I am so glad I don't need to participate in this discussion because I am actually using Linux desktop and have been on it since early 2000s. But I did have to look at Windows past XP and my general impression of everything that is happening to Windows GUI is negative. I have nothing but negative feelings for all new versions of Windows since XP, but of-course I am not a target user anymore, but I did like XP, so that's my anecdote.
Right, so if money doesn't store value how do you propose to be able to buy a similar amount of products with your money tomorrow that you could buy yesterday?
Money is not a measure of value, it is an actual store of value, it is also unit of account and medium of exchange. Without being able to store value money is not only useless, it's dangerous to have.
Well, does your life have any value under all conditions? Gold has intrinsic value that actually goes well past your life, gold had value before you and it will have value long after you are gone (and me, and everybody else who is living today).
Gold has intrinsic value in its own right and it has value that we recognise as such because we want gold. People wanted gold since the moment they have first seen it and they want it today. Gold has thousands of years of a proven track record, which is thousands of years more than any fiat currency, any paper currency and any digital currency.
Gold was used as money as a result of it having this value. Gold became money because people wanted it, not because somebody told them they have to do it.
As to the reserve currency being meaningful it has to have actual monetary value behind it, USD is not a meaningful reserve currency because it is backed by nothing. Before 1971 it was backed by gold, today it's backed by nothing and yes, it still represents the largest amount of reserve in the world, but this is exactly what I was referring to, when I mentioned Greece and Cyprus and such.
USD as a reserve is meaningless and Gresham law will prove it to be such. You can't get anything for dollars once people are unwilling to take them, because nobody has to provide you anything for them, there is no reserve behind this 'reserve'. There is nothing behind the zeroes on the paper, no gold, not even tin.
The prices of cars in gold can be falling with gold being used as money. With paper the prices are going up, there is no reason why prices shouldn't be falling and they were in fact falling under gold and they would still be falling. Prices for manufactured goods fall over time measured in real money. Price for a new car today could be 5 ounces of gold today if we did not try to inflate insanely.
Estimated gold reserve on the planet is between 155 and 171 thousand tons of gold, we mine about 3.5 thousand per year today, so that's just around 2% and the mining increased over the years (50 years ago yearly gold production was closer to 2.5 thousand tons per year).
If in fact, the governments of the world were looking for 2% inflation, which in itself is a dubious target to aim for, we should desire deflation instead, gold provides that exact amount very nicely without some idiot bankers and politicians fiddlefucking with it.
Paper money is only money if it can be exchanged for a real money reserve. Paper has no value but what it promises to get in exchange.
You don't have to believe in gold for gold to have intrinsic value, gold is a metal that has that value before it is used as money. Bitcoins are the opposite of that, they are created with the explicit purpose of being money, so they have no other purpose before BTC is money. Gold always had value for humans and people exchange things for gold regardless of what you believe. Bitcoins actually require people to believe it is money and to believe somebody else will want it for its only purpose (being money).
Gold is a tangible thing, it became money naturally. You can deny that it is money for yourself, but that doesn't change that gold was and will be accepted as payment. All fiat currencies that exist today will fail, there were thousands of fiat currencies before the ones we have today and they are all gone as well. Who remembers Portuguese Escudo, Spanish Peseta, Italian Lira, etc.?
US dollar was actually a measure of gold before it was turned into paper with value detached from the paper. USD was an actual promise to pay an ounce of gold by a bank that would redeem the note. Today it's just a piece of paper, doesn't matter how many zeroes are printed on it, you won't get gold at the Fed for it, the Fed does not have any reserve to back the dollars in circulation.
As to the amount of gold in the economy, that doesn't matter. Gold appreciates in paper value as you create more paper, that's called inflation - expansion of the money supply. All things can still be measured in real money today, you could buy a new car for 20 ounces 100 years ago you can still buy a new car for 20 ounces today. Of-course with the improvement of the manufacturing process and scaling of the production the relative prices in gold for items fall but in paper that is not connected to reality at all the prices rise. Rising prices are an effect of inflation, they are not cause of inflation and they are not inflation itself. Inflation is the expansion of the money supply.
Gold provides natural level of inflation at about 1.5% a year. Governments claim that they want 2% inflation (in reality inflation is many times higher than that), if they REALLY wanted about 2% inflation all they had to do was be ON the gold standard (or just have gold as money), that already provides a number that is close enough.
