What I've heard from the experts that weren't involved is exactly what I've already explained to you, that the derivates games the banks were playing was an explosion waiting to happen, and that the housing bubble is a small part of that. They say that without the games, the housing bubble would have produced a small recession in America.
if you ask the banks and the finance sector in Wall Street they'll tell you it was the housing market.
I don't know why some people never go to the source for information.
Considering that the primary alternative explanation is that the banks and the finance sector were responsible, it would not at all be surprising if they said it was the housing market. They have a vested interest in not being found criminally responsible.
Actually he isn't. He's a physicist who worked on semiconductors. He has no expertise at all when it comes to climatology. Winnng a Nobel prize doesn't make you an expert in fields you've never studied and clearly don't want to study.
Ron Paul has said he doesn't believe in evolution. You might be right on Newt's count, looking at his statements, he seems to claim to believe in both evolution and creationism, though I suspect his "belief" in creationism is pandering to the religious right in the party.
Huntsman was the only candidate who was willing to take a stand for science and he's out of the running now.
You may have some facts correct but your analysis is wrong. The housing market bubble was a separate phenomenom from the rest of the economic collapse. The collapse of the housing bubble ignited the rest of the problems in the financial sector but it could easily have been some other event that triggered the collapse. The unregulated derivatives markets were a disaster waiting to happen. Freddie and Fannie may are nothing but a distraction that free marketers like to blame for the structural problems in the financial sector, they're convenient scapegoats. It works especially well with people, like you, who are predisposed to blame the government for any problem.
If Freddie and Fannie were not securing those loans the banks wouldn't have issued them and they wouldn't have sold them to wallstreet.
Freddie and Fannie secured less than half of the loans. The majority will still issued and were sold to wallstreet (and beyond) even when not backed. So that statement rings entirely false. Why did so many lenders make sub-prime loans? Because they could lie about the risks and sell the liabilities to someone else and collect a substancial profit on bad loan risks. As long as housing prices were increasing, they could claim that the loans were risk free because the houses were going to worth much more than the principle owed on them when they eventually failed.
The government isn't blameless in this, they repealed some critical regulations on the financial sector, failed to regulate the derivatives markets, and failed to raise the federal reserve's interest rates long after they should have, but the wider collapse was wall street doing what it does best, play games with money. The problem with playing wallstreet's games is somebody always loses.
However, a 1 degree difference does not itself point to human activity, which is part the point that was being made by the person that called it "amazingly stable".
That's not a reasonable statement. The size of the change does not determine it's origin. That statement only makes sense if we assume that we are fundamentally ignorant of everything else concerning the climate. You may not know this, but there are people who have been studying the climate for over 50 years now. That kind of maybe is evidence that the person who wrote it is suffering from the Dunning-Kruger Effect on this topic.
Examine figure 6 on this introduction to global warming and you'll see 13 lines of evidence that "point to human activity".
I'm sorry, but your theories on the collapse just sound like Republican talking points. I know that you blame Fannie and Freddie because you already believe that all recessions are caused by government action, but in this case the sparks may have been caused by the government policy, but the kindling and logs were placed by the unregulated derivative markets. Any spark would have set it off, it just happens that the end of the housing bubble was the spark that did.
But it was unpalatable at the time, for whatever reason.
Grover Norquist. He has a lot of influence in the Republican party and forces candidates to sign his no-new-taxes-ever pledge before he will endorse them during primaries. Somewhere around 95% of elected Republicans have signed his pledge which means they can't engage in classic Keynsian economics because they can never increase tax rates, only lower them in an endless government death spiral.
This is also part of the Republican election strategy they want people to always be afraid that the Democrats will increase taxes while simultaneously denying the Democrats surpluses that they could spend on government programs that people might actually like.
That's clearly false. All of the current Republican candidates claim to be creationists who don't believe in evolution, in 2008 none of the Democratic candidates claimed to be members of PETA.
That's false equivalency, the truth is that the lunatics are driving the Republican agenda, where they don't even get invited to the Democratic campaign events.
