You're not making a great case for capitalism. Government regulation has increased in the 20th Century - far more than there was in the 19th Century.
Anything is going to beat totalitarianism. For instance, there haven't been any famines in Socialist Europe, Socialist Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, etc... but the totalitarianism of Mao, Stalin, and Hitler certainly caused misery and famines. Same thing with pre-Revolutionary France, and weak states like Afghanistan, Somalia, Ethiopia, and so on.
I would additionally argue that corporate colonialism - a close relative of fascism - also causes death and misery in the weak states it preys on. Look at the relationship of England and India, England and Kenya, the United States and Iraq, or the United States and almost any country in Latin America.
Seems like the recipe is to have a strong state, certainly strong enough to repel foreign intervention, that also regulates it's own economy and socializes infrastructure costs. In fact, I challenge you to find a single counter example.
A confidence trick or confidence game (also known as a bunko, con, flim flam, gaffle, grift, hustle, scam, scheme, swindle or bamboozle) is an attempt to defraud a person or group by gaining their confidence. The victim is known as the mark, the trickster is called a confidence man, con man, confidence trickster, or con artist, and any accomplices are known as shills. Confidence men or women exploit human characteristics such as greed and dishonesty, and have victimized individuals from all walks of life.
I can't find the exact words, but I watched a documentary on poverty the other night, and one of the economists basically said this:
"In a purely capitalist economy, the market solution to a famine is a lot of dead people. Demand for food then falls, the supply again reaches a price equilibrium, and then the problem is considered solved."
People always favor an unregulated economy when they are at the top of it.
At that period, Vasettha, there was just one mass of water, and all was darkness, blinding darkness.... And sooner or later, after a very long period of time, savory earth spread itself over the waters where those beings were. It looked just like the skin that forms itself over hot milk as it cools. It was endowed with color, smell, and taste. It was the color of fine ghee or heated butter and it was very sweet, like pure wild honey...
As long as they also include every other creation story. There should be text from scientology, islam, hinduism, buddhism, and thousands of other creation myths from all over the world, in a separate book called "Creationism". Leave evolution in the science textbook with the theories on gravity, germ theory, and all of the other accepted, testable hypotheses.
Similarly I'm okay with religion classes, as long as the world's eight major religions are all given equal time. For some reason I think equal access to alternative theories isn't what they are really after...
The issue isn't one of morality. The issue is that the vast majority of people do not follow the rules they espouse. That's why people hate the internet "memory." It exposes them for who they are, or at least who they used to be. The immediacy of information connects us with the past, and can help us make better decisions for the future. CIA coups used to be considered conspiracy theories, but now anyone can look at the source documents for themselves. News stories about what someone reportedly said are routinely dismissed, but a video of the same event makes refuting history much more difficult. In short, reality is much harder to dismiss for the people who are genuinely interested to find out what that is.
So, I'd rather not build in forgetting. I'd rather people learn to be more accepting of everyone and more skeptical of every asshole who wants to impose their morality on others. The ubiquity of distributed recording devices, and the network to freely share that media, is the most dangerous threat to the status quo since the scientific method, and for the same reason: it trades authority and mysticism for reality and results.
The archive is a vivid reminder that the Afghan conflict until recently was a second-class war, with money, troops and attention lavished on Iraq while soldiers and Marines lamented that the Afghans they were training were not being paid.
The reports — usually spare summaries but sometimes detailed narratives — shed light on some elements of the war that have been largely hidden from the public eye:
The Taliban have used portable heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft, a fact that has not been publicly disclosed by the military. This type of weapon helped the Afghan mujahedeen defeat the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
Secret commando units like Task Force 373 — a classified group of Army and Navy special operatives — work from a “capture/kill list” of about 70 top insurgent commanders. These missions, which have been stepped up under the Obama administration, claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment.
The military employs more and more drone aircraft to survey the battlefield and strike targets in Afghanistan, although their performance is less impressive than officially portrayed. Some crash or collide, forcing American troops to undertake risky retrieval missions before the Taliban can claim the drone’s weaponry.