So your statement that 'commodity-based currency eventually becomes unsustainable' is actually not applicable to gold, it's the exact opposite that is the case, since gold was abandoned the inflation destroyed the economy and it is fiat that is proved itself to be unsustainable.
Money and currency are different things, money is a store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account. Gold is market money, it has intrinsic value first of all, before it is even money and it has a long history of being used as money by market participants. Currency is what is used in circulation, for example promissary notes to pay out money (bnk notes, that promiss certain amount of money in exchange for currency). Gold coins could be currency, but generally they are not today. Currency that is not money itself (not gold) is a promise of money, but that is also lost on people today.
Fiat is currency by decree of a government and USD used to be backed by money, by gold before Nixon defaulted on the dollar in 1971. USD used to be a meaningful reserve currency before 1971, now it is not, and since that time inflation really picked up, which is why US government openly modified how it counts inflation, GDP, unemployment to make it whatever the politicians want it to be. Modifications are well anounced and changes are public information, orwellian language is used to modify meaning of terms and the public eats it up. My journal here is public, so are my comments, I don't care for conspiracies, what is public information out in the open is more relevant and interesting.
Ha ha ha, first of all yes, USD is fiat, so is Yen or Renminbi, however there is a gigantic difference today between USD and Renminbi. See, USD is printed by a government that has no productive capacity in its economy. Renminbi is also printed, but the government in that case has a gigantic manufacturing sector behind it. As to gold and silver, that's money, not currency, there is no comparison. Gold and silver is real money, market money, USD and all other paper is here for a very short time and will be gone in an insignificant time span to be sure.
Cyprus, Greece, you think the banks there weren't regulated to death by their governments? What you are relying upon, when you say 'regulated' is actually the infinite paper supply by the Federal reserve and Congress willing to backstop any large back and not let you lose your nominal dollar value, but the system itself is rotten, it doesn't have any actual savings and nothing can backstop the entire system, when it collapses you will get your paper back, for sure, but good luck buying anything with it.
Note that I am not a BTC proponent (except as a curiosity).
Seemd to me that it may be timr for CPU manufacturers to implement math functionality that we normally provide with libraries as part of the CPU itself. Does it make more sense to add more generic cores to a CPU or to add some new instructions and add math co-processors that have ROM on board with lookup tables for logs, powers, sin, cos, tan and a bunch of other useful functions?
Oh, but that is not a new idea coming from moron socialists. There are those, who literally want to LIMIT BY LAW how much money can a person make (or how much property they can own). So I heard nonsense like: hundred million or half a billion or a billion or ten billion should be enough for anybody. I say nothing is ever enough and it's none of anybody's business in the first place how many companies a person ends up creating and how big his own fortune becomes through all of his holdings, assets, enterprises. If we had a law that limited person's possessions to let's say 1 Billion, a person who owned that much wouldn't want to work to achieve more, because 100% of everything over that amount would be stolen from him (never mind that income / wealth / capital gains / dividend / death taxes are already immoral and shouldn't exist, they are destroying incentives and misallocating capital investments as is).
This diatribe of an 'article' is some kind of a hit piece, it's designed to corrupt the minds of the weak minded TV watching, newspaper reading, voting drones further, it's naked class warfare and I think there will be more of it coming soon.
No, it's not a problem, it's a normal situation. Before I started my own business I had to work for other people in order to save up enough money to do what I actually wanted to do. This process was long and tedious, but eventually I did start my own business (actually more than one) and so it goes.
Now, if you are saying that nobody will hire anybody because the jobs are automated then the question is: are you able to compete or not? Basically capital always competes with labour, cost of capital and cost of labour are in direct competition. Is it cheaper for me to hire somebody or to buy/invent and build a robot to do their job? On the other side of this is the question: can a robot actually do the job of a human in the first place?
The answers are a balance, there are always jobs where it is cheaper/easier to hire somebody, but the skill level of those jobs may not command a very high salary, but that's a stepping stone for a better job.
Eventually you have to save to start your own business but before you save you have to work somewhere. The only true barrier to entry for people into the job market is government regulations that make people uncompetitive in the first place.
Minimum wage, mandated benefits, business regulations, money printing (inflation), income related taxes, whatever the case might be, all of these are impediments that are not market created, they are created by the greed of the mob, who votes in politicians that promise something for nothing. So when there are no jobs the problem is never the market, market will clear at the correct prices.
