At best Google can use its billions to employ real humans to identify bad sites. But that's anathema to Google's flawed technocratic ideal and would lose them loads of ad revenue from the squatters and the scrapers.
Remember, if you're searching with Google then you're the product, not the client.
I was a private ("Public") school, old money, old boys' club cunt. In England, that's pretty much necessary and sufficient.
But I hated it and have told pretty much everyone I've known over the years in that environment to go fuck themselves, implicitly or explicitly. So I guess I'm in the same boat as everyone else now. I feel human for it, though. I sometimes lie awake at night wondering whether that counts for anything, but the fact that I'm still alive suggests that some part of me must think it does.
Just because you're not engaged in X when you're doing Y, it doesn't mean you're not engaged in X when you're doing Z. You're arguing politician / banker style entitlement. "Well, we do this stuff which may possibly be beneficial to some people, which means not only should we get paid a good wage but also we should get all sorts of special protections, privileges and/or rewards."
I am reminded (all too frequently) of this exchange. I'm special!!!!!!
Once upon a time there was this fairly cool guy called JRR Tolkien who wrote some popular books. Then he had some descendants who were leeching cunts. The lawyers on all sides lived happily ever after. The end.
I agree that more research is needed into why THC and synthetic compounds with similar properties seem to retard the growth of certain cancers in certain conditions. I also think that the legal prohibition of cannabis is not appropriate.
However, claims like "cannabis cures cancer" embarrass your cause, doubly so when they're coupled with the suggestion that cannabis has no negative effects on productivity or (in fewer but not insignificant cases) mental health. Cannabis isn't banned in many workplaces just because it's illegal.
He's already leaving his child in "daycare" and talking about how important his income is to the UK economy. I think we can all see where his priorities are.
I've worked in the house on and off for years when I've had caring responsibilities. It's tough, but (providing your job makes it physically possible) mostly it requires you to actually not want to make an excuse for not doing it.
- you didn't pay attention to the data, did you? US dollar has been losing value steadily, and since the Fed was created in 1913 it lost 98% of it (more than that now.) Pay attention to the data, otherwise you'll look foolish.
You're not actually replying to what I said. Currency is measured by purchasing power, not by backing. You're so obsessed with the gold standard like some puppy with a bone that your response to everything, no matter how unrelated, is "look at this article explaining why the gold standard is good!" Yes, there's been inflation, although your stupid gold-standard-based calculation overestimates it.
Now, does the inflation matter? Put another way, do we have less to spend? No, we don't, salaries have gone up at a greater rate than inflation, and that's before you consider interest rates. Is the rate of inflation systemic? No, it's concentrated in the years around the Oil Crisis. In short, the USA is not Zimbabwe.
US dollars that are passed around by the Fed have such exact features. Every new dollar printed is worth less than any dollar in existence, so every new dollar is NOT like any previous dollar. It is not genuine.
The worth of a dollar is ultimately determined by how many dollars people are prepared to accept for goods and services. The moment you understand that this is how currency works, you'll feel a lot more connected with reality. And everyone knows that the dollar is not matched with a certain weight of gold, so suggesting that counterfeiting is going on because "Things aren't going my way!" shows your basis to be in religious fervour rather than reason.
There are many reasons [npr.org] why gold is real money and why in most languages the world for money is actually 'gold' or some form of it. You can't change the facts, you see.
Oh, do grow up.
t. For example Chinese currency is 'backed' by their reserves of US dollars/debt. Their problem is that US dollars/debt is backed by nothing, so they chose a wrong backing, but their money is not counterfeit in itself.
OK, US dollars are backed by grains of sand. The problem is that grains of sand are backed by nothing. Does this make you feel better now?
- deflation is a good thing for an economy, as people gain purchasing power.
Which they sit on. Great for large holders of currency, troubling for the brighteyed young chap who actually wants to establish himself and, you know, needs money.
I have a bar of chocolate in front of me. Let's use this bar of chocolate to back all the dollars in the world. Would that make you happy? Can nothing go wrong?
Or is USSR, Argentina, Zimbabwe, Rome not good enough? What evidence do you have to the contrary?
