The left has been depersonalizing the right for decades. Their essential political tactic is to personalize everything. So to heck with them. If they can dish it out, they should be able to take it.
No calling you a stunted childish fuckwad with no balls would be name calling. What the above poster wrote is the truth and your reaction is pathetic.
Whose the one posting A/C?
How you must hate the fact that reality has a liberal bias
Would that be the "I'm just going to let GM and Chrysler go belly up so my buddies in Korea, Japan and China take over the US manufacturing base", reality bias?
Even Reagan had the guts to tell importers to pound sand for a couple of years to give Detroit a chance to fix itself. But oh no, the great savior of the working man and his Jap car driving buddies all just stand back and watch what's left of American manufacturing get gutted...
I could go through every blue state in the USA, and we'd find the same story of the three stupid mistakes made over and over and over again:
a) rampant corruption b) anti-business climate c) support for free trade
Pretty much, you make cities a terrible place to manufacture things and have industry, and then have a national set of laws that lets people go wherever they want, and what do they do? They leave.
The US dollar isn't going to hyperinflate because the money supply is being continually destroyed by people not paying their loans back. Think about fractional banking.
Fed waves magic wand, invents $1 and pays to bank Bank takes $1, lends out $10, $1 for 10 people. The money supply is now $10. Each of the borrowers goes and buys some junk at the dollar store, then stiffs the bank.
All that's really left, then, is a bunch of junk. See, the thing is, the only way that the money supply stays up is, if people pay the money back to the bank. The fed would reduce the money supply by paying down the bank, but, the borrows reduced the money supply to 0.
Thus, as Ben Bernanke so figured out, the -real- money supply is actually a lot lower than it is despite all government statistics. Once people pay down there debt, or the banks write it off, then, the money supply will go back up, but the banks will pay back the fed, which will destroy the money, and there will be no hyperinflation.
they would literally make you slit your wrists should you ever be matched up against them in a test of financial knowledge. Maybe, just maybe, they know what they're doing more than some random dude Slashdotting from work.
You know what, you are RIGHT. They do make me want to slit somebody's wrists, I mean throat... Wall Street had a bunch of those guys too, and right now its costing me something like $40,000 in additional debt, the devaluation of our national currency, a strong prospect of deflation, and 600,000 lost jobs a month, to start....
here, you have $5 million a day paid by people travelling between Phoenix and Tucson every day. If only car drivers actually paid for the roads they use, instead of depending on government handouts for building the roads.
The tax on gasoline pays for the roads. People drive cars. They use gasolines. Roads get built.
Given ALL the problems we see with corporations that carry debt, why on earth Microsoft would want to piss away a giant cash reserve AND borrow money given an extremely rough competitive landscape seems to be the worst decision made in the history of the company.
The application of anecdotal fallacy is incorrect. A rhetorical statement about letting ten men go free was made, and I replied with a rhetorical statement.
Besides, since when do anecdotal fallacies ever stop liberals..... the whole art of liberal protest is to find some shmoe who is willing to lie about about their circumstances or inflate them for a bit of tv time...
and of course you argue that appeal to tradition is wrong. of course, just wait till people start making fun of liberal traditions.
As long as you live on the block with the asshole fascist cops.
Oh, and instead you liberals would have us be disarmed living with ten crooks. Yep, no wonder every city run by liberals is a shithole, and our country is increasingly becoming one.
I've seen many Republicans like you, providing no evidence to support their positions, just spouting lame garbage. Often people like you will even sound sensible on the surface, but then ten seconds of critical thought later, your arguments are exposed for the lies and hypocrisy they truly are.
This is just name calling. Nothing more, nothing less.
I pity you, for seeing the world through such a distorted view must make your life incredibly miserable.
Blah blah blah more name calling. I don't pity liberals at all. Things that are not human are not worth pity.
