as Peter Schiff describes that currency war, it's the only war that is all about shooting at your own troops. After all every single holder of nation's currency is robbed off his purchasing power and becomes poorer.
no, the Treasury can only issue bonds and when the Fed buys them, it uses newly created money. They simply say 'ok, boys, we take the paper and you can add 100 billion to your account', so the Fed is where the money creation takes place.
what about subsidies? boatloads of taxpayer's cash are funneled to the farming industry in the US. What is the difference between paying free market wages directly and hiding the true cost of food production with subsidies? The total cost is more or less the same for the end user (higher price or lower price + tax), level of indirection is the only thing that varies here. Free market approach would be 1. simpler 2. cheaper in maintaining 3. less prone to abuse by the rentseeking corporations
and why exactly banking sector grew so much in Ireland that it threatens the very existence of the country? Because everybody and his mother took loans to buy stuff - rampant consumption today at the expense of tomorrow at inflated prices thanks to the cheap credit. Besides that only shows that imaginary sectors of economy like paper shuffling banks are not the best motor of economy growth.
Germany was an industrial powerhouse in 19th century already when nobody heard about social systems - they always had strong work ethic and were technologically advanced. I know, i live in a neighboring country and half of tech/administration related words are of german origin which shows that they were so developed throughout the centuries that their know-how spreaded around to less advanced countries.
Norway and Sweden are rich but i don't think that relatively small nations sitting on top of huge pile of natural resources and having shitloads of oil like Norway are the best example. I wouldn't praise their social system for their success, more like protestant work ethic and transparency, same thing that made Germany a powerhouse.
The evidence is overwhelming: a strong social system produces prosperity. Contempt and cruelty for the weak, and rewarding predatory behaviour of the elites leads to economic misery. Wake up.
So you got like 2 or 3 examples for and pretty much the rest of bankrupting 1st world showing the opposite. You call that proof? Strong social system produces a mirage of prosperity. If you overdo it which is not that hard (if not 100% sure), given that in democracy people want 'free stuff' and have a power to vote for it, you are on the road to serfdom and you end up as a banker's slave either way. Don't spend money that is not yours and you'll be safe.
Countries with social systems pay for them with the money of their children and unborn grandsons. Do you think Poland is rich? No it's not. Do you think we need more social stuff? The one we already got sinks the country - retirements for all kinds of privileged groups for example. It was moved off the books, so our national debt and deficits didn't look so bad, otherwise nobody would ever lend us a penny and we would be queueing for help already. We got nothing on greeks who spent the shit out on freebies for their citizens while cheating the whole EU. Certainly social system worked so well for them, didn't it.
Giving people something for nothing is never a good deal, not every nation is as strong ethically as germans or scandinavians and you can expect that people will exploit it left and right (like half of Polish or the 'professional unemployed' in UK, or the immigrants in UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Norway,...)
his argument is not as bullshit as you think. Germany has its productivity in place and is somewhat able to support all the social obligations though it's entirely possible it would be better without them (they already started to introduce unpopular reforms to cut costs of welfare). Ireland on the other hand experienced unmatched growth with low taxes in last 2 decades which was definitely ok for them but the problem is that they felt too rich and simply overconsumed basing everything on rosy projections. They are now loaded with debt they can't pay back. The only viable long term strategy to have a healthy economy is to live within your means, no exceptions. Deficit spending is very dangerous and it shouldn't be done - economy adjusts to it, shitloads of people become dependent on govt money and when economy contracts for whatever reason, deficits become HUGE and rapidly fuel national debt with no way to stop it.