The fall of the USSR was primarily a mismanagement of central economy, not a problem with inflation caused by lack of gold standard. Rome's fall was a combination of military, political, social and financial factors. Zimbabwe is a pathological extreme and shows that the ability to print money can be abused - in this case by a vicious, racist tyrant who has already ruined his country by expelling the talent. I acknowledge and agree that government can abuse its power - you insist that it must and will.
If we list every country currently on this earth, we see that most of them have reasonably stable unbacked currencies.
- gold value was the exact value of money, since people used it for trade and didn't have the federal reserve notes.
Heheh, glad you admitted to your source for that silly 98% inflation statistic. Oh, the price of gold has gone up, this means the value of the dollar must have gone down! Hey, the price of my Amstrad CPC 464 has gone down, this m
Money only has value to the extent that people are prepared to accept particular amounts. "Counterfeit" money is some instrument which you claim to have particular features but which does not have those features. Money which is not backed by a gold standard is not "counterfeit". Use of emotive language doesn't prove anything.
money that has no backing of either production or resource of any kind.
What backing does gold have? You've just changed the problem from one of the government being able to print more money - responsibly or irresponsibly - to inflation created by the mining of gold or deflation created by a growing economy lacking gold.
Money that's printed to cover any costs - be it military or unemployment or pensions or welfare or subsidies and bail outs to large government preferred institutions, like banks and insurance companies and even certain car manufacturers.
Luckily there's no way a government can abuse its power with the gold standard... oh, wait, it could ship off its reserves.
If there was no Fed, USA would have never lost its extensive railroad system,
Yes, the development of the motor car and the aeroplane would have been retarded indefinitely.
it never would have had the ridiculous suburban sprawl resulting from the gov't subsidies during FDR.
Ridiculous? In the sense that everyone needs to be piled on top of each other in the city centre, or in the sense that life's much better when everyone lives in a little isolated town far from everyone else?
as US Dollar went up in value by a factor of 2 over 19 century
How are you valuing it, please? Try to make sure that you're not using a metric which inevitably gives a high value for a gold standard-backed currency, instead explaining why the value is important to the American citizen.
If there was no Fed and no printing and if there was no income tax (which also was implemented in 1913, which is not a coincidence), the US would have not lost its capital investments
Income tax causes loss of capital investments? Tell me more.
and people would have been much better off and wouldn't have had any use for gov't SS and Medicare/aide etc.
What exactly are you talking about here? Are you suggesting that government regulation is what stops everyone from being so well off that they all have adequate healthcare and sufficient income in old age for food and roof? Do you have any evidence for this in history or the present?
Of-course gov't printing money is another reason why medical insurance and care and education costs have risen so much - gov't guarantees them by providing loans and those institutions can then take everything they see given out by gov't.
The government is the biggest client, and does not need to pay over the odds. In reality, what you're saying is nonsense - private patients and students give a far better income per capita than government-funded.
- the fractional reserve is also a scam. FDIC proves it's a scam. There was a reason banks were bankrupt prior to FDIC by bank runs - that's because people don't trust fractional reserve and with a good reason.
There's no "scam" in investing money which people give to you, as long as the people giving you the money are aware that you're doing it. In return for a better-performing bank which can give you better returns, you assume the risk that the bank may fuck up and lose a good proportion of your money. But are you saying that all banks should just sit on depositors' money?
There is no such thing as 'responsible government'.
This statement is quasi-religious. Are you suggesting that all humans are malevolent or incompetent or
Athenian democracy is not like modern democracy. We don't just elect all government workers. Much of the civil service is pretty much unelected, in the UK tied into various well-established educational institutions, examinations, old boy networks, etc. To say that the high level civil service in the UK is run by idiots is essentially to say that the top UK universities are full of idiots.
Of course, some high-level instruction comes from elected officials. And sometimes these officials even do what the population ask them to, but it's not very likely.
"Our point"? You haven't posted before so maybe I'm missing something.
The point I've made very explicit in other posts is that intelligence agencies don't work for you but for the government, and that their business is the capture, analysis and dissemination of information (true and false), so you cannot judge their performance by taking anything they publish on face value.
I also emphasised that "Air Force buys surveillance software" doesn't mean that an intelligence agency is using particular surveillance software. I guess that's where you're referring to the fallacy, but where has there been a serious suggestion that the Air Force is an intelligence agency? But I emphasised further that even "CIA buys surveillance software" doesn't mean they're using it - it could just mean that they want to give the impression that they're using it. Do you understand now?