Assume that the cost of the thing is financed like a 30 year mortgage. Just as a rule of thumb, with interest we're talking about a total of 54 billion. Just to satisfy construction costs, a need to make a payment of 150 million a month, every month. To make that payment, we need to have 5 million dollars a day, ever day. To get that, assuming a $10 a day per person spend, you'll have to have 500,000 riders a day, every day, traveling across Arizona. Is that economical? Are there THAT many people riding back and forth? I think this project is a stretch.
Between all the cameras and facial scanners at the UK, and now brain scanners and other intrusive surveillance techniques being instituted at the EU, one could see a future where historians note that George W Bush was actually rather a brake on the deployment of new "security" technology, as opposed to his trans-Atlantic counterparts.
Seriously, if we would have let Citibank or AIG go down the shitter, what would have happened? Let's see, we would have had a month where we lost 600,000 jobs.
Oh, jeez, we get those every month now.
TARP is hands down the dumbest bipartisan thing ever done. Right about now the House Republicans that opposed TARP are starting to look really good. TARP was a trillion dollar waste of money.
And of course, we followed that up with another trillion dollar waste of money in the stimulus. Our latest moron in chief could conceivably go and blow that on another stimulus that has 0 impact on GDP... as for some reason our retards in Washington think that we just need to get consumers borrowing more when the problem with the USA is that everyone has borrowed too much.
Seriously, which one of these findings were so objectionable. Was it:
"No single test for determining whether conduct is anticompetitive such as the effects-balancing, profit-sacrifice, no-economic-sense, equally efficient competitor, or disproportionality tests works well in all cases. The Department encourages the continuing development of conduct-specific tests and safe harbors;"
or
"Remedies for conduct that is found to violate Section 2 should re-establish the opportunity for competition without unnecessarily chilling competitive practices or undermining incentives to invest and innovate;"
Why should the balance of trade be zero? Because it sounds good? Most people don't know enough about it to even speak on it.
No, because, all things being considered, it represents wealth leaving the country. In past times it was actually -gold- leaving the country. In current days it shows up as a gradually decreased dollar value, and in an increase in debt both public and private.
Politicians that talk about reducing the trade deficit usually do so because it is a cryptic way to spout protectionism without sounding like you're spouting protectionism. It's a way of saying that Americans are more important than foreigners without sounding like a nationalist or a racist.
I don't think there's anything wrong with being a nationalist and I think its economically stupid to be anything but protectionist.
I do not have a vote in China or Korea or Japan. I do not care or nor should I have to care what happens to those countries should we curtail exports of their goods to the USA. I do not believe that those people are as fair minded as you would ask me to believe, and quite frankly, I'd rather spend a dollar on a union stiff's product than a guy in a chinese sweatshop. At least the american union stiff has my culture.
This is an example for which the phrase "non sequitur" is a perfect fit. The presence or absence of a trade deficit has very little to do with "goodness".
Well yes it does, because the trade deficit now has turned out to mean that the federal government is printing money and shovelling it to banks to take up for rising consumer indebtedness. To use your ridiculous scaling argument that you later make, if you buy every year 20% more than you make, what does that leave you, but in debt and broke? And how is that so different from the USA?
Let's take the position that "free trade is bad and must be prohibited" and see where it leads. If free trade on the scale of US-China should be prohibited and doing so makes people's lives better, then it should be true also on a smaller scale
Scaling arguments are retarded. If one person pissing in a river is good, then ten million people pissing in a river is also better.
So you'll have to do better than that.
Using just my wits and the soil beneath my feet, I'm going to make how many transistors?
Oh, well there is a fallacy here that you miss. You would automate as much as possible. As a rule, you make tools and labor saving devices. But, if you have a million people and maybe some slaves for yourself, what incentive do you really have to make any technology that improves things?
Free trade has value because it allows people to obtain goods from the most efficient producer
That assumes that wages are the same, but they are not. Therefor, free trade really means, obtain goods from the lowest cost producer, which is to say, enriches people lives by making them compete to be slaves, and robs humanity of innovation in tools because its always cheaper and easier because hiring a person is not a capital cost, but buying a machine is. Yep, that's a great plan.