If you want to call bullshit, please compare apples to apples - show examples of Germany-like countries with and without social burdens and examples of Ireland-like countries with and without.
yup, it's called fractional reserve banking. For X units of currency on the books under 'loans', bank has to hold only n% of X to be considered legit. That means that, assuming 10% of mandatory reserve, having 1 dollar in deposits allows for 10 dollars in loans. Nowadays the level of reserves around the world is much less than 10%, i'd even risk saying that it's less than 5%.
but the individual countries still have something to say, after al they get to choose who is elected for top positions in the central bank. it's not unlike the FED in the US, which is a private institution and should be independent but usually does what the government expects it to do. Granted, Greece, Ireland and Portugal are 2nd grade countries in EU so nobody really cares about them, yet they were/will be bailed out to save french and german banks that invested in their debt. You can bet your ass that if Germany or France will be in need of some kind of specific intervention, ECB will do whatever it takes to fulfill the expectations every single time. Currency free of any control is a game over for ever growing, all encompassing governments. Also the bankrupting countries with full control over their local currency would inflate wages, pensions and savings of their citizens away without blinking an eye (it's stealing, plain and simple). Having to face reality is more honest and beneficial in the long run as it forces bringing back the economic soundness and ending with unsustainable mirage of prosperity.
Currency is yet another good, there is no reason its price should be controlled by arbitrary decisions of the few, when everything else is decided by the market forces. Last time i heard the central planning was widely considered harmful.
if it's unworkable it's mostly because the governments don't want to give up on their monopoly to issue money and the opportunity to tax the citizens through inflation - citizens grab their pitchforks when you jack up the income tax, but inflating the money 1% here and 1% there goes mostly unnoticed.
except the moon rocks are too rare to be a currency, you'd have to split them to atoms to pay for a box of matches plus it would be extremely profitable to counterfeit them using some dirtcheap substances. Rare elements are much better and quite surprisingly we got few here on earth, some of them are already acted as a currency in human history (silver, gold).
it is a natural law of economics. Everything except Imaginary Property has some hard limits built in. When you increase pool of money everybody is willing to pay more in nominal terms to be able to put the hands on desired goods which are not infinite in supply, thus prices are bid-up and new equilibrium is achieved thanks to the supply and demand mechanics. If you are not willing to bid, you will never buy anything with your watered down money. If you are a producer, you are killing your profitability and survivability when prices of everything else rise and yours do not.
as you can see having growth is not enough to declare the end of recession. What about regaining the losses? Lowering unemployment to pre-depression levels? Economy is seriously weakened and it takes time to remove the toxic poisons from the system and rebuild. If you lose 20% in 1 rapid downward move, 2% growth/year is not much of a consolation.
What Wonko says is that none of the fundamental problems were fixed, enormous deficits will cover that for a while but the problem is bound to return with double force in few years - and he is right (100% confirmed)
fraudulent? not necessarily but GDP = consumption + investment + government + exports-imports as you can see there is nothing that takes debt into consideration so if you want nice GDP numbers you simply let the government run enormous deficit to fund shovel armed commandos to dig ditches. It doesn't matter if the money is spent in a productive manner, money changing hands is all that counts in GDP. On paper GDP will look stellar but in reality burning few trilions to buy a little growth doesn't make much sense, because the debt servicing will be a permanent and ever increasing burden on the economy.
not really, he inherited the bursting stock market bubble. Intervention of Federal Reserve (low interest rates) pumped money into economy to stop the incoming recession in its tracks and that later created the giant housing bubble which gave an illusion of prosperity for few years. The FED does the same thing now, it tries to reflate the bubble economy and force the leaking hot air back into it. Rates are at 0 and the FED buys t-bills (prints money) The main problem is that each bubble (and the following bust) is always bigger than the previous one. Imagine the size of an economic downturn in few years when the effects of all the bailouts wear off. Massive hangover and a huge debt impossible to pay will be the only long-term results of the whole thing.
maybe it didn't happen because the US was a rich enough already? At the beginning of the 20th century the US was a first world country and an economic powerhouse and its strength only rose since the WW2.