- no. And it wasn't sustainable since the Fed and SS were established.
Sorry, what? Are you saying that, if it weren't for the Federal Reserve and Social Security, the last decade of irresponsible spending and investment would not have resulted in the 2008 "crisis"?
- you missed the point. There was never 'investment', it was always a ponzi scheme from get go.
SS could be run as an investment policy, but it isn't, nor does it need to be. As long as the government behaves responsibly, it doesn't need to have everyone's pension money available - just as banks don't have the total value of all deposits in available cash.
Whatever they consider a 'surplus' is US treasury bonds,
Always? Why can't the government have a treasury surplus?
and those are like checks to yourself - don't make you any richer, but worse, they also have to be sold on bond market, and this means that it's debt that is funding SS, not investments.
What? There's no return on / cashing in of government bonds? My grandmother made excellent returns on gilts.
If gov't wanted people to have real retirement savings, it would have never taxed income - that's the only way to allow people to do their own real investment.
This has nothing to do with whether SS is a ponzi scheme.
Federal reserve was a ponzi scheme from get go as well, as the idea was to allow gov't to print reserve notes without having any real gold reserves to back up the notes.
The value of currency is determined by who is willing to accept it and how much. The tedious old gold standard argument has been refuted a thousand times, though it seems exceedingly popular on Slashdot - perhaps because it's anathema to a geek to accept that currency is an expression of faith.
Harding fixed that recession by firing/cutting gov't budget by 70%....99.9%....
You give the impression that the government budget must be continually heavily slashed to get out of recession, while government spending causes depression. The overall trend has been an increase in government spending. This makes no sense.
That depression lasted until WWII ended and then USA had a boom (not due to high taxes, as nobody was paying them) but USA had boom because it had no competition in labor market around the world because nobody was hired around the world, as the rest of the producing nations had their capital/infrastructure destroyed.
Indeed. While in the UK, despite massive debt, government spending skyrocketed with heavy investment in local industry, technology and services. Also the modern welfare state was born.
opened up for business (they went through a decade of death due to hunger before than) and so US capital started leaving the country, as the country was top heavy from gov't/taxes/regulations/corruption.
As it's always cheaper to hire a third world worker in a country where the alternative to harsh conditions is death. The reason for the massive escape of capital is not because the West gives too many protections to the worker but because it allows free trade with foreign countries which give too few.
US had various 'bail outs' in its history, all having to do with borrowing/printing money
Well, the cause is often irresponsible private borrowing, yes.
it's killing its savings because of 0% interest, so capital leaves.
Yes.
That, coupled with lack of jobs and lack of mortgage lending standards, due to gov't agencies such as HUD, FHA
Yeah, only the public housing programmes were guilty of it... *sigh*. No, hundreds of banks across the western hemisphere were involved.
This government ran experiment of having central banks, of havi
CIA reports to the National Intelligence Director and the POTUS.
So, not to you, then.
Now you, try again, this time with a better argument than CIA is intelligent and/or efficient at it. [slashdot.org]
Possibly a foreign government / unfriendly organisation was being allowed to continue using Montgomery's snake oil in order to further US interests. Or perhaps the impression that the tools were effective changed the behaviour of some adversary. For the adversary to continue believing the tools are effective, the US must appear to continue using them and not act on possible evidence that the tools were useless.
$20 million is absolutely nothing in military or intelligence spending terms, and I bet not all that money is actually in Montgomery's account.
Quite. I'm sure the quantity of money was just an exercise in budget redistribution anyway, and it's likely that the public "it's a fake!" warnings many years later by Western agencies were simply ways of adjusting the behaviour of the governments/departments using the tools. (Maybe some unrelated negotiation failed. Maybe someone's trying to sell another solution.)
Intelligence agencies aren't there to publish timely and accurate reports directly for the people. They're merely a branch of government and they employ people sufficiently skilled in particular areas to do whatever the government tells them to do. If that means finding something out, they'll do it. If it means publishing misinformation, they'll do it. The final goal is not decided by the agency.