The problem is that the economy is bogged down by governments and governments are set up to steal. The reality is that society gets the government and thus the economy that it deserves. If you have a society that is willing to steal, its economy will die.
Well, you can shiver all you like, AFAIC that's where we are going and I welcome it completely. Transnational companies are systems that help us eventually to reduce government power over people by connecting us in more ways than ever possible previously. Their scale and efficiencies are much higher than of any national level or local companies. AFAIC thinking about it in terms of 'parasites' is the wrong approach, you think that transnational companies somehow take something from economies while I see it this way: transnational companies only add to the overall economy of the entire globe by making it possible to use the most efficient manner of production, distribution and by lowering costs to as few as possible (including cost of government, cost of taxes, cost of regulations, cost of inflation, cost of doing business).
I want as few costs to be born by everybody who is productive as possible. To say that a local company is better because... what, it has to care about that locality? I disagree. I want the biggest, most efficient companies to produce the cheapest, most flexible ways of doing business and in process they eliminate as many rules and barriers and taxes as possible.
The problem is actually that they work to remove their own barriers, while the governments still remain and maintain barriers for others, so in reality transnational companies do have an unfair advantage compared to local companies specifically because because governments still remain and push local companies around.
But that's not an argument against transnational companies, that's an argument against government power.
40 years, yes, 40 years since Nixon defaulted on the dollar (on the promise to provide gold for dollars). 40 years of inflation causes destruction of productivity and the so called 'main stream economists', who are in reality propaganda pushers for the government support the idea that inflation is good and necessary for a healthy economy, while in reality inflation is what killed it.
People are poor by definition, when we are born, we are born with nothing. We only become wealthy by applying ourselves and working, creating the stuff that makes us wealthy. There is nobody who can give us something that wasn't first created by us or somebody else. Either we build our wealth ourselves or we remain poor. Theft (income taxes are theft, inflation is theft, business regulations are theft), cannot create anything, it can only take away that was created and give it to somebody else, but an economy based on theft is not going to last, USSR, Cuba, communist China (China before capitalism), North Korea and many others proved it conclusively.
People who are old and can no longer work should have been able to save for their retirement and in a wealthy working economy they would have (like they are doing in China today, routinely saving 50% of their earnings for the future, for their businesses, for retirement, for whatever). Instead the people decided that it was more fun to steal and so they vote in politicians who promise free stuff and people are jealous and gullible enough not to understand that there is nothing more expensive than 'free stuff' promised by politicians. Stuff that has to be stolen to be 'free' will never be free.
Actually jobs are not the goal, jobs are means to run a business that is not fully automated, so jobs are an intermediary situation. If all jobs could be automated away cheaper than using human labour for them, that's what should be done. Jobs are not the goal, products and services are.
If a new business is created the owner/creator has to come up with an offering based on the market capacity to pay for the product and if the business cannot supply that product/service at a low enough price for the market to buy into that product/service the business will fail and that is that (of-course unless you are a politician and can simply dictate that people have to 'buy' your new 'service' or 'product' and pay via forced collections or taxes for it).
I don't believe in any unification of anybody with anybody. Eventually people want to govern themselves and not be governed by anybody else, especially as over time governing bodies require more and more resources, they grow bigger (that's their function - growing at the expense of everything and everybody else), the taxes, money printing (inflation), rules and laws become unbearable and eventually you get revolts, wars, polarisation and that is a good thing, there is no good government, all governments are disgusting and evil by their very definition.
AFAIC eventually we will have fewer large governments, not more, there will still be municipal level governments but the federations and monarchies and dictatorship will lose their central power over people and again, that is a good thing, not a bad thing.
I much rather see transnational companies and transnational people, free individuals to move around the world without any borders and boundaries, I would rather see a world without income related taxes, without business rules, without business related laws, without government trying to control and manipulate money supply, without governments in business and money and I think the future will be closer to that than to larger federations and larger dictatorships because of our technology and because the size of humanity is growing.
The more people there are, the more connections there are between people in the world (connections helped/powered by technology) the fewer barriers will exist because the barriers will simply become irrelevant and unenforceable, and again, that is a good thing.
Just because you are jealous of some people, since you are not as wealthy as they are does not make anybody 'obscenely rich'. Nobody offends my morality, nobody is indecent or repulsive for being rich.
