Genuine Argentinian government logic: perfectly coherent, but not connected with reality in any way whatsoever.
Italy was poorer then Argentina per capita back when started this strategy. They blame their current economic problems mostly on their inability to go back to it now that they're in the Euro. It's a very good strategy. In the short term exporters get rich, but it's not like it's hard to become an exporter, or get a job with an exporter.
Note that if everyone is on vacation abroad, they're spending their money abroad, not keeping it within Argentina. It's possible the government's measures are keeping more money at home then would be leaving otherwise, but from your posts and the posts of various other people who live there/stayed there on vacation/etc. I'd have to say it seems much more likely that governmental policy is driving people to hoard their cash until they can sneak it out of the country, and the government puts up with it because they want to win re-election. I suspect an Argentina with a normalish economy (ie: no recent expropriations of major foreign companies, enough foreign friends that the Vulture Funds could be dealt with, etc.) would not have this issue.
In economics the problem is that so many states really aren't viable economic units. You can't have anybody but the Feds decide how to divide up the Colorado River.
Sure you can: through private property rights. In fact, mismanagement by the Federal Government is primarily responsible for the sorry state the Colorado River is in. The air is similarly mismanaged by the Federal Government.
The funny part is you think you're disagreeing with my point.
I said nothing about how the Feds manage the water. It could be a bureaucratic process. It could be private property rights.
If it's private property rights that means a Court. The only Court that can adjudicate when a rancher from Colorado is screwing as rancher from Utah by taking too much water is the 10th Circuit.
Militarily there's no way Kansas could have a well-armed militia. They'd need an Air Force, and they can't afford it.
I don't see what exactly you think Kansas needs an air force for. Almost all of our military throughout the past hundred years has been defending the ill gotten gains or cleaning up the messes created by our colonialist, imperialist "allies", with the result that we now have a big target painted on our backs.
So their job is to balance the Federal government, potentially by rebelling, but they don't need an Air Force?
What's your head like? It sounds like a very nice place where things are so much simpler then real life.
Life happened, and a lot of the Founders limits on Federal power (and Presidential power) just stopped being particularly meaningful.
Those limits are as meaningful today as when the US was founded. Unfortunately, European-style worship of totalitarianism and government-by-elites has infected the thinking of many Americans.
No they aren't.
In 1789 we had a minuscule military. Congress confirmed every officer in it at actual hearings. This meant that the guy who commanded a ship was answerable to both Congress and the President. Today we have 310 million people. Even if we went to a tiny military we'd have thousands of officers, and Congress just isn't designed to keep track of 1,000 Second Lieutenants. They can still do shit like refuse to confirm the promotion of Kirk Lippold to Captain, but it's no longer a way for them to meaningfully control the military on a day-to-day basis.
and the Germans still paid more then they would with a more generous early bailout because they had to repeat the process
A more generous early bailout would have meant that the Greeks spent it even faster.
That would actually be the point.
Look at this from an engineering point of view. The problem is Greece has debts it can't pay off. The reason it can't pay it off is the economy is too damn small, not growing fast enough, and lenders are convinced they won;t be paid back if they send in more checks. If you have a mini €110 Billion bailout (at 5.5% interest) then the Greek government has to fire slightly fewer people then if there were no bailout, but it can't create business tax incentives/build infrastructure/buy domestically produced tanks/or any of the other things governments can do to make the economic pie actually grow. None of the problem has been solved and you'll just have to spend €150 Billion (at 3.5%, except the €100 Billion write-down in debt from the last bailout) more next year.
Which will still not be enough to allow the Greek government to spend new money on shit that might grow the economy, so a few years after that you have to deal with Syriza. Which means that a) you have not solved the problem, b) you're not getting paid back on the €260 Billion you gave them, €160 Billion at 3.5% and c) you're really truly not getting paid back on the €100 Billion gift.
OTOH, let's say you started at €200 Billion. You didn't charge interest, or you charge 1%. Maybe you're feeling really generous payments don't start until there are signs of growth. You insist the Greeks make major changes to their economy (for example, reducing pensions and replacing their easily bribable tax enforcement guys with real tax enforcement guys). They use the extra money to grow their economy. Which, BTW, is logically equivalent to saying "they spent the money."
Now you have solved the original problem, you are getting paid back on all of it, and nobody has to worry about the end of the Euro. You have not caused a banking collapse in Cyprus, you do not have to deal with Syriza, there is a 0% chance Putin can turn your entire left flank simply by courting the Turks and telling the Greeks "you realize if you just stopped paying those guys I'd protect you, right?," etc. etc. etc.
Which included 7 Billion quid from the Brits, altho the Irish only seem to have used £3.2 billion. Additionally the UK's attempts to stabilize it's own banks have resulted in £14bn going to their Irish subsidiaries.
The Eurozone has badly fucked up this situation by trying to nickel-and-dime these bailouts. For Greece they needed to do €200-250 Billion Euros at nominal (as in zero or 1%) interest back in 2010. They insisted on much less (€110 billion) at 5.5%. Then they acted surprised that a year later they needed to arrange that €100 billion (aka: almost all the money from the first bailout) needed to be written off and the interest rate reduced on the rest. But they're still charging interest (altho 3.5% is slightly less fucking stupid then 5.5% was). And they'll probably have to do a third bailout.
But Ireland, which didn't get nickel-and-dimed by a bunch of self-righteous Germans, is gonna be fine.
That was always the intent in certain areas. In currency, defense, and foreign affairs in particular the Feds were supposed to completely dominate everything so that an ambitious Governor of South Carolina couldn't trade Charleston to the King for a Ducal coronet.
In economics the problem is that so many states really aren't viable economic units. You can't have anybody but the Feds decide how to divide up the Colorado River. State-based regulation of air pollution would be even stupider. Every corn farmer is sending his product to Chicago, and that just doesn't work if Nebraska has different rules then Kansas. Militarily there's no way Kansas could have a well-armed militia. They'd need an Air Force, and they can't afford it.
Life happened, and a lot of the Founders limits on Federal power (and Presidential power) just stopped being particularly meaningful.
Argentina has a large enough middle class that a cashless system based on geek-related crypto-currencies is possible. They've all got smartphones.
Venezuela's problem is that you have a) oil wealth, b) a relatively small number of whitish middle-class people with the money for a smartphone, and c) a bunch of really poor, less whitish, working class folks with very little understanding of economics. Without a very good method of dividing up the country's wealth, you ended up with the working class saying "fuck it," and using their superior numbers to legislate income equality. This has led to massive economic problems, which will only be solved permanently if the guy who replaces Maduro can convince the whitish folks from b) to pay more in taxes then they did pre-Chavez, and the slightly-less-whitish folks from c) to accept less in government benefits then they did under Chavez.
