- first of all it has nothing to do with 'innovation' during Reagan era, supply side is the only real economics and it made USA into the first rate producer of cheap, high quality goods in the 19th century, turned an country that used to be an afterthought to Europe into the largest producer and creditor nation.
USA lost that status in the last 40 years for the exact opposite reasons, those reasons being that USA SUPPLIES NOTHING except for ungodly amounts of paper currency. USA supplies nothing specifically because worker productivity per worker is negative, instead USA lives off of the supplies that are brought from other countries and those supplies are vendor financed. The only people that are confused here are those who can't understand the simplest of things: productive workers produce and USA doesn't produce anything.
The companies with their profits are showing inflation, not productivity. Current profits are based solely on the ability of the Federal reserve bank to create inflation via money printing and their ability to print money is actually infinite, but not their ability to do anything positive for the economy. Every newly created dollar (electronic or otherwise) only undermines USA economy specifically because it has nothing to do with any productivity whatsoever, it is not a reflection of productive output, it is only the indicator that USA economy is dying and it will choke on the dollar vomit that the Fed is producing.
USA corporations that are catering to the foreign consumers are showing some real gains, but be careful buying into them as well, as their gains will very likely be stolen from them by the government once the inevitable real collapse (dollar this time) wipes out the remaining economy in the States and then we will see just what USA government and the mob are capable of when they decide to confiscate every last penny from anybody who is still actively producing something, anything.
I don't care one way or another what you derive from this, given your position I am not sure you can actually derive anything from a conversation that doesn't go your way.
I have seen pretty much anything you can imagine, from multiple immigrations to wars and collapses of countries, I can say with absolute certainty that nothing compares to the risk of running a business with employees and clients, with money and years of life on the line.
I don't need any links to any lists, in my life I rely on my own experiences and knowledge and make my own decisions, so if you want to talk to me, you will have to actually have meaningful additions to the conversation that you make on your own without cheat sheets.
Banks foreclosing, etc., all of this is based on government participating in the market, destroying lending standards and propping up failing business models with money that is stolen from the individuals (taxpayers). None of this is normal behaviour under free market conditions, these situations are created by government "trying to help".
Banking is government regulated. Power is government regulated. Health care is government regulated. Insurance is government regulated. Food industry is government regulated. Money is obviously government regulated.
Find me something that is not government regulated beyond computer software and other systems (and even many of these are regulated by the government) and then lets talk about free markets and how somehow without government regulations, taxes, inflation and generally control companies 'tax people' in an actual competitive environment.
You don't know what risk is until you take put all of your money on the line and then hire somebody in an anti-business environment to work for you, in a system that sees every employer as a potential cash cow to be stolen from, to be sued for every transgression even of the people that have nothing to do with the business in the first place. You have 0 understanding of real risk, you are thinking very small and insignificant.
Once you have employees that can sue you, clients that can sue you, government that can sue you, all of your money on the line, even your personal freedom on the line, all because you are now an employer, then you will start gaining a slim sliver of understanding of what risk actually is. You are a child in this, you know nothing until you actually do it. You have nothing to compare to. People do risky things every day, immigration is risky, life is a risky thing. However starting a business in an anti-business system is about as risky for all layers of your life as it gets.
Capital is valued much more than labour because there is a huge lack of capital in the face of labour that has no capital and no skills that are useful enough to be combined with any available capital in a profitable manner, that is why.
Capital is not always valued more than labour, however the system that we are in set up the government that is destroying capital formation with inflation, rules and taxes and because the capital is being destroyed and the formation of capital is disincentivised with all the inflation there is a huge shortage of capital, so the real interest rates are so high that new businesses cannot afford to borrow at that cost of money and the existing businesses are engaged into the asset bubble creation with the fake money supplied by the Federal reserve.
So instead of building new businesses we are supporting the failing existing business models that are not providing utility that would reflect positively on the huge trade imbalances.
As to risk, you don't know what risk is until you started your own business (or maybe went to war).
Obviously. Rights are protections against government abuse, persecution, theft and murder, not against other individuals or businesses.
Government is the only entity that has legal ability to fine, imprison or even murder an individual, companies cannot do that (of-course under a contract fines are possible between 2 parties that agree to a contract).
Inalienable rights are the rights of the individual not to be stolen from and destroyed by the collective, where the collective is the organisation with legal privileges actually to steal from you (taxes, inflation, regulations) and destroy you (imprison you, murder you).
So what, in many cases people choose mates and friends based on their race preferences.
Many clients choose which businesses they will deal with based on the origin business owner (some prefer to frequent or to avoid Indian or Middle Eastern or Asian establishments for example).
People must be able to discriminate however they see fit and I am talking about people in their individual lives and I am also talking about businesses obviously.