The Central Intelligence Agency has expanded paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan. The units launch ambushes, order airstrikes and conduct night raids. From 2001 to 2008, the C.I.A. paid the budget of Afghanistan’s spy agency and ran it as a virtual subsidiary.
So, the Taliban are apparently using advanced weaponry against ineffective drones, and the CIA has once again formed a secret police force that's terrorizing Afghani citizens for the crime of defending themselves against a foreign invader.
The special interest group I represent is my daughters, who will be chattel (that's "slave" for the illiterate) if we lose this war
You may or may not be a coward, but you're a fucking credulous idiot. Or did you not know that Saudi Arabia is a theocracy, the financial foundation of Al Qeada, and home of 80% of the hijackers? And for some reason you think you're defending democracy by imposing your worldview on some tribal civilization halfway around the globe who can barely afford to make ends meet, much less launch an assault on the soil of the US.
Which is fine, as long as you and your loved ones don't become a problem. If you're afraid of reaping what you sow, then by God you fucking deserve to.
So in your imaginary world, could I sell poisoned candy to children? How about poisoned woodchips for their playground? How about coal mining methods that poisoned the school water supply?
In the civilized world, regulations prevent things like these from ever being legal. They define weights and measures, test and certify building materials, and make sure that fly-by-night companies don't sell substandard products and take the profits to the Caribbean, leaving someone else to bear the cost of their negligence.
With your fascination with no regulations, you may have been at home in the Victorian era. Slavery, children as young as 4 working mills, mines, blacking factories, dying young from simple exposure to the chemicals they worked with. Child prostitution. Everyone else was working sixteen hours a day for little pay, getting dumped in a ditch if they were seriously injured on the job, people burning to death in locked buildings... and no government regulations to get in the way and slow down the economy. No annoying fire safety standards, housing standards, workplace safety standards...
And, since you seem to be preoccupied with the red herring about fiat currency, just take a look at a history of bank panics.
Notice how there's a huge gap when regulations about bank activity and leverage were put in place after 1933. Savings and loan deregulation was followed by a crisis. Repealing laws against derivatives and the deregulation of financial firewalls was followed a crisis.
The market is irrational, and so are you if you have blind faith in it.
You seriously misunderstand the history of subprime mortgages, and the relationship between government regulatory failure and the current economic crisis. If derivatives weren't legalized in the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1998, there would have been no subprime crisis. If Glass Steagall was in place, the ponzi scheme financiers came up with - originating bad loans, marking them as AAA when they were packaged with subprime loans, and selling them to unsuspecting buyers - would have been more difficult to pull off. And, if investment houses were firewalled separately from regular banks, we could have let them collapse without fearing larger damage to the economy.
The argument that you entirely miss is that if the rules weren't there in the first place, corporations wouldn't seek government permission to fuck people over. They would just fuck people over without fear of punishment.
In order to operate, markets have to have rules, just like any other system. The market is not self-aware, and has no built in morality. The only thing protecting anyone from the economic warfare of other nations, or of exploitation by their fellow citizens, is their own government. It is the rise of the supremacy of law over the rights of kings, holy men, and landowners that has made civilization flourish. (The scientific method is the real reason for our success, because it equalized and democratized how to establish what was accepted as fact.) So when the kings, holy men, and landowners work their way into the government and mutilate the law, you don't say that law is broken. You say the current system of law is ineffective.
I swear, if libertarians were mechanics, they'd throw away cars for having a flat tire.
USSR. I was born there, I lived there, my parents and their parents lived their and here is where you are even more delusional - believing that such a monstrosity, as a centrally planning government, can remain 'transparent branches of government' and do something that is actually good for the people rather than for 'people' who work there.
The main difference between the communism of the USSR and plutocratic capitalism is PR. You still have a small minority of the population directing where money will be spent, and who it will benefit, without any recourse of the population at large to affect change. One of those classic cases of the triumph of capitalism is farming in the USSR, before and after ownership was allowed. What every professor didn't say is anything about Trofim Lysenko, who turned all of Russian agriculture into an experiment based on fraudulent work. Now, if he had competition, you're absolutely right: the market would have dominated the government solution. But let's suppose instead of one man, it was a consortium of corporations very invested in his particular theory. They would also, if uncontrolled by a government, have enough power to silence critics and impose their production methods on society to the same result.
