I do write on this topic sometimes, so I can just point you at one of my comments, if you read it, it may be the answer you are looking for (unless I misunderstood the question).
(oh, and that's my first account, it's limited specifically because some people who do not like what I write on that topic have mod points and they do not argue on ideas, only on personalities).
If something is legitimately a good idea, then it means people will want to buy it and it will be developed. But actually if it's not happening by itself in the market, how about examining why it's not happening and is there a bunch of moral hazards and various regulatory road blocks set up by the government?
Does government ever admit that it is doing something wrong, that it is a mistake to create artificial monopolies for example? Governments don't admit mistakes, they just pass more laws to pile more new mistakes on top of the old ones.
Well, you are wrong in the very first sentence, I am a Canadian citizen (and of a couple of other countries as well), but don't live there, not a resident.
You should be smart enough to realize that the Russian economy, by the time the USSR fell apart, was no longer "centrally planned' by any meaningful degree.
- you are completely ignorant of everything that concerns USSR, including that sentence.
USSR had a completely planned economy, yes, by the end of the country there were some businesses set up, that was the beginning of the end of the USSR, which simply was becoming more and more obvious. You silly implication is that by the end USSR wasn't a planned economy, it couldn't be further from the truth. The new businesses that appeared in the former USSR by 1991 were completely insignificant, almost all people in the former USSR even up to the end of it were still employed by the government, which was printing trillions of rubbles a year, into hundreds of trillions by the end of the regime, that was hyper inflation.
People stopped accepting USSR rubbles by the end, the money was changing rapidly. You couldn't buy anything with rubbles already by 1986 I would say, you needed special 'coupons' to go together with the rubbles actually to buy stuff, from food to anything else.
The Communist Party was falling apart by the end of the regime, but the major industries didn't shut down even after it was toppled, things were still running by inertia. People came to work and didn't even get paid, they didn't know what to do, where to go for anything, they eventually were "paid" with "stock" in the factories and organizations and with some of the products that were produced there (if anything was produced there, and major industries couldn't give anything to employees, major industries were military factories).
Saying that USSR wasn't a 'socialist' country for DECADES before 1991? People got there "free" education, "free" healthcare even in 1991. Socialism is alive and well in the former Soviet republics even today, socialism is collectivism, it's about central planning, so you don't even understand what socialism is. Everything in the former USSR (and to a large degree even today) is centrally planned. Of-course today it's much less than before, but the money is still controlled by the governments, and that's already central planning (just like in USA).
As to USSR fooling Reagan, never mind Reagan, USSR foold all of the establishment "economists" of the West, specifically because the establishment "economists" of the West are Keynesians even today.
OTOH actual real economists, like Friedrich Hayek, predicted the collapse of Soviet Union. Ludwig von Mises predicted the collapse of USSR when it was forming already, all while Keynesians saw the Soviet Union as paragon of progressive ideas, because everything was centrally planned and government was in every aspect of human life.
As to distribution of wealth - the only moral and effective way to distribute wealth is through free market capitalism, there are no other ways that are fair, moral and efficient, because free market capitalism is a system of voluntarism, and as long as a system denies voluntarism there is nothing fair or moral about it and it cannot be efficient by definition because of central planning.
Lastly, thinking that it is the failure of the specific people 'tasked with the execution of the plan' is the great lie.
It's the same exact lie as somebody like Paul Krugman would propagate, when he advocates for more government spending than there is ever. Krugman always comes out saying that regardless of how much money is printed and how much government intervention exists, it's not enough, it won't help.
It's a simple prediction to make, because no amount of government intervention will help, government intervention only makes things further, so in a sense Krugman ends up being right about gov't inability to help, but his being right is only a technicality,
Correct, issuing government bonds and printing money is the same thing for the purposes of government that runs the printing presses.
That's because to "buy the bonds back" it only has to print more money. Printing bonds or printing money, it's not really different in terms of inflation. That's why the market reaction was so wrong, when there was the 'debt ceiling crisis' and people piled into bonds.
You don't pile into bonds if you are afraid of the sovereign debt crisis, that's irrational behavior. But people do behave irrationally for a while, before they find the correct behavior pattern. Unfortunately that's because most people are 'educated' by the governments of the world, who promote Keynesian ideology, mythology that government bonds are the 'safest investment'. They are not safe at all and especially they are not safe compared to the currency of the same country that can print it.
As to whether the world will end up paying 100% of US spending, well, it's totally possible for some time, but it's a political time bomb for every government that participates, because it really means inflation for all other people. That's why there were riots in Tunisia, the toppling of Mubarak, Libyan revolution, etc. There will be more, it's all about inflation and prices going up for other nations that are not printing US dollars, but that suffer through the consequences of this global inflation imposed by the 'reserve currency'. This will end with a revolution in China if Chinese government doesn't stop this behavior voluntarily.
Do you know how screwed up and completely conflicted your own comment is?
Here, let me demonstrate:
Humanity's greatest moments are when it defies the market and
that's one sentence from your comment.
Here is another one, and they go together:
How did the US became a nation? By giving Britain the finger and kicking their ass.
OK, that should be enough for any thinking individual to see how completely screwed up your thinking is.
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Britain was The Government and USA was rebelling against The Government and for more freedoms from The Government.
The USA became a powerful economy by removing The Government and by protecting people's freedoms, that's how it became the economic powerhouse.
As to lands, whatever, it doesn't matter that the white people kicked Indians off the lands, obviously the white people didn't come to America to protect the rights of the natives, they came to America to escape their own tyrannical government.
As to slavery - the free market capitalism ended slavery by industrialization, which started in the North. Slave owners would have simply be priced out of the market eventually, their costs were much higher than costs of people hiring employees rather than owning slaves. Slaves cost money, they are not an efficient way to run businesses. Slaves do not act for your benefit, they act for their benefit, so most of their work is very inefficient and they do have to be taken care of, from health care to living accommodations, to food, etc. It makes no economic sense and is not sustainable for slavery to exist in the same economic space as industrialization, which constantly leads to more and more efficient allocation of resources and less and less demand for actual physical human labour, while requiring human workers to be more and more educated and specialized.