If you want, you can describe 2008 as "inevitable" rather than planned: Now if some ongoing behaviour is unsustainable then it will inevitably eventually fail. Do you regard that the past decade of behaviour was sustainable? If the answer is no then you must accept that what happened in 2008 was inevitable. If the answer is yes then provide evidence.
The whole "social security is a ponzi scheme" is bullshit: everyone takes part in SS whereas a ponzi scheme collapses because there are not enough new investors to give profitable returns the older investors. The changing demographic will mean that pension ages may need to be tweaked, but that's happening anyway. AFAIK accusations that the Federal Reserve is a ponzi scheme are based on the way it behaves in certain situations - there is nothing inherently ponzi about it. But I don't know enough about it. If it is a ponzi scheme, when is it considered that it will fail and what's retarding it?
The "crisis" is you being on the losing end of a collection of similar financial deals over the past decade which have made other people very rich. Nothing has happened which was not planned. And do you think that debt appeared overnight? It's been building up in the past decade.
Everyone relevant was aware of what Madoff was up to. Since at least 1999 people were warning about his behaviour, but who of relevance would benefit if he were called out so soon? His scheme was simply not sustainable through 2008 and for some reason known only personally to him he didn't run off / stage a Maxwell. I'm sure he had guesstimated the period of time he could sustain his entertaining financial stunt - perhaps he'd already planned for a cosy jail sentence when the inevitable shit hit the fan.
After all, if you're going to be the best in the world at something, why not set up the largest Ponzi scheme in history? He won.
Re-read. The obviously bungled reports are known not to be true (except, perhaps, by you?), but are created to further a particular goal. Or is propaganda something only the Axis of Naughtiness engages in?
Slashdot Mirror
At best Google can use its billions to employ real humans to identify bad sites. But that's anathema to Google's flawed technocratic ideal and would lose them loads of ad revenue from the squatters and the scrapers.
Remember, if you're searching with Google then you're the product, not the client.
Alternatively, usinagaz, being a real TCP/IP stack for a real engineer's calculator. IRC, web server, mail client, etc.
Not sure why you'd need an Arduino board. What simple interface did TI manage to break?
I was a private ("Public") school, old money, old boys' club cunt. In England, that's pretty much necessary and sufficient.
But I hated it and have told pretty much everyone I've known over the years in that environment to go fuck themselves, implicitly or explicitly. So I guess I'm in the same boat as everyone else now. I feel human for it, though. I sometimes lie awake at night wondering whether that counts for anything, but the fact that I'm still alive suggests that some part of me must think it does.
Government --> lucrative private lobbying position --> contacts in government
Just because you're not engaged in X when you're doing Y, it doesn't mean you're not engaged in X when you're doing Z. You're arguing politician / banker style entitlement. "Well, we do this stuff which may possibly be beneficial to some people, which means not only should we get paid a good wage but also we should get all sorts of special protections, privileges and/or rewards."
I am reminded (all too frequently) of this exchange. I'm special!!!!!!
Once upon a time there was this fairly cool guy called JRR Tolkien who wrote some popular books. Then he had some descendants who were leeching cunts. The lawyers on all sides lived happily ever after. The end.
This is OK because it's not fiction, right?
You could have just said, "I've ignored the link and the logic. THE SKY IS FALLING FOR THE FOURTH TIME IN THE LAST CENTURY!"
The average person - and I'm sure you're one - had an excellent time 100 years ago. Carry on yearning for the old religion, Brother.
I agree that more research is needed into why THC and synthetic compounds with similar properties seem to retard the growth of certain cancers in certain conditions. I also think that the legal prohibition of cannabis is not appropriate.
However, claims like "cannabis cures cancer" embarrass your cause, doubly so when they're coupled with the suggestion that cannabis has no negative effects on productivity or (in fewer but not insignificant cases) mental health. Cannabis isn't banned in many workplaces just because it's illegal.
He's already leaving his child in "daycare" and talking about how important his income is to the UK economy. I think we can all see where his priorities are.
I've worked in the house on and off for years when I've had caring responsibilities. It's tough, but (providing your job makes it physically possible) mostly it requires you to actually not want to make an excuse for not doing it.
- you didn't pay attention to the data, did you? US dollar has been losing value steadily, and since the Fed was created in 1913 it lost 98% of it (more than that now.) Pay attention to the data, otherwise you'll look foolish.