The need for a third party actor, democratically controlled by the majority, for fostering competition and regulating the market is the most crucial element of a successful economy.
And who said they had to be centrally managed? Each county could have their own banks with completely open books, subjected to Federal oversight to guard against abuses and embezzling. The same goes with insurance agents. It works pretty well for fire protection, emergency services, and policing. There are major problems to be addressed, for sure, but if they were the function of a corporation with deep ties to non-elected officials, you have no chance of throwing them out. As long as they can be affected by a vote, there can be change.
This seems like a Rube Goldbergian way of doing business.
You'll probably want to sit down for this.
Most of the business world based on lies, because most of the business world depends on marketing. And marketing, once you break it down, is manipulation. Why does your girlfriend want a common blood stained rock on her finger to symbolize fidelity? Why do some people spend two hundred dollars on a steak one night, instead of cooking one for themselves every night for a month? Why did everyone think that home prices should outpace inflation for eternity? Because businessmen are very good at lying to you, and conning you into buying things - ideas, products, services, status - that are worth far less than you think they are. That's where the money is.
When men thought capitalism could lead to liberty, the world was radically different. Manufacturing was just hiring enough people to hand-make everything that you could sell. There was no automation, no assembly lines. Laissez faire makes sense when it's hard to hide cheating. Plus, most of the population believed that charging interest was a mortal sin, because making money without working was immoral.
In today's world, people often have no idea of what they are buying. Bonds in financial markets are purposefully inscrutable. Required company filings are mangled beyond comprehension. As proof of this, just look at the subprime meltdown. One guy in California figured it out, and had to beg Goldman Sachs into creating the instrument that would allow him to short the housing market bonds. They had gotten so good at selling, and so bad at actually analyzing the market, that Wall St conned itself into trillions of dollars of debt. Luckily, "main street' - ie, the people who actually perform economic work - were there to bail them out. And Wall St, since a few of them had figured it out early, was busy selling the debt to public entities like schools, county governments, and retirement funds because they were easy marks.
And now, since a company's value is perceived to be the things Wall St says about it, you have a totally fucked up system, where companies are trying to seek the approval of these greedy, useless motherfuckers, who wouldn't know a day's work if it hit them in the mouth with a sledgehammer. We have an entire industry - the financial system - that doesn't perform any useful work. It's like a cancer on the economy, but one that's very successful in centralizing wealth into their own corner. We could replace all of the banks, insurance agents, and ratings agents with totally transparent branches of government, and get on with the business of really innovating - new technology to improve the world, not just figments of financial imagination, repacked and resold to sucker after sucker. But for some reason the American people think that would be the end of the world. Socialism! Communism! The loss of liberty and freedom and democracy!
Also, to be pedantic, if an industry is as mismanaged as this one, you ought not call it capitalism. It would make more sense to say, "That's why regulation is broken". However, you won't claim that because you don't like freedom (the essense of capitalism).
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good...
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance...
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures...
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power...
For protecting [troops], by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States...
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences...
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation...
Moscow expects the budget deficit to hit 6.8% of GDP this year and wants to lower that to around 3% by 2012. Officials have not said exactly how much they intend to raise with the bond issue, or at what yield. But according to some reports, Finance Ministry officials are looking for a yield of 200 basis points above the benchmark German bund, (the 10-year yields 3.28% and the 30-year, 4%), to launch the bond in April at the earliest and to raise a total $18 billion this year, most likely in various tranches...
The last time Russia issued a Eurobond was in 2000. It was two years after the country's infamous 1998 financial crisis which saw the country's export-dependent finances crumble after a huge drop in oil prices. In August 1998, Russia defaulted on its sovereign debt and suspended payments by local banks to foreign creditors.
But it wasn't long before the devalued ruble helped boost exports, oil prices rose again and the economy was back on its feet.
You can always spend a bit more and make something a little safer. At some point you need to draw the line.
This isn't like they didn't spend extra money on 360 degree airbags for a car and parachutes in case it falls off a cliff. This is like they found out that the brakes were working intermittently and decided to do nothing about it. And when one of their employees questioned them, they told them to keep quiet.
