So the only way to make sure that people in a Volvo ALMOST never get killed is to make it a tank. It better be a huge one too, in case a train hits it. Still, probably won't do good against another Volvo tank.
It should weigh 80 tons and go no faster than 120km/h. At that point the survivability for Volvo drivers will be almost completely assured. I am not that positive about drivers of other cars, pedestrians, houses, bridges and even roads though.
I am very sorry for the people, you know, I feel terrible that such bad times are coming. But they are coming, there very very close and no amount of regulation and spending by the government can do anything about it.
Government can never do anything about economy except for making things worse. For some reason, which still eludes me, many people believe that government must have a role in economy. This is perplexing, after all, the government is not supposed to be a for profit outfit. They are supposed to do things that will not normally be done by private enterprise, for example building interstate roads and such (I am not American, I can't be certain of all the things that government really is doing in the States.)
One of my points is that it is nonsensical to expect any entity in this world to be able to control the uncontrollable. Economy is like weather, it has a billion variables and they all change all the time. Economy is not a static system, it is constantly changing. Any new born human, any new store, any closing restaurant, any new shipping company, any new invention, any new efficiency, any war, any incident, all of those things have an effect, nothing can control those incidents.
But on the grand schema of things, you know, on the macro-economic level, the government can do things. Bad things. They do them for their own purposes with their own understanding. Artificially pushing interest rates down, printing new fiat dollars, removing the backing of the dollar by the gold, coming up with legislation for 'fairness'. Attempting to meddle with economy in any way, will always always always always always be to the detriment of the economy.
Now, government can force environmental standards, prohibit illegal use of monopolies for killing competition and such. This is also detrimental in one sense, but can be beneficial in another. However flooding market with phony dollars, that is definitely going to have a detrimental effect.
Imagine this: the dollars are understood to be phony by the outside to the US world. The world that lends money to the US. US owes tens of trillions in debt and this debt cannot be repaid.
From point of view of a single citizen (you know, they used to be citizens before they were all changed to consumers), this is a catastrophe. No more money is given on credit, whatever can be borrowed will have enormous interest rate. If the interest rate is not pushed up, the dollar will fall to 0. Simply to 0. It will happen the way it happened in many countries for the past 100 years.
Imagine buying a loaf of bread for $100 in the morning, and by the evening realizing that now bread costs $1000. $10000 in 5 days from then, $1,000,000 in a month, $1,000,000,000 in half a year. That is not impossible. That is what happens when government gets their hands into economics. They don't actually understand economics, even worse, it is not in their best interests to act upon understanding of economics.
Don't expect a man to understand something, is his job relies on not understanding it.
So why am I saying this? Well, recession is here. Government will attempt to maintain the phony dollar and will create hyper-inflation by pushing interest rates down. People will freak out and will stop buying everything except food and probably energy (you know, for heating and such.)
Goods will become scarce, as lender countries will stop lending. The problem is, once they stop lending, the US will have nothing to buy outside products with. This is bad news, at that point it is going to be a depression and probably a deflation of resources and goods that are of not essential value (not food).
In a situation like this the following will happen:
1. Government will fix prices. Obviously this will cause shortages, nobody in their right mind will want to sell for nothing. USD will be nothing. 2. Shortages will cause panic and probably hunger and anger. 3. Whoever has any means left will attempt to flee the country. O
you don't know the half of it, peasant, hope you enjoyed that dollar while it lasted. So far you've been able to fill in that 'purchase basket' of yours with those credit dollars, I wonder what you'll do when the supply is cut out...
A more correct question would be this: in the world where the main currency is failing, dying actually, in the country where government regulations have destroyed the monetary system, the education system, created the credit bubble, helped creating a number of generations of people, whose only purpose seems to be the sense of entitlement in itself, in this world and country, how can the existing Internet be used finally to remove this crappy government from power and to start using logic and rationality where there is none so far.
What can the Internet do to save the people from their government?
Well, I was actually the best student in my history class, I also was pretty good at economics, thus I can easily counter your extremely uninformed points.
their decline has resulted in the collapse we have today. (pro-tip: stagnant wages, thanks to the decline of unions, plus inflating prices = foreclosures). - so you believe that it is the decline of unions that brought on the foreclosures.
Unions had their purpose early on, when the corporations figuratively and sometimes literally raped their workers, that was the case in manufacturing. Today manufacturing seems to do rather well without unions, even wages, vacation time and other perks are on par with non-union workers. But forget about that, I like this, I like how I can point out huge ignorance in the following:
Foreclosures, about which you seem to complain, are not in fact resulting from lack of unions. Surely, you cannot deny that the manufacturing sector has been outsourced from this continent for sometime now to cheaper places to run, like China, Korea, Vietnam etc. Once the manufacturing jobs are gone, what is really left to do for the poor, uneducated shmacks? Oh, I know, I know, let's have a 'service economy'. Let's pretend that by providing discretionary services, which is a concept purely internal to the country, can somehow be equated with a real economy, based on manufacturing. Let's pretend that the dollar is still worth something, even though the exports from the country have been on a steady decline from each previous year to the each next one.