Children as young as three were put to work. A high number of children also worked as prostitutes.[11] Many children (and adults) worked 16 hour days. As early as 1802 and 1819 Factory Acts were passed to regulate the working hours of workhouse children in factories and cotton mills to 12 hours per day. These acts were largely ineffective and after radical agitation, by for example the "Short Time Committees" in 1831, a Royal Commission recommended in 1833 that children aged 11–18 should work a maximum of 12 hours per day, children aged 9–11 a maximum of eight hours, and children under the age of nine were no longer permitted to work. This act however only applied to the textile industry, and further agitation led to another act in 1847 limiting both adults and children to 10 hour working days.[11] Enforcement was difficult due to the small number of inspectors.[8]
By 1900, there were 1.7 million child laborers reported in American industry under the age of fifteen.[12] The number of children under the age of 15 who worked in industrial jobs for wages climbed to 2 million in 1910.[13]
also care to explain how you want to distribute that 4k calories a day without a profit motive, so we can all feel good about it? Communism tried non-profit ways to provide stuff to the people and failed miserably. Redistribution kills incentives to do work, without work there is no force pushing the whole thing forward.
You can't discount good intentions by the mere mention of unintended consequences.
yes i can. sorry, the problem with good intentions is that there always are the unintended consequences, and they are often worse than the problem you are trying to fix. Anyone who acts like 'Fuck yeah, that's a great idea, let's do this and everybody will be happy!' should be shot. People full of beautiful ideas lack the foresight too often if not always. Why they don't ask the question 'why our brilliant idea was never put into practice?'. The truth is most probably it was tested somewhere, but the results were not pretty and now they simply repeat the same mistake.
Examples of good ideas gone bad: Famine in Africa (especially in the east part). Oh noes, children are dying so we must send them tons of food! problems: - local population grows to accomodate the greater supply of food but life model doesn't change so they get 10 children and soon starve again. Back to square 1, only you have more people to feed now. Ethiopia has 2x more people than in the 80s, how is that possible in the state of permanent famine? - native agriculture is wiped out by the subsidized free food from 1st world so they can't ever be selfsufficient - they get to consume the free fish, but they can't learn how to use a fishing pole. - humanitarian organizations fund well drilling to provide water to villages but that changes the supply and more water is sucked out - people use more than the source can refill, so deeper wells are required plus everybody else who is tapped to the same reservoir of water is now screwed because they need a deeper well too.
no child left behind in schools - how is the overall quality of education looking lately? Again, it's a questionable gain for the mediocre at the expense of the brilliant ones.
Economy is about as complex as ecosystems. Ever heard of successful meddling in any ecosystem? So called smart people thought they know enough, but just look at Australia and it
You can't happily legislate 'no child labor' or whatever feel-good law when the economic reality is not really cooperating with your hippy idea. Well you can, but usually you will be truly amazed by the unintended consequences. Ever heard of 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions'? 3rd world countries that tried to abolish child labor experienced skyrocketing prostitution among the minors. The money has to be made or the family dies of starvation - simple as that. If they can't work legally, they will do other things to earn for a living and the only group benefiting is the organized crime.
Nation has to be rich enough for children not to work but if it is, children usually don't work either way.
Re:Glad I play games just to have fun
on
Diablo 3 Hands-On
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
you've got to be kidding. 50k long thread in WoW forum was locked in 2 days and hundreds of people posted their cancellation status. Europe had similar ungodly long thread too. People starting to leave can trigger a snowball effect, few friends leave so others have less motivation to keep playing and leave too. Ok, so in 2 days only tiny part of community found out and raged, but this info would spread and consume more and more subscriptions with every passing day. How many would quit after a month? Also remember that it was just before the SC2 release with Cataclysm on a horizon, so not only people cancelled WoW subscriptions but also preorders en masse. Bad press also counts, even reputable newspapers like WSJ picked up the story. They simply risked pissing off too many fans who up to that moment bought every single game of whatever genre with Blizz logo. They had no other choice but to put their plans on hold, otherwise they would have their ass grilled by pretty much everybody. Also remember that their official message about stopping this madness included ambiguous 'at this time'.