Or perhaps your brand of politics is nationalism, "my country is the only good and nothing else matters."
Why should other countries matter to me? Did the Japanese help my friends in Iraq? The Koreans? Nope. Those countries can go f--- themselves for all I care. But, more importantly, why do they have a right to get rich off the USA with an export driven economy characterized by low wages at home and no consumer economy of their own? How about, Japanese and Koreans and Chinese all manufacture for themselves?
Says fact dude. Google Tariff of Abominations as your start, look at the impact that had on northern industry during the civil war, vs the free trading csa, and how the northerners (aka Republicans) relied on free trade all the way through the 1930s. I bet you find that the arguments in favor of free trade were more of a political means to an end. We repeat Roosevelt's "protectionism caused the Great Depression", because it worked, but, he only really said it because he was looking to reaffirm southern support back in the day when the south was solidly democratic. Wilson, Roosevelt's ideological forbear, also was an ardent free trader, for the same political reasons, the need to secure the South in elections, but his excuses for free trade were entirely different. To him, it was the evil factory owners in the Senate...its only that Republicans and Democrats switched places starting in 1965. When the Democrats signed the civil rights stuff, they basically handed the south to Republican politicians shrewd enough to throw some coded bones about state's rights and free trade to the South. Nixon started it, but he was never really a free trader or even really a die hard capitalist himself (price controls?), but it was Reagan that was the master of it, although ironically, Reagan in office would make you think he invented free trade when he was actually rather protectionist.
(Also remember that Wikipedia is an international project, so it is not solely concerned with looking at things from an American viewpoint
That's fine, but that doesn't mean you need to get the history wrong. In fact, a good history of World War II should go country by country of the major powers and what their war aims were vs the outcome. Certainly the British, despite having won the war, can't be THAT happy about it, and it would be useful for Americans to understand that WWII was a bittersweet thing for the British - yes they played a pivotal role in stopping Hitler and helped us immensely in the final year of the war with Japan, but that, they bankrupted themselves to do it and essentially found that the price of American cooperation in the war was to give up their empire, and for all of that, it would take the cold war for Poland to get its country back.
Dude, saying the Battle of the Somme took place in World War II is the Open Source Software equivalent of a beta copy of Windows 3.1 on a 386SX with a faulty DIMM.
If I read a textbook with your thoughts on #4, I'd toss it in the trash. The benefits of trade have been clearly evidenced through numerous academic studies
That's not true at all. If free trade were so good, economists would be forcasting a date when the trade deficit will be balanced. But you can't and they can't and no one can.
The fact of the matter is, the USA got where it got because of protectionism. Just look at the tariff history from 1830-1940, and the increase in national wealth, versus the gradual decrease in national wealth, that has taken place, and accelerated with, the increasing openness of trade.
Everyone in protective isolation is a more likely brewing ground for hostility and war than everyone in cooperative interdependency.
Dude, I could grab a dozen programmers that would hope that Pakistan nukes India, a dozen guys from the UAW that hope that Japan has a giant Tsunami, textile workers that hope for a plague on China, and so on. Free trade leads to wage competition, destabilizes societies, and really pisses people off.
In any case, let me know when the trade deficit will be 0. It won't, as long as we have free trade. The only people that benefit from free trade are a slovenly, lazy investment class, and those people are more deserving of a gunshot to the back of the head than they are of continued federal subsidies.
Slashdot Mirror
The left has been depersonalizing the right for decades. Their essential political tactic is to personalize everything. So to heck with them. If they can dish it out, they should be able to take it.
No calling you a stunted childish fuckwad with no balls would be name calling. What the above poster wrote is the truth and your reaction is pathetic.
Whose the one posting A/C?
How you must hate the fact that reality has a liberal bias
Would that be the "I'm just going to let GM and Chrysler go belly up so my buddies in Korea, Japan and China take over the US manufacturing base", reality bias?