It's amazingly stable on a chart that goes from 0 to 288. However when was the last time it was 459.67 degrees where you live? Of course, if the average global temperature drops by 5 degrees for a persistent period we end up with an ice age and 1 mile thick glacier across much of the area that North Americans currently live in. So 1 degree Kelvin is 20% of the difference between an ice age and our modern climate. Suddenly a 20% divergence doesn't quite look so stable, does it?
What happens when the temperature goes up 5 degrees instead? We don't know for sure, but most of the evidence points towards massive disruption to human societies. We can hope that it won't be as devastating a change as the one going in the opposite direction. During the Permian-Triassic changeover massive climate change killed off 90% of the earth's biomass, but we hope our results aren't won't be as extreme.
You lack imagination if you think the document says "everything the company doesn't want people to hear". Realistically it says one or two things that they wouldn't want people to hear. There's a lot more that could have been in there that wasn't.
And that decision most likely protects your ego from having to consider the possibility that your world view is wrong. Convenient, isn't it?
Gun control probably isn't an authoritarian trait. It might be an authoritarian policy, I'm not even sure of that because an authoritarian could be quite happy to see his mob of angry people armed, so it might be a conditionally authoritarian policy. Much more likely is that you were looking for flaws and grasping at straws to ignore some inconvenient facts.
For certain conservatives, Global Warming might actually seem like a big of a threat. Global Warming calls into question their idea of what America is supposed to be. The bastion of free capitalism. The problem that Global Warming presents is huge and scary to them. The problem is that Global Warming shows that the system is broken and not perfect. It's enough to make libertarian heads explode. The government is required to do something that isn't protecting private property from thieves? Heresy.
It's very existence contradicts the deregulation, trickle-down-economic, let-the-corporations-and-job-makers-run-wild conservatives because it's something the market can't fix. Of course, if there's something that the markets can't fix, then the principles that their lives are built around might be wrong. And that can never be allowed.
Charter schools are not self-selecting, they have to accept everyone who applies up to the number of places available, if more people apply then there are places available then they are required to have a lottery to select students for places.
You don't know what self-selecting means, do you? If you have to apply for something it is, by definition, self-selecting.
There is no resolve to fix the system, they have had decades to do something about it and haven't. Asking us to continue sacrificing children to a system that fails them on the hopes that maybe someone will fix it is both repugnant and the opposite is suggested based on the history of attempted reform.
And relegating the public school system to a system of last resort for those who can't go somewhere else will make it into a veritable paradise, am I right?
Also on the issue of vouchers and private schools I consider it hugely advantageous to provide a mechanism for highly performing students to have a curriculum and environment that nurtures their abilities instead of one that seeks merely mediocrity.
As do I, however, if the mechanism is lottery or pay-through-the-nose then it's not going to be a very good system. The point isn't that charter schools or private schools are bad, it's that the public school system is going to fail and fail badly if the most promising students are routinely removed from the system. It's the expected consequence of vouchers that let parents take their tax money elsewhere. So, when people say it will weaken the system they're right, and in some cases it most certainly is a deliberately attack on the system.
Whether or not the consequences justify it is up to you. However, it seems to me that most voucher systems involve sacrificing some students for the benefit of others. The question becomes which students should be sacrificed and how?
Part of the problem is that people (such as yourself) keep framing the charter/voucher issue as an "attack" on public education when its nothing of the sort, people are not advocating for shutting down public schools and the only way charters & vouchers will "take money away" from public schools is if they perform better. What people are advocating for is choice, if the current system really is superior then it won't face any problems with charters or vouchers, if it is endemically broken then reform will be forced or the system will simply die.
That's not quite right. There's a problem here that may be too subtle for some people to see until it's pointed out. Charter schools and private schools are virtually guaranteed to do better because they're self-selecting. You have to apply and and pay and jump through hoops to get your kids into them. This virtually guarantees that the kids with the best prospects and fewest problems will get into those schools. The public system then ends up with the least motivated and most expensive children.