You're not actually replying to what I said. Currency is measured by purchasing power, not by backing. You're so obsessed with the gold standard like some puppy with a bone that your response to everything, no matter how unrelated, is "look at this article explaining why the gold standard is good!" Yes, there's been inflation, although your stupid gold-standard-based calculation overestimates it.
Now, does the inflation matter? Put another way, do we have less to spend? No, we don't, salaries have gone up at a greater rate than inflation, and that's before you consider interest rates. Is the rate of inflation systemic? No, it's concentrated in the years around the Oil Crisis. In short, the USA is not Zimbabwe.
US dollars that are passed around by the Fed have such exact features. Every new dollar printed is worth less than any dollar in existence, so every new dollar is NOT like any previous dollar. It is not genuine.
The worth of a dollar is ultimately determined by how many dollars people are prepared to accept for goods and services. The moment you understand that this is how currency works, you'll feel a lot more connected with reality. And everyone knows that the dollar is not matched with a certain weight of gold, so suggesting that counterfeiting is going on because "Things aren't going my way!" shows your basis to be in religious fervour rather than reason.
There are many reasons [npr.org] why gold is real money and why in most languages the world for money is actually 'gold' or some form of it. You can't change the facts, you see.
Oh, do grow up.
t. For example Chinese currency is 'backed' by their reserves of US dollars/debt. Their problem is that US dollars/debt is backed by nothing, so they chose a wrong backing, but their money is not counterfeit in itself.
OK, US dollars are backed by grains of sand. The problem is that grains of sand are backed by nothing. Does this make you feel better now?
- deflation is a good thing for an economy, as people gain purchasing power.
Which they sit on. Great for large holders of currency, troubling for the brighteyed young chap who actually wants to establish himself and, you know, needs money.
I have a bar of chocolate in front of me. Let's use this bar of chocolate to back all the dollars in the world. Would that make you happy? Can nothing go wrong?
Or is USSR, Argentina, Zimbabwe, Rome not good enough? What evidence do you have to the contrary?
The fall of the USSR was primarily a mismanagement of central economy, not a problem with inflation caused by lack of gold standard. Rome's fall was a combination of military, political, social and financial factors. Zimbabwe is a pathological extreme and shows that the ability to print money can be abused - in this case by a vicious, racist tyrant who has already ruined his country by expelling the talent. I acknowledge and agree that government can abuse its power - you insist that it must and will.
If we list every country currently on this earth, we see that most of them have reasonably stable unbacked currencies.
- gold value was the exact value of money, since people used it for trade and didn't have the federal reserve notes.
Heheh, glad you admitted to your source for that silly 98% inflation statistic. Oh, the price of gold has gone up, this means the value of the dollar must have gone down! Hey, the price of my Amstrad CPC 464 has gone down, this m
cannabis cures cancer
Yeah, I think I'll just leave that here.
Oh god, you're insane.
Counterfeit money
Money only has value to the extent that people are prepared to accept particular amounts. "Counterfeit" money is some instrument which you claim to have particular features but which does not have those features. Money which is not backed by a gold standard is not "counterfeit". Use of emotive language doesn't prove anything.
money that has no backing of either production or resource of any kind.
What backing does gold have? You've just changed the problem from one of the government being able to print more money - responsibly or irresponsibly - to inflation created by the mining of gold or deflation created by a growing economy lacking gold.
Money that's printed to cover any costs - be it military or unemployment or pensions or welfare or subsidies and bail outs to large government preferred institutions, like banks and insurance companies and even certain car manufacturers.
Luckily there's no way a government can abuse its power with the gold standard... oh, wait, it could ship off its reserves.
If there was no Fed, USA would have never lost its extensive railroad system,
Yes, the development of the motor car and the aeroplane would have been retarded indefinitely.
it never would have had the ridiculous suburban sprawl resulting from the gov't subsidies during FDR.
Ridiculous? In the sense that everyone needs to be piled on top of each other in the city centre, or in the sense that life's much better when everyone lives in a little isolated town far from everyone else?
as US Dollar went up in value by a factor of 2 over 19 century
How are you valuing it, please? Try to make sure that you're not using a metric which inevitably gives a high value for a gold standard-backed currency, instead explaining why the value is important to the American citizen.
