelings of happiness right now:)
You only need one thing: stop increasing the spending ceiling.
That's it. There won't be a need for 'repealing' any new regulations, laws, the Government has spent itself out long time ago, it is constantly borrowing and printing and interest rates are outrageous.
There is a reason why the US Government continuously borrows against its debt in 30 day periods and not buying 30 year loans, it's because if it tried doing that, the interest rate for 30 year bonds would actually go through the roof and since US is Keynesian, this would mean that all of the debt based economy would stop, everyone would default.
But this is only a matter of time now, probably months.
I am a libertarian, while you can definitely call that a 'conservative' (minus the religion, I am an atheist), you cannot argue that libertarians are for any of the government programs at all, including wars, socialized medical care, socialized anything, income taxes, subverting the Constitution etc.
Any new regulations, be it financial, health insurance, fcc, cdc, whatever, has to be paid for somehow, doesn't it?
In the past 10 years the Federal budget in US has grown by a factor of 2, that probably means that the Government is twice as big now as it was then.
Show of hands who here makes 2 times the money now as they made 10 years ago? I know I don't.
What about the Economy, is it twice as big, twice as strong, produced twice as many goods, created twice as many jobs, anything at all that doubled beside unemployment?
Didn't think so.
The US Government at this point is living on borrowed time, so does the US Dollar and the entire country. Question is, what is going to happen when the time runs out? I dread to think of the possibilities, wars, dictatorships, hunger, sickness, mass exodus.
Apple is bi or multisexual, its customer love having unprotected sex with Apple (and Jobs by proxy... hmmmm... jobs, what kind of jobs I wonder) and you know, Apple's customers are of all genders I think.
Slashdot Mirror
Social Security has never cost the US Government a dime.
- a pyramid scheme, money from which were spent long time ago and which is now paid just like everything else is by borrowing and printing.
As to the military spending, you are correct, that's another huge debt based Government program designed to enrich a few. The Wall street financial institutions are bad, but at least they did not kill millions of people around the world as opposed to all of the US military invasions.
The issue is that Greece cannot devalue it's own currency, as the US can through the Fed. It is forced to keep the Euro, and France and Germany do not want their currency devalued. Fiat money systems are purposefully designed that way - the restrictions of gold based currencies were the cause of massive crashes in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
- except that it is the creation of Fed and the fiat money printing that caused the 'Great' depression rather than gold standard, and Nixon got rid of the gold standard to pay for more of his programs, you can't print gold. Saying that gold is responsible for massive crashes is basically insane.
They've been able to print money and control interest rates since the mid 1930s. America has had a good debt level for most of those years - only when taxes were cut for the wealthy in the 80s did real investment in production stop.
- Investment in production stopped because of tax cuts? Do you understand what income tax is? Income tax is a disincentive to reinvest, like a consumption tax would be the disincentive to consume. However the production decline in US has to do with Government propping up Monopolies by printing money (not gold) and giving it away at low interest rates and by creating regulation that reduce competition by creating barriers to entry. Only the biggest can survive when you have to comply with endless regulations. Monopolies though were bad in one specific way for US economy. As the USSR collapsed and the markets globalized, the Monopolies had the ability to move their production to places with low production costs (China).
Moving jobs away to China due to Globalization is done by Monopolies to escape the expensive regulations, the taxes, the minimum wage laws, the unions. It makes perfect sense to move production away to low costs zones especially when you gain from economy of scale and Monopolies do gain there. Middle size and small size business cannot gain as much from moving production as huge, Government created Monopolies.
Mid-thirties is mid-depression years that were ended by the WWII and then, because US has gained the most out of that war than any other country and because its home was not devastated by the war, the US was able to grow their economy the most.
The great FAILURE of the Keynesian ideas was that it predicted that once the war ends, the US would be in worse shape because of all of the men returning from the war would cause a huge unemployment in the minds of Keynesians. The Austrian school predicted correctly that there would be a boom following the war as the women would quit the work force but more importantly because there would be a huge supply of cheap labor and resources would free from fighting a war (which in case of Austrian school is seen as a burden, as opposed to the Keynesians, who see a war as just another huge Government consumption project.) Keynesians are shamans, not economists.
You call the printing, the borrowing and spending a success of Keynesian school?
Keynesian's main theme is that the normal economic cycles of Boom and Bust must be distorted by removing the Bust. Governments liked that because Governments shrink during a Bust and they can't have it. Government can be anything, but it cannot allow itself to shrink, that much is certain. So Keynesian ideas were perfect: never shrink anything, fight the business boom/bust cycle by creating artificial demand instead of allowing
Except that how do you suggest getting rid of it without getting rid of the entire Economy as it stands right now on the printing press of the Governments, who are in so much debt because they all need to be reelected and thus all of their efforts are about taking on more and more debt to continue the illusion of the good times.