Even Reagan had the guts to tell importers to pound sand for a couple of years to give Detroit a chance to fix itself. But oh no, the great savior of the working man and his Jap car driving buddies all just stand back and watch what's left of American manufacturing get gutted...
Way to go.
You, sir, have just achieved a new low in online political discourse.
Cool!
Citation please.
Detroit, this was where we used to build cars
Cleveland, used to build parts for cars
Philadelphia, Kensington, this was where we used to build ships
Akron, tires
I could go through every blue state in the USA, and we'd find the same story of the three stupid mistakes made over and over and over again:
a) rampant corruption
b) anti-business climate
c) support for free trade
Pretty much, you make cities a terrible place to manufacture things and have industry, and then have a national set of laws that lets people go wherever they want, and what do they do? They leave.
The US dollar isn't going to hyperinflate because the money supply is being continually destroyed by people not paying their loans back. Think about fractional banking.
Fed waves magic wand, invents $1 and pays to bank
Bank takes $1, lends out $10, $1 for 10 people. The money supply is now $10.
Each of the borrowers goes and buys some junk at the dollar store, then stiffs the bank.
All that's really left, then, is a bunch of junk. See, the thing is, the only way that the money supply stays up is, if people pay the money back to the bank. The fed would reduce the money supply by paying down the bank, but, the borrows reduced the money supply to 0.
Thus, as Ben Bernanke so figured out, the -real- money supply is actually a lot lower than it is despite all government statistics. Once people pay down there debt, or the banks write it off, then, the money supply will go back up, but the banks will pay back the fed, which will destroy the money, and there will be no hyperinflation.
they would literally make you slit your wrists should you ever be matched up against them in a test of financial knowledge. Maybe, just maybe, they know what they're doing more than some random dude Slashdotting from work.
You know what, you are RIGHT. They do make me want to slit somebody's wrists, I mean throat... Wall Street had a bunch of those guys too, and right now its costing me something like $40,000 in additional debt, the devaluation of our national currency, a strong prospect of deflation, and 600,000 lost jobs a month, to start....
Go home and post anonymously. You can't hold corporations to be accountable if you do not speak out.
here, you have $5 million a day paid by people travelling between Phoenix and Tucson every day. If only car drivers actually paid for the roads they use, instead of depending on government handouts for building the roads.
The tax on gasoline pays for the roads. People drive cars. They use gasolines. Roads get built.
Given ALL the problems we see with corporations that carry debt, why on earth Microsoft would want to piss away a giant cash reserve AND borrow money given an extremely rough competitive landscape seems to be the worst decision made in the history of the company.
The application of anecdotal fallacy is incorrect. A rhetorical statement about letting ten men go free was made, and I replied with a rhetorical statement.
Besides, since when do anecdotal fallacies ever stop liberals..... the whole art of liberal protest is to find some shmoe who is willing to lie about about their circumstances or inflate them for a bit of tv time...
and of course you argue that appeal to tradition is wrong. of course, just wait till people start making fun of liberal traditions.
The problem is the Miranda Warning, 1966.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_warning
Ed Meese was right to argue against it during the Reagan Administration.
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
Crime rates doubled, tripled per capita across the board since 1960.
Historical crime statistics
Since 1960, violent crime has tripled, robberies quadrupled.... pretty much every crime rate has at least doubled or tripled per capita.
As long as you live on the block with the asshole fascist cops.
Oh, and instead you liberals would have us be disarmed living with ten crooks. Yep, no wonder every city run by liberals is a shithole, and our country is increasingly becoming one.
I've seen many Republicans like you, providing no evidence to support their positions, just spouting lame garbage. Often people like you will even sound sensible on the surface, but then ten seconds of critical thought later, your arguments are exposed for the lies and hypocrisy they truly are.
This is just name calling. Nothing more, nothing less.
I pity you, for seeing the world through such a distorted view must make your life incredibly miserable.