Now, that we have a 'service economy', what do we do when we actually need a manufactured product? Oh, I know, I know, let's import these products from these cheap places, like China.
But what do we give the Chinese in lieu of the fruits of their labor? I know, I know, let's give them the greenbacks. Of-course, it makes perfect sense. What are they going to do with all those greens? Well, they can exchange that 'money' for their own currency. So now the central Chinese (and other Asian) banks have many of these dollars. Wonderful, what are they going to get for them? After all, they can't exchange these 'money' back for any real American exports. America is exporting war, not love, so what to do? Oh, they just buy the t-bonds. Makes some sense, doesn't it? But what happens if those t-bonds become worthless and how could that even happen? Well, that is what happens when instead of a real economy, country has a 'service economy' and the only remaining thing that can grow in value is some stocks and house prices. So there is so much money pumped back from the Chinese, that US people don't know what to do with them, luckily there is this new cool idea - the Internet! So they pump billions into worthless internet stocks. That bubble burst, but it wasn't too bad. W came to power and his crony, Greenspan simply pushed the interest rate down artificially. That's all it takes to push the problem away, not to solve it, just to hide it.
Meanwhile, there is still all this green 'money' around, it's cheap, it's flowing back. The interest rates are artificially lowered, so it's cheap to borrow, though it should really be expensive to borrow, because people have no real purchasing power in 'service economy'. They don't really produce anything! But the money is cheap, at some point it's so cheap, you can 'buy' a house even without any collateral at all, no down-payment. No down payment? Shit, everyone should buy a house, there is no risk to the buyer! If the house flops, just walk away. So the lender carries the risk. But the lender is smart, he 'securitizes' the risk, repackages and sells it, and who buys it? Mutual funds, t-bonds are financed by these sub-prime mortgages. This is something now, the actual value of the dollar is completely gone.
Foreclosures now? Just wait until Asia stops lending the US money at all, and then the inflow of products stop. No products, no money, maybe not even food or energy. Nothing, but plenty of gu
You know, if you actually knew anything about economics, and did something other than listen to journalists sensationalize the situation and try to scare everyone into watching their new info on how to survive, you might realize the economic situation isn't that bad. - ok, let's start from this. You believe that you know something about economy and that my understanding that it is the fundamentals that are broken is flawed, let's go over your comment.
We're experiencing a burst of a bubble. But that bubble is relatively small in the grand scheme of things. People aren't broke, the money is in the economy, the banks and lending institutions are broke. So we can't take out any more loans because we're over committed already, but there is no lack of cash flow, its in the enviroment moving, not tied up in some bank vault. - you put many things into this paragraph.
1. Burst of a bubble. - this is true, but this is a credit bubble, not a housing bubble specifically, not even a stock bubble. This is a bubble created by the fed that forced the interest rates down artificially. 2. Certainly the bubble itself is not a big deal, the problem is not the bubble. Bursting this bubble is necessary, it will force the folks to stop spending and start saving. 3. People are broke though, this is where you are wrong. People don't have good jobs, they don't have any savings left either. Whatever capital they believed they had was in the inflated property values, which are crashing obviously and for a good reason. Lending institutions are broke because the fed pushed the interest rates down and so getting into debt was cheap. Mortgage sellers gave loans to too many people and to people who cannot pay the money back. So it would seem it's the mortgage sellers problem, but in reality where did these mortgages go? The banks don't hold them anymore, they 'securitize' them, repackage them, sell them, where are these mortgages, can anyone follow? They are now owned by pension funds, mutual funds, (for Canadians those are their RRSPs for example). Is it really the lending institutions that are broke? No, it's pensions. 4. You can't take loans anymore, loans will become expensive. This will cause reduction in purchases obviously, but more importantly is not this, it's the very close realization of the rest of the world and USA cannot be trusted to repay the debt. No debt will be repaid. USD will be worth nothing at this point. That's going to be the problem. With the USD worth nothing, with a huge debt to repay in some other ways, and without those means to repay the debt, nobody will lend money to America anymore. Realize that the money that US is using to purchase goods from the outside world are all borrowed.
You are correct, it's 'faith' that holds this economy together, but it's not subjective faith anymore. It's objective. US does not have enough exports to get currency of other countries, and the dollar is printed and discounted and will be worth nothing now. When the rest of the manufacturing world finally comes to its senses, it will stop lending real money to the States. Without those money, there will be no way buy anything. You are not seeing the big picture, USA will experience shortages of basic goods and even food.
You believe what you want to believe, my opinion does not change the simple fact: the trust to America is gone, it cannot repay its debt, it will not have any more real money to buy goods produced by other countries, because it can give nothing, absolutely nothing back in return. USD is paper, it's no longer even gold, but forget gold. It's not backed up by production.