The sad thing is that the only group of customers that has any influence over Blizzard is the WoW community. They send a stream of cash to blizzard every month so they are being heard. Other games with 'pay once and forget' model can be entirely ignored. SC players can whine all day and nothing will happen, D3 players will be treated similarly.
yes, they are a honored group but it's slowly shifting. Honors are exactly what caused them to be a parasite. When you get carte blanche as a reward for your heroism, sooner or later you start to take advantage of this fact. It requires a lot of discipline to resist the temptation and not many people can. Long story short, majority of union leaders were not made of the finer kind of clay. Also many spineless creatures flocked to the unions because it's the dreamed up environment for them, rubbing backs and knowing the right people are more than enough to live a good life with no actual work.
Past deeds of unions are today mercilessly exploited to perpetuate the situation and silence everybody who claims that economic laws have to apply also in their overgrown unprofitable sectors. The fact that many of the union leaders and people from the political elite are good friends from the times of anticommunist activity doesn't help. There is no political will to change anything.
Mining industry, railroads, shipyards (especially famous for their Solidarity branches) and few others - all these industries are managed by the state. They bring heavy losses and suck the life out of the country's economy. Union workers of these industries are mentally stuck in the socialism of the past and are full of sense of baseless entitlement. The company can be dying or even almost dead (and many are) and the only thriving thing in it would be the unions. Miners don't want to hear about any pay cut, raising the retirement age or layoffs in the times when mines are deeply in the red, but they are first to demand a bonus when the company shows any profit for the first time in last decade. WTF?! What about repaying your debts first? So I have to pay taxes for years so they can live in a bubble and enjoy privileges i can't even dream of?
care to share what you do exactly with your SC2 when the bnet goes down for maintenance? or when the few second timeout of internet connection drops you out of the game?
i don't like the idea that you actually need addons to be successful. Devs have to account for all these addons so the difficulty of the game is artificially inflated, leaving 'casuals' behind. You simply can't raid instances with vanilla client. Addons are not convenience - they are a must have thing or you are just a nub nobody would ever want to team up with.
i have a great example from my beautiful country - coal mining in Poland. Situation is simply ridiculous. I don't know if the Polish coal mines have been profitable for more than 2 years in the last 2 decades. They are not a private business, they cost the budget a metric fuckton of cash in taxes they can't and don't pay, yet the miners are the holy cows - they get 13th and 14th salaries, have shitload of other bonuses and can retire much much earlier than the ordinary taxpayer. And there is way too many of them. IIRC in the last 20 years coal mining sucked in something between 10 and 20 gigadollars of taxpayer's money, which is a respectable score for a rather poor by european standards sub-40million country. I've found some data from 2003 - in the Coal Company which manages several mines there were 28(!) unions. When they don't like the ideas discussed in the parliament, they gather in Warsaw, demolish the streets, burn tires, throw stones and bricks and in the end they get any shit they want from the spineless politicians. Nobody can touch miners and their unions. At least in this case worker unions are a fucking parasite and should be blasted into oblivion.
always connected = no play when battle.net is down and this is a frequent event thanks to WoW maintenance (wtf?), plus endless problems for competitive scene and its tournaments.
story is watered down incoherent garbage, there are only about 10 meaningful story pushing missions (which coincidentally is about the length of single SC1 campaign), so 16 is pure filler. Only technical side is superior to SC1. If you happen to be a fan of SC lore, SC2 is a disaster and it pisses all over the predecessor with warm urine.
No LAN means problems for tournaments. It's only few months and there were many tournament disasters already, lag and dropped connections. Hell, Blizzcon, their own fucking event was riddled with technical problems. If they can't provide a smooth experience who can? Ok, this affects only competitive scene so what about this: always connected is a problem when the WoW maintenance tuesday happens and the whole battle.net goes down and you can't do shit with your starcraft 2. This one affects everybody, no exceptions.
Slashdot Mirror
as Peter Schiff describes that currency war, it's the only war that is all about shooting at your own troops. After all every single holder of nation's currency is robbed off his purchasing power and becomes poorer.
no, the Treasury can only issue bonds and when the Fed buys them, it uses newly created money. They simply say 'ok, boys, we take the paper and you can add 100 billion to your account', so the Fed is where the money creation takes place.