If you really want to judge how effective those alternate systems are you need to do double-blind studies so you can see how the private schools and charter schools will handle the children who have parents who couldn't care less about what they're doing in school, the children who have mental, emotional or learning handicaps. The public school system sometimes has to deal with children who are completely unsuited to any form of education, a friend of the family taught at a special public school where several of her students were mentally regressing not progressing. The disorders they are afflicted with will probably kill them before they're old enough to even go to university (even if they could ever potentially have the capacity to go there). These kids cost a lot more than the average child and the fewer average children there are to offset them, the more expensive the system gets per student.
Lastly, flight from public schools weakens the resolve to do something about it. For example, if the kids of politicians aren't in public schools then there's little incentive for them to seriously work to improve the situation.
What percentage of the profits of society do the top 1% earn?
Reduce the income of each person by what is required to live (say using the poverty line), and compare the percentage of profits to the percentage of tax paid.
You might find that the top 1% have been getting far more than 40% of the profits from this society. The tax rates on the rich have dropped faster than on the middle class and the poor, at the same time that their incomes have been increasing faster. (Please note these factors are not unrelated. As tax rates on the top income brackets decrease it encourages wealth hoarding and massive salaries for corporate executives.) They are paying a larger share of income tax (and only income tax, because we're deliberate excluding payroll and other taxes to make the number look bigger), because they have a much larger share of the income.
I agree, any group that receives 80% of the profits from society should pay 80% of the costs of society. The fact they get away with 40% seems more than a little "unfair". The proportion of wealth in the hands of the rich is increasing, that seems like clear proof that they aren't paying their fair share.
Let's be rational, the worst either an "evil" corporation or government can do is kill you and claim that it's your own fault for getting killed.
Governments and corporations are essentially the same thing, groups that wield power on behalf of their owners. In theory corporations have less control over your life, but in reality it's merely less direct control.
As I understand it, currently about 96% of the politicians who had more money than their opponent win the election.
Is that 96% causation or correlation?
I seem to remember the Freakonomics people say that it was the people who raised the most money that won 96% of the time, not the people who spent the most money (which had a lower correlation). In many cases they judged that the person who raised the most money would likely have still won if they had spent none of the raised money.
Just something to think about, people may be more likely to give money to someone who looks like they're going to win.
Not really. Sony has a monopoly on supply, thus they can arbitrarily limit supply or increase the price when demand increases. There's still a sweet spot where you maximize profits and with the news media focused on Whitney Houston's death that sweet spot is going to go up because of increased demand. From a pure capitalist point of view it's better to sell 10,000 units at $10 than it is to sell 20,000 units at $4, even if the cost of the product is $0.
That doesn't mean this isn't a scummy move. It just means that you don't believe in the infallibility of the invisible hand of the marketplace and that's probably a good thing.
Oh, not all the economic problems, just unemployment in one particular sector of the economy. Tarriffs aren't always bad, they restrict trade and thus disrupt specialization and while that is generally a bad thing, there may be situations where that is the better answer, at least for one of the trading partners. The point isn't that a trade disruption will be great for everyone, just that it would hurt some and benefit others. The question is always who and to what extent.
The original statement is that it would only drive up prices for everyone buying chinese goods. The consequences of driving those prices up is that new competitors will enter the market and old competitors will prosper. After all, I thought that article on the iPad indicated that Apple only saves about 30% of the cost of construction on their iPads by building them in China. If that's true, increasing the cost of similar goods by 50% due to shipping losses might drive retail prices up 25% and create jobs for a million Americans*. The question is whether that increased cost (negative) offsets the positive (1 million employed).
Like I said tarriffs carry additional political costs, but otherwise you could achieve the same ends with them. Generally speaking more trade is better, but I doubt it's always true in every circumstance. For example, failing to protect yourself against dumping can lead to higher prices and poorer quality, and imposing anti-dumping tarriffs temporarily should lead to lower prices and higher quality than the alternative.
* numbers invented for the purpose of illustration
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Unless, of course, like every other talking point on the list it's completely false.