... trips are a big thing right now... my Facebook account has been full of people travelling for the last couple of years. This is because we can pay for the tickets in installments, the cost of food and other expenses is not too far from the prices in Argentina, and you can buy technology, clothes, etc. at lower prices.
Which explains why the black market exchange rate is so bad.
To go on a trip you need dollars or euros, which means high demand for those currencies. Since there's very little reason for a non-Argentinean to buy Pesos (except, perhaps, trips to Buenas Aires) there's low demand for pesos.
Which means that it will take a lot of pesos to convince a dollar-owner to give up his dollar, and quite a few people will pay his price.
Lets assume, for the sake of the argument, that there is no inflation, there is a predictable interest rate and the people can save it.
You're hilarious.
This is Argentina we're talking about. There is no such thing as either "savings" or an "interest rate."
You spend whatever you get because the last time you put your money in a bank it got confiscated, and if you have a big pile of bills on the floor the tax man might notice.
1 - We're nowhere near desperate. We've been desperate-ish in the past... not lately.
Pardon me, but I'm not sure the definition of desperate is the same for an Argentinean as it is for the rest of us. In the US, or most of Latin America, having a legally mandated exchange rate much different from the actual market-based rate would count as a major problem.
The Argentine attitude seems to be "The legal exchange rate is different from the market-based one? It must be Tuesday."
2 - We have a high but predictable inflation... it's impossible to save in Pesos, so it stimulates spending and the economy survives.
3 - Purchase of dollars is restricted but there's a "healthy" black market that sells at a higher but well know rate (it's published in the newspapers and there are websites that inform the black market rate as well). The government counts on the existance of this black market to keep peace.
In theory the smart governmental policy at this point would be to float the Peso and kill the official exchange rate. The inflation would mean that your exports got cheaper in dollar terms (ie: if it costs you 100 pesos to make something, at 9 pesos for a dollar you need to get $11 US to break even; at 15 you're breaking even at $7), which would help the economy.
But as far as I can tell the people of Argentina have specifically designed their economy so that, with a significant amount of scrambling, everyone can be roughly as prosperous today as their ancestors were in 1905. Which is not that bad (Argentina was pretty rich in 1905), but also means that a) you've missed out on a century of economic growth, and b) you're doing so much scrambling you're surprised anyone else thinks you should not be scrambling.
4 - Going cashless solves nothing..!!! Your cashless bank account still lists an amount of pesos and if you want to convert them to dollars the normal restrictions apply. People taking advantage of bitcoin and other schemes are simply operating in the black market... it could be bitcoin, it could be bonds or stock.
I suspect when a Bitcoiner says "cashless" he means that there's no government-currency involved at all. So a cell phone transaction involving your bank account would be cash.
This is why I try to avoid economic discussions with bitcoiners.
The US, by and large, has lucked out, in no small part to what Bagehot referred to as Americans' "genius for politics". But in other societies, where the legislative and judicial branches have remained stunted as compared to the US Congress, SCOTUS and the Federal Courts, all the Presidential system does is deliver near-dictatorial powers into the hands of the President.
Based on the record power grabs by the executive branch in the past couple administrations the US luck is fast running out. We've worked our way from free country to police state light. Sadly I expect in my lifetime that will become a full police state or, as I like to say, a banana republic.
Dude, this is all designed into the system. Checks and Balances are meaningless if the a) the Executive never does anything worthy of being checked, and b) everyone is not constantly bitching/arguing about which things should have been checked.
Here's what's not designed into the system: a lawyer makes a Youtube video alleging he's going to be assassinated by the President's thugs, then he pays someone to shoot him, and shuts down the country for six months until the cops figure it out. Or the time the President ordered the Army to administer a referendum allowing him to run for a third term, and the Constitutional Court and Senate decided this was impeachable, and ordered the army to exile him. There's still some debate over whether that counts as a coup d'tat. On the one hand, the Army stormed the Presidential Palace, on the other the Supreme Court said it was ok.
In the US we avoid these things largely because we've got a religious/./slavish devotion to the Constitution, and the guy trying to get around it by framing Obama for murder or arranging a secret impeachment trial would be fucked politically. And it seems to be working pretty well in some of the bigger countries of the world (ie: Indonesia, Brazil). But in quite a few Latin American the intricate levers of power, the numerous opportunities for stupid BS fights, etc. just seem to overwhelm the political system and you get a level of bullshit unimaginable for an American.
If you had a nice, boring Westminster system you'd have less personality cult (because the dude in power would technically be subordinate to a powerless President), less bullshitty (a PM is a creature of the Legislature, so if the Senate gets pissed at the PM of Honduras it just fires him and doesn't give a shit about either the Constitutional Court or the Army), elections matter less (Obama is Presient until 2016 come hell or high water, if David Cameron or Steven Harper fuck up enough they could be fired tomorrow), much simpler lines of responsibility (there's no ability for the Executive to claim the Legislative screwed up, and if they'd only supported that bill he'd wanted [Bad Thing] would have been avoided if the Legislative and Executive are the same guy), etc.
If you think that a number of parties greater then one is correlated with more viewpoints you really need to watch a Republican Presidential debate. The reason those guys have the same label isn't that they all agree on everything, it's that they all disagree with the Democrats coalition more then with each-other. In Northern Europe you could probably have a less drama-bullshit-you're-better-then-Hillary-you-traitor-to-freedom-party if you forced the local center-right guys (frequently called Christian Democrats) into the same party as the center-left (usually called Social Democrats) and one or two of the minor parties.
And you're talking Argentina. They haven't had an effective economic policy for more then a century, which is they you went from richer then Italy (France and Germany too) to poorer then Italy; they've been surpassed by the Chileans and the Uruguayans; and the Mexicans/Brazilians/etc. are all on pace to beat them. An Argentinian talking about economic prosperity is like a virgin talking about sex.
They should not have a long-term set exchange rate at all. Particularly to a currency that's got a completely different growth strategy then them. It's dumb economics.
Yeah, but keep in mind Mexico is moving up. Argentina is moving sideways. Has been for roughly a century. They're roughly equal in income at the moment, largely because Argentine politics suck. As soon as Argentina finds a solution that works they go crazy, implementing ever stricter versions of it, until it becomes clear that the version they had three years ago was too far and they're all fucked now. At this point they start blaming foreigners, posting melodramatic videos about grandmas prostituting themselves on YouTube, etc. etc. etc. Then the President loses an election, the new President does the opposite, in ever stricter versions, etc. etc. etc.