Slavery didn't have to be ended with any wars, and it was ended peacefully enough in other parts of the world. That war in USA was not about ending slavery, it was about setting up another government bureaucracy.
USA will end without any other empire 'toppling it', that's completely unnecessary. USSR fell apart not because of USA but because its economy was completely unsustainable, as all centrally planned economies are unsustainable and eventually fall apart or change to a more market based economy.
since the policies you're complaining about didn't go into effect until fall of 2008 at the earliest
- that's where you and I disagree and diverge completely, no question about it. AFAIC the policies that I am 'complaining' about came into effect stage by stage, starting with 1913 introduction of the Federal reserve (and coincidentally the IRS). This immediately had the effect of inflating the bubble that caused the depression of 1921. This was over in 1.5 years, because Harding cut spending by 70%.
In 1925 the Fed started printing dollars again to buy bad UK debt, this gave rise to the stock market bubble of 1929, and then the Fed and IRS allowed the policies of Hoover and FDR to turn that necessary recession (market correction of mis-allocation of resources, which is more commonly known as a 'recession') into the Great Depression. The depression lasted all the way until 1947, when gov't cut overall spending by 64% and overall taxes by 32%. The next 20 years became boom years, based on a number of factors: monopoly on productivity for at least a decade, since the rest of the world was rebuilding infrastructure after the war, the Bretton Woods, which turned USD into the reserve that everybody pegged to, the Fed, which set artificial interest rates. The 1950 to 1970 government gluttony resulted in the depression of 1970s, which was a stagflation, by the way, a very serious rate of inflation coupled with rising unemployment (which put a nail into the Keynesian coffin, but not for the politicians, though that later part of the decade gave rise to Thatcher).
Of-course 1971 was the next serious stage in that history, with Nixon defaulting on the dollar ('temporarily' taking the world off the gold standard). Of-course EVERYTHING that Nixon said was a LIE or it was just wrong (but it really was just a lie). The problem for the dollar was never speculation, speculators in fact keep prices stable and even lower them, you don't hear that from your politicians though. The problem was crazy printing of the dollars for a couple of decades prior.
So when Nixon said there: you will pay somewhat more for foreign goods abroad and for imports (the 10% tax), but you will not see any rise in prices within the country for locally made goods, what he conveniently forgot to tell everybody was that nobody in their right mind would stay in USA and keep manufacturing under those conditions, so there would be fewer and fewer American made goods (and the 10% import tax, or any import tax, is never a tax on the foreign producer. US Congress does not have authority to tax foreign countries or entities or citizens. It's the tax on USA consumer, who will have to pay that import tax).
Gold was allowed to trade in the free market, which meant that it finally was no longer artificially pegged to the dollar. Nixon could have just devalued the currency honestly, that would mean that instead of 1 ounce of gold for 20 dollars or so, people would be getting 1 ounce of gold for 100 bucks or so, that's what he COULD do, instead he chose to default on the payments.
From 1971 to 1980, gold rose from 20 to 800 dollars per ounce. The crazy inflation was stopped by Volcker, who raised interest rates dramatically, which got up as high as 21.5%, at this point gold corrected to about 250 and staid there for some time. In 2000 it was 300, today it's 1760. The trajectory is obvious, you can calculate how much value dollar lost since 1971 (when again, by my estimate the real price of gold was 100 bucks per ounce). Trust me, it's not a pretty number.
Should a central bank exist? No, I do not believe it should.
Is monetary policy socialism? Yes, it is central planning, which is by definition collectivism, and socialism is just one instance of collectivism. Other instances include fascism for example, and of-course fascism is just the next logical step once the socialists admit that their methods cannot be
The source of funds to pay off (currently zero-interest) debt is growth.
Those are not 0 interest, not even close. Those are negative interest bonds. The real interest is negative, if you buy US Treasury debt, you are immediately accepting a loss because you are forgetting the rate of inflation. The real inflation is many times the official level, and the market is so screwed up with the artificial buying of Treasuries by the Fed that the real interest rates are not even calculable right now. No business can get a loan, because there are no savings and nobody eve knows what the real interest rate needs to be in this situation, the market is not allowed to set the real rate for now.
Once the market does set the real interest rate (and it will happen, US Fed is powerful, but its powers are not infinite), then there will be the real economic slowdown, the real recession, depression, everything that the market will throw at USA to start reallocating the mis-allocated resources. The companies that went bankrupt before, will be bankrupt again (actually for banks it doesn't take a crazy interest rate, just anything above 3.5% will do).
You are talking about growth? Growth? There is no growth, the real GDP is shrinking because of the under-reported interest rate and because larger and larger portion of GDP is consumption (70% right now), not production.
There cannot be growth as long as the economy is out of whack with all the imbalances. To rebalance the economy the recession must be allowed to run its course, so that the debts are restructured, companies are wiped out, credit is freed up, gov't shrinks.
The real austerity is not in increasing taxes and keeping the gov't at the same spending level, the real austerity will hit anyway, but the real austerity is reducing gov't spending. Real austerity is about stopping the payments to the unproductive people, whoever they are, be it stimulus and bail outs and free money to the banks and other companies, be it loans guarantees by gov't to anybody, be it buying mortgages by the Fed, be it SS and Medicare checks and wars, all this stuff, it must stop.
The real austerity is government austerity, shrinking of government and allowing the private sector to recover from this abuse.
The problems is gov't borrowing yesterday, gov't borrowing today and whatever it manages to borrow tomorrow. The public debt is 16 Trillion, the unfunded liabilities are 222Trillion (SS, Medicare, other pensions), and then there are all the guarantees, from FDIC to student loans, to mortgages, everything.
That's a debt that cannot ever be repaid.
The public debt is about 53,000 USD per every person in USA, the 222Trillion is another 740,000 and then the rest of it. This debt will not be repaid no matter what, it can't be repaid ever under any circumstances, the truth of the matter is that USA is bankrupt right now, not in the future. It's been bankrupt for a while, but just like with Greece, until the debts are called, nobody bothers to check.