Yes, it should be possible to discriminate based on race, absolutely. Race, age, sex, any form of discrimination must be absolutely legal (and by the way it is unconstitutional, illegal for the federal government to regulate businesses and the entire concept of interstate commerce does not allow government to regulate business, it is only there to prevent individual States from erecting barriers of entry, which are still all there, so the federal government is not doing what it's job is and instead it constantly harasses businesses for no reason whatsoever).
Now, government must not be able to discriminate against anybody based on age, race, sex, ethnicity but that is also constantly happening for example with the war on drugs, with the so called 'war on terrorism', with every war that government runs.
Government must not be able to discriminate because it destroys the rule of law, destroys the free market (which is already destroyed in USA of-course) and eventually destroys the economy and thus the society. Government must be forced to treat people equally regardless of their natural characteristics, individuals must not be forced into anything.
If you will not accept government forcing you to marry any particular person or to frequent any particular business then it is inconsistent for you to be cheering for the government forcing a business to either hire or to serve any particular person. Cheering for it is the real discrimination and helps the government to grow its gigantic poisonous tentacles that end up stealing and murdering everything on their path.
I am absolutely correct, worker productivity is productive output, not inflated value of assets and various dollar related bubbles that these graphs are actually showing, which is coincidentally why they all start in early 1970s, after Nixon's default on the dollar, when USA took the world off of the gold standard.
The world used to be on the gold standard before 1971, which prevented gigantic bubbles that we are living through now. USA was (is still) the reserve currency that foreign national banks hold as 'reserves', however that literally meant that the foreigners had gold reserves in those dollars (that's what the gold standard promised). As Nixon defaulted on the dollar, the world was taken off of the gold standard and that started gigantic inflation mania that we have experienced since.
USA productive output is negative, which is why USA cannot pay for its own consumption, which is subsidised by the very people that produce the stuff that Americans consume (Chinese and the like). USA has been running a 500Billion USD/year trade deficit for over 2 decades now, there is nothing at all productive about an economy that does not pay for imports with its own exports, this the destruction of productivity I am talking about and what the pundits that push nonsensical propaganda about 'rising USA productivity' are actually talking about is inflation and the related to the inflation rising cost of living, rising prices that do not reflect productivity, in fact they reflect destruction of the economy.
How tired I am of you and your nonsense on the Great Depression and the false reasons behind it that you believe in and the actual facts that you cannot get through your thick skull. The Great Depression was not caused by oversupply of anything, it was caused by the Federal reserve bank of America buying up bad UK debt from France and creating giant inflation in the process, which inflated the stock market bubble, which was not sustainable because bubbles are not sustainable. The recession that resulted from the burst of the bubble would have been dealt with swiftly, just like the depression of 1921, if the government stayed away, but instead Hoover and later FDR stepped in and turned the recession into the depression (which by the way only had about 25% unemployment, which is actually no worse than what USA is experiencing today) and many of the 'solutions' of the idiots that believe in nonsensical Keynesian garbage was to print more money by government to DESTROY PRODUCTS that farmers created, they literally destroyed food, ploughed it into the ground rather than allowing the absolutely necessary reduction of prices that would have absolutely helped the people of that era and prevented any unnecessary suffering.
The government, that you fucking love so much, took farming output and literally ploughed it into the fucking ground so that the prices wouldn't drop, you unimaginable unintelligent creep.
THE HUMAN DEMAND IS INFINITE. The ability to satisfy the demand is limited by productivity of the humans that have those demands and that is why 600 meter yachts are not selling for 10 dollars and that is why people do not have their own 787s and space ships, because the human productivity today is minuscule on the grand scale of things, which prevents most humans from owning such items (where those items are even present in existence to be owned).
Again, human demand is infinite and thus the opportunities to satisfy the human demand are also infinite.
Stop replying to my comments, you never add anything to the discussion beyond complete waste of time.
You started a business, good for you, I started more than one.
Capitalism is ownership and operation of property and there will be no time on this planet that I will ever agree with anybody that somehow ownership and operation of property is the wrong thing, I like owning and operating my own body and my business and work output is extension of my own body, it takes my own time and effort and it translates my life on this planet into what I do and thus into money that I make and AFAIC theft (including taxes and inflation and business regulations) is always a personal attack on an individual life and there is nothing moral or right or economically good about it.
Slavery was a bad economic system that is why it died out not because of wars or government rules. Slavery died out because free people make better workers. Economically it is better to have free people deciding what they are going to do and where they will work and how they will spend their own money (output of their own lives). Today many if not most governments and nations are ran in such a way that turns a thinking, working individual into a slave of the system and it is wrong, AFAIC, on every level, starting with it being absolutely immoral. AFAIC life of another individual does not belong to anybody but to him or her self, neither does their economic and creative output.
What USA and many other countries have is a horrendous mix of socialism and fascism, where socialism is what is promised and what the masses are voting for (wrongly and immorally) but what is actually delivered is fascism (wrongly and immorally).
I will not agree that 2 wrongs make 1 right.