Blah blah blah more name calling. I don't pity liberals at all. Things that are not human are not worth pity.
Assume that the cost of the thing is financed like a 30 year mortgage. Just as a rule of thumb, with interest we're talking about a total of 54 billion. Just to satisfy construction costs, a need to make a payment of 150 million a month, every month. To make that payment, we need to have 5 million dollars a day, ever day. To get that, assuming a $10 a day per person spend, you'll have to have 500,000 riders a day, every day, traveling across Arizona. Is that economical? Are there THAT many people riding back and forth? I think this project is a stretch.
That it is better to let ten guilty men go free than to convict a single innocent man.
No, its not. You go right ahead and live on the block where 10 guilty guys went free.
The way to deal with police mistakes is with sanctions and fines. This is the way it was before the 1960s.
Between all the cameras and facial scanners at the UK, and now brain scanners and other intrusive surveillance techniques being instituted at the EU, one could see a future where historians note that George W Bush was actually rather a brake on the deployment of new "security" technology, as opposed to his trans-Atlantic counterparts.
Seriously, if we would have let Citibank or AIG go down the shitter, what would have happened? Let's see, we would have had a month where we lost 600,000 jobs.
Oh, jeez, we get those every month now.
TARP is hands down the dumbest bipartisan thing ever done. Right about now the House Republicans that opposed TARP are starting to look really good. TARP was a trillion dollar waste of money.
And of course, we followed that up with another trillion dollar waste of money in the stimulus. Our latest moron in chief could conceivably go and blow that on another stimulus that has 0 impact on GDP... as for some reason our retards in Washington think that we just need to get consumers borrowing more when the problem with the USA is that everyone has borrowed too much.
Seriously, which one of these findings were so objectionable. Was it:
"No single test for determining whether conduct is anticompetitive such as the effects-balancing, profit-sacrifice, no-economic-sense, equally efficient competitor, or disproportionality tests works well in all cases. The Department encourages the continuing development of conduct-specific tests and safe harbors;"
or
"Remedies for conduct that is found to violate Section 2 should re-establish the opportunity for competition without unnecessarily chilling competitive practices or undermining incentives to invest and innovate;"
Why should the balance of trade be zero? Because it sounds good? Most people don't know enough about it to even speak on it.
No, because, all things being considered, it represents wealth leaving the country. In past times it was actually -gold- leaving the country. In current days it shows up as a gradually decreased dollar value, and in an increase in debt both public and private.
Politicians that talk about reducing the trade deficit usually do so because it is a cryptic way to spout protectionism without sounding like you're spouting protectionism. It's a way of saying that Americans are more important than foreigners without sounding like a nationalist or a racist.
I don't think there's anything wrong with being a nationalist and I think its economically stupid to be anything but protectionist.
I do not have a vote in China or Korea or Japan. I do not care or nor should I have to care what happens to those countries should we curtail exports of their goods to the USA. I do not believe that those people are as fair minded as you would ask me to believe, and quite frankly, I'd rather spend a dollar on a union stiff's product than a guy in a chinese sweatshop. At least the american union stiff has my culture.
This is an example for which the phrase "non sequitur" is a perfect fit. The presence or absence of a trade deficit has very little to do with "goodness".
Well yes it does, because the trade deficit now has turned out to mean that the federal government is printing money and shovelling it to banks to take up for rising consumer indebtedness. To use your ridiculous scaling argument that you later make, if you buy every year 20% more than you make, what does that leave you, but in debt and broke? And how is that so different from the USA?
Let's take the position that "free trade is bad and must be prohibited" and see where it leads. If free trade on the scale of US-China should be prohibited and doing so makes people's lives better, then it should be true also on a smaller scale
Scaling arguments are retarded. If one person pissing in a river is good, then ten million people pissing in a river is also better.
So you'll have to do better than that.
Using just my wits and the soil beneath my feet, I'm going to make how many transistors?