In the past, this was called negligence. I think today it's called business.
A company we hired nearly destroyed the Gulf of Mexico... What's that got to do with us?
One our business partners was rating these bonds as AAA when they were worthless, and we were busy making billions passing the bonds off as good investments... What's that got to do with us?
The company we hired to dispose of this toxic waste is just dumping it in a river... What's that got to do with us?
In effect, modern capitalism is a system of mafia thugs and their hired patsies who operate technically within the law, as long as they hire an agent to do their dirty work to take the fall. Any of the real costs can be passed off to the public, either though bailouts or just ruining the commons.
I've had my hard days, though not 25 or 50 cans of beer. However, when I worked in construction, I knew some guys who could buy a 24 pack and put it away all by themselves, every single night. I also knew some guys who could drink almost a handle of vodka by themselves. Those are the real alcoholics. Some of them never stopped drinking at all. Wake up, have a screwdriver. Carry a flask around at work. Drink more with lunch.
I'll never forget one of the guys turning yellow and his buddies dropped him off at the hospital, of course stopping on the way for one last pint. Two days later he was dead.
The worst I ever did was probably the night I drank 12 Trois Pistoles in a four hour session. I have not made that same mistake twice. The bill was almost as bad as the hangover.
So you don't believe in anything similar to what Mr. Nye espouses? Until you are able or willing to define your belief system, my delusions about it will have to suffice.
Slashdot Mirror
You're not making a great case for capitalism. Government regulation has increased in the 20th Century - far more than there was in the 19th Century.
Anything is going to beat totalitarianism. For instance, there haven't been any famines in Socialist Europe, Socialist Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, etc... but the totalitarianism of Mao, Stalin, and Hitler certainly caused misery and famines. Same thing with pre-Revolutionary France, and weak states like Afghanistan, Somalia, Ethiopia, and so on.
I would additionally argue that corporate colonialism - a close relative of fascism - also causes death and misery in the weak states it preys on. Look at the relationship of England and India, England and Kenya, the United States and Iraq, or the United States and almost any country in Latin America.
Seems like the recipe is to have a strong state, certainly strong enough to repel foreign intervention, that also regulates it's own economy and socializes infrastructure costs. In fact, I challenge you to find a single counter example.
Scientology is not a religion, it is a confidence scam.
What part of a religion isn't a confidence scam?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_trick
A confidence trick or confidence game (also known as a bunko, con, flim flam, gaffle, grift, hustle, scam, scheme, swindle or bamboozle) is an attempt to defraud a person or group by gaining their confidence. The victim is known as the mark, the trickster is called a confidence man, con man, confidence trickster, or con artist, and any accomplices are known as shills. Confidence men or women exploit human characteristics such as greed and dishonesty, and have victimized individuals from all walks of life.
I can't find the exact words, but I watched a documentary on poverty the other night, and one of the economists basically said this:
"In a purely capitalist economy, the market solution to a famine is a lot of dead people. Demand for food then falls, the supply again reaches a price equilibrium, and then the problem is considered solved."
People always favor an unregulated economy when they are at the top of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agga%C3%B1%C3%B1a_Sutta
At that period, Vasettha, there was just one mass of water, and all was darkness, blinding darkness.... And sooner or later, after a very long period of time, savory earth spread itself over the waters where those beings were. It looked just like the skin that forms itself over hot milk as it cools. It was endowed with color, smell, and taste. It was the color of fine ghee or heated butter and it was very sweet, like pure wild honey...
I'm an existentialist.
Hypocrite!
As long as they also include every other creation story. There should be text from scientology, islam, hinduism, buddhism, and thousands of other creation myths from all over the world, in a separate book called "Creationism". Leave evolution in the science textbook with the theories on gravity, germ theory, and all of the other accepted, testable hypotheses.
Similarly I'm okay with religion classes, as long as the world's eight major religions are all given equal time. For some reason I think equal access to alternative theories isn't what they are really after...
Good advice from a facebook friend, whom I promptly hid.