As to "having enough money for affordable health care for every single person", I agree, there is enough money. What I absolutely disagree with is that the money should be stolen in form of taxes, inflation and regulations to give anybody anything at all, including healthcare.
Your words "we have" to me sounds very simply like this: we steal.
FALSE. It is not possible to have meaningful trade with somebody that does not provide you with any value. I run a business and the reason I run it is that I believe that by making money I am going to get something from other people who run their businesses. I would not run a business to sell my product to anybody if they were only able to afford it from taking the money that I make on the sales and then using MY OWN MONEY to buy MY OWN PRODUCT.
That makes 0 sense, of-course that is what the Chinese are currently doing for the Americans and maybe you are looking at that and thinking that it is a viable option, but it is not. Chinese will not do this forever and nobody in their right mind would run a business, would work so that their productivity could be stolen from them this way.
The only reason to run a business is to trade for the productive output of other businesses. The purpose is trade, if there is no trade there is no need to run a business. Sure, you can have a hobby doing something, which even may be a business, but very few people would run a business if their productive output was actually stolen from them in order to subsidise somebody so they could take the productive output of that business and actually give nothing back.
Using my own money to buy my own productive output is not trade, it's not actually a purchase, it's theft if it is enforced by the system, the collective, the government, the oppressive power.
No, everybody here who thinks that people have a purpose in life that is to be born into a welfare state, where somebody else does everything for them in their lives are mistaken. A system like that will not live long.
Also people here are mistaken about something else: if you don't need as many people to run the already existing businesses and you can downsize the workforce in the existing businesses, this frees up people to find new ways to satisfy customer demand and the actuality is this:
HUMAN DEMAND IS INFINITE and this simple reality is why all of these socialist / Marxist and of-course fascist notions are complete nonsense.
Everybody would have a 600meter yacht if they could buy it for 10 dollars.
Everybody would have their own 787 if they could buy it for 10 dollars.
Everybody would have a 1000 square meter mansion if they could buy it for 10 dollars.
Everybody would have 10 servants if they could pay as little as 10 dollars a person a month.
Everybody would have their own space ship and would want to spend some time checking out views around Jupiter and Saturn.
Everybody would have much more stuff, everybody would want a much longer life if only this was possible and achievable with money and people will always look for solutions to make things cheaper, more plentiful and more accessible.
People will always look for solutions against aging and against death, people will always look for more entertainment and for new experiences.
People will always be interested in new things and ideas, so new things and ideas will be generated.
Your fears of the future and what it brings are limited by your personal box that you are placed in by yourself, by the society, the sick society that places you in a box rather than letting you be free and actually learn to think on your own.
You got your logic all fucked up. USA economy was first of all a capitalist, free market economy, which generated enough wealth for the socialists to start coming to power because now they had something to steal and something they could rally the troops around by promising to steal and redistribute.
USA is no longer a wealthy economy, but for a while it was, when it was a productive economy and then the socialist scavengers (I see socialists as something akin to Ebola virus) took over and destroyed the host economy.
Socialism is a disease, it is a rot of the mind, rot of the will, annihilate of the individual freedoms, zombification of the individual. Socialism is a parasitic, vomit inducing toxin that destroys everything it touches, but the bigger the host, the more time it takes for the parasitic disease to destroy it. The host can stay a zombie for a while, it takes a while for it to be fully destroyed.
Oh my god, do you honestly believe that companies do anything out of 'goodness of heart' rather than because it makes sense economically? The time in America when it made sense economically to offer benefits that included pensions, etc has long gone. Today in America the only thing that makes sense economically is to fire all employees and hire them somewhere else while using the fact that the Fed feels it needs to prop up the housing, stock and bond markets by creating extraordinary amounts of fiat (fake currency, not money) and if you are lucky enough to be on the good side of the government you can participate in this wealth transfer from those, who hold US dollars and bonds to those, who get their hands on the newly minted currency (even if only electronic) that dilutes the total value of all US denominated holdings in the world.
Let's put it this way: if USA economy was actually healthy today, which means if there was actual free market in operation, if there was actual free market capitalism in operation, there would have been plenty of competition for the employees just like decades ago and it would have been enough incentive for companies to offer various benefits, including pensions to decrease turnover.
In today's climate it makes 0 (ZERO) sense to hire Americans to do anything. You want to hire an American? Prepare to be fucked in the ass by all government and quasi government organisations and all courts, everything is against you as an employer. The DUMBEST THING somebody can do in USA is hire an American.
Actually productivity is non-existent. Productivity in USA has plunged since the 1971, when Nixon defaulted on the dollar. Women entered the work force to pay for the cost of ever growing government in the face of destroyed dollar, women entered the work force to make money to cover the taxes that their husbands were now giving up to the ever more oppressive government.
A productive economy can sustain itself, USA economy has no productivity at all, there is only 40-50Billion USD / month trade deficit, which means that the so called 'productive' Americans are being fed by the Chinese and the rest.