CDProjekt is definitely a Polish company
what about subsidies? boatloads of taxpayer's cash are funneled to the farming industry in the US. What is the difference between paying free market wages directly and hiding the true cost of food production with subsidies? The total cost is more or less the same for the end user (higher price or lower price + tax), level of indirection is the only thing that varies here. Free market approach would be 1. simpler 2. cheaper in maintaining 3. less prone to abuse by the rentseeking corporations
and why exactly banking sector grew so much in Ireland that it threatens the very existence of the country? Because everybody and his mother took loans to buy stuff - rampant consumption today at the expense of tomorrow at inflated prices thanks to the cheap credit. Besides that only shows that imaginary sectors of economy like paper shuffling banks are not the best motor of economy growth.
Germany was an industrial powerhouse in 19th century already when nobody heard about social systems - they always had strong work ethic and were technologically advanced. I know, i live in a neighboring country and half of tech/administration related words are of german origin which shows that they were so developed throughout the centuries that their know-how spreaded around to less advanced countries.
Norway and Sweden are rich but i don't think that relatively small nations sitting on top of huge pile of natural resources and having shitloads of oil like Norway are the best example. I wouldn't praise their social system for their success, more like protestant work ethic and transparency, same thing that made Germany a powerhouse.
The evidence is overwhelming: a strong social system produces prosperity. Contempt and cruelty for the weak, and rewarding predatory behaviour of the elites leads to economic misery. Wake up.
So you got like 2 or 3 examples for and pretty much the rest of bankrupting 1st world showing the opposite. You call that proof?
Strong social system produces a mirage of prosperity. If you overdo it which is not that hard (if not 100% sure), given that in democracy people want 'free stuff' and have a power to vote for it, you are on the road to serfdom and you end up as a banker's slave either way. Don't spend money that is not yours and you'll be safe.
Countries with social systems pay for them with the money of their children and unborn grandsons. Do you think Poland is rich? No it's not. Do you think we need more social stuff? The one we already got sinks the country - retirements for all kinds of privileged groups for example. It was moved off the books, so our national debt and deficits didn't look so bad, otherwise nobody would ever lend us a penny and we would be queueing for help already. We got nothing on greeks who spent the shit out on freebies for their citizens while cheating the whole EU. Certainly social system worked so well for them, didn't it.
Giving people something for nothing is never a good deal, not every nation is as strong ethically as germans or scandinavians and you can expect that people will exploit it left and right (like half of Polish or the 'professional unemployed' in UK, or the immigrants in UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, ...)
his argument is not as bullshit as you think. Germany has its productivity in place and is somewhat able to support all the social obligations though it's entirely possible it would be better without them (they already started to introduce unpopular reforms to cut costs of welfare). Ireland on the other hand experienced unmatched growth with low taxes in last 2 decades which was definitely ok for them but the problem is that they felt too rich and simply overconsumed basing everything on rosy projections. They are now loaded with debt they can't pay back.
The only viable long term strategy to have a healthy economy is to live within your means, no exceptions. Deficit spending is very dangerous and it shouldn't be done - economy adjusts to it, shitloads of people become dependent on govt money and when economy contracts for whatever reason, deficits become HUGE and rapidly fuel national debt with no way to stop it.
If you want to call bullshit, please compare apples to apples - show examples of Germany-like countries with and without social burdens and examples of Ireland-like countries with and without.
yup, it's called fractional reserve banking. For X units of currency on the books under 'loans', bank has to hold only n% of X to be considered legit.