The issue isn't one of morality. The issue is that the vast majority of people do not follow the rules they espouse. That's why people hate the internet "memory." It exposes them for who they are, or at least who they used to be. The immediacy of information connects us with the past, and can help us make better decisions for the future. CIA coups used to be considered conspiracy theories, but now anyone can look at the source documents for themselves. News stories about what someone reportedly said are routinely dismissed, but a video of the same event makes refuting history much more difficult. In short, reality is much harder to dismiss for the people who are genuinely interested to find out what that is.
So, I'd rather not build in forgetting. I'd rather people learn to be more accepting of everyone and more skeptical of every asshole who wants to impose their morality on others. The ubiquity of distributed recording devices, and the network to freely share that media, is the most dangerous threat to the status quo since the scientific method, and for the same reason: it trades authority and mysticism for reality and results.
All you had to do was read a single news story for the point. It's the truth versus the rah-rah bullshit patriotism that passes for news these days.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/asia/26warlogs.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
The archive is a vivid reminder that the Afghan conflict until recently was a second-class war, with money, troops and attention lavished on Iraq while soldiers and Marines lamented that the Afghans they were training were not being paid.
The reports — usually spare summaries but sometimes detailed narratives — shed light on some elements of the war that have been largely hidden from the public eye:
The Taliban have used portable heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft, a fact that has not been publicly disclosed by the military. This type of weapon helped the Afghan mujahedeen defeat the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
Secret commando units like Task Force 373 — a classified group of Army and Navy special operatives — work from a “capture/kill list” of about 70 top insurgent commanders. These missions, which have been stepped up under the Obama administration, claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment.
The military employs more and more drone aircraft to survey the battlefield and strike targets in Afghanistan, although their performance is less impressive than officially portrayed. Some crash or collide, forcing American troops to undertake risky retrieval missions before the Taliban can claim the drone’s weaponry.
The Central Intelligence Agency has expanded paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan. The units launch ambushes, order airstrikes and conduct night raids. From 2001 to 2008, the C.I.A. paid the budget of Afghanistan’s spy agency and ran it as a virtual subsidiary.
So, the Taliban are apparently using advanced weaponry against ineffective drones, and the CIA has once again formed a secret police force that's terrorizing Afghani citizens for the crime of defending themselves against a foreign invader.
The special interest group I represent is my daughters, who will be chattel (that's "slave" for the illiterate) if we lose this war
You may or may not be a coward, but you're a fucking credulous idiot. Or did you not know that Saudi Arabia is a theocracy, the financial foundation of Al Qeada, and home of 80% of the hijackers? And for some reason you think you're defending democracy by imposing your worldview on some tribal civilization halfway around the globe who can barely afford to make ends meet, much less launch an assault on the soil of the US.
I hope you reap what you sow.
Which is fine, as long as you and your loved ones don't become a problem. If you're afraid of reaping what you sow, then by God you fucking deserve to.
You are the irrational one if you think that governments do something that helps the long term economy rather than dis-balances and destroys it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
Find the first non-regulatory economy on the list. Don't worry. We'll wait.
So in your imaginary world, could I sell poisoned candy to children? How about poisoned woodchips for their playground? How about coal mining methods that poisoned the school water supply?
In the civilized world, regulations prevent things like these from ever being legal. They define weights and measures, test and certify building materials, and make sure that fly-by-night companies don't sell substandard products and take the profits to the Caribbean, leaving someone else to bear the cost of their negligence.
With your fascination with no regulations, you may have been at home in the Victorian era. Slavery, children as young as 4 working mills, mines, blacking factories, dying young from simple exposure to the chemicals they worked with. Child prostitution. Everyone else was working sixteen hours a day for little pay, getting dumped in a ditch if they were seriously injured on the job, people burning to death in locked buildings... and no government regulations to get in the way and slow down the economy. No annoying fire safety standards, housing standards, workplace safety standards...
And, since you seem to be preoccupied with the red herring about fiat currency, just take a look at a history of bank panics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banking_crises
Notice how there's a huge gap when regulations about bank activity and leverage were put in place after 1933. Savings and loan deregulation was followed by a crisis. Repealing laws against derivatives and the deregulation of financial firewalls was followed a crisis.
The market is irrational, and so are you if you have blind faith in it.