What I've heard from the experts that weren't involved is exactly what I've already explained to you, that the derivates games the banks were playing was an explosion waiting to happen, and that the housing bubble is a small part of that. They say that without the games, the housing bubble would have produced a small recession in America.
if you ask the banks and the finance sector in Wall Street they'll tell you it was the housing market.
I don't know why some people never go to the source for information.
Considering that the primary alternative explanation is that the banks and the finance sector were responsible, it would not at all be surprising if they said it was the housing market. They have a vested interest in not being found criminally responsible.
Actually he isn't. He's a physicist who worked on semiconductors. He has no expertise at all when it comes to climatology. Winnng a Nobel prize doesn't make you an expert in fields you've never studied and clearly don't want to study.
Ron Paul has said he doesn't believe in evolution. You might be right on Newt's count, looking at his statements, he seems to claim to believe in both evolution and creationism, though I suspect his "belief" in creationism is pandering to the religious right in the party.
Huntsman was the only candidate who was willing to take a stand for science and he's out of the running now.
You may have some facts correct but your analysis is wrong. The housing market bubble was a separate phenomenom from the rest of the economic collapse. The collapse of the housing bubble ignited the rest of the problems in the financial sector but it could easily have been some other event that triggered the collapse. The unregulated derivatives markets were a disaster waiting to happen. Freddie and Fannie may are nothing but a distraction that free marketers like to blame for the structural problems in the financial sector, they're convenient scapegoats. It works especially well with people, like you, who are predisposed to blame the government for any problem.
If Freddie and Fannie were not securing those loans the banks wouldn't have issued them and they wouldn't have sold them to wallstreet.
Freddie and Fannie secured less than half of the loans. The majority will still issued and were sold to wallstreet (and beyond) even when not backed. So that statement rings entirely false. Why did so many lenders make sub-prime loans? Because they could lie about the risks and sell the liabilities to someone else and collect a substancial profit on bad loan risks. As long as housing prices were increasing, they could claim that the loans were risk free because the houses were going to worth much more than the principle owed on them when they eventually failed.
The government isn't blameless in this, they repealed some critical regulations on the financial sector, failed to regulate the derivatives markets, and failed to raise the federal reserve's interest rates long after they should have, but the wider collapse was wall street doing what it does best, play games with money. The problem with playing wallstreet's games is somebody always loses.
However, a 1 degree difference does not itself point to human activity, which is part the point that was being made by the person that called it "amazingly stable".
That's not a reasonable statement. The size of the change does not determine it's origin. That statement only makes sense if we assume that we are fundamentally ignorant of everything else concerning the climate. You may not know this, but there are people who have been studying the climate for over 50 years now. That kind of maybe is evidence that the person who wrote it is suffering from the Dunning-Kruger Effect on this topic.
Examine figure 6 on this introduction to global warming and you'll see 13 lines of evidence that "point to human activity".
There's a funny thing, governments tend to spend the tax money they collect, they rarely "eat it".
I'm sorry, but your theories on the collapse just sound like Republican talking points. I know that you blame Fannie and Freddie because you already believe that all recessions are caused by government action, but in this case the sparks may have been caused by the government policy, but the kindling and logs were placed by the unregulated derivative markets. Any spark would have set it off, it just happens that the end of the housing bubble was the spark that did.
But it was unpalatable at the time, for whatever reason.
Grover Norquist. He has a lot of influence in the Republican party and forces candidates to sign his no-new-taxes-ever pledge before he will endorse them during primaries. Somewhere around 95% of elected Republicans have signed his pledge which means they can't engage in classic Keynsian economics because they can never increase tax rates, only lower them in an endless government death spiral.
This is also part of the Republican election strategy they want people to always be afraid that the Democrats will increase taxes while simultaneously denying the Democrats surpluses that they could spend on government programs that people might actually like.
That's clearly false. All of the current Republican candidates claim to be creationists who don't believe in evolution, in 2008 none of the Democratic candidates claimed to be members of PETA.
That's false equivalency, the truth is that the lunatics are driving the Republican agenda, where they don't even get invited to the Democratic campaign events.