In fact I think many people are obscenely poor, but there is no such thing as 'obscenely rich'. I am not in any way disturbed that there are people with billions (or trillions at some point) dollars or any other thing in their possession, wealth requires work, wealth management is work and private individuals who command more personal wealth are providing capital to the entire planet basically.
Speed limit is an infringement when it's done by a government. If a road is private, then it's up to private enterprise to set their own limits on their private property, governments shouldn't be in road business in the first place and AFAIC there shouldn't be any government cops either.
Wrong. Jobs are created by people coming up with ideas for new businesses based on new products and best product ideas come from people trying to solve their own problems in life.
Saying that demand creates jobs is fine, when the jobs in question are in very well understood industries, but it is wrong even then, because all new supply brings down prices even further and creates more choices. So in reality SUPPLY creates new demand, because the bigger the supply, the lower the prices.
If TVs cost 1000USD per unit, everybody has one. If TVs cost 10USD per unit, everybody has 20.
If TVs cost 1USD per unit, people build houses out of them maybe.
However before TVs were supplied by companies that went into that industry there was no demand for TVs at all, nobody knew what the fuck 'TVs' were.
Supply created the demand.
Supply of poetry created the demand for poetry.
Supply of ballet created the demand for ballet.
Supply of space ships will create demand for space ships.
Supply of terraformed planets or space stations will create demand for them.
Currently only the very rich can afford to buy luxury yachts, but if the price for a yacht came down to the level of a new car, then demand for all these yachts will be created where there was very very little before.
Nobody is 'obscenely rich' and stealing is not sharing.
What we should do is remove ALL trade barriers and ALL business regulations and ALL income related taxes and ALL wealth related taxes, basically we have to get rid of government manipulating business and money, then there will be plenty new companies appearing with plenty of new ideas that will generate wealth and sell new products we can't even imagine today.
Theft is NOT a good long term solution to any problem, you can ask the USSR, North Korea, Cuba, etc.
No, you pathetic creature, income taxes have plenty to do with it. Ford was paying his employees something that wasn't reduced by government theft to at best half of the wage, so whatever Ford was paying his employees they were getting in full. So there is a huge difference between Ford's employees 100 years ago and today.
Secondly again, Ford was only paying his workers to work there, not to have something more than he absolutely had to supply for them not to move to other companies. He found THE salary (twice the normal salary at the time) that still allowed him to DOUBLE (and yes, this word has to be full caps and in bold, he doubled production) in his factories.
No business owner in his right mind would pay somebody to do anything at a higher rate than they absolutely have to in order to ensure that they do a good job and they don't leave if he/she wants them to do the job repeatedly.
Yeah, again, you are full of shit. NOWHERE does it say: pay highest wages that allow somebody to buy a truck or a car made by Ford in 4 to 8 months (that's if one saved 100% of salary without any other expenses).
By the way, there were NO INCOME TAXES applied to ANY of Ford's workers, only Ford was paying income tax at that time, which was introduced in 1913 and the tax was only applied to top earners in a completely illegal and discriminatory manner. Of-course later it expanded to most people.
No, Ford wasn't paying anybody "to buy Ford", he was paying the highest wage possible to prevent as much turnover as possible, the only ignorant person here is you, you never had any employees and have 0 understanding of the subject.
Both of you are wrong, no industrialist, no employer would care about your wages above what he must pay in order to retain talent, there is nothing else at play, if you have to have employees, you pay them what you must to retain them if they are important to your bottom line, no other considerations are relevant. I wouldn't pay anybody to be able to buy what we produce here with 100% of their 4-8 months salary, it makes 0 sense for me, that's not why I run a company, Ford didn't run a charity, he ran a company in a competitive market. He had 0 interest in unions and didn't allow them in his factories (same here), he had 0 interest in 'social justice' (same here), he had 0 interest in 'equality' (same here). His interest was his bottom line (same here).
If my employees can buy something we produce it's not because I care for them to be able to buy it. If they can become my clients while being my employees as well - great. However this doesn't even enter the equation when thinking about business and it shouldn't.
We have to satisfy our clients, that's all we have to do. An employee CAN be a client and indeed it often happens that people that work in certain places also consume products produced by their place of employment, but that's not why they are paid their salaries.