That means that, assuming 10% of mandatory reserve, having 1 dollar in deposits allows for 10 dollars in loans. Nowadays the level of reserves around the world is much less than 10%, i'd even risk saying that it's less than 5%.
but the individual countries still have something to say, after al they get to choose who is elected for top positions in the central bank. it's not unlike the FED in the US, which is a private institution and should be independent but usually does what the government expects it to do. Granted, Greece, Ireland and Portugal are 2nd grade countries in EU so nobody really cares about them, yet they were/will be bailed out to save french and german banks that invested in their debt. You can bet your ass that if Germany or France will be in need of some kind of specific intervention, ECB will do whatever it takes to fulfill the expectations every single time. Currency free of any control is a game over for ever growing, all encompassing governments. Also the bankrupting countries with full control over their local currency would inflate wages, pensions and savings of their citizens away without blinking an eye (it's stealing, plain and simple). Having to face reality is more honest and beneficial in the long run as it forces bringing back the economic soundness and ending with unsustainable mirage of prosperity.
Currency is yet another good, there is no reason its price should be controlled by arbitrary decisions of the few, when everything else is decided by the market forces. Last time i heard the central planning was widely considered harmful.
if it's unworkable it's mostly because the governments don't want to give up on their monopoly to issue money and the opportunity to tax the citizens through inflation - citizens grab their pitchforks when you jack up the income tax, but inflating the money 1% here and 1% there goes mostly unnoticed.
except the moon rocks are too rare to be a currency, you'd have to split them to atoms to pay for a box of matches plus it would be extremely profitable to counterfeit them using some dirtcheap substances. Rare elements are much better and quite surprisingly we got few here on earth, some of them are already acted as a currency in human history (silver, gold).
it is a natural law of economics. Everything except Imaginary Property has some hard limits built in. When you increase pool of money everybody is willing to pay more in nominal terms to be able to put the hands on desired goods which are not infinite in supply, thus prices are bid-up and new equilibrium is achieved thanks to the supply and demand mechanics. If you are not willing to bid, you will never buy anything with your watered down money. If you are a producer, you are killing your profitability and survivability when prices of everything else rise and yours do not.
i hope you realize that fascism means the government in bed with corporations? i don't see how Ayn Rand falls under this category.
apparently you have a weird idea how the GD looked like.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_GDP_10-60.jpg
as you can see having growth is not enough to declare the end of recession. What about regaining the losses? Lowering unemployment to pre-depression levels? Economy is seriously weakened and it takes time to remove the toxic poisons from the system and rebuild.
If you lose 20% in 1 rapid downward move, 2% growth/year is not much of a consolation.
What Wonko says is that none of the fundamental problems were fixed, enormous deficits will cover that for a while but the problem is bound to return with double force in few years - and he is right (100% confirmed)
fraudulent? not necessarily
but GDP = consumption + investment + government + exports-imports
as you can see there is nothing that takes debt into consideration so if you want nice GDP numbers you simply let the government run enormous deficit to fund shovel armed commandos to dig ditches. It doesn't matter if the money is spent in a productive manner, money changing hands is all that counts in GDP.
On paper GDP will look stellar but in reality burning few trilions to buy a little growth doesn't make much sense, because the debt servicing will be a permanent and ever increasing burden on the economy.
not really, he inherited the bursting stock market bubble. Intervention of Federal Reserve (low interest rates) pumped money into economy to stop the incoming recession in its tracks and that later created the giant housing bubble which gave an illusion of prosperity for few years. The FED does the same thing now, it tries to reflate the bubble economy and force the leaking hot air back into it. Rates are at 0 and the FED buys t-bills (prints money)
The main problem is that each bubble (and the following bust) is always bigger than the previous one. Imagine the size of an economic downturn in few years when the effects of all the bailouts wear off. Massive hangover and a huge debt impossible to pay will be the only long-term results of the whole thing.