So your middle-class family is fine, and will likely remain fine. But they ain't gonna be moving up on the income ladder, and the folks who aren't middle class won't be entering it.
It's Argentina. I can't remember the last time I read about the Argentine government doing something smart.
Seriously, these are people who responded to Brazil,a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_American_dreadnought_race#Counter:_Argentina_and_Chile_respond">buying two extremely modern naval vessels by insisting that a) it was evil that Brazil do this and the entire world should come to a stop while to problem was solved, and b) the most equitable solution would be for the Brazilians to give Argentina one of them. The foreign minister was fired after much drama, including the revelation that the back-up plan was an invasion.
So I suspect the ultimate Argentine reaction to their current predicament will be to go all-in on a solution and then stubbornly refuse to change until it's clear they should have changed 50-6 years back.
The problem you get is that Greece is not a dictatorship.
The King cannot simply decree "everyone will take huge cute to income, it will suck ass for six years, but years 7-10 will be great and I will be remembered as a brilliant leader."
You have to show results in year two or three. If your problem is too many government employees, and you keep firing government employees to keep your budget near the deficit numbers the Troika likes, things will not improve by year three. Which means that your pet austerity-Cabinet gets it's ass kicked by a bunch of people who suck at economics and are convinced you are the cause of every problem the world has ever seen.
And if the Germans had done the smart thing in the first place, and not insisted on a 5.5% interest rate on the first bail-out; we wouldn;t have needed a second bail-out.
You don't rebalance an economy in a democracy without new government spending, even if it's only temporary (ie: hire young people to do make-woirk for a few years). It just doesn't work because you're taking money out of the economy (for example, pensioners buy less stuff, while people using under-the-table money to pay their bills have to pay taxes on it), which means even the people who were living what the Germans considered a financially moral life (ie: the guy who owns a store and paid all the tax on it) get screwed. Which means the economy shrinks, the deficit that was just under the allowed number before is now above it because the denominator went down and the numerator stayed the same, and you have to cut pensions/jack up taxes/etc. more...
You can sell hope to these folks for a few years, but if you don't get growth within three years you're fucked politically. They are miserable, they are not PhDs in the Milton Friedman School of Economics so they don't really understand why this plan makes sense in the long-term (and they question the point of long-term prosperity if it means short-term mass unemployment for the foreseeable future). They'll try a new plan. The new plan will be written by people who hate you because the voters hate you.
And instead of spending 200 Billion Euros once and keeping the Aegean in your military alliance; you'll spend 150 Billion, plus 110 Billion, plus possibly a third bail-out; and you risk the Greeks switching over to an Alliance with somebody who doesn't like Western Europe very much because (as we just established) the Greek people are pretty pissed at Western Europe at the moment.
exactly the folks who Greeks blame for all their problems.
So, the Greeks are blaming the Germans because the Greek government couldn't pay its bills? Interesting....
That's the way the Germans and Northern Europeans think of it.
The way much of the rest of the world thinks of it is that the Greek government lied to everyone about it's books, the Germans didn't notice, which led to a Greek economic collapse; and now the Germans are refusing to help their fellow Europeans because those damned Greeks should have noticed their government wasn't telling the truth.
Moreover countries where the government responded to the crises by spending extra money (like the US and UK) tended to do much better then countries where they cut the budget to the bone in an effort to save 100% of the bondholders and not spend any EU money. Even the Eurozone's poster-child Ireland got through it mostly because the Brits were willing to aded billions of pounds more then the EU Troika.
Which has led to a massive confidence-loss in the very concept of the Eurozone, could possibly lead to Greece leaving the Western alliance for Russia, and the Germans still paid more then they would with a more generous early bailout because they had to repeat the process. There was never a rational reason to insist that people who don;t have money pay 5.5% interest, and even the 3.5% interest the Germans agreed to in the last round of bail-outs means they'll make a significant profit.
Reread your Constitution. Article 1, Section 8, on the list of enumerated powers: To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
In 1819 McCulloch vs. Maryland established that printed paper money was valid due to this clause and the "necessary and proper clause." ie: the Courts ruled that it was both necessary and proper for the Feds to "coin" paper bank notes.
You don't. You sell it on the market, buy US Dollars, and send those with your tax return. Otherwise the IRS will not credit your account. They'll probably east the chicken, tho.
One thing Bitcoiners and gold bugs alike really have trouble understanding is that the reason the USD has value is that the US Economy is one of the best in the world, to participate you have to pay taxes, and the taxes can ONLY be paid in United States Dollars. Many people who do not participate in our economy (such as ex-pats whose sole income is in their new country) have to file taxes, and if they owe they have to buy United States dollars, or they are tax cheats and any bank who ever does business with them will be banned from the world forever.
Starting your own company requires knowing a lot more "whos" then ladder-climbing. It's called marketing, getting a bank loan, etc. Either way you're working your ass off to get somebody to like you.
It's just that if you're the kind of person who would start your own business it feels less like ass-kissing (despite the fact that all good salesman are kissing everyone's ass 40 hours a week) and more like doing your job.
So 12.86% of the UK lives in a single City, and 79.6% live in cities, the vast majority of the UK tax money comes from cities, but the UK shouldn't use it's (mostly urban) tax money to create high speed rail stops because the 20.4% of the population is too far from them to use them?
You do realize there are precisely zero transportation options for rural areas that don't suck? Sometimes you get a highway through one, if it's between urban centers, but generally what they get are surface streets and buses. And the bus tends to be a Greyhound to the next County over, not a Megabus.
Even in the US we have a high urbanization rate (82% or so), and most tax money tends to come from a) downtowns of big cities or b) wealthy suburbs.
Listening to someone talk hockey brings back memories...
As an ex-Detroiter in Cleveland it's very rare for me to encounter anyone who knows what a Left Wing is, much less understands anything about the game.
You're ignoring 3, just don't use the damn picture. There are plenty of other pictures. The world is not gonna end if you use a picture shot by the photography club.
The problem though, as I see it, is not necessarily the original photo. It's the whole clusterfuck of the photo as proof that men are sexist pigs, and that is an acceptable reason to call them pigs, and that somethig has to be done. Yes, you can use a different photo. But do you have to make it a national story, broadly calling all men sexist pigs? We get very very close to saying that young men should not ever be around young women. Because both sexes spend a lot of time thinking about the other sex at that age, yes boys, but girls too. We will not scrub sex from any career.
You're reading the "all men are sexist pigs" bit into her piece. She's not denigrating all men, or even a particular man, she's denigrating using a pic from Playboy in High School. And given a) the maturity level of all teenagers, b) the probable reaction of some of them (mostly boys) to be being able to use the pic, and c) the probable reaction of others (mostly girls) to said reaction it's hard to argue with her case.