That's why any hint by an independent rating agency that the real debt in USA is even slightly riskier than AAA is met with the force of the "justice system".
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When the economy is depressed, it's depressed for a reason. The reason is that the credit was misallocated to cause that depression. Under those conditions, government must shrink, not expand its balance sheet. Debts must restructure, credit must be allowed to be freed up from unproductive uses, people, businesses (and governments) must be allowed to fail so that the system could repair the damage and restart.
BTW., this has nothing to do with "Limbaugh", because the main stream Republicans are just as guilty of this Keynesian nonsense as the Democrats are, and Limbaugh obviously is not a libertarian.
But I am not talking about inflation of the nominal values in stock prices, I am talking about getting dividends, yield, I am talking about being paid in money that will not necessarily go to 0.
Also if you are comparing S&P500, let's look at it closer, shall we?
Year 2000. S&P 500 was about.... 14000. Today S&P 500 is about.... 14000.
Wow, great stuff. And does it even pay dividend? Gold back in 2000 was 300, today it's 1760 or so. Thus in gold, S&P500 was about 1:46.6 and today it's about 1:7.9
So in real terms it depreciated by a factor of 6 over 10 years.
Your comparison between UK, US and Spain, well talking about Socialism. NO, I would rather be in Singapore. Hong Kong, Switzerland, which is coincidentally where I am, moved out of America 3 years ago with my business and all. As to unemployment in USA, those numbers will go back up again in a couple of months. The Fed came out with QE3 to get those numbers. The White House promised the gov't contractors to pay their penalties for not sending out pink slips 60 days in advance before letting some people go, that also helps with those numbers. There are all sorts of ways to manipulate numbers, but there is no way to hide the real numbers - trade deficit.
It would be a much more honest way to default on the debt (which can never be repaid) - let the bond holder eat a huge loss. Let them get 10 cents on a dollar or whatever, the interest rates would shoot up, where they should be (where they are really right now, just try and get a business loan if you are not government, you can't do it, that's because real interest rates are crazy and there are no savings).
Printing money is the most dishonest way to default.
The markets do not buy US Bonds, who is buying 10, 20, 30 year bonds? The Fed did the operation twist exactly to offload those long term bonds off the people who didn't want to hold them in order to push interest rates down, the Fed replaced its government short term paper it was holding with long term bonds, that was operation 'Twist'.
The Fed is buying all new long term bonds that are created by the Treasury.
The Fed is also buying all long term mortgages at this point, don't forget that. 40 Billion a months, that's what Bernanke said he'd be buying in mortgages, but that's just the floor. He said he'll be pumping money into the economy "until it gets better". Guess what, the economy is where it is because of fake money, because of size of gov't and taxes, it's not going to get better if more of the same is applied only in larger quantities. What will happen, is that the dollar will lose more and more value.
Yes, gold is money. Ask yourself this simple question: what would you hold for 10 years in a row, government bonds or a piece of gold?
But gold is not the only possible store of value, there are others. There are well placed equities, it's just they are mostly not in USA. In USA you probably can buy some well priced property at this point, maybe a house or two, especially if you can rent them out. Also farm land, though I wouldn't be looking at that in USA, too many regulations. Energy companies, but then again, when the shit hits the fan in terms of crazy inflation, there probably will be some 'windfall' taxes instrumented against 'ill gains' or whatever, so AFAIC US companies are very risky investment, as risky as US bonds and the US dollar itself.
The real problem is that there is too much fake money that people do not personally feel attached to, because it's created by the main counterfeiters of the world - the central banks, and because starting a competing exchange is nearly impossible.
In April, motivated by what I consider pure maliciousness, the SEC initiated a âoecease and desistâ administrative proceeding it deemed âoenecessary for the protection of investors and in the public interestâ against Egan-Jones Ratings Co., a privately owned, 20-person firm based in Haverford, Pennsylvania, and against its principal owner, Sean Egan.
Do you know what the alleged crimes are?
Here:
Now, incredibly, Egan-Jones is the sole rater that the SEC has decided to attack. The trouble for the firm started on July 16, 2011, when Egan-Jones downgraded the U.S.â(TM)s sovereign debt by one notch, to AA+ from AAA. Egan-Jones cited âoethe relatively high level of debt and the difficulty in significantly cutting spending.â Two days later, the SECâ(TM)s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations contacted the firm seeking information about its rating decision. (The next month, S&P also downgraded the U.S.â(TM)s sovereign debt, but neither Moodyâ(TM)s nor Fitch did.)
Then, on Oct. 12, Egan-Jones received a call from the SEC notifying the firm of a Wells Notice, an indication that it was being investigated. On April 5 of this year, Egan-Jones again downgraded the U.S. sovereign debt, to AA from AA+. On April 19, leaks started emanating from the SEC that it had voted to start an âoeadministrative law proceedingâ against the firm. And on April 24, the SEC filed its complaint.
The crime is that this one agency is not paid by the sellers of the bonds but instead it's paid by the buyers of the bonds, and the buyers have an incentive to have debt rated properly, so that they know their risk.
Of-course AFAIC US bonds are junk.
So you think SEC is interested in really dealing with HFT and whatever you think is market manipulation?
Think again, the only thing it is interested in is protecting the fake rating of the sovereign debt, so that the US gov't can keep piling it on.
You can surely follow the links that I have already provided to my previous comments (and clearly my previous comments are under my first account, which is not usable right now, but I assure you, both accounts are for the same person). I explained it already.
An apprentice is not exactly an experienced worker, that's the actual reason he is an apprentice. He starts from nothing, no knowledge, no useful skills (at least no skills and expertise that he can have in a resume, otherwise he wouldn't be an apprentice).
As such, he is of very limited use to an employer, still, employers have historically hired apprentices before government started interfering with various labour related laws, entitlements for the employees, obligations for the employers, messing with the contract law. That is part of the problem. Another part of the problem is the moral hazard created by the government, which supposedly promises to produce skilled employees with this 'public education', whatever it is, and thus employees do not feel that they have to invest into training employees in their field.