Sure, I am not an economist, but I am getting ready to move money out of dollars (Canadian, we are too tied to the States). Cheers.
By encouraging the rest of the world to share our delusion, with force if necessary. - highly unlikely. The sentiment is not the same, there is no resolve in the current US population to start yet another war, I don't believe. Even if they wanted to, who would they attack and for what purpose? I doubt anyone would want to be an ally, not in that kind of war, and whoever gets attacked will most likely get support from the rest, because in this case, there would be no guarantees at all that they wouldn't be next. No, this is very very unlikely, what you are implying now.
Obviously this is what is happening right now, this uncontrollable infusion of cash by the guvmnt is going to cause the USD to plummet so low, and the interest rate will go sky high (who can trust anyone with a loan anymore?) the property values will dive. Lack of production capacity will guarantee that nobody will trust the States with being able to repay the debt. More fun to follow as the rest of the world will stop lending money to the US and thus the Americans will no longer be able to buy the goods they have so far enjoyed, unfortunately these goods include food, energy, clothing, machines and so on. Imagine shortages, line ups for food, food stamps for all, explosion of criminal incidents, introduction of state of emergency with the martial law, basically implementation of the Insurrection Act, things like travel restriction, various mandatory obligations for 'the good of the nation' etc. Think this is impossible?
it has everything to do with economy, except that it is not only economy right now. The way economy is now did not happen in the last year. It happened over the course of he last 15 year, as manufacturing was moved out of the US, people speculated more and more on things they didn't understand (first the internet bubble, now the mortgage bubble, both of which are really just credit bubbles) and the fact that the interest rates in the US were artificially pushed down to prevent the real cost of getting into debt from stopping people from making really stupid and bad decisions.
but for people who are just starting out, such as recent university grads, it really only makes sense to do something like that if one is more concerned with "stamping out the evil" than in just having a decent-paying job in the field that they spent a heck of a lot of money to get recognizably qualified in - funny, I always thought that if anyone was anti-establishment, it's the university/college students, ah well.
I do have to chuckle at the backlash against the UAW. The UAW is evil because they "bent the big three over the table during the fat years" by demanding profit sharing, and reaping fat bonuses for their workers. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart is evil because they don't provide benefits, make employees work unpaid overtime, and their management gets fat bonuses.... - I think that you will find that the people who bash WalMart are not the same people who bash UAW. For example I am always anti-union, so I was only cheering for WalMart when they closed a store here in Canada because they did want to allow a union in the doors. So this is the exception I take with your comment, everything else there seems to be fair.
Economy (not just US economy, but especially US) is in deep f.cking shit. This is a symptom. You see, very little is actually produced in the US at this point, but more regulations, lawsuits, patents, various copyrighted materials like movies/music are still made there (I live in Canada, we are not far away from this problem here also, except that our movies/music sucks even more.)
When there is nothing to produce except for more laws/regulations, meaningless, useless, obvious patents and lawsuits, and also the greenback, at this point you have to ask yourself a question: how is this economy, that borrows so much from the rest of the world and then buys the products from the rest of the world going to pay the freaking debt? What is it, 10 trillion in debt at least?
Anyway, I read TFPatent and thought to myself: holy shit. In 1998 I worked on a system for a purchase basket for a promotions company and I had to display thumbnails on the HTML page too.
In fact various stores and also porn sites would be great at showing prior art to this BS patent.
Well, you know, it's posted medium, it's hard to interpret what is meant exactly by any text that stands on its own, especially when it can be easily read multiple ways, and I am a bit paranoid probably, maybe I see twists where there are none:)
This 'BS' about not signing, it wouldn't be BS if everyone had principles not to sign these BS papers. I am not kidding you, it's difficult to fight all by yourself against this garbage when most people apparently don't care. I do, modify these clauses. I did turn down a contract that I couldn't bear myself to sign and the client did not budge. This things happen, however I don't know why more people don't at least attempt to negotiate these things. Most of the time it works (well it works for me.)
I am saying that NCAs are anti-competitive and that the contractors and permanent employees should not sign them, because it works against their own interests as well as against promotion of competition.
It is not the market that promotes NCAs, it is the complacency of those, signing such agreements even to their own detriment. No pure system is going to exist for too long because people are not principled, only principles can maintain purity of any system, this includes capitalism.
Companies coming up with NCAs and NDAs do not promote competition and thus they do not promote capitalism. Corporations do not care for any purity in the system, they just want to get ahead no matter what that means. Lobbying the governments, subverting the judicial system, recklessly neglecting the problems they create in environment around them. Yes, environment is part of any corporate strategy. Dumping billions of tons of garbage and pollution is always easier than making sure that the environment does not suffer. However corporations prefer to do so where they can avoid taking care of their own pollution.
By taking away from environment and not fixing the problems that they create, corporations take the profits and then share the responsibility for the clean ups among the rest of the population. That's where the people really must step up and force the corporations to clean up their mess. Of-course this will make the products cost more, but in reality all it means is that the product will bear the actual real costs and will not hide the cost in the polluted environment.