Jim Rogers, Marc Faber, Peter Schiff
professional enough?
maybe it didn't happen because the US was a rich enough already? At the beginning of the 20th century the US was a first world country and an economic powerhouse and its strength only rose since the WW2.
wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_labor
Children as young as three were put to work. A high number of children also worked as prostitutes.[11] Many children (and adults) worked 16 hour days. As early as 1802 and 1819 Factory Acts were passed to regulate the working hours of workhouse children in factories and cotton mills to 12 hours per day. These acts were largely ineffective and after radical agitation, by for example the "Short Time Committees" in 1831, a Royal Commission recommended in 1833 that children aged 11–18 should work a maximum of 12 hours per day, children aged 9–11 a maximum of eight hours, and children under the age of nine were no longer permitted to work. This act however only applied to the textile industry, and further agitation led to another act in 1847 limiting both adults and children to 10 hour working days.[11] Enforcement was difficult due to the small number of inspectors.[8]
By 1900, there were 1.7 million child laborers reported in American industry under the age of fifteen.[12] The number of children under the age of 15 who worked in industrial jobs for wages climbed to 2 million in 1910.[13]
http://socialistworker.org/2004-2/500Supp/500S_20000707_ChildLabor.shtml
oh look, child labor happens to this day in the US.
also care to explain how you want to distribute that 4k calories a day without a profit motive, so we can all feel good about it? Communism tried non-profit ways to provide stuff to the people and failed miserably. Redistribution kills incentives to do work, without work there is no force pushing the whole thing forward.
You can't discount good intentions by the mere mention of unintended consequences.
yes i can.
sorry, the problem with good intentions is that there always are the unintended consequences, and they are often worse than the problem you are trying to fix. Anyone who acts like 'Fuck yeah, that's a great idea, let's do this and everybody will be happy!' should be shot. People full of beautiful ideas lack the foresight too often if not always. Why they don't ask the question 'why our brilliant idea was never put into practice?'. The truth is most probably it was tested somewhere, but the results were not pretty and now they simply repeat the same mistake.
Examples of good ideas gone bad:
Famine in Africa (especially in the east part). Oh noes, children are dying so we must send them tons of food!
problems:
- local population grows to accomodate the greater supply of food but life model doesn't change so they get 10 children and soon starve again. Back to square 1, only you have more people to feed now. Ethiopia has 2x more people than in the 80s, how is that possible in the state of permanent famine?
- native agriculture is wiped out by the subsidized free food from 1st world so they can't ever be selfsufficient - they get to consume the free fish, but they can't learn how to use a fishing pole.
- humanitarian organizations fund well drilling to provide water to villages but that changes the supply and more water is sucked out - people use more than the source can refill, so deeper wells are required plus everybody else who is tapped to the same reservoir of water is now screwed because they need a deeper well too.
no child left behind in schools
- how is the overall quality of education looking lately? Again, it's a questionable gain for the mediocre at the expense of the brilliant ones.
Economy is about as complex as ecosystems. Ever heard of successful meddling in any ecosystem? So called smart people thought they know enough, but just look at Australia and it
You can't happily legislate 'no child labor' or whatever feel-good law when the economic reality is not really cooperating with your hippy idea. Well you can, but usually you will be truly amazed by the unintended consequences. Ever heard of 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions'?
3rd world countries that tried to abolish child labor experienced skyrocketing prostitution among the minors. The money has to be made or the family dies of starvation - simple as that. If they can't work legally, they will do other things to earn for a living and the only group benefiting is the organized crime.
Nation has to be rich enough for children not to work but if it is, children usually don't work either way.
you've got to be kidding. 50k long thread in WoW forum was locked in 2 days and hundreds of people posted their cancellation status. Europe had similar ungodly long thread too. People starting to leave can trigger a snowball effect, few friends leave so others have less motivation to keep playing and leave too. Ok, so in 2 days only tiny part of community found out and raged, but this info would spread and consume more and more subscriptions with every passing day. How many would quit after a month?
Also remember that it was just before the SC2 release with Cataclysm on a horizon, so not only people cancelled WoW subscriptions but also preorders en masse. Bad press also counts, even reputable newspapers like WSJ picked up the story.
They simply risked pissing off too many fans who up to that moment bought every single game of whatever genre with Blizz logo. They had no other choice but to put their plans on hold, otherwise they would have their ass grilled by pretty much everybody.