There is no productivity in USA except the productivity of the few companies that manage to stay profitable in the face of the gigantic socialist/fascist anti-business machine.
Who is 'working harder and longer' exactly? 92Million Americans are not working, the '5.9%' unemployment is due to the people no longer searching but also it is due to people taking much worse jobs than previously. Part time, lower paying jobs, the pay increase is not there, it's not coming. The Federal reserve is trying to push your real wages down in order to try and prop up the failing economy that doesn't even exist anymore if it weren't for the Federal reserve printing billions to buy into the stock market, housing market, bond market, etc.
As to 'free market conservative' in USA, that's interesting. Where are these 'free market' people exactly if everybody wants the government to do something, anything, anything at all? Free market means that government should be small enough for it to be drowned in a bucket. Today American government is large enough to personally drown every American in a bucket.
All wrong, the actual problem is that all this wealth that the economy was generated was too sweet for the socialists to pass by, socialists of-course being the masses, who would elect anybody to the top who would promise to steal from those who have more and prop up those who have less. Combined with the destruction of sound money (inflation via money printing by government), the climate is so anti-business that it makes no sense hiring anybody in USA and many European countries also and a similar problem apparently.
The reality is of-course that free market capitalism was destroyed and replaced with socialism/fascism and this is the reason that there is no competitive environment, there are fewer and fewer businesses, only the largest ones are remaining and these can automate and outsource to increase efficiencies.
Small businesses are being destroyed by the rules, laws, regulations, taxation and inflation (lack of savings that prevents capital formation and prevents smaller businesses from getting loans) and large businesses are propped up in this socialist/fascist system.
Yes, socialism is a dirty word. Collectivism is a dirty word. Fascism is a dirty word. Communism is a dirty word. Those are the ideas that the oppressors use to destroy individuals and in an amusing twist, those are the same ideas that then turn around and assign the blame for the economic destruction that they cause to the no longer existing free market capitalism and laissez faire ideas, which are nowhere to be found in this regulated, taxed, inflated environment.
OTOH all security is by obscurity, what is a password if not a piece of data that is obscured from most people and supposedly is only known by the one that owns it?
Wait, WHAT??? You want technological progress but to achieve it you reject people who are naturally interested to attempt and lure in those who are not? What are your REAL priorities, because they are not what you are saying they are?
Startups do not provide "good jobs", if you are looking for a "good job" you may want to consider an established business.
If you have a womb and are in a startup, you may want to wait with your personal life, the fact that people do not removes incentives for startup to hire women.
Well it will teach them, wouldn't it? Do not hire women for key positions in startup companies. And yes, in a startup there aren't enough mechanisms to cope with absentees, these are not established companies with established cash flow and product lines, these are like volatile chemical experiments that haven't been done before and can either produce something great or implode/burn fairly easily and disappear in a flash. They are not places for people that need stable incomes / benefits / maternity leaves, they are for people that take risks and put it all in.
Didn't you read my comment that started this thread? Your individual rights are stolen from you by the government that has no authority to take those rights away from you but it still does, so it is not the parents that are required to provide permission or consent, it is the government that took away the power to dictate / set the standard for what the kids are allowed / not allowed to do.
Real pornography happens within people's heads and minds, not on film or pictures. Government is not authorised to destroy individual freedoms this way, however once you allow the government to take some freedoms away, allow it to take away most of your private property ownership and operation rights, you lose your bodies to the government as well, which is why in many respects, the government sees itself as your owner, where your income belongs to it, your property belongs to it unless it allows you to keep some and where your bodies and your lives belong to it as well.
The TSA agents feeling up your private parts or taking your naked pictures, the prison sentences for narcotics possession or sale, the capital punishment for anything at all really, the wars, the murder of civilians in cases of so called 'collateral damage', the 'civil forfeiture', etc.etc. all of these are indicators of the unauthorised usurped powers that government enjoys and that the individuals lost.
I do not require audio applications, I do not listen to music that much, don't need it but I do not mind it. However if it is an 'audio application' it should be standalone and not tied into any 'platform' whatsoever.
Agreed. Here is what I either want to have or can tolerate on the phone: 1. Phone. 2. Address Book / Phone Book. 3. Maps. 4. SMS. 5. Text notes. 6. Camera. 7. Voice recorder (very useful if can also record phone calls). 8. View of images / movies. 9. Browser. 10. Alarm clock. 11. Daily planner. 12. Calculator. 13. File manager.
That is what I think a smartphone is for and I do not want anything else on it.
We could have socialized medicine in the US if we could get this money.
Or we could have something useful. Or just not collect the taxes in the first place, if that's the best you can do with it.
absolutely.
At the time when an average/.er writes another meaningless statement as to how to use more government violence to steal more money from individuals to create more monstrous government monopolies, Switzerland stands its ground and votes against such notions.