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I am so glad I don't need to participate in this discussion because I am actually using Linux desktop and have been on it since early 2000s. But I did have to look at Windows past XP and my general impression of everything that is happening to Windows GUI is negative. I have nothing but negative feelings for all new versions of Windows since XP, but of-course I am not a target user anymore, but I did like XP, so that's my anecdote.
Right, so if money doesn't store value how do you propose to be able to buy a similar amount of products with your money tomorrow that you could buy yesterday?
Money is not a measure of value, it is an actual store of value, it is also unit of account and medium of exchange. Without being able to store value money is not only useless, it's dangerous to have.
Well, does your life have any value under all conditions?
Gold has intrinsic value that actually goes well past your life, gold had value before you and it will have value long after you are gone (and me, and everybody else who is living today).
Gold has intrinsic value in its own right and it has value that we recognise as such because we want gold. People wanted gold since the moment they have first seen it and they want it today. Gold has thousands of years of a proven track record, which is thousands of years more than any fiat currency, any paper currency and any digital currency.
Gold was used as money as a result of it having this value. Gold became money because people wanted it, not because somebody told them they have to do it.
As to the reserve currency being meaningful it has to have actual monetary value behind it, USD is not a meaningful reserve currency because it is backed by nothing. Before 1971 it was backed by gold, today it's backed by nothing and yes, it still represents the largest amount of reserve in the world, but this is exactly what I was referring to, when I mentioned Greece and Cyprus and such.
USD as a reserve is meaningless and Gresham law will prove it to be such. You can't get anything for dollars once people are unwilling to take them, because nobody has to provide you anything for them, there is no reserve behind this 'reserve'. There is nothing behind the zeroes on the paper, no gold, not even tin.
The prices of cars in gold can be falling with gold being used as money. With paper the prices are going up, there is no reason why prices shouldn't be falling and they were in fact falling under gold and they would still be falling. Prices for manufactured goods fall over time measured in real money. Price for a new car today could be 5 ounces of gold today if we did not try to inflate insanely.
Estimated gold reserve on the planet is between 155 and 171 thousand tons of gold, we mine about 3.5 thousand per year today, so that's just around 2% and the mining increased over the years (50 years ago yearly gold production was closer to 2.5 thousand tons per year).
If in fact, the governments of the world were looking for 2% inflation, which in itself is a dubious target to aim for, we should desire deflation instead, gold provides that exact amount very nicely without some idiot bankers and politicians fiddlefucking with it.
Paper money is only money if it can be exchanged for a real money reserve. Paper has no value but what it promises to get in exchange.
You don't have to believe in gold for gold to have intrinsic value, gold is a metal that has that value before it is used as money. Bitcoins are the opposite of that, they are created with the explicit purpose of being money, so they have no other purpose before BTC is money. Gold always had value for humans and people exchange things for gold regardless of what you believe. Bitcoins actually require people to believe it is money and to believe somebody else will want it for its only purpose (being money).
Gold is a tangible thing, it became money naturally. You can deny that it is money for yourself, but that doesn't change that gold was and will be accepted as payment. All fiat currencies that exist today will fail, there were thousands of fiat currencies before the ones we have today and they are all gone as well. Who remembers Portuguese Escudo, Spanish Peseta, Italian Lira, etc.?
US dollar was actually a measure of gold before it was turned into paper with value detached from the paper. USD was an actual promise to pay an ounce of gold by a bank that would redeem the note. Today it's just a piece of paper, doesn't matter how many zeroes are printed on it, you won't get gold at the Fed for it, the Fed does not have any reserve to back the dollars in circulation.
As to the amount of gold in the economy, that doesn't matter. Gold appreciates in paper value as you create more paper, that's called inflation - expansion of the money supply. All things can still be measured in real money today, you could buy a new car for 20 ounces 100 years ago you can still buy a new car for 20 ounces today. Of-course with the improvement of the manufacturing process and scaling of the production the relative prices in gold for items fall but in paper that is not connected to reality at all the prices rise. Rising prices are an effect of inflation, they are not cause of inflation and they are not inflation itself. Inflation is the expansion of the money supply.
Gold provides natural level of inflation at about 1.5% a year. Governments claim that they want 2% inflation (in reality inflation is many times higher than that), if they REALLY wanted about 2% inflation all they had to do was be ON the gold standard (or just have gold as money), that already provides a number that is close enough.