If there was no Fed and no printing and if there was no income tax (which also was implemented in 1913, which is not a coincidence), the US would have not lost its capital investments
Income tax causes loss of capital investments? Tell me more.
and people would have been much better off and wouldn't have had any use for gov't SS and Medicare/aide etc.
What exactly are you talking about here? Are you suggesting that government regulation is what stops everyone from being so well off that they all have adequate healthcare and sufficient income in old age for food and roof? Do you have any evidence for this in history or the present?
Of-course gov't printing money is another reason why medical insurance and care and education costs have risen so much - gov't guarantees them by providing loans and those institutions can then take everything they see given out by gov't.
The government is the biggest client, and does not need to pay over the odds. In reality, what you're saying is nonsense - private patients and students give a far better income per capita than government-funded.
- the fractional reserve is also a scam. FDIC proves it's a scam. There was a reason banks were bankrupt prior to FDIC by bank runs - that's because people don't trust fractional reserve and with a good reason.
There's no "scam" in investing money which people give to you, as long as the people giving you the money are aware that you're doing it. In return for a better-performing bank which can give you better returns, you assume the risk that the bank may fuck up and lose a good proportion of your money. But are you saying that all banks should just sit on depositors' money?
There is no such thing as 'responsible government'.
This statement is quasi-religious. Are you suggesting that all humans are malevolent or incompetent or
Athenian democracy is not like modern democracy. We don't just elect all government workers. Much of the civil service is pretty much unelected, in the UK tied into various well-established educational institutions, examinations, old boy networks, etc. To say that the high level civil service in the UK is run by idiots is essentially to say that the top UK universities are full of idiots.
Of course, some high-level instruction comes from elected officials. And sometimes these officials even do what the population ask them to, but it's not very likely.
"Our point"? You haven't posted before so maybe I'm missing something.
The point I've made very explicit in other posts is that intelligence agencies don't work for you but for the government, and that their business is the capture, analysis and dissemination of information (true and false), so you cannot judge their performance by taking anything they publish on face value.
I also emphasised that "Air Force buys surveillance software" doesn't mean that an intelligence agency is using particular surveillance software. I guess that's where you're referring to the fallacy, but where has there been a serious suggestion that the Air Force is an intelligence agency? But I emphasised further that even "CIA buys surveillance software" doesn't mean they're using it - it could just mean that they want to give the impression that they're using it. Do you understand now?
- no. And it wasn't sustainable since the Fed and SS were established.
Sorry, what? Are you saying that, if it weren't for the Federal Reserve and Social Security, the last decade of irresponsible spending and investment would not have resulted in the 2008 "crisis"?
- you missed the point. There was never 'investment', it was always a ponzi scheme from get go.
SS could be run as an investment policy, but it isn't, nor does it need to be. As long as the government behaves responsibly, it doesn't need to have everyone's pension money available - just as banks don't have the total value of all deposits in available cash.
Whatever they consider a 'surplus' is US treasury bonds,
Always? Why can't the government have a treasury surplus?
and those are like checks to yourself - don't make you any richer, but worse, they also have to be sold on bond market, and this means that it's debt that is funding SS, not investments.
What? There's no return on / cashing in of government bonds? My grandmother made excellent returns on gilts.
If gov't wanted people to have real retirement savings, it would have never taxed income - that's the only way to allow people to do their own real investment.
This has nothing to do with whether SS is a ponzi scheme.
Federal reserve was a ponzi scheme from get go as well, as the idea was to allow gov't to print reserve notes without having any real gold reserves to back up the notes.
The value of currency is determined by who is willing to accept it and how much. The tedious old gold standard argument has been refuted a thousand times, though it seems exceedingly popular on Slashdot - perhaps because it's anathema to a geek to accept that currency is an expression of faith.
Harding fixed that recession by firing/cutting gov't budget by 70%....99.9%....
You give the impression that the government budget must be continually heavily slashed to get out of recession, while government spending causes depression. The overall trend has been an increase in government spending. This makes no sense.
That depression lasted until WWII ended and then USA had a boom (not due to high taxes, as nobody was paying them) but USA had boom because it had no competition in labor market around the world because nobody was hired around the world, as the rest of the producing nations had their capital/infrastructure destroyed.