All of this is detrimental to the apprenticeship programs, all of it removes incentives that exist in the Free Market for the employers to hire unskilled workers and to train them on the job. Gov't guaranteed education loans are also a moral hazard, which simultaneously creates inflation in the values of education levels, while putting all students into an ever growing debt. The debt comes out of the loan guarantees, which create artificial demand for more and more levels of formal education, while actually reducing the quality of the education, because no educational institution wants to forgo the easy money coming their way. Everybody is given their token high school diploma, their token college degrees, more people feel they need to get more levels of education. Masters, PhD, whatever, and this inflates the education bubble further.
Yes, the companies must be able to hire unskilled labour force without any artificial price floors (and that's what minimum wage and various other entitlement regulations and liabilities are). Yes, government should not be guaranteeing student loans (or any other loans for that matter, all government guarantees are fake and can only be paid because of inflation - money printing).
Yes, kids should be able to skip college and just ask an employer to hire them at a low cost, promising to stay with the employer for a few years as they learn and become actually useful employees, which eventually will allow them to command much better employment opportunities and conditions, and at the same time they would not waste time and would not get into insurmountable debt that the system forces them into.
It's not a bad idea at all, question is, can you afford that apprentice at the minimum wage (and multiply the minimum wage by 2, because the cost is not just the wage, there are taxes and various mandates and there is liability due to gov't interference).
No, both are unnecessary. Both are only as necessary as you need them to be.
Some people need and want to attend higher education, they can actually use it for something that really requires it.
Others don't need higher education, they only need to learn what is necessary to hold a job, they can become proficient in it without wasting their time, which is what a university experience would be for them and they wouldn't have the insane debt that the modern system would force them into.
Nonsense. My first account is unusable because/. is in fact full of your kind of people, intolerant, unintelligent, unable to maintain a conversation based on ideas rather than personalities.
I already defined you for what you are, so don't bother./. is not a community in the first place, it's a forum, and unless there was a test to register in the forum, which asked specific questions, one of which was: do you waste time by playing with computer dolls, then there is no criteria by which you can define/. participants. There are in fact people here from all walks of life, from chemists, to physicists, to engineers, to managers, to CEOs, to musicians, to 15 y.o. girls (probably 1 or 2).
There isn't even a 'shared level of understanding regarding computers' here, technology is not only computers and gaming has nothing to do with understanding.
You know what I expect of/.? A minimum level of rationality and tolerance to others, that's all. AFAIC you lack both.
I have been arguing this for quite a while, there should be more apprentices and fewer university graduates with insurmountable debt, however this is not going to happen given the labour regulations, tax incentives, even inflation. All of these prevent jobs from appearing. A businessman doesn't need an incentive to hire people, his incentive is to make more money, it exists already. What he needs is not to have incentives to do things that are not actually useful to him. A business could have a bunch of apprentices, if it was possible to pay them a very low wage. As things stand (never mind the inflation, which kills savings and jobs), the labour law makes it illegal to hire people below minimum wage while still allowing to have students as 'apprentices' who have to work for free. All this does is incentivizes the kids to go to higher education, where they don't actually need to, while working for free as apprentices, while getting deeper and deeper into debt. Instead the kids must be able to skip school entirely and learn the trade at work making a little bit of money, that would give them an incentive to show up and do the work, while not getting into debt and learning the skills. This is something that businesses have always done before governments screwed this up.
Clearly I am an atheist and I truly think that any person believing in god has issues with reality around them, however, I don't care about public displays of anything actually.
What I DO care about is god and religion being part of government systems. Now THAT I find not only 'grossly offensive', but actually highly criminal.
You are an asshole, that's your problem. The kind of person that needs to be punched in the kisser repeatedly day after day until they learn to shut the fuck up. That's what I understand from this story and the thread. Again, when posting a story about esoteric stuff that applies to a tiny, irrelevant percentage of people, the summary should be made useful, which means it should be useful to a wider audience than just those who are actually interested in that thing, and this includes providing full names, maybe followed by abbreviations.
My second account, since the first one you are replying to cannot be used for a while. --
1. I don't play computer games except for chess maybe, an occasional game of Tetris.
2. This story is as much about some game as it is about a few other things, maybe you don't understand the concept of different perspectives, but not everybody has a one track mind.
This story is about a hack. This story is about some people losing something, maybe it's valuable, it's possible there is even monetary value attached to it, after all, people spend time, which a form of investment to build their 'cities' or whatever in that game.
Given the fact that there are many ways to look at it, and I didn't mention all of them, a better summary is in order.
As to various comments implying that I should google for it, no, I shouldn't. This info can be in a summary and I can expect to be able to understand what's in the summary without having to resort to search engines. If I cannot, then I can leave a comment saying that it's unreadable by people without specific knowledge on some terms.
Finally, you wouldn't know a 'target audience', if it was staring you in the face.
I believe that yours answer is the only one that is actually informative, while not condescending. Good, there are some people on this site who are not assholes after all.
For the record, whoever is replying as an AC with 'you have been trolled' remarks has nothing to do with me, I do not play almost any computer games except some simple stuff, like chess.
I didn't care to find out what NPC was by searching, because AFAIC the story summary should be more useful than what it was here.
Thanks.
(oh, and interestingly enough, I don't believe that it's possible to take a karma from 'positive' to 'terrible' with just -2 moderation, so somebody with editor controls is having fun I take it? Thus my second account).
This is a step in that direction. Starting your own business and using only contractors to bring the equipment and install it and do the necessary preparations and then having all aspects of business being automated, from conveyor belts and all the production activities, to packaging, to marketing and sales, everything should be automated.
In that situation anybody could run a business providing the market with yet another gadget or service that the market is willing to exchange other goods for voluntarily.
Slashdot Mirror
I do write on this topic sometimes, so I can just point you at one of my comments, if you read it, it may be the answer you are looking for (unless I misunderstood the question).
(oh, and that's my first account, it's limited specifically because some people who do not like what I write on that topic have mod points and they do not argue on ideas, only on personalities).
IF it is a good idea, then the market will build it.