NCAs and NDAs are a similar situation, where corporations like to take resources (employees/contractors) from the environment, in which they create their products/services and then, once the corporations don't need those resources for any reason, they would like the society to bear the costs of having experienced resources not being able to do the jobs they are good at by getting hired for competitors (thus reducing the total costs of these products to the society by sharing their experience).
So, corporations, when unchecked, will not promote capitalism or competition or fairness. This is not really the point. My point is that one way of keeping them in check is by refusing to sign the NDAs and NCAs and such.
protectionism by private companies when it starts infringing on ability of people to find employment is anti competitive and is not capitalism. Corporations will attempt to do so, but it must be fought by the employees.
I said nothing about government making NCA/NDA illegal, I said people must chose not to sign it, then the corporations will not have a choice but to hire people regardless of these NCAs/NDAs not being signed. Of-course government involvement creates protectionism and is also not capitalism, but any protectionism at all is anti-competitive and in real capitalism wouldn't be able to exist.
However this is not what I am talking about, I am talking about principles of the people who chose to sign/ not sign these NCAs/NDAs.
I do not disagree with you, no need for 'boy-o'ing me, however I am still absolutely correct that the idea of protectionism is anti-capitalist.
It does not have to be the government to act in an anti-capitalist manner, private companies can and absolutely do act in such ways. NDAs and anti-competition clauses are anti-capitalist whether it's the government that requires them or a private or a public firm, whatever.
My point is that we must not simply give in and sign whatever someone wants us to sign, and that if people did have principles, such activities by the firms and other entities would not be common place, because they would never be signed.
I agree with you except for this part: You don't even really need to scratch them out, unless you are inclined to want to point out to your future employer that their contracts aren't entirely legally enforceable (which even if true can easily come across as just trying to show off or be a know-it-all, which of course is probably not what you want to do when you are just starting a brand new job). - I am anti-union, but I am pro-principle. I believe some NDAs and some anti-competition statements and entire clauses are evil in various ways and I do not want the evil to do evil to me. I am pro-intelligence and believe that others also do not want evil to be done to them. So it is my strong believe that evil must always be pointed out and it should be defeated where possible.
Crossing out certain statements/paragraphs, changing wording to be less evil and such is very necessary and if everyone was doing it there would be less evil. We should never be complacent when evil wants to hurt us. That's why I do read contracts and I do remove / change portions of contracts, if not to make them 'good' then at least to remove the excess of 'evil'.
Or, how, about, they pay you for the rest of your life. - you are being facetious but I am not certain why exactly, I suppose there is very thick sarcasm somewhere there. Certainly a company should be able to fire someone they don't need, someone who is not doing his/her job, whatever, and there if someone is fired, they are fired. If there is a contract that forces the company to pay compensation for certain types of dismissal it's all good, whatever.
However this does not have anything to do with the anti-competitive clauses that people routinely sign when they get a position. I am a contractor, haven't worked permanently since the beginning of 2001 and I do sign various NDAs, anti-competition clauses and such. But I always read them first and I modify them where I see it necessary. Most people make the mistake of not doing this and it will bite them.
NDAs and anti-competition clauses are really anti-capitalist in nature, they are protectionist ideas, they go against my system of believes. But enough about that.
Motorola stating that the unemployed people, who were fired by them must not be allowed to be hired by a competitor because this will cause harm to the economy of the USA is not simply mean spirited and false, it is pure evil.
It cannot be argued that an unemployed person, or a person who has good experience to do a job that requires special knowledge will harm any economy by obtaining a job that requires this expertise. However it can be argued economy gets harmed by having people who are under-utilizing their potential or simply are unemployed, collecting employment insurance or welfare or whatever. Economy suffers from this much more than from people working for competitors, because in fact working for competitors, creates more competition, whether it is fair or not, competition does what it is supposed to do.
I can't believe that anyone is even allowed to fire someone and then to prevent them from attempting to get another job anywhere they want.
One thing is when someone quits and there is a non-competition agreement, another thing is when someone is fired. Has anyone ever lost in court to a company that fired them when they started working for a competitor?
Everyone: if you are a 'permanent' employee, don't sign non-compete clauses, and if you do, at least modify them to say that if the company terminates your employment, then this clause does not apply.
Nice of Motorola, by the way, to attempt and stop people that they fired from trying to find employment, especially in this economy. If anything is going to hurt economy of the USA it's going to be millions of unemployed people.
actually, if someone did this to me and I found out who it was, I would shoot the fucker. So no, jail time is not inappropriate. It's not about $40 at all. It's about disrespect and grief that these people cause to other people.
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So the only way to make sure that people in a Volvo ALMOST never get killed is to make it a tank. It better be a huge one too, in case a train hits it. Still, probably won't do good against another Volvo tank.