Indeed. While in the UK, despite massive debt, government spending skyrocketed with heavy investment in local industry, technology and services. Also the modern welfare state was born.
opened up for business (they went through a decade of death due to hunger before than) and so US capital started leaving the country, as the country was top heavy from gov't/taxes/regulations/corruption.
As it's always cheaper to hire a third world worker in a country where the alternative to harsh conditions is death. The reason for the massive escape of capital is not because the West gives too many protections to the worker but because it allows free trade with foreign countries which give too few.
US had various 'bail outs' in its history, all having to do with borrowing/printing money
Well, the cause is often irresponsible private borrowing, yes.
it's killing its savings because of 0% interest, so capital leaves.
Yes.
That, coupled with lack of jobs and lack of mortgage lending standards, due to gov't agencies such as HUD, FHA
Yeah, only the public housing programmes were guilty of it... *sigh*. No, hundreds of banks across the western hemisphere were involved.
This government ran experiment of having central banks, of havi
CIA reports to the National Intelligence Director and the POTUS.
So, not to you, then.
Now you, try again, this time with a better argument than CIA is intelligent and/or efficient at it. [slashdot.org]
Possibly a foreign government / unfriendly organisation was being allowed to continue using Montgomery's snake oil in order to further US interests. Or perhaps the impression that the tools were effective changed the behaviour of some adversary. For the adversary to continue believing the tools are effective, the US must appear to continue using them and not act on possible evidence that the tools were useless.
$20 million is absolutely nothing in military or intelligence spending terms, and I bet not all that money is actually in Montgomery's account.
Quite. I'm sure the quantity of money was just an exercise in budget redistribution anyway, and it's likely that the public "it's a fake!" warnings many years later by Western agencies were simply ways of adjusting the behaviour of the governments/departments using the tools. (Maybe some unrelated negotiation failed. Maybe someone's trying to sell another solution.)
Intelligence agencies aren't there to publish timely and accurate reports directly for the people. They're merely a branch of government and they employ people sufficiently skilled in particular areas to do whatever the government tells them to do. If that means finding something out, they'll do it. If it means publishing misinformation, they'll do it. The final goal is not decided by the agency.
You're not really answering the question. Try again: For whom do they work? IOW, who tells them what to do? To whom do they report?
If you want, you can describe 2008 as "inevitable" rather than planned: Now if some ongoing behaviour is unsustainable then it will inevitably eventually fail. Do you regard that the past decade of behaviour was sustainable? If the answer is no then you must accept that what happened in 2008 was inevitable. If the answer is yes then provide evidence.
The whole "social security is a ponzi scheme" is bullshit: everyone takes part in SS whereas a ponzi scheme collapses because there are not enough new investors to give profitable returns the older investors. The changing demographic will mean that pension ages may need to be tweaked, but that's happening anyway. AFAIK accusations that the Federal Reserve is a ponzi scheme are based on the way it behaves in certain situations - there is nothing inherently ponzi about it. But I don't know enough about it. If it is a ponzi scheme, when is it considered that it will fail and what's retarding it?
Intelligence agencies do not answer directly to the people in any country.
For whom do they work? IOW, who tells them what to do? To whom do they report?
For whom do you understand intelligence agencies to work?
The "crisis" is you being on the losing end of a collection of similar financial deals over the past decade which have made other people very rich. Nothing has happened which was not planned. And do you think that debt appeared overnight? It's been building up in the past decade.
Everyone relevant was aware of what Madoff was up to. Since at least 1999 people were warning about his behaviour, but who of relevance would benefit if he were called out so soon? His scheme was simply not sustainable through 2008 and for some reason known only personally to him he didn't run off / stage a Maxwell. I'm sure he had guesstimated the period of time he could sustain his entertaining financial stunt - perhaps he'd already planned for a cosy jail sentence when the inevitable shit hit the fan.
After all, if you're going to be the best in the world at something, why not set up the largest Ponzi scheme in history? He won.
tl;dr Both. Which is what I said.
Imagine what society will look like when a whole generation is brought up like that. Who doesn't want a pool of scared idiots to exploit?
Re-read. The obviously bungled reports are known not to be true (except, perhaps, by you?), but are created to further a particular goal. Or is propaganda something only the Axis of Naughtiness engages in?