Do you understand this? If something is a good idea, allow the market to take care of it, why would you want to impose something through government?
In South Korea gaming addiction increased dramatically as the government started with all this "free Internet for everybody, including kindergarten" nonsense.
If something is legitimately a good idea, then it means people will want to buy it and it will be developed. But actually if it's not happening by itself in the market, how about examining why it's not happening and is there a bunch of moral hazards and various regulatory road blocks set up by the government?
Does government ever admit that it is doing something wrong, that it is a mistake to create artificial monopolies for example? Governments don't admit mistakes, they just pass more laws to pile more new mistakes on top of the old ones.
Well, you are wrong in the very first sentence, I am a Canadian citizen (and of a couple of other countries as well), but don't live there, not a resident.
You should be smart enough to realize that the Russian economy, by the time the USSR fell apart, was no longer "centrally planned' by any meaningful degree.
- you are completely ignorant of everything that concerns USSR, including that sentence.
USSR had a completely planned economy, yes, by the end of the country there were some businesses set up, that was the beginning of the end of the USSR, which simply was becoming more and more obvious. You silly implication is that by the end USSR wasn't a planned economy, it couldn't be further from the truth. The new businesses that appeared in the former USSR by 1991 were completely insignificant, almost all people in the former USSR even up to the end of it were still employed by the government, which was printing trillions of rubbles a year, into hundreds of trillions by the end of the regime, that was hyper inflation.
People stopped accepting USSR rubbles by the end, the money was changing rapidly. You couldn't buy anything with rubbles already by 1986 I would say, you needed special 'coupons' to go together with the rubbles actually to buy stuff, from food to anything else.
The Communist Party was falling apart by the end of the regime, but the major industries didn't shut down even after it was toppled, things were still running by inertia. People came to work and didn't even get paid, they didn't know what to do, where to go for anything, they eventually were "paid" with "stock" in the factories and organizations and with some of the products that were produced there (if anything was produced there, and major industries couldn't give anything to employees, major industries were military factories).
Saying that USSR wasn't a 'socialist' country for DECADES before 1991? People got there "free" education, "free" healthcare even in 1991. Socialism is alive and well in the former Soviet republics even today, socialism is collectivism, it's about central planning, so you don't even understand what socialism is. Everything in the former USSR (and to a large degree even today) is centrally planned. Of-course today it's much less than before, but the money is still controlled by the governments, and that's already central planning (just like in USA).
As to USSR fooling Reagan, never mind Reagan, USSR foold all of the establishment "economists" of the West, specifically because the establishment "economists" of the West are Keynesians even today.
OTOH actual real economists, like Friedrich Hayek, predicted the collapse of Soviet Union. Ludwig von Mises predicted the collapse of USSR when it was forming already, all while Keynesians saw the Soviet Union as paragon of progressive ideas, because everything was centrally planned and government was in every aspect of human life.
As to distribution of wealth - the only moral and effective way to distribute wealth is through free market capitalism, there are no other ways that are fair, moral and efficient, because free market capitalism is a system of voluntarism, and as long as a system denies voluntarism there is nothing fair or moral about it and it cannot be efficient by definition because of central planning.
Lastly, thinking that it is the failure of the specific people 'tasked with the execution of the plan' is the great lie.
It's the same exact lie as somebody like Paul Krugman would propagate, when he advocates for more government spending than there is ever. Krugman always comes out saying that regardless of how much money is printed and how much government intervention exists, it's not enough, it won't help.
It's a simple prediction to make, because no amount of government intervention will help, government intervention only makes things further, so in a sense Krugman ends up being right about gov't inability to help, but his being right is only a technicality,
Correct, issuing government bonds and printing money is the same thing for the purposes of government that runs the printing presses.
That's because to "buy the bonds back" it only has to print more money. Printing bonds or printing money, it's not really different in terms of inflation. That's why the market reaction was so wrong, when there was the 'debt ceiling crisis' and people piled into bonds.
You don't pile into bonds if you are afraid of the sovereign debt crisis, that's irrational behavior. But people do behave irrationally for a while, before they find the correct behavior pattern. Unfortunately that's because most people are 'educated' by the governments of the world, who promote Keynesian ideology, mythology that government bonds are the 'safest investment'. They are not safe at all and especially they are not safe compared to the currency of the same country that can print it.
As to whether the world will end up paying 100% of US spending, well, it's totally possible for some time, but it's a political time bomb for every government that participates, because it really means inflation for all other people. That's why there were riots in Tunisia, the toppling of Mubarak, Libyan revolution, etc. There will be more, it's all about inflation and prices going up for other nations that are not printing US dollars, but that suffer through the consequences of this global inflation imposed by the 'reserve currency'. This will end with a revolution in China if Chinese government doesn't stop this behavior voluntarily.
Do you know how screwed up and completely conflicted your own comment is?
Here, let me demonstrate:
Humanity's greatest moments are when it defies the market and
that's one sentence from your comment.
Here is another one, and they go together:
How did the US became a nation? By giving Britain the finger and kicking their ass.
OK, that should be enough for any thinking individual to see how completely screwed up your thinking is.
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Britain was The Government and USA was rebelling against The Government and for more freedoms from The Government.
The USA became a powerful economy by removing The Government and by protecting people's freedoms, that's how it became the economic powerhouse.
As to lands, whatever, it doesn't matter that the white people kicked Indians off the lands, obviously the white people didn't come to America to protect the rights of the natives, they came to America to escape their own tyrannical government.
As to slavery - the free market capitalism ended slavery by industrialization, which started in the North. Slave owners would have simply be priced out of the market eventually, their costs were much higher than costs of people hiring employees rather than owning slaves. Slaves cost money, they are not an efficient way to run businesses. Slaves do not act for your benefit, they act for their benefit, so most of their work is very inefficient and they do have to be taken care of, from health care to living accommodations, to food, etc. It makes no economic sense and is not sustainable for slavery to exist in the same economic space as industrialization, which constantly leads to more and more efficient allocation of resources and less and less demand for actual physical human labour, while requiring human workers to be more and more educated and specialized.