She's 17. The article was written about a class when she was 16. his is a country where most teenagers go through abstinence only sex ed. Sex-positive is controversial, and having your 10th graders use a Playboy pic is one of the most sex-positive things you could do.
BTW, it's interesting how you've defined STEM. I'd say Veterinarian is one of the most STEM fields possible. And yes, for the record Veterinary schools try to figure out how to get guys to apply.
You see, I'm not the one defining it . Despite the 80 percent females in Veterinarian schools, how much do we hear about "Veterinarian careers ar ea shinig example of success in getting young women into science fields" How do we emulate that success in other careers?
If you read articles on Veterinary medicine you'll find plenty of talk about it. But if you read articles about STEM in general it gets one line because it is one line, and since the field was male-dominated for so long even roughly a decade of 3/4 of new vets being female means it's still quite close 50/50.
Cornell did an article on this a ways back: http://www.news.cornell.edu/st... Is that guys have simply stopped applying. Which makes sense. It's very difficult to get into Vet School (in many cases more difficult then Medical School), it's as hard as Med School, and when you get out your salary is comparable to an MD during his residency. Which is more then I will ever make, but don;t try telling an MD his residency salary was anything but a pittance.
Which means you only apply if you have a true passion for making pets feel better from childhood, and the people like that are mostly girls.
I have never heard that. In fact, I have heard some women complain about that, saying it still isn't "right". There will soon be no male veterinarians. Hell where we take our pets, there is a staff of 25.
1 male staff person, the guy who cleans up. That's a sample of 1, but it meshes well with the statistics if a little worse (unless the goal is no males
Young vets are female. The ones in a large practice like that are going to be mostly young, and probably disproportionately female for their generation because guys are less risk-averse and thus more likely to hang out a shingle of their very own.
My point in all of this, is that we have to be careful who we listen to. And what we have been listening to is a tremendous amount of n
First a totally off-topic question, which you (or may not) be able to answer: How common is it for a High School Ice Hockey team, to have a couple of girls on defense because they're the only ones who know how to skate backwards? I read a story ages ago about hockey in Tennessee, and one of the things it said was this team's top two defenders were the coach's daughters, because when they were tiny they'd learned to figure skate, which meant skating backwards. And I thought "Gee, that makes sense, it's fucking Tennessee, they don't make a frozen pond in their back yard every year thing that the Canadians and Minnesotans do."
Now back to on-topic (or at least the off-topic we were discussing before), as I mentioned another time on one of these (it may even have been to you) I'm not sure you're maturity was actually emotional maturity. Years years, when the Baby Boom was entering the work force, somebody with a High School degree could get a job earning the equivalent of $10-15 an hour, full-time, virtually no questions asked. The staring UAW salary (which, again, was there for the taking for almost anybody who lived near a union auto plant), was the equivalent of $23.59 in 1970. That means just about any guy who could show on-time for a shift can afford to pay for a House, a wife (who may even be able to be a stay-at-home wife), and a couple kids; even if they're immature.
The 2015 economy is not that simple. Jobs for High School guys who will show up guaranteed are almost all part-time/minimum wage deals. The maturity level is irrelevant, no girl's gonna marry that. Much less settle down to be a stay-at-home mom. Jobs for college graduates (including two-year Associates programs) can be much better, and a college grad is pretty much by definition demonstrating a significant amount of maturity just by getting through a four-year-program that they had to design themselves. But unless you have the exact right major and/or are great at marketing/networking you can easily end up having student loans greater then 10% of your monthly income, which you deal with by getting on a payment plan, and whose gonna marry a guy who can't make his debt payments?
And in the end, if young women are so turned off by a completely innocuous photo that they declare that as a reason to go into another field, and that a photo like that is ispo facto sexual harassment, we have a choice of three things.
1.Try these obnoxious males as adult sexual offenders, and give them the same punishments.
2. completely segregate the sexes in school. Send boys to one, and girls to another. At that point, there will be no male harassment to dissuade the young ladies, and the field should quickly even out in a gender equitable mode
You're ignoring 3, just don't use the damn picture. There are plenty of other pictures. The world is not gonna end if you use a picture shot by the photography club. One of the kids finds it on his own, and tries to use it because it's "standard," you cross that bridge when you come to it. Depending on how you designed the assignment maybe you have to let him use another picture. But you do not announce to the class they should look for Lenna. If you don't get caught using Lenna you've pissed off several of your students to make the most obnoxious boys gleeful. If you do get caught you'll get written up in the Washington Post as "that guy," and thanking the author for not a) using your name, and b) insisting you be fired.
BTW, it's interesting how you've defined STEM. I'd say Veterinarian is one of the most STEM fields possible. And yes, for the record Veterinary schools try to figure out how to get guys to apply.
I'm not trying to get you to take a 180 degree position. I'm trying to get you to explore the idea. Right now your argument that the US is not better then Canada consists of a) a point you freely acknowledge has nothing to do with my claim to the contrary, and b) you don't believe me because you've done no research.
BTW, if you were actually interested in this topic you'd know that one area a PM has less power then a President is in debate. In Canada every day, for an hour, the PM gets peppered with questions by the guys who want to fire him. The choice bits get on the national news. People still talk about the time the Attorney General called Sheila Cops "honey" during Question Period in the early 80s. Which I mentioned at least once on this thread.
Congratulations, the Right Honorable, the Prime Minister of this thread, the Honorable Leader of the Opposition thinks your argument is bonkers.
Your insistence on talking about corruption is irrelevant to my argument. It's like bringing up prostitution in a discussion of excessive campaign spending. I'm not talking about the things people do that are illegal (and almost everything you find online will be about somebody being charged for a crime).
I'm talking about maneuvers that can be done behind closed doors, perfectly legally, with no exposure ion the press whatsoever because they're routine. Those tend to provide advantages to the wealthy because they have the time to figure that shit out and/or the money to hire someone who did it already; and they're very difficult to pull off in the Canadian system because a) everything runs through one guy, and b) he gets questioned by his opponents on national TV for an hour a day.
As for public thing: Call it people's thing, or public affairs. Translating Latin to English is tricky because we tend to have three+ words for concepts that have a single word in Latin. "Public Thing" is literal, but "Public Affair" would be accurate as well. The silliness is all in your head, and caused largely by poor reading comprehension.
For example, you're the one whose claiming that the Roman Republican model is a good idea; therefore if the Roman Republican model is that Centurions execute their daughters for being raped, and periodically the Constitution is replaced by a Dictator; you are the one who is arguing those are good things.