You seriously misunderstand the history of subprime mortgages, and the relationship between government regulatory failure and the current economic crisis. If derivatives weren't legalized in the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1998, there would have been no subprime crisis. If Glass Steagall was in place, the ponzi scheme financiers came up with - originating bad loans, marking them as AAA when they were packaged with subprime loans, and selling them to unsuspecting buyers - would have been more difficult to pull off. And, if investment houses were firewalled separately from regular banks, we could have let them collapse without fearing larger damage to the economy.
The argument that you entirely miss is that if the rules weren't there in the first place, corporations wouldn't seek government permission to fuck people over. They would just fuck people over without fear of punishment.
In order to operate, markets have to have rules, just like any other system. The market is not self-aware, and has no built in morality. The only thing protecting anyone from the economic warfare of other nations, or of exploitation by their fellow citizens, is their own government. It is the rise of the supremacy of law over the rights of kings, holy men, and landowners that has made civilization flourish. (The scientific method is the real reason for our success, because it equalized and democratized how to establish what was accepted as fact.) So when the kings, holy men, and landowners work their way into the government and mutilate the law, you don't say that law is broken. You say the current system of law is ineffective.
I swear, if libertarians were mechanics, they'd throw away cars for having a flat tire.
USSR. I was born there, I lived there, my parents and their parents lived their and here is where you are even more delusional - believing that such a monstrosity, as a centrally planning government, can remain 'transparent branches of government' and do something that is actually good for the people rather than for 'people' who work there.
The main difference between the communism of the USSR and plutocratic capitalism is PR. You still have a small minority of the population directing where money will be spent, and who it will benefit, without any recourse of the population at large to affect change. One of those classic cases of the triumph of capitalism is farming in the USSR, before and after ownership was allowed. What every professor didn't say is anything about Trofim Lysenko, who turned all of Russian agriculture into an experiment based on fraudulent work. Now, if he had competition, you're absolutely right: the market would have dominated the government solution. But let's suppose instead of one man, it was a consortium of corporations very invested in his particular theory. They would also, if uncontrolled by a government, have enough power to silence critics and impose their production methods on society to the same result.
The need for a third party actor, democratically controlled by the majority, for fostering competition and regulating the market is the most crucial element of a successful economy.
And who said they had to be centrally managed? Each county could have their own banks with completely open books, subjected to Federal oversight to guard against abuses and embezzling. The same goes with insurance agents. It works pretty well for fire protection, emergency services, and policing. There are major problems to be addressed, for sure, but if they were the function of a corporation with deep ties to non-elected officials, you have no chance of throwing them out. As long as they can be affected by a vote, there can be change.
54% of the Senate is lawyers. The rules are not made to achieve justice, but to delay the case long enough to pad the bill.
This seems like a Rube Goldbergian way of doing business.
You'll probably want to sit down for this.
Most of the business world based on lies, because most of the business world depends on marketing. And marketing, once you break it down, is manipulation. Why does your girlfriend want a common blood stained rock on her finger to symbolize fidelity? Why do some people spend two hundred dollars on a steak one night, instead of cooking one for themselves every night for a month? Why did everyone think that home prices should outpace inflation for eternity? Because businessmen are very good at lying to you, and conning you into buying things - ideas, products, services, status - that are worth far less than you think they are. That's where the money is.
When men thought capitalism could lead to liberty, the world was radically different. Manufacturing was just hiring enough people to hand-make everything that you could sell. There was no automation, no assembly lines. Laissez faire makes sense when it's hard to hide cheating. Plus, most of the population believed that charging interest was a mortal sin, because making money without working was immoral.
In today's world, people often have no idea of what they are buying. Bonds in financial markets are purposefully inscrutable. Required company filings are mangled beyond comprehension. As proof of this, just look at the subprime meltdown. One guy in California figured it out, and had to beg Goldman Sachs into creating the instrument that would allow him to short the housing market bonds. They had gotten so good at selling, and so bad at actually analyzing the market, that Wall St conned itself into trillions of dollars of debt. Luckily, "main street' - ie, the people who actually perform economic work - were there to bail them out. And Wall St, since a few of them had figured it out early, was busy selling the debt to public entities like schools, county governments, and retirement funds because they were easy marks.