Slavery didn't have to be ended with any wars, and it was ended peacefully enough in other parts of the world. That war in USA was not about ending slavery, it was about setting up another government bureaucracy.
USA will end without any other empire 'toppling it', that's completely unnecessary. USSR fell apart not because of USA but because its economy was completely unsustainable, as all centrally planned economies are unsustainable and eventually fall apart or change to a more market based economy.
since the policies you're complaining about didn't go into effect until fall of 2008 at the earliest
- that's where you and I disagree and diverge completely, no question about it. AFAIC the policies that I am 'complaining' about came into effect stage by stage, starting with 1913 introduction of the Federal reserve (and coincidentally the IRS). This immediately had the effect of inflating the bubble that caused the depression of 1921. This was over in 1.5 years, because Harding cut spending by 70%.
In 1925 the Fed started printing dollars again to buy bad UK debt, this gave rise to the stock market bubble of 1929, and then the Fed and IRS allowed the policies of Hoover and FDR to turn that necessary recession (market correction of mis-allocation of resources, which is more commonly known as a 'recession') into the Great Depression. The depression lasted all the way until 1947, when gov't cut overall spending by 64% and overall taxes by 32%. The next 20 years became boom years, based on a number of factors: monopoly on productivity for at least a decade, since the rest of the world was rebuilding infrastructure after the war, the Bretton Woods, which turned USD into the reserve that everybody pegged to, the Fed, which set artificial interest rates. The 1950 to 1970 government gluttony resulted in the depression of 1970s, which was a stagflation, by the way, a very serious rate of inflation coupled with rising unemployment (which put a nail into the Keynesian coffin, but not for the politicians, though that later part of the decade gave rise to Thatcher).
Of-course 1971 was the next serious stage in that history, with Nixon defaulting on the dollar ('temporarily' taking the world off the gold standard). Of-course EVERYTHING that Nixon said was a LIE or it was just wrong (but it really was just a lie). The problem for the dollar was never speculation, speculators in fact keep prices stable and even lower them, you don't hear that from your politicians though. The problem was crazy printing of the dollars for a couple of decades prior.
So when Nixon said there: you will pay somewhat more for foreign goods abroad and for imports (the 10% tax), but you will not see any rise in prices within the country for locally made goods, what he conveniently forgot to tell everybody was that nobody in their right mind would stay in USA and keep manufacturing under those conditions, so there would be fewer and fewer American made goods (and the 10% import tax, or any import tax, is never a tax on the foreign producer. US Congress does not have authority to tax foreign countries or entities or citizens. It's the tax on USA consumer, who will have to pay that import tax).
Gold was allowed to trade in the free market, which meant that it finally was no longer artificially pegged to the dollar. Nixon could have just devalued the currency honestly, that would mean that instead of 1 ounce of gold for 20 dollars or so, people would be getting 1 ounce of gold for 100 bucks or so, that's what he COULD do, instead he chose to default on the payments.
From 1971 to 1980, gold rose from 20 to 800 dollars per ounce. The crazy inflation was stopped by Volcker, who raised interest rates dramatically, which got up as high as 21.5%, at this point gold corrected to about 250 and staid there for some time. In 2000 it was 300, today it's 1760. The trajectory is obvious, you can calculate how much value dollar lost since 1971 (when again, by my estimate the real price of gold was 100 bucks per ounce). Trust me, it's not a pretty number.
Should a central bank exist? No, I do not believe it should.
Is monetary policy socialism? Yes, it is central planning, which is by definition collectivism, and socialism is just one instance of collectivism. Other instances include fascism for example, and of-course fascism is just the next logical step once the socialists admit that their methods cannot be
The source of funds to pay off (currently zero-interest) debt is growth.
Those are not 0 interest, not even close. Those are negative interest bonds. The real interest is negative, if you buy US Treasury debt, you are immediately accepting a loss because you are forgetting the rate of inflation. The real inflation is many times the official level, and the market is so screwed up with the artificial buying of Treasuries by the Fed that the real interest rates are not even calculable right now. No business can get a loan, because there are no savings and nobody eve knows what the real interest rate needs to be in this situation, the market is not allowed to set the real rate for now.
Once the market does set the real interest rate (and it will happen, US Fed is powerful, but its powers are not infinite), then there will be the real economic slowdown, the real recession, depression, everything that the market will throw at USA to start reallocating the mis-allocated resources. The companies that went bankrupt before, will be bankrupt again (actually for banks it doesn't take a crazy interest rate, just anything above 3.5% will do).
You are talking about growth? Growth? There is no growth, the real GDP is shrinking because of the under-reported interest rate and because larger and larger portion of GDP is consumption (70% right now), not production.
There cannot be growth as long as the economy is out of whack with all the imbalances. To rebalance the economy the recession must be allowed to run its course, so that the debts are restructured, companies are wiped out, credit is freed up, gov't shrinks.
The real austerity is not in increasing taxes and keeping the gov't at the same spending level, the real austerity will hit anyway, but the real austerity is reducing gov't spending. Real austerity is about stopping the payments to the unproductive people, whoever they are, be it stimulus and bail outs and free money to the banks and other companies, be it loans guarantees by gov't to anybody, be it buying mortgages by the Fed, be it SS and Medicare checks and wars, all this stuff, it must stop.
The real austerity is government austerity, shrinking of government and allowing the private sector to recover from this abuse.
The problems is gov't borrowing yesterday, gov't borrowing today and whatever it manages to borrow tomorrow. The public debt is 16 Trillion, the unfunded liabilities are 222Trillion (SS, Medicare, other pensions), and then there are all the guarantees, from FDIC to student loans, to mortgages, everything.
That's a debt that cannot ever be repaid.
The public debt is about 53,000 USD per every person in USA, the 222Trillion is another 740,000 and then the rest of it. This debt will not be repaid no matter what, it can't be repaid ever under any circumstances, the truth of the matter is that USA is bankrupt right now, not in the future. It's been bankrupt for a while, but just like with Greece, until the debts are called, nobody bothers to check.
That's why any hint by an independent rating agency that the real debt in USA is even slightly riskier than AAA is met with the force of the "justice system".