Slashdot Mirror
Genuine Argentinian government logic: perfectly coherent, but not connected with reality in any way whatsoever.
Italy was poorer then Argentina per capita back when started this strategy. They blame their current economic problems mostly on their inability to go back to it now that they're in the Euro. It's a very good strategy. In the short term exporters get rich, but it's not like it's hard to become an exporter, or get a job with an exporter.
Note that if everyone is on vacation abroad, they're spending their money abroad, not keeping it within Argentina. It's possible the government's measures are keeping more money at home then would be leaving otherwise, but from your posts and the posts of various other people who live there/stayed there on vacation/etc. I'd have to say it seems much more likely that governmental policy is driving people to hoard their cash until they can sneak it out of the country, and the government puts up with it because they want to win re-election. I suspect an Argentina with a normalish economy (ie: no recent expropriations of major foreign companies, enough foreign friends that the Vulture Funds could be dealt with, etc.) would not have this issue.
Sure you can: through private property rights. In fact, mismanagement by the Federal Government is primarily responsible for the sorry state the Colorado River is in. The air is similarly mismanaged by the Federal Government.
The funny part is you think you're disagreeing with my point.
I said nothing about how the Feds manage the water. It could be a bureaucratic process. It could be private property rights.
If it's private property rights that means a Court. The only Court that can adjudicate when a rancher from Colorado is screwing as rancher from Utah by taking too much water is the 10th Circuit.
I don't see what exactly you think Kansas needs an air force for. Almost all of our military throughout the past hundred years has been defending the ill gotten gains or cleaning up the messes created by our colonialist, imperialist "allies", with the result that we now have a big target painted on our backs.
So their job is to balance the Federal government, potentially by rebelling, but they don't need an Air Force?
What's your head like? It sounds like a very nice place where things are so much simpler then real life.
Those limits are as meaningful today as when the US was founded. Unfortunately, European-style worship of totalitarianism and government-by-elites has infected the thinking of many Americans.
No they aren't.
In 1789 we had a minuscule military. Congress confirmed every officer in it at actual hearings. This meant that the guy who commanded a ship was answerable to both Congress and the President. Today we have 310 million people. Even if we went to a tiny military we'd have thousands of officers, and Congress just isn't designed to keep track of 1,000 Second Lieutenants. They can still do shit like refuse to confirm the promotion of Kirk Lippold to Captain, but it's no longer a way for them to meaningfully control the military on a day-to-day basis.
and the Germans still paid more then they would with a more generous early bailout because they had to repeat the process
A more generous early bailout would have meant that the Greeks spent it even faster.
That would actually be the point.
Look at this from an engineering point of view. The problem is Greece has debts it can't pay off. The reason it can't pay it off is the economy is too damn small, not growing fast enough, and lenders are convinced they won;t be paid back if they send in more checks. If you have a mini €110 Billion bailout (at 5.5% interest) then the Greek government has to fire slightly fewer people then if there were no bailout, but it can't create business tax incentives/build infrastructure/buy domestically produced tanks/or any of the other things governments can do to make the economic pie actually grow. None of the problem has been solved and you'll just have to spend €150 Billion (at 3.5%, except the €100 Billion write-down in debt from the last bailout) more next year.
Which will still not be enough to allow the Greek government to spend new money on shit that might grow the economy, so a few years after that you have to deal with Syriza. Which means that a) you have not solved the problem, b) you're not getting paid back on the €260 Billion you gave them, €160 Billion at 3.5% and c) you're really truly not getting paid back on the €100 Billion gift.
OTOH, let's say you started at €200 Billion. You didn't charge interest, or you charge 1%. Maybe you're feeling really generous payments don't start until there are signs of growth. You insist the Greeks make major changes to their economy (for example, reducing pensions and replacing their easily bribable tax enforcement guys with real tax enforcement guys). They use the extra money to grow their economy. Which, BTW, is logically equivalent to saying "they spent the money."
Now you have solved the original problem, you are getting paid back on all of it, and nobody has to worry about the end of the Euro. You have not caused a banking collapse in Cyprus, you do not have to deal with Syriza, there is a 0% chance Putin can turn your entire left flank simply by courting the Turks and telling the Greeks "you realize if you just stopped paying those guys I'd protect you, right?," etc. etc. etc.
Which included 7 Billion quid from the Brits, altho the Irish only seem to have used £3.2 billion. Additionally the UK's attempts to stabilize it's own banks have resulted in £14bn going to their Irish subsidiaries.
The Eurozone has badly fucked up this situation by trying to nickel-and-dime these bailouts. For Greece they needed to do €200-250 Billion Euros at nominal (as in zero or 1%) interest back in 2010. They insisted on much less (€110 billion) at 5.5%. Then they acted surprised that a year later they needed to arrange that €100 billion (aka: almost all the money from the first bailout) needed to be written off and the interest rate reduced on the rest. But they're still charging interest (altho 3.5% is slightly less fucking stupid then 5.5% was). And they'll probably have to do a third bailout.
But Ireland, which didn't get nickel-and-dimed by a bunch of self-righteous Germans, is gonna be fine.
That was always the intent in certain areas. In currency, defense, and foreign affairs in particular the Feds were supposed to completely dominate everything so that an ambitious Governor of South Carolina couldn't trade Charleston to the King for a Ducal coronet.
In economics the problem is that so many states really aren't viable economic units. You can't have anybody but the Feds decide how to divide up the Colorado River. State-based regulation of air pollution would be even stupider. Every corn farmer is sending his product to Chicago, and that just doesn't work if Nebraska has different rules then Kansas. Militarily there's no way Kansas could have a well-armed militia. They'd need an Air Force, and they can't afford it.
Life happened, and a lot of the Founders limits on Federal power (and Presidential power) just stopped being particularly meaningful.
What angle could a geek post on Venezuela?
Argentina has a large enough middle class that a cashless system based on geek-related crypto-currencies is possible. They've all got smartphones.
Venezuela's problem is that you have a) oil wealth, b) a relatively small number of whitish middle-class people with the money for a smartphone, and c) a bunch of really poor, less whitish, working class folks with very little understanding of economics. Without a very good method of dividing up the country's wealth, you ended up with the working class saying "fuck it," and using their superior numbers to legislate income equality. This has led to massive economic problems, which will only be solved permanently if the guy who replaces Maduro can convince the whitish folks from b) to pay more in taxes then they did pre-Chavez, and the slightly-less-whitish folks from c) to accept less in government benefits then they did under Chavez.