It should weigh 80 tons and go no faster than 120km/h. At that point the survivability for Volvo drivers will be almost completely assured. I am not that positive about drivers of other cars, pedestrians, houses, bridges and even roads though.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these! And a beowulf cluster of those clusters! Why, I could fit them on a matchstick head, call it W. Bush's brain!
I am very sorry for the people, you know, I feel terrible that such bad times are coming. But they are coming, there very very close and no amount of regulation and spending by the government can do anything about it.
Government can never do anything about economy except for making things worse. For some reason, which still eludes me, many people believe that government must have a role in economy. This is perplexing, after all, the government is not supposed to be a for profit outfit. They are supposed to do things that will not normally be done by private enterprise, for example building interstate roads and such (I am not American, I can't be certain of all the things that government really is doing in the States.)
One of my points is that it is nonsensical to expect any entity in this world to be able to control the uncontrollable. Economy is like weather, it has a billion variables and they all change all the time. Economy is not a static system, it is constantly changing. Any new born human, any new store, any closing restaurant, any new shipping company, any new invention, any new efficiency, any war, any incident, all of those things have an effect, nothing can control those incidents.
But on the grand schema of things, you know, on the macro-economic level, the government can do things. Bad things. They do them for their own purposes with their own understanding. Artificially pushing interest rates down, printing new fiat dollars, removing the backing of the dollar by the gold, coming up with legislation for 'fairness'. Attempting to meddle with economy in any way, will always always always always always be to the detriment of the economy.
Now, government can force environmental standards, prohibit illegal use of monopolies for killing competition and such. This is also detrimental in one sense, but can be beneficial in another. However flooding market with phony dollars, that is definitely going to have a detrimental effect.
Imagine this: the dollars are understood to be phony by the outside to the US world. The world that lends money to the US. US owes tens of trillions in debt and this debt cannot be repaid.
From point of view of a single citizen (you know, they used to be citizens before they were all changed to consumers), this is a catastrophe. No more money is given on credit, whatever can be borrowed will have enormous interest rate. If the interest rate is not pushed up, the dollar will fall to 0. Simply to 0. It will happen the way it happened in many countries for the past 100 years.
Imagine buying a loaf of bread for $100 in the morning, and by the evening realizing that now bread costs $1000. $10000 in 5 days from then, $1,000,000 in a month, $1,000,000,000 in half a year. That is not impossible. That is what happens when government gets their hands into economics. They don't actually understand economics, even worse, it is not in their best interests to act upon understanding of economics.
Don't expect a man to understand something, is his job relies on not understanding it.
So why am I saying this? Well, recession is here. Government will attempt to maintain the phony dollar and will create hyper-inflation by pushing interest rates down. People will freak out and will stop buying everything except food and probably energy (you know, for heating and such.)
Goods will become scarce, as lender countries will stop lending. The problem is, once they stop lending, the US will have nothing to buy outside products with. This is bad news, at that point it is going to be a depression and probably a deflation of resources and goods that are of not essential value (not food).
In a situation like this the following will happen:
1. Government will fix prices. Obviously this will cause shortages, nobody in their right mind will want to sell for nothing. USD will be nothing.
2. Shortages will cause panic and probably hunger and anger.
3. Whoever has any means left will attempt to flee the country. O
you don't know the half of it, peasant, hope you enjoyed that dollar while it lasted. So far you've been able to fill in that 'purchase basket' of yours with those credit dollars, I wonder what you'll do when the supply is cut out...
This story is asking an irrelevant question.
A more correct question would be this: in the world where the main currency is failing, dying actually, in the country where government regulations have destroyed the monetary system, the education system, created the credit bubble, helped creating a number of generations of people, whose only purpose seems to be the sense of entitlement in itself, in this world and country, how can the existing Internet be used finally to remove this crappy government from power and to start using logic and rationality where there is none so far.
What can the Internet do to save the people from their government?
I don't know what any of this means, but I'll take it as a complement. Thanks then.
Well, I was actually the best student in my history class, I also was pretty good at economics, thus I can easily counter your extremely uninformed points.
their decline has resulted in the collapse we have today. (pro-tip: stagnant wages, thanks to the decline of unions, plus inflating prices = foreclosures). - so you believe that it is the decline of unions that brought on the foreclosures.
Unions had their purpose early on, when the corporations figuratively and sometimes literally raped their workers, that was the case in manufacturing. Today manufacturing seems to do rather well without unions, even wages, vacation time and other perks are on par with non-union workers. But forget about that, I like this, I like how I can point out huge ignorance in the following:
Foreclosures, about which you seem to complain, are not in fact resulting from lack of unions. Surely, you cannot deny that the manufacturing sector has been outsourced from this continent for sometime now to cheaper places to run, like China, Korea, Vietnam etc. Once the manufacturing jobs are gone, what is really left to do for the poor, uneducated shmacks? Oh, I know, I know, let's have a 'service economy'. Let's pretend that by providing discretionary services, which is a concept purely internal to the country, can somehow be equated with a real economy, based on manufacturing. Let's pretend that the dollar is still worth something, even though the exports from the country have been on a steady decline from each previous year to the each next one.