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When the economy is depressed, it's depressed for a reason. The reason is that the credit was misallocated to cause that depression. Under those conditions, government must shrink, not expand its balance sheet. Debts must restructure, credit must be allowed to be freed up from unproductive uses, people, businesses (and governments) must be allowed to fail so that the system could repair the damage and restart.
BTW., this has nothing to do with "Limbaugh", because the main stream Republicans are just as guilty of this Keynesian nonsense as the Democrats are, and Limbaugh obviously is not a libertarian.
Yeah, and the houses couldn't go down in price.
But I am not talking about inflation of the nominal values in stock prices, I am talking about getting dividends, yield, I am talking about being paid in money that will not necessarily go to 0.
Also if you are comparing S&P500, let's look at it closer, shall we?
Year 2000. S&P 500 was about.... 14000. Today S&P 500 is about.... 14000.
Wow, great stuff. And does it even pay dividend? Gold back in 2000 was 300, today it's 1760 or so. Thus in gold, S&P500 was about 1:46.6 and today it's about 1:7.9
So in real terms it depreciated by a factor of 6 over 10 years.
Your comparison between UK, US and Spain, well talking about Socialism. NO, I would rather be in Singapore. Hong Kong, Switzerland, which is coincidentally where I am, moved out of America 3 years ago with my business and all. As to unemployment in USA, those numbers will go back up again in a couple of months. The Fed came out with QE3 to get those numbers. The White House promised the gov't contractors to pay their penalties for not sending out pink slips 60 days in advance before letting some people go, that also helps with those numbers. There are all sorts of ways to manipulate numbers, but there is no way to hide the real numbers - trade deficit.
It would be a much more honest way to default on the debt (which can never be repaid) - let the bond holder eat a huge loss. Let them get 10 cents on a dollar or whatever, the interest rates would shoot up, where they should be (where they are really right now, just try and get a business loan if you are not government, you can't do it, that's because real interest rates are crazy and there are no savings).
Printing money is the most dishonest way to default.
The markets do not buy US Bonds, who is buying 10, 20, 30 year bonds? The Fed did the operation twist exactly to offload those long term bonds off the people who didn't want to hold them in order to push interest rates down, the Fed replaced its government short term paper it was holding with long term bonds, that was operation 'Twist'.
The Fed is buying all new long term bonds that are created by the Treasury.
The Fed is also buying all long term mortgages at this point, don't forget that. 40 Billion a months, that's what Bernanke said he'd be buying in mortgages, but that's just the floor. He said he'll be pumping money into the economy "until it gets better". Guess what, the economy is where it is because of fake money, because of size of gov't and taxes, it's not going to get better if more of the same is applied only in larger quantities. What will happen, is that the dollar will lose more and more value.
Yes, gold is money. Ask yourself this simple question: what would you hold for 10 years in a row, government bonds or a piece of gold?
But gold is not the only possible store of value, there are others. There are well placed equities, it's just they are mostly not in USA. In USA you probably can buy some well priced property at this point, maybe a house or two, especially if you can rent them out. Also farm land, though I wouldn't be looking at that in USA, too many regulations. Energy companies, but then again, when the shit hits the fan in terms of crazy inflation, there probably will be some 'windfall' taxes instrumented against 'ill gains' or whatever, so AFAIC US companies are very risky investment, as risky as US bonds and the US dollar itself.
The real problem is that there is too much fake money that people do not personally feel attached to, because it's created by the main counterfeiters of the world - the central banks, and because starting a competing exchange is nearly impossible.
How about this for a story:
In April, motivated by what I consider pure maliciousness, the SEC initiated a âoecease and desistâ administrative proceeding it deemed âoenecessary for the protection of investors and in the public interestâ against Egan-Jones Ratings Co., a privately owned, 20-person firm based in Haverford, Pennsylvania, and against its principal owner, Sean Egan.
Do you know what the alleged crimes are?
Here:
Now, incredibly, Egan-Jones is the sole rater that the SEC has decided to attack. The trouble for the firm started on July 16, 2011, when Egan-Jones downgraded the U.S.â(TM)s sovereign debt by one notch, to AA+ from AAA. Egan-Jones cited âoethe relatively high level of debt and the difficulty in significantly cutting spending.â Two days later, the SECâ(TM)s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations contacted the firm seeking information about its rating decision. (The next month, S&P also downgraded the U.S.â(TM)s sovereign debt, but neither Moodyâ(TM)s nor Fitch did.)
Then, on Oct. 12, Egan-Jones received a call from the SEC notifying the firm of a Wells Notice, an indication that it was being investigated. On April 5 of this year, Egan-Jones again downgraded the U.S. sovereign debt, to AA from AA+. On April 19, leaks started emanating from the SEC that it had voted to start an âoeadministrative law proceedingâ against the firm. And on April 24, the SEC filed its complaint.
The crime is that this one agency is not paid by the sellers of the bonds but instead it's paid by the buyers of the bonds, and the buyers have an incentive to have debt rated properly, so that they know their risk.
Of-course AFAIC US bonds are junk.
So you think SEC is interested in really dealing with HFT and whatever you think is market manipulation?
Think again, the only thing it is interested in is protecting the fake rating of the sovereign debt, so that the US gov't can keep piling it on.
You can surely follow the links that I have already provided to my previous comments (and clearly my previous comments are under my first account, which is not usable right now, but I assure you, both accounts are for the same person). I explained it already.
An apprentice is not exactly an experienced worker, that's the actual reason he is an apprentice. He starts from nothing, no knowledge, no useful skills (at least no skills and expertise that he can have in a resume, otherwise he wouldn't be an apprentice).
As such, he is of very limited use to an employer, still, employers have historically hired apprentices before government started interfering with various labour related laws, entitlements for the employees, obligations for the employers, messing with the contract law. That is part of the problem. Another part of the problem is the moral hazard created by the government, which supposedly promises to produce skilled employees with this 'public education', whatever it is, and thus employees do not feel that they have to invest into training employees in their field.