... trips are a big thing right now... my Facebook account has been full of people travelling for the last couple of years. This is because we can pay for the tickets in installments, the cost of food and other expenses is not too far from the prices in Argentina, and you can buy technology, clothes, etc. at lower prices.
Which explains why the black market exchange rate is so bad.
To go on a trip you need dollars or euros, which means high demand for those currencies. Since there's very little reason for a non-Argentinean to buy Pesos (except, perhaps, trips to Buenas Aires) there's low demand for pesos.
Which means that it will take a lot of pesos to convince a dollar-owner to give up his dollar, and quite a few people will pay his price.
>
Lets assume, for the sake of the argument, that there is no inflation, there is a predictable interest rate and the people can save it.
You're hilarious.
This is Argentina we're talking about. There is no such thing as either "savings" or an "interest rate."
You spend whatever you get because the last time you put your money in a bank it got confiscated, and if you have a big pile of bills on the floor the tax man might notice.
1 - We're nowhere near desperate. We've been desperate-ish in the past... not lately.
Pardon me, but I'm not sure the definition of desperate is the same for an Argentinean as it is for the rest of us. In the US, or most of Latin America, having a legally mandated exchange rate much different from the actual market-based rate would count as a major problem.
The Argentine attitude seems to be "The legal exchange rate is different from the market-based one? It must be Tuesday."
2 - We have a high but predictable inflation... it's impossible to save in Pesos, so it stimulates spending and the economy survives.
3 - Purchase of dollars is restricted but there's a "healthy" black market that sells at a higher but well know rate (it's published in the newspapers and there are websites that inform the black market rate as well). The government counts on the existance of this black market to keep peace.
In theory the smart governmental policy at this point would be to float the Peso and kill the official exchange rate. The inflation would mean that your exports got cheaper in dollar terms (ie: if it costs you 100 pesos to make something, at 9 pesos for a dollar you need to get $11 US to break even; at 15 you're breaking even at $7), which would help the economy.
But as far as I can tell the people of Argentina have specifically designed their economy so that, with a significant amount of scrambling, everyone can be roughly as prosperous today as their ancestors were in 1905. Which is not that bad (Argentina was pretty rich in 1905), but also means that a) you've missed out on a century of economic growth, and b) you're doing so much scrambling you're surprised anyone else thinks you should not be scrambling.
4 - Going cashless solves nothing..!!! Your cashless bank account still lists an amount of pesos and if you want to convert them to dollars the normal restrictions apply. People taking advantage of bitcoin and other schemes are simply operating in the black market... it could be bitcoin, it could be bonds or stock.
I suspect when a Bitcoiner says "cashless" he means that there's no government-currency involved at all. So a cell phone transaction involving your bank account would be cash.
This is why I try to avoid economic discussions with bitcoiners.
The US, by and large, has lucked out, in no small part to what Bagehot referred to as Americans' "genius for politics". But in other societies, where the legislative and judicial branches have remained stunted as compared to the US Congress, SCOTUS and the Federal Courts, all the Presidential system does is deliver near-dictatorial powers into the hands of the President.
Based on the record power grabs by the executive branch in the past couple administrations the US luck is fast running out. We've worked our way from free country to police state light. Sadly I expect in my lifetime that will become a full police state or, as I like to say, a banana republic.
Dude, this is all designed into the system. Checks and Balances are meaningless if the a) the Executive never does anything worthy of being checked, and b) everyone is not constantly bitching/arguing about which things should have been checked.
Here's what's not designed into the system: a lawyer makes a Youtube video alleging he's going to be assassinated by the President's thugs, then he pays someone to shoot him, and shuts down the country for six months until the cops figure it out. Or the time the President ordered the Army to administer a referendum allowing him to run for a third term, and the Constitutional Court and Senate decided this was impeachable, and ordered the army to exile him. There's still some debate over whether that counts as a coup d'tat. On the one hand, the Army stormed the Presidential Palace, on the other the Supreme Court said it was ok.
In the US we avoid these things largely because we've got a religious/./slavish devotion to the Constitution, and the guy trying to get around it by framing Obama for murder or arranging a secret impeachment trial would be fucked politically. And it seems to be working pretty well in some of the bigger countries of the world (ie: Indonesia, Brazil). But in quite a few Latin American the intricate levers of power, the numerous opportunities for stupid BS fights, etc. just seem to overwhelm the political system and you get a level of bullshit unimaginable for an American.
If you had a nice, boring Westminster system you'd have less personality cult (because the dude in power would technically be subordinate to a powerless President), less bullshitty (a PM is a creature of the Legislature, so if the Senate gets pissed at the PM of Honduras it just fires him and doesn't give a shit about either the Constitutional Court or the Army), elections matter less (Obama is Presient until 2016 come hell or high water, if David Cameron or Steven Harper fuck up enough they could be fired tomorrow), much simpler lines of responsibility (there's no ability for the Executive to claim the Legislative screwed up, and if they'd only supported that bill he'd wanted [Bad Thing] would have been avoided if the Legislative and Executive are the same guy), etc.
If you think that a number of parties greater then one is correlated with more viewpoints you really need to watch a Republican Presidential debate. The reason those guys have the same label isn't that they all agree on everything, it's that they all disagree with the Democrats coalition more then with each-other. In Northern Europe you could probably have a less drama-bullshit-you're-better-then-Hillary-you-traitor-to-freedom-party if you forced the local center-right guys (frequently called Christian Democrats) into the same party as the center-left (usually called Social Democrats) and one or two of the minor parties.
And you're talking Argentina. They haven't had an effective economic policy for more then a century, which is they you went from richer then Italy (France and Germany too) to poorer then Italy; they've been surpassed by the Chileans and the Uruguayans; and the Mexicans/Brazilians/etc. are all on pace to beat them. An Argentinian talking about economic prosperity is like a virgin talking about sex.
They should not have a long-term set exchange rate at all. Particularly to a currency that's got a completely different growth strategy then them. It's dumb economics.
That form of seignorage isn't a big deal today.
Most actual seignorage comes when the Federal reserve bank decrees that there will be x Billion in this bank account so we can use it to buy bonds.
Yeah, but keep in mind Mexico is moving up. Argentina is moving sideways. Has been for roughly a century. They're roughly equal in income at the moment, largely because Argentine politics suck. As soon as Argentina finds a solution that works they go crazy, implementing ever stricter versions of it, until it becomes clear that the version they had three years ago was too far and they're all fucked now. At this point they start blaming foreigners, posting melodramatic videos about grandmas prostituting themselves on YouTube, etc. etc. etc. Then the President loses an election, the new President does the opposite, in ever stricter versions, etc. etc. etc.