Slashdot Mirror
Reagan-era innovation called, "supply-side economics"
- first of all it has nothing to do with 'innovation' during Reagan era, supply side is the only real economics and it made USA into the first rate producer of cheap, high quality goods in the 19th century, turned an country that used to be an afterthought to Europe into the largest producer and creditor nation.
USA lost that status in the last 40 years for the exact opposite reasons, those reasons being that USA SUPPLIES NOTHING except for ungodly amounts of paper currency. USA supplies nothing specifically because worker productivity per worker is negative, instead USA lives off of the supplies that are brought from other countries and those supplies are vendor financed. The only people that are confused here are those who can't understand the simplest of things: productive workers produce and USA doesn't produce anything.
The companies with their profits are showing inflation, not productivity. Current profits are based solely on the ability of the Federal reserve bank to create inflation via money printing and their ability to print money is actually infinite, but not their ability to do anything positive for the economy. Every newly created dollar (electronic or otherwise) only undermines USA economy specifically because it has nothing to do with any productivity whatsoever, it is not a reflection of productive output, it is only the indicator that USA economy is dying and it will choke on the dollar vomit that the Fed is producing.
USA corporations that are catering to the foreign consumers are showing some real gains, but be careful buying into them as well, as their gains will very likely be stolen from them by the government once the inevitable real collapse (dollar this time) wipes out the remaining economy in the States and then we will see just what USA government and the mob are capable of when they decide to confiscate every last penny from anybody who is still actively producing something, anything.
Good luck to you.
I don't care one way or another what you derive from this, given your position I am not sure you can actually derive anything from a conversation that doesn't go your way.
I have seen pretty much anything you can imagine, from multiple immigrations to wars and collapses of countries, I can say with absolute certainty that nothing compares to the risk of running a business with employees and clients, with money and years of life on the line.
I don't need any links to any lists, in my life I rely on my own experiences and knowledge and make my own decisions, so if you want to talk to me, you will have to actually have meaningful additions to the conversation that you make on your own without cheat sheets.
Banks foreclosing, etc., all of this is based on government participating in the market, destroying lending standards and propping up failing business models with money that is stolen from the individuals (taxpayers). None of this is normal behaviour under free market conditions, these situations are created by government "trying to help".
Banking is government regulated.
Power is government regulated.
Health care is government regulated.
Insurance is government regulated.
Food industry is government regulated.
Money is obviously government regulated.
Find me something that is not government regulated beyond computer software and other systems (and even many of these are regulated by the government) and then lets talk about free markets and how somehow without government regulations, taxes, inflation and generally control companies 'tax people' in an actual competitive environment.
You don't know what risk is until you take put all of your money on the line and then hire somebody in an anti-business environment to work for you, in a system that sees every employer as a potential cash cow to be stolen from, to be sued for every transgression even of the people that have nothing to do with the business in the first place. You have 0 understanding of real risk, you are thinking very small and insignificant.
Once you have employees that can sue you, clients that can sue you, government that can sue you, all of your money on the line, even your personal freedom on the line, all because you are now an employer, then you will start gaining a slim sliver of understanding of what risk actually is. You are a child in this, you know nothing until you actually do it. You have nothing to compare to. People do risky things every day, immigration is risky, life is a risky thing. However starting a business in an anti-business system is about as risky for all layers of your life as it gets.
Capital is valued much more than labour because there is a huge lack of capital in the face of labour that has no capital and no skills that are useful enough to be combined with any available capital in a profitable manner, that is why.
Capital is not always valued more than labour, however the system that we are in set up the government that is destroying capital formation with inflation, rules and taxes and because the capital is being destroyed and the formation of capital is disincentivised with all the inflation there is a huge shortage of capital, so the real interest rates are so high that new businesses cannot afford to borrow at that cost of money and the existing businesses are engaged into the asset bubble creation with the fake money supplied by the Federal reserve.
So instead of building new businesses we are supporting the failing existing business models that are not providing utility that would reflect positively on the huge trade imbalances.
As to risk, you don't know what risk is until you started your own business (or maybe went to war).
Obviously. Rights are protections against government abuse, persecution, theft and murder, not against other individuals or businesses.
Government is the only entity that has legal ability to fine, imprison or even murder an individual, companies cannot do that (of-course under a contract fines are possible between 2 parties that agree to a contract).
Inalienable rights are the rights of the individual not to be stolen from and destroyed by the collective, where the collective is the organisation with legal privileges actually to steal from you (taxes, inflation, regulations) and destroy you (imprison you, murder you).
So what, in many cases people choose mates and friends based on their race preferences.
Many clients choose which businesses they will deal with based on the origin business owner (some prefer to frequent or to avoid Indian or Middle Eastern or Asian establishments for example).
People must be able to discriminate however they see fit and I am talking about people in their individual lives and I am also talking about businesses obviously.