And now, since a company's value is perceived to be the things Wall St says about it, you have a totally fucked up system, where companies are trying to seek the approval of these greedy, useless motherfuckers, who wouldn't know a day's work if it hit them in the mouth with a sledgehammer. We have an entire industry - the financial system - that doesn't perform any useful work. It's like a cancer on the economy, but one that's very successful in centralizing wealth into their own corner. We could replace all of the banks, insurance agents, and ratings agents with totally transparent branches of government, and get on with the business of really innovating - new technology to improve the world, not just figments of financial imagination, repacked and resold to sucker after sucker. But for some reason the American people think that would be the end of the world. Socialism! Communism! The loss of liberty and freedom and democracy!
I wonder who gave them that idea.
Also, to be pedantic, if an industry is as mismanaged as this one, you ought not call it capitalism. It would make more sense to say, "That's why regulation is broken". However, you won't claim that because you don't like freedom (the essense of capitalism).
Physician, heal thyself.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good...
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance...
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures...
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power...
For protecting [troops], by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States...
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences...
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation...
Russia's deficit is about 7% of GDP compared to our 60% of GDP. Or is there something more to an economy than it's public debt...
(See what I did there?)
http://www.forbes.com/2010/02/19/russia-eurobond-auction-markets-bonds-deficit-putin.html
Moscow expects the budget deficit to hit 6.8% of GDP this year and wants to lower that to around 3% by 2012. Officials have not said exactly how much they intend to raise with the bond issue, or at what yield. But according to some reports, Finance Ministry officials are looking for a yield of 200 basis points above the benchmark German bund, (the 10-year yields 3.28% and the 30-year, 4%), to launch the bond in April at the earliest and to raise a total $18 billion this year, most likely in various tranches...
The last time Russia issued a Eurobond was in 2000. It was two years after the country's infamous 1998 financial crisis which saw the country's export-dependent finances crumble after a huge drop in oil prices. In August 1998, Russia defaulted on its sovereign debt and suspended payments by local banks to foreign creditors.
But it wasn't long before the devalued ruble helped boost exports, oil prices rose again and the economy was back on its feet.
In this case, as with many modern cars, the sensor was saying TIRE FLAT. They turned off the sensor and ignored it.
This is the very definition of negligence.
You can always spend a bit more and make something a little safer. At some point you need to draw the line.
This isn't like they didn't spend extra money on 360 degree airbags for a car and parachutes in case it falls off a cliff. This is like they found out that the brakes were working intermittently and decided to do nothing about it. And when one of their employees questioned them, they told them to keep quiet.
In the past, this was called negligence. I think today it's called business.
A company we hired nearly destroyed the Gulf of Mexico... What's that got to do with us?
One our business partners was rating these bonds as AAA when they were worthless, and we were busy making billions passing the bonds off as good investments... What's that got to do with us?
The company we hired to dispose of this toxic waste is just dumping it in a river... What's that got to do with us?
In effect, modern capitalism is a system of mafia thugs and their hired patsies who operate technically within the law, as long as they hire an agent to do their dirty work to take the fall. Any of the real costs can be passed off to the public, either though bailouts or just ruining the commons.
I've had my hard days, though not 25 or 50 cans of beer. However, when I worked in construction, I knew some guys who could buy a 24 pack and put it away all by themselves, every single night. I also knew some guys who could drink almost a handle of vodka by themselves. Those are the real alcoholics. Some of them never stopped drinking at all. Wake up, have a screwdriver. Carry a flask around at work. Drink more with lunch.
I'll never forget one of the guys turning yellow and his buddies dropped him off at the hospital, of course stopping on the way for one last pint. Two days later he was dead.
The worst I ever did was probably the night I drank 12 Trois Pistoles in a four hour session. I have not made that same mistake twice. The bill was almost as bad as the hangover.
So your belief system is that I don't know it, so I can't know it?
It seems we are at an impasse.
So you don't believe in anything similar to what Mr. Nye espouses? Until you are able or willing to define your belief system, my delusions about it will have to suffice.