It's amazingly stable on a chart that goes from 0 to 288. However when was the last time it was 459.67 degrees where you live? Of course, if the average global temperature drops by 5 degrees for a persistent period we end up with an ice age and 1 mile thick glacier across much of the area that North Americans currently live in. So 1 degree Kelvin is 20% of the difference between an ice age and our modern climate. Suddenly a 20% divergence doesn't quite look so stable, does it?
What happens when the temperature goes up 5 degrees instead? We don't know for sure, but most of the evidence points towards massive disruption to human societies. We can hope that it won't be as devastating a change as the one going in the opposite direction. During the Permian-Triassic changeover massive climate change killed off 90% of the earth's biomass, but we hope our results aren't won't be as extreme.
You lack imagination if you think the document says "everything the company doesn't want people to hear". Realistically it says one or two things that they wouldn't want people to hear. There's a lot more that could have been in there that wasn't.
And that decision most likely protects your ego from having to consider the possibility that your world view is wrong. Convenient, isn't it?
Gun control probably isn't an authoritarian trait. It might be an authoritarian policy, I'm not even sure of that because an authoritarian could be quite happy to see his mob of angry people armed, so it might be a conditionally authoritarian policy. Much more likely is that you were looking for flaws and grasping at straws to ignore some inconvenient facts.
There's something wrong with that survey:
38% supported teaching only creationism.
64% supported teaching both creationism and evolution.
Therefore:
-2% supported teaching only evolution.
I find those numbers very surprising.
For certain conservatives, Global Warming might actually seem like a big of a threat. Global Warming calls into question their idea of what America is supposed to be. The bastion of free capitalism. The problem that Global Warming presents is huge and scary to them. The problem is that Global Warming shows that the system is broken and not perfect. It's enough to make libertarian heads explode. The government is required to do something that isn't protecting private property from thieves? Heresy.
It's very existence contradicts the deregulation, trickle-down-economic, let-the-corporations-and-job-makers-run-wild conservatives because it's something the market can't fix. Of course, if there's something that the markets can't fix, then the principles that their lives are built around might be wrong. And that can never be allowed.
they're self-selecting
Charter schools are not self-selecting, they have to accept everyone who applies up to the number of places available, if more people apply then there are places available then they are required to have a lottery to select students for places.
You don't know what self-selecting means, do you? If you have to apply for something it is, by definition, self-selecting.
There is no resolve to fix the system, they have had decades to do something about it and haven't. Asking us to continue sacrificing children to a system that fails them on the hopes that maybe someone will fix it is both repugnant and the opposite is suggested based on the history of attempted reform.
And relegating the public school system to a system of last resort for those who can't go somewhere else will make it into a veritable paradise, am I right?
Also on the issue of vouchers and private schools I consider it hugely advantageous to provide a mechanism for highly performing students to have a curriculum and environment that nurtures their abilities instead of one that seeks merely mediocrity.
As do I, however, if the mechanism is lottery or pay-through-the-nose then it's not going to be a very good system. The point isn't that charter schools or private schools are bad, it's that the public school system is going to fail and fail badly if the most promising students are routinely removed from the system. It's the expected consequence of vouchers that let parents take their tax money elsewhere. So, when people say it will weaken the system they're right, and in some cases it most certainly is a deliberately attack on the system.
Whether or not the consequences justify it is up to you. However, it seems to me that most voucher systems involve sacrificing some students for the benefit of others. The question becomes which students should be sacrificed and how?
Part of the problem is that people (such as yourself) keep framing the charter/voucher issue as an "attack" on public education when its nothing of the sort, people are not advocating for shutting down public schools and the only way charters & vouchers will "take money away" from public schools is if they perform better. What people are advocating for is choice, if the current system really is superior then it won't face any problems with charters or vouchers, if it is endemically broken then reform will be forced or the system will simply die.
That's not quite right. There's a problem here that may be too subtle for some people to see until it's pointed out. Charter schools and private schools are virtually guaranteed to do better because they're self-selecting. You have to apply and and pay and jump through hoops to get your kids into them. This virtually guarantees that the kids with the best prospects and fewest problems will get into those schools. The public system then ends up with the least motivated and most expensive children.