Yes, it should be possible to discriminate based on race, absolutely. Race, age, sex, any form of discrimination must be absolutely legal (and by the way it is unconstitutional, illegal for the federal government to regulate businesses and the entire concept of interstate commerce does not allow government to regulate business, it is only there to prevent individual States from erecting barriers of entry, which are still all there, so the federal government is not doing what it's job is and instead it constantly harasses businesses for no reason whatsoever).
Now, government must not be able to discriminate against anybody based on age, race, sex, ethnicity but that is also constantly happening for example with the war on drugs, with the so called 'war on terrorism', with every war that government runs.
Government must not be able to discriminate because it destroys the rule of law, destroys the free market (which is already destroyed in USA of-course) and eventually destroys the economy and thus the society. Government must be forced to treat people equally regardless of their natural characteristics, individuals must not be forced into anything.
If you will not accept government forcing you to marry any particular person or to frequent any particular business then it is inconsistent for you to be cheering for the government forcing a business to either hire or to serve any particular person. Cheering for it is the real discrimination and helps the government to grow its gigantic poisonous tentacles that end up stealing and murdering everything on their path.
I am absolutely correct, worker productivity is productive output, not inflated value of assets and various dollar related bubbles that these graphs are actually showing, which is coincidentally why they all start in early 1970s, after Nixon's default on the dollar, when USA took the world off of the gold standard.
The world used to be on the gold standard before 1971, which prevented gigantic bubbles that we are living through now. USA was (is still) the reserve currency that foreign national banks hold as 'reserves', however that literally meant that the foreigners had gold reserves in those dollars (that's what the gold standard promised). As Nixon defaulted on the dollar, the world was taken off of the gold standard and that started gigantic inflation mania that we have experienced since.
USA productive output is negative, which is why USA cannot pay for its own consumption, which is subsidised by the very people that produce the stuff that Americans consume (Chinese and the like). USA has been running a 500Billion USD/year trade deficit for over 2 decades now, there is nothing at all productive about an economy that does not pay for imports with its own exports, this the destruction of productivity I am talking about and what the pundits that push nonsensical propaganda about 'rising USA productivity' are actually talking about is inflation and the related to the inflation rising cost of living, rising prices that do not reflect productivity, in fact they reflect destruction of the economy.
How tired I am of you and your nonsense on the Great Depression and the false reasons behind it that you believe in and the actual facts that you cannot get through your thick skull. The Great Depression was not caused by oversupply of anything, it was caused by the Federal reserve bank of America buying up bad UK debt from France and creating giant inflation in the process, which inflated the stock market bubble, which was not sustainable because bubbles are not sustainable. The recession that resulted from the burst of the bubble would have been dealt with swiftly, just like the depression of 1921, if the government stayed away, but instead Hoover and later FDR stepped in and turned the recession into the depression (which by the way only had about 25% unemployment, which is actually no worse than what USA is experiencing today) and many of the 'solutions' of the idiots that believe in nonsensical Keynesian garbage was to print more money by government to DESTROY PRODUCTS that farmers created, they literally destroyed food, ploughed it into the ground rather than allowing the absolutely necessary reduction of prices that would have absolutely helped the people of that era and prevented any unnecessary suffering.
The government, that you fucking love so much, took farming output and literally ploughed it into the fucking ground so that the prices wouldn't drop, you unimaginable unintelligent creep.
THE HUMAN DEMAND IS INFINITE. The ability to satisfy the demand is limited by productivity of the humans that have those demands and that is why 600 meter yachts are not selling for 10 dollars and that is why people do not have their own 787s and space ships, because the human productivity today is minuscule on the grand scale of things, which prevents most humans from owning such items (where those items are even present in existence to be owned).
Again, human demand is infinite and thus the opportunities to satisfy the human demand are also infinite.
Stop replying to my comments, you never add anything to the discussion beyond complete waste of time.
You started a business, good for you, I started more than one.
Capitalism is ownership and operation of property and there will be no time on this planet that I will ever agree with anybody that somehow ownership and operation of property is the wrong thing, I like owning and operating my own body and my business and work output is extension of my own body, it takes my own time and effort and it translates my life on this planet into what I do and thus into money that I make and AFAIC theft (including taxes and inflation and business regulations) is always a personal attack on an individual life and there is nothing moral or right or economically good about it.
Slavery was a bad economic system that is why it died out not because of wars or government rules. Slavery died out because free people make better workers. Economically it is better to have free people deciding what they are going to do and where they will work and how they will spend their own money (output of their own lives). Today many if not most governments and nations are ran in such a way that turns a thinking, working individual into a slave of the system and it is wrong, AFAIC, on every level, starting with it being absolutely immoral. AFAIC life of another individual does not belong to anybody but to him or her self, neither does their economic and creative output.
What USA and many other countries have is a horrendous mix of socialism and fascism, where socialism is what is promised and what the masses are voting for (wrongly and immorally) but what is actually delivered is fascism (wrongly and immorally).
I will not agree that 2 wrongs make 1 right.