Now, that we have a 'service economy', what do we do when we actually need a manufactured product? Oh, I know, I know, let's import these products from these cheap places, like China.
But what do we give the Chinese in lieu of the fruits of their labor? I know, I know, let's give them the greenbacks. Of-course, it makes perfect sense. What are they going to do with all those greens? Well, they can exchange that 'money' for their own currency. So now the central Chinese (and other Asian) banks have many of these dollars. Wonderful, what are they going to get for them? After all, they can't exchange these 'money' back for any real American exports. America is exporting war, not love, so what to do? Oh, they just buy the t-bonds. Makes some sense, doesn't it? But what happens if those t-bonds become worthless and how could that even happen? Well, that is what happens when instead of a real economy, country has a 'service economy' and the only remaining thing that can grow in value is some stocks and house prices. So there is so much money pumped back from the Chinese, that US people don't know what to do with them, luckily there is this new cool idea - the Internet! So they pump billions into worthless internet stocks. That bubble burst, but it wasn't too bad. W came to power and his crony, Greenspan simply pushed the interest rate down artificially. That's all it takes to push the problem away, not to solve it, just to hide it.
Meanwhile, there is still all this green 'money' around, it's cheap, it's flowing back. The interest rates are artificially lowered, so it's cheap to borrow, though it should really be expensive to borrow, because people have no real purchasing power in 'service economy'. They don't really produce anything! But the money is cheap, at some point it's so cheap, you can 'buy' a house even without any collateral at all, no down-payment. No down payment? Shit, everyone should buy a house, there is no risk to the buyer! If the house flops, just walk away. So the lender carries the risk. But the lender is smart, he 'securitizes' the risk, repackages and sells it, and who buys it? Mutual funds, t-bonds are financed by these sub-prime mortgages. This is something now, the actual value of the dollar is completely gone.
Foreclosures now? Just wait until Asia stops lending the US money at all, and then the inflow of products stop. No products, no money, maybe not even food or energy. Nothing, but plenty of gu
You know, if you actually knew anything about economics, and did something other than listen to journalists sensationalize the situation and try to scare everyone into watching their new info on how to survive, you might realize the economic situation isn't that bad. - ok, let's start from this. You believe that you know something about economy and that my understanding that it is the fundamentals that are broken is flawed, let's go over your comment.
We're experiencing a burst of a bubble. But that bubble is relatively small in the grand scheme of things. People aren't broke, the money is in the economy, the banks and lending institutions are broke. So we can't take out any more loans because we're over committed already, but there is no lack of cash flow, its in the enviroment moving, not tied up in some bank vault. - you put many things into this paragraph.
1. Burst of a bubble. - this is true, but this is a credit bubble, not a housing bubble specifically, not even a stock bubble. This is a bubble created by the fed that forced the interest rates down artificially.
2. Certainly the bubble itself is not a big deal, the problem is not the bubble. Bursting this bubble is necessary, it will force the folks to stop spending and start saving.
3. People are broke though, this is where you are wrong. People don't have good jobs, they don't have any savings left either. Whatever capital they believed they had was in the inflated property values, which are crashing obviously and for a good reason. Lending institutions are broke because the fed pushed the interest rates down and so getting into debt was cheap. Mortgage sellers gave loans to too many people and to people who cannot pay the money back. So it would seem it's the mortgage sellers problem, but in reality where did these mortgages go? The banks don't hold them anymore, they 'securitize' them, repackage them, sell them, where are these mortgages, can anyone follow? They are now owned by pension funds, mutual funds, (for Canadians those are their RRSPs for example). Is it really the lending institutions that are broke? No, it's pensions.
4. You can't take loans anymore, loans will become expensive. This will cause reduction in purchases obviously, but more importantly is not this, it's the very close realization of the rest of the world and USA cannot be trusted to repay the debt. No debt will be repaid. USD will be worth nothing at this point. That's going to be the problem. With the USD worth nothing, with a huge debt to repay in some other ways, and without those means to repay the debt, nobody will lend money to America anymore. Realize that the money that US is using to purchase goods from the outside world are all borrowed.
You are correct, it's 'faith' that holds this economy together, but it's not subjective faith anymore. It's objective. US does not have enough exports to get currency of other countries, and the dollar is printed and discounted and will be worth nothing now. When the rest of the manufacturing world finally comes to its senses, it will stop lending real money to the States. Without those money, there will be no way buy anything. You are not seeing the big picture, USA will experience shortages of basic goods and even food.
You believe what you want to believe, my opinion does not change the simple fact: the trust to America is gone, it cannot repay its debt, it will not have any more real money to buy goods produced by other countries, because it can give nothing, absolutely nothing back in return. USD is paper, it's no longer even gold, but forget gold. It's not backed up by production.
Sure, I am not an economist, but I am getting ready to move money out of dollars (Canadian, we are too tied to the States).