Somebody will have to pay the debt. Question is: will anybody really pay it?
Greece has no ability to print Euro (not legal ability anyway, I am sure they can print it somehow somewhere in a basement), Greeks are used to their Government handing out a pretty sweet life there. The party will last as long as someone finances it.
US has all the ability to print the USD in the world, US is in worse shape than Greece is in terms of the total debt amount.
Greece decided to go the unpopular road and make good on the debt and this pissed off the Greeks something awful, they don't want to pay! Their Government decided to pay 100cents on the borrowed dollar + interest. Now, the people who were lending money to Greece did the same thing that the people who lent money for the sub-par mortgages. They lent the money to Greece and probably also repackaged the debt into some SIVs and sold it off.
This debt, all the debt of all the debtor nations, that's the stuff that fuels the markets. It's free money that is being printed, it's the crazy low interest rates that allow banks to borrow at almost nothing.
When you have all that insane cash around, it's easy to see how it becomes target of various schemes, like betting against certain SIVs, short bets against the debt that is known not to be payable.
However. Greece decided to bite the bullet and pay. This means cutting spending and increasing taxes.
Will US do that when it is cornered into the same question? No. Of-course it will not. Will ANY politician in US say to the 'voters': You have to bite the bullet. There is no money for Medicare. There is no money for Social Security checks. There is no money for any Government run program. However here is a nice new tax on anything that moves, all of that so we can make good our interest and principal payments to the lenders like China, Japan etc.
Do you believe that anybody in US will say: -Hell yes, let's bite the bullet and pay that debt!?
NOBODY.
Nobody will say that. The US will end up doing what it does: it will monetize the debt, print more and more USD to buy back the bonds and treasuries that will be sold off at an increasing rate, who wants the useless USD, who wants to hold the debt that is known to be paid in useless money that will inflate faster than the interest payments can ever make up for?
This. This is caused by the Government borrowing and spending without any production to back up the transactions. Do you really think that Governments can do anything at all to stop the markets, to stop the wheel turning? The Government is NOT interested in stopping anything because it WILL trigger the sell off and decline of USD.
However the BIG Sell Off is coming whether the Governments do anything or not.
The difference between US and Greece is this: Greece is in Euro and cannot print, so it either quits Euro and goes back to Drachma and prints the money into oblivion causing a crash of its bonds/treasuries/currency OR Greece bites the bullet. Greek's Government for some reason decided to go the High Road and to be Honest for some reason, I need to figure it out.
US will NEVER do this, it's impossible. It will print and print USD into hyper-inflation.
So when you say:
work has ceased to become a rewarded function.
, just understand that for a Government work has ceased being a rewarded function long time ago, when the government decided it can print money and set interest rates. That's the primary problem.
I also need to get rid of some keys, where does his girlfriend live, I am moving?
Why would anyone want to own a US stock now if they are not a speculator but actually an investor? That is really not where you want to be and not where you wanted to be or the past 5 years for sure.
As a speculator you may win a lot of money you can also lose a lot of money, but as an investor you want to be in a market that actually produces something and in stocks that pay dividends, such as agriculture/mining, but don't be in any currency, they are all going to be printed into non-existence, it's definitely better to be in gold than in a currency. But it is crazy to be in US stock markets if you just want an investment.
all that trouble with the fake 'e' come to a crashing halt as the hacker appears to be dyslexic.
so I see. A giant 'catch a bug' party for everyone? Do you think majority would do this to themselves maybe to solve the problem for the future generations? Why would anyone sacrifice themselves for the future generations ever, that's a stupid thing to do.
When in Canada, I always vote Conservative or Libertarian, no way in Hell will I ever vote for the Liberals, Green or whatever, and you cannot stab me enough times with a knife for me to ever vote NDP, it's just impossible.
However I do not like Harper for this kind of behavior, but at least he is an accountant or economist of some sort, that at least is better than a lawyer, he knows something about money.
This is interesting, because this is a story about a huge beaver dyke that can be seen from space.
I'll create a GUI interface using Visual Basic, see if I can track an IP address.
I read your comment as so:
I tried your approach with the balls that I couldn't play...
- took me a while to come back into my senses after the cold feelings of horror have gone through my spine column and I forced myself to reread that statement.
Magnetosphere is easy, all you need to do is
I am not sure where you learned your humor, but you and it are also quite distant it seems.
Now, that you are a knight, which Trojan horse will you be riding on?
Congratulations though!
Oh Your God, I can sell Moderation Points for Money? Where where, how to who?
Mod Points, Mod Points, Fresh out of the /. bakery! Get them here, get them now! Now with only 4 easy payments of 19.99!!!!