All of this is detrimental to the apprenticeship programs, all of it removes incentives that exist in the Free Market for the employers to hire unskilled workers and to train them on the job. Gov't guaranteed education loans are also a moral hazard, which simultaneously creates inflation in the values of education levels, while putting all students into an ever growing debt. The debt comes out of the loan guarantees, which create artificial demand for more and more levels of formal education, while actually reducing the quality of the education, because no educational institution wants to forgo the easy money coming their way. Everybody is given their token high school diploma, their token college degrees, more people feel they need to get more levels of education. Masters, PhD, whatever, and this inflates the education bubble further.
Yes, the companies must be able to hire unskilled labour force without any artificial price floors (and that's what minimum wage and various other entitlement regulations and liabilities are). Yes, government should not be guaranteeing student loans (or any other loans for that matter, all government guarantees are fake and can only be paid because of inflation - money printing).
Yes, kids should be able to skip college and just ask an employer to hire them at a low cost, promising to stay with the employer for a few years as they learn and become actually useful employees, which eventually will allow them to command much better employment opportunities and conditions, and at the same time they would not waste time and would not get into insurmountable debt that the system forces them into.
It's not a bad idea at all, question is, can you afford that apprentice at the minimum wage (and multiply the minimum wage by 2, because the cost is not just the wage, there are taxes and various mandates and there is liability due to gov't interference).
No, both are unnecessary. Both are only as necessary as you need them to be.
Some people need and want to attend higher education, they can actually use it for something that really requires it.
Others don't need higher education, they only need to learn what is necessary to hold a job, they can become proficient in it without wasting their time, which is what a university experience would be for them and they wouldn't have the insane debt that the modern system would force them into.
Nonsense. My first account is unusable because /. is in fact full of your kind of people, intolerant, unintelligent, unable to maintain a conversation based on ideas rather than personalities.
I already defined you for what you are, so don't bother. /. is not a community in the first place, it's a forum, and unless there was a test to register in the forum, which asked specific questions, one of which was: do you waste time by playing with computer dolls, then there is no criteria by which you can define /. participants. There are in fact people here from all walks of life, from chemists, to physicists, to engineers, to managers, to CEOs, to musicians, to 15 y.o. girls (probably 1 or 2).
There isn't even a 'shared level of understanding regarding computers' here, technology is not only computers and gaming has nothing to do with understanding.
You know what I expect of /.? A minimum level of rationality and tolerance to others, that's all. AFAIC you lack both.
I have been arguing this for quite a while, there should be more apprentices and fewer university graduates with insurmountable debt, however this is not going to happen given the labour regulations, tax incentives, even inflation. All of these prevent jobs from appearing. A businessman doesn't need an incentive to hire people, his incentive is to make more money, it exists already. What he needs is not to have incentives to do things that are not actually useful to him. A business could have a bunch of apprentices, if it was possible to pay them a very low wage. As things stand (never mind the inflation, which kills savings and jobs), the labour law makes it illegal to hire people below minimum wage while still allowing to have students as 'apprentices' who have to work for free. All this does is incentivizes the kids to go to higher education, where they don't actually need to, while working for free as apprentices, while getting deeper and deeper into debt. Instead the kids must be able to skip school entirely and learn the trade at work making a little bit of money, that would give them an incentive to show up and do the work, while not getting into debt and learning the skills. This is something that businesses have always done before governments screwed this up.
There is no god.
Clearly I am an atheist and I truly think that any person believing in god has issues with reality around them, however, I don't care about public displays of anything actually.
What I DO care about is god and religion being part of government systems. Now THAT I find not only 'grossly offensive', but actually highly criminal.
You are an asshole, that's your problem. The kind of person that needs to be punched in the kisser repeatedly day after day until they learn to shut the fuck up. That's what I understand from this story and the thread. Again, when posting a story about esoteric stuff that applies to a tiny, irrelevant percentage of people, the summary should be made useful, which means it should be useful to a wider audience than just those who are actually interested in that thing, and this includes providing full names, maybe followed by abbreviations.
OP here from my second account, here is the reply to your useless comment.
I replied to a comment similar to yours, here, let me link to that reply for you.
My second account, since the first one you are replying to cannot be used for a while.
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1. I don't play computer games except for chess maybe, an occasional game of Tetris.
2. This story is as much about some game as it is about a few other things, maybe you don't understand the concept of different perspectives, but not everybody has a one track mind.
This story is about a hack. This story is about some people losing something, maybe it's valuable, it's possible there is even monetary value attached to it, after all, people spend time, which a form of investment to build their 'cities' or whatever in that game.
Given the fact that there are many ways to look at it, and I didn't mention all of them, a better summary is in order.
As to various comments implying that I should google for it, no, I shouldn't. This info can be in a summary and I can expect to be able to understand what's in the summary without having to resort to search engines. If I cannot, then I can leave a comment saying that it's unreadable by people without specific knowledge on some terms.
Finally, you wouldn't know a 'target audience', if it was staring you in the face.
I believe that yours answer is the only one that is actually informative, while not condescending. Good, there are some people on this site who are not assholes after all.
For the record, whoever is replying as an AC with 'you have been trolled' remarks has nothing to do with me, I do not play almost any computer games except some simple stuff, like chess.
I didn't care to find out what NPC was by searching, because AFAIC the story summary should be more useful than what it was here.
Thanks.
(oh, and interestingly enough, I don't believe that it's possible to take a karma from 'positive' to 'terrible' with just -2 moderation, so somebody with editor controls is having fun I take it? Thus my second account).
As I said earlier: if a businessman could run a business without hiring a single person and instead by automating every aspect of business, then he absolutely should do it, it's the best thing for the economy.
This is a step in that direction. Starting your own business and using only contractors to bring the equipment and install it and do the necessary preparations and then having all aspects of business being automated, from conveyor belts and all the production activities, to packaging, to marketing and sales, everything should be automated.
In that situation anybody could run a business providing the market with yet another gadget or service that the market is willing to exchange other goods for voluntarily.
Yeah, imagine a slogan: Have fun with Diaspora. Hmmm. Sounds like a threat.