If you really want to judge how effective those alternate systems are you need to do double-blind studies so you can see how the private schools and charter schools will handle the children who have parents who couldn't care less about what they're doing in school, the children who have mental, emotional or learning handicaps. The public school system sometimes has to deal with children who are completely unsuited to any form of education, a friend of the family taught at a special public school where several of her students were mentally regressing not progressing. The disorders they are afflicted with will probably kill them before they're old enough to even go to university (even if they could ever potentially have the capacity to go there). These kids cost a lot more than the average child and the fewer average children there are to offset them, the more expensive the system gets per student.
Lastly, flight from public schools weakens the resolve to do something about it. For example, if the kids of politicians aren't in public schools then there's little incentive for them to seriously work to improve the situation.
What percentage of the profits of society do the top 1% earn?
Reduce the income of each person by what is required to live (say using the poverty line), and compare the percentage of profits to the percentage of tax paid.
You might find that the top 1% have been getting far more than 40% of the profits from this society. The tax rates on the rich have dropped faster than on the middle class and the poor, at the same time that their incomes have been increasing faster. (Please note these factors are not unrelated. As tax rates on the top income brackets decrease it encourages wealth hoarding and massive salaries for corporate executives.) They are paying a larger share of income tax (and only income tax, because we're deliberate excluding payroll and other taxes to make the number look bigger), because they have a much larger share of the income.
I agree, any group that receives 80% of the profits from society should pay 80% of the costs of society. The fact they get away with 40% seems more than a little "unfair". The proportion of wealth in the hands of the rich is increasing, that seems like clear proof that they aren't paying their fair share.
You should keep reading, in many cases, your wishes will be granted.
Let's be rational, the worst either an "evil" corporation or government can do is kill you and claim that it's your own fault for getting killed.
Governments and corporations are essentially the same thing, groups that wield power on behalf of their owners. In theory corporations have less control over your life, but in reality it's merely less direct control.
As I understand it, currently about 96% of the politicians who had more money than their opponent win the election.
Is that 96% causation or correlation?
I seem to remember the Freakonomics people say that it was the people who raised the most money that won 96% of the time, not the people who spent the most money (which had a lower correlation). In many cases they judged that the person who raised the most money would likely have still won if they had spent none of the raised money.
Just something to think about, people may be more likely to give money to someone who looks like they're going to win.
Not really. Sony has a monopoly on supply, thus they can arbitrarily limit supply or increase the price when demand increases. There's still a sweet spot where you maximize profits and with the news media focused on Whitney Houston's death that sweet spot is going to go up because of increased demand. From a pure capitalist point of view it's better to sell 10,000 units at $10 than it is to sell 20,000 units at $4, even if the cost of the product is $0.
That doesn't mean this isn't a scummy move. It just means that you don't believe in the infallibility of the invisible hand of the marketplace and that's probably a good thing.
Oh, not all the economic problems, just unemployment in one particular sector of the economy. Tarriffs aren't always bad, they restrict trade and thus disrupt specialization and while that is generally a bad thing, there may be situations where that is the better answer, at least for one of the trading partners. The point isn't that a trade disruption will be great for everyone, just that it would hurt some and benefit others. The question is always who and to what extent.
The original statement is that it would only drive up prices for everyone buying chinese goods. The consequences of driving those prices up is that new competitors will enter the market and old competitors will prosper. After all, I thought that article on the iPad indicated that Apple only saves about 30% of the cost of construction on their iPads by building them in China. If that's true, increasing the cost of similar goods by 50% due to shipping losses might drive retail prices up 25% and create jobs for a million Americans*. The question is whether that increased cost (negative) offsets the positive (1 million employed).
Like I said tarriffs carry additional political costs, but otherwise you could achieve the same ends with them. Generally speaking more trade is better, but I doubt it's always true in every circumstance. For example, failing to protect yourself against dumping can lead to higher prices and poorer quality, and imposing anti-dumping tarriffs temporarily should lead to lower prices and higher quality than the alternative.
* numbers invented for the purpose of illustration