Cheers.
not really, but they pretend that they do here.
By encouraging the rest of the world to share our delusion, with force if necessary. - highly unlikely. The sentiment is not the same, there is no resolve in the current US population to start yet another war, I don't believe. Even if they wanted to, who would they attack and for what purpose? I doubt anyone would want to be an ally, not in that kind of war, and whoever gets attacked will most likely get support from the rest, because in this case, there would be no guarantees at all that they wouldn't be next. No, this is very very unlikely, what you are implying now.
Obviously this is what is happening right now, this uncontrollable infusion of cash by the guvmnt is going to cause the USD to plummet so low, and the interest rate will go sky high (who can trust anyone with a loan anymore?) the property values will dive. Lack of production capacity will guarantee that nobody will trust the States with being able to repay the debt. More fun to follow as the rest of the world will stop lending money to the US and thus the Americans will no longer be able to buy the goods they have so far enjoyed, unfortunately these goods include food, energy, clothing, machines and so on. Imagine shortages, line ups for food, food stamps for all, explosion of criminal incidents, introduction of state of emergency with the martial law, basically implementation of the Insurrection Act, things like travel restriction, various mandatory obligations for 'the good of the nation' etc. Think this is impossible?
it has everything to do with economy, except that it is not only economy right now. The way economy is now did not happen in the last year. It happened over the course of he last 15 year, as manufacturing was moved out of the US, people speculated more and more on things they didn't understand (first the internet bubble, now the mortgage bubble, both of which are really just credit bubbles) and the fact that the interest rates in the US were artificially pushed down to prevent the real cost of getting into debt from stopping people from making really stupid and bad decisions.
but for people who are just starting out, such as recent university grads, it really only makes sense to do something like that if one is more concerned with "stamping out the evil" than in just having a decent-paying job in the field that they spent a heck of a lot of money to get recognizably qualified in - funny, I always thought that if anyone was anti-establishment, it's the university/college students, ah well.
I do have to chuckle at the backlash against the UAW. The UAW is evil because they "bent the big three over the table during the fat years" by demanding profit sharing, and reaping fat bonuses for their workers. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart is evil because they don't provide benefits, make employees work unpaid overtime, and their management gets fat bonuses.... - I think that you will find that the people who bash WalMart are not the same people who bash UAW. For example I am always anti-union, so I was only cheering for WalMart when they closed a store here in Canada because they did want to allow a union in the doors. So this is the exception I take with your comment, everything else there seems to be fair.
Economy (not just US economy, but especially US) is in deep f.cking shit. This is a symptom. You see, very little is actually produced in the US at this point, but more regulations, lawsuits, patents, various copyrighted materials like movies/music are still made there (I live in Canada, we are not far away from this problem here also, except that our movies/music sucks even more.)
When there is nothing to produce except for more laws/regulations, meaningless, useless, obvious patents and lawsuits, and also the greenback, at this point you have to ask yourself a question: how is this economy, that borrows so much from the rest of the world and then buys the products from the rest of the world going to pay the freaking debt? What is it, 10 trillion in debt at least?
Anyway, I read TFPatent and thought to myself: holy shit. In 1998 I worked on a system for a purchase basket for a promotions company and I had to display thumbnails on the HTML page too.
In fact various stores and also porn sites would be great at showing prior art to this BS patent.
Well, you know, it's posted medium, it's hard to interpret what is meant exactly by any text that stands on its own, especially when it can be easily read multiple ways, and I am a bit paranoid probably, maybe I see twists where there are none :)
This 'BS' about not signing, it wouldn't be BS if everyone had principles not to sign these BS papers. I am not kidding you, it's difficult to fight all by yourself against this garbage when most people apparently don't care. I do, modify these clauses. I did turn down a contract that I couldn't bear myself to sign and the client did not budge. This things happen, however I don't know why more people don't at least attempt to negotiate these things. Most of the time it works (well it works for me.)
Anyhow, Happy New Year.
Yeah, ok, whatever, and all I am saying is that everyone should, in their best interests, avoid signing any NDAs and NCAs.
I am saying that NCAs are anti-competitive and that the contractors and permanent employees should not sign them, because it works against their own interests as well as against promotion of competition.
It is not the market that promotes NCAs, it is the complacency of those, signing such agreements even to their own detriment. No pure system is going to exist for too long because people are not principled, only principles can maintain purity of any system, this includes capitalism.
Companies coming up with NCAs and NDAs do not promote competition and thus they do not promote capitalism. Corporations do not care for any purity in the system, they just want to get ahead no matter what that means. Lobbying the governments, subverting the judicial system, recklessly neglecting the problems they create in environment around them. Yes, environment is part of any corporate strategy. Dumping billions of tons of garbage and pollution is always easier than making sure that the environment does not suffer. However corporations prefer to do so where they can avoid taking care of their own pollution.