As to "having enough money for affordable health care for every single person", I agree, there is enough money. What I absolutely disagree with is that the money should be stolen in form of taxes, inflation and regulations to give anybody anything at all, including healthcare.
Your words "we have" to me sounds very simply like this: we steal.
FALSE. It is not possible to have meaningful trade with somebody that does not provide you with any value. I run a business and the reason I run it is that I believe that by making money I am going to get something from other people who run their businesses. I would not run a business to sell my product to anybody if they were only able to afford it from taking the money that I make on the sales and then using MY OWN MONEY to buy MY OWN PRODUCT.
That makes 0 sense, of-course that is what the Chinese are currently doing for the Americans and maybe you are looking at that and thinking that it is a viable option, but it is not. Chinese will not do this forever and nobody in their right mind would run a business, would work so that their productivity could be stolen from them this way.
The only reason to run a business is to trade for the productive output of other businesses. The purpose is trade, if there is no trade there is no need to run a business. Sure, you can have a hobby doing something, which even may be a business, but very few people would run a business if their productive output was actually stolen from them in order to subsidise somebody so they could take the productive output of that business and actually give nothing back.
Using my own money to buy my own productive output is not trade, it's not actually a purchase, it's theft if it is enforced by the system, the collective, the government, the oppressive power.
No, everybody here who thinks that people have a purpose in life that is to be born into a welfare state, where somebody else does everything for them in their lives are mistaken. A system like that will not live long.
Also people here are mistaken about something else: if you don't need as many people to run the already existing businesses and you can downsize the workforce in the existing businesses, this frees up people to find new ways to satisfy customer demand and the actuality is this:
HUMAN DEMAND IS INFINITE and this simple reality is why all of these socialist / Marxist and of-course fascist notions are complete nonsense.
Everybody would have a 600meter yacht if they could buy it for 10 dollars.
Everybody would have their own 787 if they could buy it for 10 dollars.
Everybody would have a 1000 square meter mansion if they could buy it for 10 dollars.
Everybody would have 10 servants if they could pay as little as 10 dollars a person a month.
Everybody would have their own space ship and would want to spend some time checking out views around Jupiter and Saturn.
Everybody would have much more stuff, everybody would want a much longer life if only this was possible and achievable with money and people will always look for solutions to make things cheaper, more plentiful and more accessible.
People will always look for solutions against aging and against death, people will always look for more entertainment and for new experiences.
People will always be interested in new things and ideas, so new things and ideas will be generated.
Your fears of the future and what it brings are limited by your personal box that you are placed in by yourself, by the society, the sick society that places you in a box rather than letting you be free and actually learn to think on your own.
You got your logic all fucked up. USA economy was first of all a capitalist, free market economy, which generated enough wealth for the socialists to start coming to power because now they had something to steal and something they could rally the troops around by promising to steal and redistribute.
USA is no longer a wealthy economy, but for a while it was, when it was a productive economy and then the socialist scavengers (I see socialists as something akin to Ebola virus) took over and destroyed the host economy.
Socialism is a disease, it is a rot of the mind, rot of the will, annihilate of the individual freedoms, zombification of the individual. Socialism is a parasitic, vomit inducing toxin that destroys everything it touches, but the bigger the host, the more time it takes for the parasitic disease to destroy it. The host can stay a zombie for a while, it takes a while for it to be fully destroyed.
Oh my god, do you honestly believe that companies do anything out of 'goodness of heart' rather than because it makes sense economically? The time in America when it made sense economically to offer benefits that included pensions, etc has long gone. Today in America the only thing that makes sense economically is to fire all employees and hire them somewhere else while using the fact that the Fed feels it needs to prop up the housing, stock and bond markets by creating extraordinary amounts of fiat (fake currency, not money) and if you are lucky enough to be on the good side of the government you can participate in this wealth transfer from those, who hold US dollars and bonds to those, who get their hands on the newly minted currency (even if only electronic) that dilutes the total value of all US denominated holdings in the world.
Let's put it this way: if USA economy was actually healthy today, which means if there was actual free market in operation, if there was actual free market capitalism in operation, there would have been plenty of competition for the employees just like decades ago and it would have been enough incentive for companies to offer various benefits, including pensions to decrease turnover.
In today's climate it makes 0 (ZERO) sense to hire Americans to do anything. You want to hire an American? Prepare to be fucked in the ass by all government and quasi government organisations and all courts, everything is against you as an employer. The DUMBEST THING somebody can do in USA is hire an American.
Actually productivity is non-existent. Productivity in USA has plunged since the 1971, when Nixon defaulted on the dollar. Women entered the work force to pay for the cost of ever growing government in the face of destroyed dollar, women entered the work force to make money to cover the taxes that their husbands were now giving up to the ever more oppressive government.
A productive economy can sustain itself, USA economy has no productivity at all, there is only 40-50Billion USD / month trade deficit, which means that the so called 'productive' Americans are being fed by the Chinese and the rest.