So your middle-class family is fine, and will likely remain fine. But they ain't gonna be moving up on the income ladder, and the folks who aren't middle class won't be entering it.
Unless they move to Mexico.
It's Argentina. I can't remember the last time I read about the Argentine government doing something smart.
Seriously, these are people who responded to Brazil ,a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_American_dreadnought_race#Counter:_Argentina_and_Chile_respond">buying two extremely modern naval vessels by insisting that a) it was evil that Brazil do this and the entire world should come to a stop while to problem was solved, and b) the most equitable solution would be for the Brazilians to give Argentina one of them. The foreign minister was fired after much drama, including the revelation that the back-up plan was an invasion.
So I suspect the ultimate Argentine reaction to their current predicament will be to go all-in on a solution and then stubbornly refuse to change until it's clear they should have changed 50-6 years back.
The problem you get is that Greece is not a dictatorship.
The King cannot simply decree "everyone will take huge cute to income, it will suck ass for six years, but years 7-10 will be great and I will be remembered as a brilliant leader."
You have to show results in year two or three. If your problem is too many government employees, and you keep firing government employees to keep your budget near the deficit numbers the Troika likes, things will not improve by year three. Which means that your pet austerity-Cabinet gets it's ass kicked by a bunch of people who suck at economics and are convinced you are the cause of every problem the world has ever seen.
And if the Germans had done the smart thing in the first place, and not insisted on a 5.5% interest rate on the first bail-out; we wouldn;t have needed a second bail-out.
You don't rebalance an economy in a democracy without new government spending, even if it's only temporary (ie: hire young people to do make-woirk for a few years). It just doesn't work because you're taking money out of the economy (for example, pensioners buy less stuff, while people using under-the-table money to pay their bills have to pay taxes on it), which means even the people who were living what the Germans considered a financially moral life (ie: the guy who owns a store and paid all the tax on it) get screwed. Which means the economy shrinks, the deficit that was just under the allowed number before is now above it because the denominator went down and the numerator stayed the same, and you have to cut pensions/jack up taxes/etc. more...
You can sell hope to these folks for a few years, but if you don't get growth within three years you're fucked politically. They are miserable, they are not PhDs in the Milton Friedman School of Economics so they don't really understand why this plan makes sense in the long-term (and they question the point of long-term prosperity if it means short-term mass unemployment for the foreseeable future). They'll try a new plan. The new plan will be written by people who hate you because the voters hate you.
And instead of spending 200 Billion Euros once and keeping the Aegean in your military alliance; you'll spend 150 Billion, plus 110 Billion, plus possibly a third bail-out; and you risk the Greeks switching over to an Alliance with somebody who doesn't like Western Europe very much because (as we just established) the Greek people are pretty pissed at Western Europe at the moment.
So, the Greeks are blaming the Germans because the Greek government couldn't pay its bills? Interesting....
That's the way the Germans and Northern Europeans think of it.
The way much of the rest of the world thinks of it is that the Greek government lied to everyone about it's books, the Germans didn't notice, which led to a Greek economic collapse; and now the Germans are refusing to help their fellow Europeans because those damned Greeks should have noticed their government wasn't telling the truth.
Moreover countries where the government responded to the crises by spending extra money (like the US and UK) tended to do much better then countries where they cut the budget to the bone in an effort to save 100% of the bondholders and not spend any EU money. Even the Eurozone's poster-child Ireland got through it mostly because the Brits were willing to aded billions of pounds more then the EU Troika.
Which has led to a massive confidence-loss in the very concept of the Eurozone, could possibly lead to Greece leaving the Western alliance for Russia, and the Germans still paid more then they would with a more generous early bailout because they had to repeat the process. There was never a rational reason to insist that people who don;t have money pay 5.5% interest, and even the 3.5% interest the Germans agreed to in the last round of bail-outs means they'll make a significant profit.
Reread your Constitution. Article 1, Section 8, on the list of enumerated powers:
To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
In 1819 McCulloch vs. Maryland established that printed paper money was valid due to this clause and the "necessary and proper clause." ie: the Courts ruled that it was both necessary and proper for the Feds to "coin" paper bank notes.
You don't. You sell it on the market, buy US Dollars, and send those with your tax return. Otherwise the IRS will not credit your account. They'll probably east the chicken, tho.
One thing Bitcoiners and gold bugs alike really have trouble understanding is that the reason the USD has value is that the US Economy is one of the best in the world, to participate you have to pay taxes, and the taxes can ONLY be paid in United States Dollars. Many people who do not participate in our economy (such as ex-pats whose sole income is in their new country) have to file taxes, and if they owe they have to buy United States dollars, or they are tax cheats and any bank who ever does business with them will be banned from the world forever.
Starting your own company requires knowing a lot more "whos" then ladder-climbing. It's called marketing, getting a bank loan, etc. Either way you're working your ass off to get somebody to like you.
It's just that if you're the kind of person who would start your own business it feels less like ass-kissing (despite the fact that all good salesman are kissing everyone's ass 40 hours a week) and more like doing your job.
So 12.86% of the UK lives in a single City, and 79.6% live in cities, the vast majority of the UK tax money comes from cities, but the UK shouldn't use it's (mostly urban) tax money to create high speed rail stops because the 20.4% of the population is too far from them to use them?
You do realize there are precisely zero transportation options for rural areas that don't suck? Sometimes you get a highway through one, if it's between urban centers, but generally what they get are surface streets and buses. And the bus tends to be a Greyhound to the next County over, not a Megabus.
Even in the US we have a high urbanization rate (82% or so), and most tax money tends to come from a) downtowns of big cities or b) wealthy suburbs.
Listening to someone talk hockey brings back memories...
As an ex-Detroiter in Cleveland it's very rare for me to encounter anyone who knows what a Left Wing is, much less understands anything about the game.
You're ignoring 3, just don't use the damn picture. There are plenty of other pictures. The world is not gonna end if you use a picture shot by the photography club.
The problem though, as I see it, is not necessarily the original photo. It's the whole clusterfuck of the photo as proof that men are sexist pigs, and that is an acceptable reason to call them pigs, and that somethig has to be done. Yes, you can use a different photo. But do you have to make it a national story, broadly calling all men sexist pigs? We get very very close to saying that young men should not ever be around young women. Because both sexes spend a lot of time thinking about the other sex at that age, yes boys, but girls too. We will not scrub sex from any career.
You're reading the "all men are sexist pigs" bit into her piece. She's not denigrating all men, or even a particular man, she's denigrating using a pic from Playboy in High School. And given a) the maturity level of all teenagers, b) the probable reaction of some of them (mostly boys) to be being able to use the pic, and c) the probable reaction of others (mostly girls) to said reaction it's hard to argue with her case.