So your statement that 'commodity-based currency eventually becomes unsustainable' is actually not applicable to gold, it's the exact opposite that is the case, since gold was abandoned the inflation destroyed the economy and it is fiat that is proved itself to be unsustainable.
Money and currency are different things, money is a store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account. Gold is market money, it has intrinsic value first of all, before it is even money and it has a long history of being used as money by market participants. Currency is what is used in circulation, for example promissary notes to pay out money (bnk notes, that promiss certain amount of money in exchange for currency). Gold coins could be currency, but generally they are not today. Currency that is not money itself (not gold) is a promise of money, but that is also lost on people today.
Fiat is currency by decree of a government and USD used to be backed by money, by gold before Nixon defaulted on the dollar in 1971. USD used to be a meaningful reserve currency before 1971, now it is not, and since that time inflation really picked up, which is why US government openly modified how it counts inflation, GDP, unemployment to make it whatever the politicians want it to be. Modifications are well anounced and changes are public information, orwellian language is used to modify meaning of terms and the public eats it up. My journal here is public, so are my comments, I don't care for conspiracies, what is public information out in the open is more relevant and interesting.
Ha ha ha, first of all yes, USD is fiat, so is Yen or Renminbi, however there is a gigantic difference today between USD and Renminbi. See, USD is printed by a government that has no productive capacity in its economy. Renminbi is also printed, but the government in that case has a gigantic manufacturing sector behind it. As to gold and silver, that's money, not currency, there is no comparison. Gold and silver is real money, market money, USD and all other paper is here for a very short time and will be gone in an insignificant time span to be sure.
Cyprus, Greece, you think the banks there weren't regulated to death by their governments? What you are relying upon, when you say 'regulated' is actually the infinite paper supply by the Federal reserve and Congress willing to backstop any large back and not let you lose your nominal dollar value, but the system itself is rotten, it doesn't have any actual savings and nothing can backstop the entire system, when it collapses you will get your paper back, for sure, but good luck buying anything with it.
Note that I am not a BTC proponent (except as a curiosity).
It's also proven that ancient people mastered the art of wireless communication. The lack of wire traces is definite proof.
- you make it sound as if all of it was just smoke and mirrors...
Seemd to me that it may be timr for CPU manufacturers to implement math functionality that we normally provide with libraries as part of the CPU itself. Does it make more sense to add more generic cores to a CPU or to add some new instructions and add math co-processors that have ROM on board with lookup tables for logs, powers, sin, cos, tan and a bunch of other useful functions?
Why are you surprised? I hear this often, here is a funny one.
Oh, but that is not a new idea coming from moron socialists. There are those, who literally want to LIMIT BY LAW how much money can a person make (or how much property they can own). So I heard nonsense like: hundred million or half a billion or a billion or ten billion should be enough for anybody. I say nothing is ever enough and it's none of anybody's business in the first place how many companies a person ends up creating and how big his own fortune becomes through all of his holdings, assets, enterprises. If we had a law that limited person's possessions to let's say 1 Billion, a person who owned that much wouldn't want to work to achieve more, because 100% of everything over that amount would be stolen from him (never mind that income / wealth / capital gains / dividend / death taxes are already immoral and shouldn't exist, they are destroying incentives and misallocating capital investments as is).
This diatribe of an 'article' is some kind of a hit piece, it's designed to corrupt the minds of the weak minded TV watching, newspaper reading, voting drones further, it's naked class warfare and I think there will be more of it coming soon.
No, it's not a problem, it's a normal situation. Before I started my own business I had to work for other people in order to save up enough money to do what I actually wanted to do. This process was long and tedious, but eventually I did start my own business (actually more than one) and so it goes.
Now, if you are saying that nobody will hire anybody because the jobs are automated then the question is: are you able to compete or not? Basically capital always competes with labour, cost of capital and cost of labour are in direct competition. Is it cheaper for me to hire somebody or to buy/invent and build a robot to do their job? On the other side of this is the question: can a robot actually do the job of a human in the first place?
The answers are a balance, there are always jobs where it is cheaper/easier to hire somebody, but the skill level of those jobs may not command a very high salary, but that's a stepping stone for a better job.
Eventually you have to save to start your own business but before you save you have to work somewhere. The only true barrier to entry for people into the job market is government regulations that make people uncompetitive in the first place.