Also remember that their official message about stopping this madness included ambiguous 'at this time'.
The sad thing is that the only group of customers that has any influence over Blizzard is the WoW community. They send a stream of cash to blizzard every month so they are being heard. Other games with 'pay once and forget' model can be entirely ignored. SC players can whine all day and nothing will happen, D3 players will be treated similarly.
yes, they are a honored group but it's slowly shifting. Honors are exactly what caused them to be a parasite. When you get carte blanche as a reward for your heroism, sooner or later you start to take advantage of this fact. It requires a lot of discipline to resist the temptation and not many people can. Long story short, majority of union leaders were not made of the finer kind of clay. Also many spineless creatures flocked to the unions because it's the dreamed up environment for them, rubbing backs and knowing the right people are more than enough to live a good life with no actual work.
Past deeds of unions are today mercilessly exploited to perpetuate the situation and silence everybody who claims that economic laws have to apply also in their overgrown unprofitable sectors. The fact that many of the union leaders and people from the political elite are good friends from the times of anticommunist activity doesn't help. There is no political will to change anything.
Mining industry, railroads, shipyards (especially famous for their Solidarity branches) and few others - all these industries are managed by the state. They bring heavy losses and suck the life out of the country's economy. Union workers of these industries are mentally stuck in the socialism of the past and are full of sense of baseless entitlement. The company can be dying or even almost dead (and many are) and the only thriving thing in it would be the unions.
Miners don't want to hear about any pay cut, raising the retirement age or layoffs in the times when mines are deeply in the red, but they are first to demand a bonus when the company shows any profit for the first time in last decade. WTF?! What about repaying your debts first? So I have to pay taxes for years so they can live in a bubble and enjoy privileges i can't even dream of?
care to share what you do exactly with your SC2 when the bnet goes down for maintenance? or when the few second timeout of internet connection drops you out of the game?
i don't like the idea that you actually need addons to be successful. Devs have to account for all these addons so the difficulty of the game is artificially inflated, leaving 'casuals' behind. You simply can't raid instances with vanilla client. Addons are not convenience - they are a must have thing or you are just a nub nobody would ever want to team up with.
i have a great example from my beautiful country - coal mining in Poland.
Situation is simply ridiculous. I don't know if the Polish coal mines have been profitable for more than 2 years in the last 2 decades. They are not a private business, they cost the budget a metric fuckton of cash in taxes they can't and don't pay, yet the miners are the holy cows - they get 13th and 14th salaries, have shitload of other bonuses and can retire much much earlier than the ordinary taxpayer. And there is way too many of them. IIRC in the last 20 years coal mining sucked in something between 10 and 20 gigadollars of taxpayer's money, which is a respectable score for a rather poor by european standards sub-40million country. I've found some data from 2003 - in the Coal Company which manages several mines there were 28(!) unions.
When they don't like the ideas discussed in the parliament, they gather in Warsaw, demolish the streets, burn tires, throw stones and bricks and in the end they get any shit they want from the spineless politicians. Nobody can touch miners and their unions.
At least in this case worker unions are a fucking parasite and should be blasted into oblivion.
always connected = no play when battle.net is down and this is a frequent event thanks to WoW maintenance (wtf?), plus endless problems for competitive scene and its tournaments.
story is watered down incoherent garbage, there are only about 10 meaningful story pushing missions (which coincidentally is about the length of single SC1 campaign), so 16 is pure filler. Only technical side is superior to SC1. If you happen to be a fan of SC lore, SC2 is a disaster and it pisses all over the predecessor with warm urine.
No LAN means problems for tournaments. It's only few months and there were many tournament disasters already, lag and dropped connections. Hell, Blizzcon, their own fucking event was riddled with technical problems. If they can't provide a smooth experience who can? Ok, this affects only competitive scene so what about this: always connected is a problem when the WoW maintenance tuesday happens and the whole battle.net goes down and you can't do shit with your starcraft 2. This one affects everybody, no exceptions.