By taking away from environment and not fixing the problems that they create, corporations take the profits and then share the responsibility for the clean ups among the rest of the population. That's where the people really must step up and force the corporations to clean up their mess. Of-course this will make the products cost more, but in reality all it means is that the product will bear the actual real costs and will not hide the cost in the polluted environment.
NCAs and NDAs are a similar situation, where corporations like to take resources (employees/contractors) from the environment, in which they create their products/services and then, once the corporations don't need those resources for any reason, they would like the society to bear the costs of having experienced resources not being able to do the jobs they are good at by getting hired for competitors (thus reducing the total costs of these products to the society by sharing their experience).
So, corporations, when unchecked, will not promote capitalism or competition or fairness. This is not really the point. My point is that one way of keeping them in check is by refusing to sign the NDAs and NCAs and such.
Cheers.
protectionism by private companies when it starts infringing on ability of people to find employment is anti competitive and is not capitalism. Corporations will attempt to do so, but it must be fought by the employees.
I said nothing about government making NCA/NDA illegal, I said people must chose not to sign it, then the corporations will not have a choice but to hire people regardless of these NCAs/NDAs not being signed. Of-course government involvement creates protectionism and is also not capitalism, but any protectionism at all is anti-competitive and in real capitalism wouldn't be able to exist.
However this is not what I am talking about, I am talking about principles of the people who chose to sign/ not sign these NCAs/NDAs.
I do not disagree with you, no need for 'boy-o'ing me, however I am still absolutely correct that the idea of protectionism is anti-capitalist.
It does not have to be the government to act in an anti-capitalist manner, private companies can and absolutely do act in such ways. NDAs and anti-competition clauses are anti-capitalist whether it's the government that requires them or a private or a public firm, whatever.
My point is that we must not simply give in and sign whatever someone wants us to sign, and that if people did have principles, such activities by the firms and other entities would not be common place, because they would never be signed.
I agree with you except for this part: You don't even really need to scratch them out, unless you are inclined to want to point out to your future employer that their contracts aren't entirely legally enforceable (which even if true can easily come across as just trying to show off or be a know-it-all, which of course is probably not what you want to do when you are just starting a brand new job). - I am anti-union, but I am pro-principle. I believe some NDAs and some anti-competition statements and entire clauses are evil in various ways and I do not want the evil to do evil to me. I am pro-intelligence and believe that others also do not want evil to be done to them. So it is my strong believe that evil must always be pointed out and it should be defeated where possible.
Crossing out certain statements/paragraphs, changing wording to be less evil and such is very necessary and if everyone was doing it there would be less evil. We should never be complacent when evil wants to hurt us. That's why I do read contracts and I do remove / change portions of contracts, if not to make them 'good' then at least to remove the excess of 'evil'.
Or, how, about, they pay you for the rest of your life. - you are being facetious but I am not certain why exactly, I suppose there is very thick sarcasm somewhere there. Certainly a company should be able to fire someone they don't need, someone who is not doing his/her job, whatever, and there if someone is fired, they are fired. If there is a contract that forces the company to pay compensation for certain types of dismissal it's all good, whatever.
However this does not have anything to do with the anti-competitive clauses that people routinely sign when they get a position. I am a contractor, haven't worked permanently since the beginning of 2001 and I do sign various NDAs, anti-competition clauses and such. But I always read them first and I modify them where I see it necessary. Most people make the mistake of not doing this and it will bite them.
NDAs and anti-competition clauses are really anti-capitalist in nature, they are protectionist ideas, they go against my system of believes. But enough about that.
Motorola stating that the unemployed people, who were fired by them must not be allowed to be hired by a competitor because this will cause harm to the economy of the USA is not simply mean spirited and false, it is pure evil.
It cannot be argued that an unemployed person, or a person who has good experience to do a job that requires special knowledge will harm any economy by obtaining a job that requires this expertise. However it can be argued economy gets harmed by having people who are under-utilizing their potential or simply are unemployed, collecting employment insurance or welfare or whatever. Economy suffers from this much more than from people working for competitors, because in fact working for competitors, creates more competition, whether it is fair or not, competition does what it is supposed to do.
I can't believe that anyone is even allowed to fire someone and then to prevent them from attempting to get another job anywhere they want.
One thing is when someone quits and there is a non-competition agreement, another thing is when someone is fired. Has anyone ever lost in court to a company that fired them when they started working for a competitor?
Everyone: if you are a 'permanent' employee, don't sign non-compete clauses, and if you do, at least modify them to say that if the company terminates your employment, then this clause does not apply.
Nice of Motorola, by the way, to attempt and stop people that they fired from trying to find employment, especially in this economy. If anything is going to hurt economy of the USA it's going to be millions of unemployed people.
if you give the Internet away as a prize to anyone who'll answer your question, what will the Internet elders say?
Just make sure that they don't drop the bloody thing, or reception may be permanently damaged.
actually, if someone did this to me and I found out who it was, I would shoot the fucker. So no, jail time is not inappropriate. It's not about $40 at all. It's about disrespect and grief that these people cause to other people.