Oh, well there is a fallacy here that you miss. You would automate as much as possible. As a rule, you make tools and labor saving devices. But, if you have a million people and maybe some slaves for yourself, what incentive do you really have to make any technology that improves things?
Free trade has value because it allows people to obtain goods from the most efficient producer
That assumes that wages are the same, but they are not. Therefor, free trade really means, obtain goods from the lowest cost producer, which is to say, enriches people lives by making them compete to be slaves, and robs humanity of innovation in tools because its always cheaper and easier because hiring a person is not a capital cost, but buying a machine is. Yep, that's a great plan.
Or perhaps your brand of politics is nationalism, "my country is the only good and nothing else matters."
Why should other countries matter to me? Did the Japanese help my friends in Iraq? The Koreans? Nope. Those countries can go f--- themselves for all I care. But, more importantly, why do they have a right to get rich off the USA with an export driven economy characterized by low wages at home and no consumer economy of their own? How about, Japanese and Koreans and Chinese all manufacture for themselves?
Is it? Says who?
Says fact dude. Google Tariff of Abominations as your start, look at the impact that had on northern industry during the civil war, vs the free trading csa, and how the northerners (aka Republicans) relied on free trade all the way through the 1930s. I bet you find that the arguments in favor of free trade were more of a political means to an end. We repeat Roosevelt's "protectionism caused the Great Depression", because it worked, but, he only really said it because he was looking to reaffirm southern support back in the day when the south was solidly democratic. Wilson, Roosevelt's ideological forbear, also was an ardent free trader, for the same political reasons, the need to secure the South in elections, but his excuses for free trade were entirely different. To him, it was the evil factory owners in the Senate...its only that Republicans and Democrats switched places starting in 1965. When the Democrats signed the civil rights stuff, they basically handed the south to Republican politicians shrewd enough to throw some coded bones about state's rights and free trade to the South. Nixon started it, but he was never really a free trader or even really a die hard capitalist himself (price controls?), but it was Reagan that was the master of it, although ironically, Reagan in office would make you think he invented free trade when he was actually rather protectionist.
(Also remember that Wikipedia is an international project, so it is not solely concerned with looking at things from an American viewpoint
That's fine, but that doesn't mean you need to get the history wrong. In fact, a good history of World War II should go country by country of the major powers and what their war aims were vs the outcome. Certainly the British, despite having won the war, can't be THAT happy about it, and it would be useful for Americans to understand that WWII was a bittersweet thing for the British - yes they played a pivotal role in stopping Hitler and helped us immensely in the final year of the war with Japan, but that, they bankrupted themselves to do it and essentially found that the price of American cooperation in the war was to give up their empire, and for all of that, it would take the cold war for Poland to get its country back.
Therefor all Open Source software is crap.
Dude, saying the Battle of the Somme took place in World War II is the Open Source Software equivalent of a beta copy of Windows 3.1 on a 386SX with a faulty DIMM.
If I read a textbook with your thoughts on #4, I'd toss it in the trash. The benefits of trade have been clearly evidenced through numerous academic studies
That's not true at all. If free trade were so good, economists would be forcasting a date when the trade deficit will be balanced. But you can't and they can't and no one can.
The fact of the matter is, the USA got where it got because of protectionism. Just look at the tariff history from 1830-1940, and the increase in national wealth, versus the gradual decrease in national wealth, that has taken place, and accelerated with, the increasing openness of trade.
Everyone in protective isolation is a more likely brewing ground for hostility and war than everyone in cooperative interdependency.
Dude, I could grab a dozen programmers that would hope that Pakistan nukes India, a dozen guys from the UAW that hope that Japan has a giant Tsunami, textile workers that hope for a plague on China, and so on. Free trade leads to wage competition, destabilizes societies, and really pisses people off.
In any case, let me know when the trade deficit will be 0. It won't, as long as we have free trade. The only people that benefit from free trade are a slovenly, lazy investment class, and those people are more deserving of a gunshot to the back of the head than they are of continued federal subsidies.