Seriously though, I think the time pressure is worse than the money pressure. Also take into account that money pressure is relative: if you are making $100/hour, then $120 is not such an outrageous amount for you to panic, but if you are offered $1000/hour after only making $100/hour, that's a different story.
Well, I did the sacrilegious thing, I read TFA :( Sorry.
So that's not what the thesis is. The thesis is that by offering to receive a very large reward as opposed to offering to receive a small reward without paying attention to the time, the people were driven to enter this mode of behavior, where they stopped thinking creatively and tried to solve the problem by brute force, without any regard the real question at hand. People who were offered large reward if they solved the problem quicker, actually did worse (took more time and did not come up with the optimal solution) on average than those, who were offered a small reward and where time did not matter (they saved about a third of time it looks like and came up with the optimal solution that corresponded to the actual requirements correctly.)
So what TFA is saying is that offering a lot of money quickly prevents people from actually doing a good job quickly and that they take on average more time then to do a worse job. It's like TFA is saying that people enter some sort of a panic mode and cannot think straight because of the money involved.
This was my comment on the previous /. story about Flash not going to be supported under iPhone, moded 'Troll' as you see. My current comment is the exact opposite of that one.
This is a disaster! Flash must be made into a pariah or maybe just a piranha of the Internet. It became a de-facto standard for playing video in a browser and supplanted development of an open standard, which was so late to arrive obviously, it only has appeared in html5. It is insane, if the rest of the Internet was based on similar technology, closed down, depending on a single company, there would have been no Internet, and now Android doing this (probably just to show itself as a more 'competitive' platform to iPhone).
I just had a tear I think, well somewhere on the inside of my mind... :(
Formaldehyde is an organic material, and I would not want that put into my body in any great quantity.
- that's because you are not as cool yet as a pharaoh.
Is it like some sort of a water bag/pocket, only if it tears it will not leak, is it sort of like Jelo?
The story has no details, it's water + clay + some organic stuff.
Sounds like what god was using to throw together the first human prototype. Are these guys from Tokyo god?
more importantly, what happens if there is an asteroid that is about to hit the Earth in a year's time, can we still rely on the ocean Oil drillers to help out, was Bruce Willis available for a comment?
There is the fundamental problem of drilling in the ocean, never mind what government thinks it can regulate and what an Oil driller thinks they can handle, the pressure from the 5000 feet of water/soil is huge, it pushes the light Oil out of the reserve and up, I wonder if it is not possible for the opening to widen into something gigantic, like a crater that doesn't just trickle the oil as it is doing now but is gushing it out through some enormous opening a few hundred meters wide.
How much Oil is there underneath that water and rock right now, does anybody know? What is the worst case scenario if all of it is pushed to the top?
I just had a tear I think, well somewhere on the inside of my mind... :)
finally, finally, man I hate Flash, I want everyone who used flash on their sites to suffer from this decision :) Sorry, just can't control my feelings of happiness right now :)
HTML5, here we go.
You only need one thing: stop increasing the spending ceiling.
That's it. There won't be a need for 'repealing' any new regulations, laws, the Government has spent itself out long time ago, it is constantly borrowing and printing and interest rates are outrageous.
There is a reason why the US Government continuously borrows against its debt in 30 day periods and not buying 30 year loans, it's because if it tried doing that, the interest rate for 30 year bonds would actually go through the roof and since US is Keynesian, this would mean that all of the debt based economy would stop, everyone would default.
But this is only a matter of time now, probably months.
I am a libertarian, while you can definitely call that a 'conservative' (minus the religion, I am an atheist), you cannot argue that libertarians are for any of the government programs at all, including wars, socialized medical care, socialized anything, income taxes, subverting the Constitution etc.
Any new regulations, be it financial, health insurance, fcc, cdc, whatever, has to be paid for somehow, doesn't it?
In the past 10 years the Federal budget in US has grown by a factor of 2, that probably means that the Government is twice as big now as it was then.
Show of hands who here makes 2 times the money now as they made 10 years ago? I know I don't.
What about the Economy, is it twice as big, twice as strong, produced twice as many goods, created twice as many jobs, anything at all that doubled beside unemployment?
Didn't think so.
The US Government at this point is living on borrowed time, so does the US Dollar and the entire country. Question is, what is going to happen when the time runs out? I dread to think of the possibilities, wars, dictatorships, hunger, sickness, mass exodus.
Bright side? It also could be fun shooting.
Apple is bi or multisexual, its customer love having unprotected sex with Apple (and Jobs by proxy... hmmmm... jobs, what kind of jobs I wonder) and you know, Apple's customers are of all genders I think.
I suppose there is an App for that, iSex anyone?