Minimum wage, mandated benefits, business regulations, money printing (inflation), income related taxes, whatever the case might be, all of these are impediments that are not market created, they are created by the greed of the mob, who votes in politicians that promise something for nothing. So when there are no jobs the problem is never the market, market will clear at the correct prices.
The problem is that the economy is bogged down by governments and governments are set up to steal. The reality is that society gets the government and thus the economy that it deserves. If you have a society that is willing to steal, its economy will die.
Well, you can shiver all you like, AFAIC that's where we are going and I welcome it completely. Transnational companies are systems that help us eventually to reduce government power over people by connecting us in more ways than ever possible previously. Their scale and efficiencies are much higher than of any national level or local companies. AFAIC thinking about it in terms of 'parasites' is the wrong approach, you think that transnational companies somehow take something from economies while I see it this way: transnational companies only add to the overall economy of the entire globe by making it possible to use the most efficient manner of production, distribution and by lowering costs to as few as possible (including cost of government, cost of taxes, cost of regulations, cost of inflation, cost of doing business).
I want as few costs to be born by everybody who is productive as possible. To say that a local company is better because ... what, it has to care about that locality? I disagree. I want the biggest, most efficient companies to produce the cheapest, most flexible ways of doing business and in process they eliminate as many rules and barriers and taxes as possible.
The problem is actually that they work to remove their own barriers, while the governments still remain and maintain barriers for others, so in reality transnational companies do have an unfair advantage compared to local companies specifically because because governments still remain and push local companies around.
But that's not an argument against transnational companies, that's an argument against government power.
40 years, yes, 40 years since Nixon defaulted on the dollar (on the promise to provide gold for dollars). 40 years of inflation causes destruction of productivity and the so called 'main stream economists', who are in reality propaganda pushers for the government support the idea that inflation is good and necessary for a healthy economy, while in reality inflation is what killed it.
People are poor by definition, when we are born, we are born with nothing. We only become wealthy by applying ourselves and working, creating the stuff that makes us wealthy. There is nobody who can give us something that wasn't first created by us or somebody else. Either we build our wealth ourselves or we remain poor. Theft (income taxes are theft, inflation is theft, business regulations are theft), cannot create anything, it can only take away that was created and give it to somebody else, but an economy based on theft is not going to last, USSR, Cuba, communist China (China before capitalism), North Korea and many others proved it conclusively.
People who are old and can no longer work should have been able to save for their retirement and in a wealthy working economy they would have (like they are doing in China today, routinely saving 50% of their earnings for the future, for their businesses, for retirement, for whatever). Instead the people decided that it was more fun to steal and so they vote in politicians who promise free stuff and people are jealous and gullible enough not to understand that there is nothing more expensive than 'free stuff' promised by politicians. Stuff that has to be stolen to be 'free' will never be free.
Actually jobs are not the goal, jobs are means to run a business that is not fully automated, so jobs are an intermediary situation. If all jobs could be automated away cheaper than using human labour for them, that's what should be done. Jobs are not the goal, products and services are.
If a new business is created the owner/creator has to come up with an offering based on the market capacity to pay for the product and if the business cannot supply that product/service at a low enough price for the market to buy into that product/service the business will fail and that is that (of-course unless you are a politician and can simply dictate that people have to 'buy' your new 'service' or 'product' and pay via forced collections or taxes for it).
I don't believe in any unification of anybody with anybody. Eventually people want to govern themselves and not be governed by anybody else, especially as over time governing bodies require more and more resources, they grow bigger (that's their function - growing at the expense of everything and everybody else), the taxes, money printing (inflation), rules and laws become unbearable and eventually you get revolts, wars, polarisation and that is a good thing, there is no good government, all governments are disgusting and evil by their very definition.
AFAIC eventually we will have fewer large governments, not more, there will still be municipal level governments but the federations and monarchies and dictatorship will lose their central power over people and again, that is a good thing, not a bad thing.
I much rather see transnational companies and transnational people, free individuals to move around the world without any borders and boundaries, I would rather see a world without income related taxes, without business rules, without business related laws, without government trying to control and manipulate money supply, without governments in business and money and I think the future will be closer to that than to larger federations and larger dictatorships because of our technology and because the size of humanity is growing.
The more people there are, the more connections there are between people in the world (connections helped/powered by technology) the fewer barriers will exist because the barriers will simply become irrelevant and unenforceable, and again, that is a good thing.