She's 17. The article was written about a class when she was 16. his is a country where most teenagers go through abstinence only sex ed. Sex-positive is controversial, and having your 10th graders use a Playboy pic is one of the most sex-positive things you could do.
BTW, it's interesting how you've defined STEM. I'd say Veterinarian is one of the most STEM fields possible. And yes, for the record Veterinary schools try to figure out how to get guys to apply.
You see, I'm not the one defining it . Despite the 80 percent females in Veterinarian schools, how much do we hear about "Veterinarian careers ar ea shinig example of success in getting young women into science fields" How do we emulate that success in other careers?
If you read articles on Veterinary medicine you'll find plenty of talk about it. But if you read articles about STEM in general it gets one line because it is one line, and since the field was male-dominated for so long even roughly a decade of 3/4 of new vets being female means it's still quite close 50/50.
Cornell did an article on this a ways back:
http://www.news.cornell.edu/st...
Is that guys have simply stopped applying. Which makes sense. It's very difficult to get into Vet School (in many cases more difficult then Medical School), it's as hard as Med School, and when you get out your salary is comparable to an MD during his residency. Which is more then I will ever make, but don;t try telling an MD his residency salary was anything but a pittance.
Which means you only apply if you have a true passion for making pets feel better from childhood, and the people like that are mostly girls.
I have never heard that. In fact, I have heard some women complain about that, saying it still isn't "right". There will soon be no male veterinarians. Hell where we take our pets, there is a staff of 25.
1 male staff person, the guy who cleans up. That's a sample of 1, but it meshes well with the statistics if a little worse (unless the goal is no males
Young vets are female. The ones in a large practice like that are going to be mostly young, and probably disproportionately female for their generation because guys are less risk-averse and thus more likely to hang out a shingle of their very own.
My point in all of this, is that we have to be careful who we listen to. And what we have been listening to is a tremendous amount of n
First a totally off-topic question, which you (or may not) be able to answer:
How common is it for a High School Ice Hockey team, to have a couple of girls on defense because they're the only ones who know how to skate backwards? I read a story ages ago about hockey in Tennessee, and one of the things it said was this team's top two defenders were the coach's daughters, because when they were tiny they'd learned to figure skate, which meant skating backwards. And I thought "Gee, that makes sense, it's fucking Tennessee, they don't make a frozen pond in their back yard every year thing that the Canadians and Minnesotans do."
Now back to on-topic (or at least the off-topic we were discussing before), as I mentioned another time on one of these (it may even have been to you) I'm not sure you're maturity was actually emotional maturity. Years years, when the Baby Boom was entering the work force, somebody with a High School degree could get a job earning the equivalent of $10-15 an hour, full-time, virtually no questions asked. The staring UAW salary (which, again, was there for the taking for almost anybody who lived near a union auto plant), was the equivalent of $23.59 in 1970. That means just about any guy who could show on-time for a shift can afford to pay for a House, a wife (who may even be able to be a stay-at-home wife), and a couple kids; even if they're immature.
The 2015 economy is not that simple. Jobs for High School guys who will show up guaranteed are almost all part-time/minimum wage deals. The maturity level is irrelevant, no girl's gonna marry that. Much less settle down to be a stay-at-home mom. Jobs for college graduates (including two-year Associates programs) can be much better, and a college grad is pretty much by definition demonstrating a significant amount of maturity just by getting through a four-year-program that they had to design themselves. But unless you have the exact right major and/or are great at marketing/networking you can easily end up having student loans greater then 10% of your monthly income, which you deal with by getting on a payment plan, and whose gonna marry a guy who can't make his debt payments?
And in the end, if young women are so turned off by a completely innocuous photo that they declare that as a reason to go into another field, and that a photo like that is ispo facto sexual harassment, we have a choice of three things.
1.Try these obnoxious males as adult sexual offenders, and give them the same punishments.
2. completely segregate the sexes in school. Send boys to one, and girls to another. At that point, there will be no male harassment to dissuade the young ladies, and the field should quickly even out in a gender equitable mode
You're ignoring 3, just don't use the damn picture. There are plenty of other pictures. The world is not gonna end if you use a picture shot by the photography club. One of the kids finds it on his own, and tries to use it because it's "standard," you cross that bridge when you come to it. Depending on how you designed the assignment maybe you have to let him use another picture. But you do not announce to the class they should look for Lenna. If you don't get caught using Lenna you've pissed off several of your students to make the most obnoxious boys gleeful. If you do get caught you'll get written up in the Washington Post as "that guy," and thanking the author for not a) using your name, and b) insisting you be fired.
BTW, it's interesting how you've defined STEM. I'd say Veterinarian is one of the most STEM fields possible. And yes, for the record Veterinary schools try to figure out how to get guys to apply.
I'm not trying to get you to take a 180 degree position. I'm trying to get you to explore the idea. Right now your argument that the US is not better then Canada consists of a) a point you freely acknowledge has nothing to do with my claim to the contrary, and b) you don't believe me because you've done no research.
BTW, if you were actually interested in this topic you'd know that one area a PM has less power then a President is in debate. In Canada every day, for an hour, the PM gets peppered with questions by the guys who want to fire him. The choice bits get on the national news. People still talk about the time the Attorney General called Sheila Cops "honey" during Question Period in the early 80s. Which I mentioned at least once on this thread.
Congratulations, the Right Honorable, the Prime Minister of this thread, the Honorable Leader of the Opposition thinks your argument is bonkers.
Your insistence on talking about corruption is irrelevant to my argument. It's like bringing up prostitution in a discussion of excessive campaign spending. I'm not talking about the things people do that are illegal (and almost everything you find online will be about somebody being charged for a crime).
I'm talking about maneuvers that can be done behind closed doors, perfectly legally, with no exposure ion the press whatsoever because they're routine. Those tend to provide advantages to the wealthy because they have the time to figure that shit out and/or the money to hire someone who did it already; and they're very difficult to pull off in the Canadian system because a) everything runs through one guy, and b) he gets questioned by his opponents on national TV for an hour a day.
As for public thing:
Call it people's thing, or public affairs. Translating Latin to English is tricky because we tend to have three+ words for concepts that have a single word in Latin. "Public Thing" is literal, but "Public Affair" would be accurate as well. The silliness is all in your head, and caused largely by poor reading comprehension.
For example, you're the one whose claiming that the Roman Republican model is a good idea; therefore if the Roman Republican model is that Centurions execute their daughters for being raped, and periodically the Constitution is replaced by a Dictator; you are the one who is arguing those are good things.