There is no productivity in USA except the productivity of the few companies that manage to stay profitable in the face of the gigantic socialist/fascist anti-business machine.
Who is 'working harder and longer' exactly? 92Million Americans are not working, the '5.9%' unemployment is due to the people no longer searching but also it is due to people taking much worse jobs than previously. Part time, lower paying jobs, the pay increase is not there, it's not coming. The Federal reserve is trying to push your real wages down in order to try and prop up the failing economy that doesn't even exist anymore if it weren't for the Federal reserve printing billions to buy into the stock market, housing market, bond market, etc.
As to 'free market conservative' in USA, that's interesting. Where are these 'free market' people exactly if everybody wants the government to do something, anything, anything at all? Free market means that government should be small enough for it to be drowned in a bucket. Today American government is large enough to personally drown every American in a bucket.
All wrong, the actual problem is that all this wealth that the economy was generated was too sweet for the socialists to pass by, socialists of-course being the masses, who would elect anybody to the top who would promise to steal from those who have more and prop up those who have less. Combined with the destruction of sound money (inflation via money printing by government), the climate is so anti-business that it makes no sense hiring anybody in USA and many European countries also and a similar problem apparently.
The reality is of-course that free market capitalism was destroyed and replaced with socialism/fascism and this is the reason that there is no competitive environment, there are fewer and fewer businesses, only the largest ones are remaining and these can automate and outsource to increase efficiencies.
Small businesses are being destroyed by the rules, laws, regulations, taxation and inflation (lack of savings that prevents capital formation and prevents smaller businesses from getting loans) and large businesses are propped up in this socialist/fascist system.
Yes, socialism is a dirty word. Collectivism is a dirty word. Fascism is a dirty word. Communism is a dirty word. Those are the ideas that the oppressors use to destroy individuals and in an amusing twist, those are the same ideas that then turn around and assign the blame for the economic destruction that they cause to the no longer existing free market capitalism and laissez faire ideas, which are nowhere to be found in this regulated, taxed, inflated environment.
OTOH all security is by obscurity, what is a password if not a piece of data that is obscured from most people and supposedly is only known by the one that owns it?
Wait, WHAT??? You want technological progress but to achieve it you reject people who are naturally interested to attempt and lure in those who are not? What are your REAL priorities, because they are not what you are saying they are?
Startups do not provide "good jobs", if you are looking for a "good job" you may want to consider an established business.
If you have a womb and are in a startup, you may want to wait with your personal life, the fact that people do not removes incentives for startup to hire women.
Well it will teach them, wouldn't it? Do not hire women for key positions in startup companies. And yes, in a startup there aren't enough mechanisms to cope with absentees, these are not established companies with established cash flow and product lines, these are like volatile chemical experiments that haven't been done before and can either produce something great or implode/burn fairly easily and disappear in a flash. They are not places for people that need stable incomes / benefits / maternity leaves, they are for people that take risks and put it all in.
Didn't you read my comment that started this thread? Your individual rights are stolen from you by the government that has no authority to take those rights away from you but it still does, so it is not the parents that are required to provide permission or consent, it is the government that took away the power to dictate / set the standard for what the kids are allowed / not allowed to do.
I guess under these standards the papua new guinea indigenous dress would be considered pornography and 'child pornography'.
Real pornography happens within people's heads and minds, not on film or pictures. Government is not authorised to destroy individual freedoms this way, however once you allow the government to take some freedoms away, allow it to take away most of your private property ownership and operation rights, you lose your bodies to the government as well, which is why in many respects, the government sees itself as your owner, where your income belongs to it, your property belongs to it unless it allows you to keep some and where your bodies and your lives belong to it as well.
The TSA agents feeling up your private parts or taking your naked pictures, the prison sentences for narcotics possession or sale, the capital punishment for anything at all really, the wars, the murder of civilians in cases of so called 'collateral damage', the 'civil forfeiture', etc.etc. all of these are indicators of the unauthorised usurped powers that government enjoys and that the individuals lost.
Tetris, the last BLOCKBUSTER.
I do not require audio applications, I do not listen to music that much, don't need it but I do not mind it. However if it is an 'audio application' it should be standalone and not tied into any 'platform' whatsoever.
Agreed.
Here is what I either want to have or can tolerate on the phone:
1. Phone.
2. Address Book / Phone Book.
3. Maps.
4. SMS.
5. Text notes.
6. Camera.
7. Voice recorder (very useful if can also record phone calls).
8. View of images / movies.
9. Browser.
10. Alarm clock.
11. Daily planner.
12. Calculator.
13. File manager.
That is what I think a smartphone is for and I do not want anything else on it.
We could have socialized medicine in the US if we could get this money.
Or we could have something useful. Or just not collect the taxes in the first place, if that's the best you can do with it.
absolutely.
At the time when an average /.er writes another meaningless statement as to how to use more government violence to steal more money from individuals to create more monstrous government monopolies, Switzerland stands its ground and votes against such notions.