Just because you are jealous of some people, since you are not as wealthy as they are does not make anybody 'obscenely rich'. Nobody offends my morality, nobody is indecent or repulsive for being rich.
In fact I think many people are obscenely poor, but there is no such thing as 'obscenely rich'. I am not in any way disturbed that there are people with billions (or trillions at some point) dollars or any other thing in their possession, wealth requires work, wealth management is work and private individuals who command more personal wealth are providing capital to the entire planet basically.
What I find obscene is theft.
Speed limit is an infringement when it's done by a government. If a road is private, then it's up to private enterprise to set their own limits on their private property, governments shouldn't be in road business in the first place and AFAIC there shouldn't be any government cops either.
Wrong. Jobs are created by people coming up with ideas for new businesses based on new products and best product ideas come from people trying to solve their own problems in life.
Saying that demand creates jobs is fine, when the jobs in question are in very well understood industries, but it is wrong even then, because all new supply brings down prices even further and creates more choices. So in reality SUPPLY creates new demand, because the bigger the supply, the lower the prices.
If TVs cost 1000USD per unit, everybody has one. If TVs cost 10USD per unit, everybody has 20.
If TVs cost 1USD per unit, people build houses out of them maybe.
However before TVs were supplied by companies that went into that industry there was no demand for TVs at all, nobody knew what the fuck 'TVs' were.
Supply created the demand.
Supply of poetry created the demand for poetry.
Supply of ballet created the demand for ballet.
Supply of space ships will create demand for space ships.
Supply of terraformed planets or space stations will create demand for them.
Currently only the very rich can afford to buy luxury yachts, but if the price for a yacht came down to the level of a new car, then demand for all these yachts will be created where there was very very little before.
Nobody is 'obscenely rich' and stealing is not sharing.
What we should do is remove ALL trade barriers and ALL business regulations and ALL income related taxes and ALL wealth related taxes, basically we have to get rid of government manipulating business and money, then there will be plenty new companies appearing with plenty of new ideas that will generate wealth and sell new products we can't even imagine today.
Theft is NOT a good long term solution to any problem, you can ask the USSR, North Korea, Cuba, etc.
No, you pathetic creature, income taxes have plenty to do with it. Ford was paying his employees something that wasn't reduced by government theft to at best half of the wage, so whatever Ford was paying his employees they were getting in full. So there is a huge difference between Ford's employees 100 years ago and today.
Secondly again, Ford was only paying his workers to work there, not to have something more than he absolutely had to supply for them not to move to other companies. He found THE salary (twice the normal salary at the time) that still allowed him to DOUBLE (and yes, this word has to be full caps and in bold, he doubled production) in his factories.
No business owner in his right mind would pay somebody to do anything at a higher rate than they absolutely have to in order to ensure that they do a good job and they don't leave if he/she wants them to do the job repeatedly.
Yeah, again, you are full of shit. NOWHERE does it say: pay highest wages that allow somebody to buy a truck or a car made by Ford in 4 to 8 months (that's if one saved 100% of salary without any other expenses).
By the way, there were NO INCOME TAXES applied to ANY of Ford's workers, only Ford was paying income tax at that time, which was introduced in 1913 and the tax was only applied to top earners in a completely illegal and discriminatory manner. Of-course later it expanded to most people.
No, Ford wasn't paying anybody "to buy Ford", he was paying the highest wage possible to prevent as much turnover as possible, the only ignorant person here is you, you never had any employees and have 0 understanding of the subject.
Both of you are wrong, no industrialist, no employer would care about your wages above what he must pay in order to retain talent, there is nothing else at play, if you have to have employees, you pay them what you must to retain them if they are important to your bottom line, no other considerations are relevant. I wouldn't pay anybody to be able to buy what we produce here with 100% of their 4-8 months salary, it makes 0 sense for me, that's not why I run a company, Ford didn't run a charity, he ran a company in a competitive market. He had 0 interest in unions and didn't allow them in his factories (same here), he had 0 interest in 'social justice' (same here), he had 0 interest in 'equality' (same here). His interest was his bottom line (same here).
If my employees can buy something we produce it's not because I care for them to be able to buy it. If they can become my clients while being my employees as well - great. However this doesn't even enter the equation when thinking about business and it shouldn't.
We have to satisfy our clients, that's all we have to do. An employee CAN be a client and indeed it often happens that people that work in certain places also consume products produced by their place of employment, but that's not why they are paid their salaries.