So people want to be able to buy something, government says: you can't. This always leads to black markets.
Inflation (money printing) in Argentina is high, their prices are going up 24% per year, which is the consequence of high inflation. Instead of stopping the inflation (stopping the money printing), the government wants to stop people from saving their purchasing power, however they do it. Apparently to the people of Argentina USD seem to be more attractive then their own currency.
In USA inflation is also high, 11-15%, but prices are not going up as quickly as in Argentina, because other countries are still willing to absorb the new dollars and exchange their goods for them, so prices are going up in other countries, who respond with their own inflation, they print their own currencies in response to USA printing and they are willing so far to exchange their own productivity (products they manufacture and make) for US dollars. This pushes prices up for those productive nations and this still acts as a price buffer for USA.
But look at this obvious response by government of Argentina: it's not that the government is plainly wrong in what it is doing, destroying the currency of the people.
The government says: it is the people, who are wrong for wanting to save their own savings, their purchasing power. Let's take the purchasing power away from the people. What it means is that the government wants to keep its high levels of spending but cannot or will not raise taxes, so it wants to steal from people. Printing money is theft of productivity and it's most obvious to the people when their prices go up.
Of-course very few people can understand the link between their prices going up and their government printing the currency, it's not a link that is necessarily very obvious directly to people, that's because people are not taught economics and the version of economics that they are taught is really not economics, it's propaganda that allows the government elite to keep people in check by denying them the real understanding of what is going on.
What is happening in Argentina is nothing new. Many countries did the same thing - printed money, set exchange controls, price controls, all it ever does is it creates black markets and very quickly creates very wide separation onto the poor and rich, even among people that maybe didn't have that huge of a separation before the gov't actions.
The newly printed money does not equal wealth. The amount of production stays the same (or it is decreased because people move their savings somewhere else and this means moving production somewhere else, so the country suffers decrease of productivity and increase of money supply), so the new money simply ends up bidding up prices for the existing assets and goods.
This is why inflation (money printing) hurts the poor much more than the wealthy, because the poor live on various fixed incomes, they are getting less and less with every check, be it a salary or a dividend or a pension check, whatever.
The wealthy end up bidding up prices for existing assets. Everything becomes a fight for a fixed or a decreasing pie, the pie is not growing. Only savings and production grows the pie, money printing destroys savings and productivity and re-allocates the pie from middle and poor to the top.
That's why there is a higher and higher wealth disparity, it's not because the 1% is stealing something, it's because the government is stealing something, the government is stealing purchasing power, it's destroying the savings, productivity, it's destroying the currency.
Of-course as people try to avoid their purchasing power from being destroyed by the government, the government sees this as something to be prevented, so it sets exchange controls, currency controls, wage and price controls. Minimum wage is just an attempt to hide levels of inflation, like many other things that gov't does it backfires and creates more unemployment and dependency and decreases productivity and standa
Back in the eighties I spent 6 years in Udachny (see the nick?) What are and were near 20,000 people doing so far north? Why was there an underground nuclear explosion there? Diamonds. For the longest time that place supplied 80% of Soviet and then Russian diamonds. Udachny is the deepest open diamond mine at 610 meters. The largest diamond in Russia was found there on the 23 of December 1980. It was 48x36x25 mm, at 342.5ct, it was very clear, yellow stone.
I thought I typed/. but it looks like I am on playboy letters to the editor section, and it's not very good.
I could tell you stories about office situations like that but that's the thing, I don't think people who have stories to tell actually want to tell them to anybody, the world is too small.
Yeah, American "school lag" does not matter, but it doesn't matter for a different reason. It doesn't matter because education is irrelevant in USA, there is no new manufacturing, old manufacturing is leaving. The people who care about their kids will send them to private schools and probably those kids will not have a 'lag' or it will be a smaller 'lag' and kids that are not sent to private schools are on a lower socio-economic status, probably would have been factory workers in the past, but since today there are no factories, they'll end up serving fries and in other various service sector jobs until the service sector economy melts down and once it does, it won't matter at all what your education was in the past life.
The only thing that will matter in the new life is how well you are able to survive in really harsh economic conditions, no jobs, no money. Does education lag matter in those conditions? Unlikely.
Maybe programming should be defined first. I am almost certain that excluding people with various mental and cognitive problems, any person can put together a simple flow chart, with conditions in it (doesn't have to have loops, but any non-trivial problem sketched with a flow chart will likely have a loop or two, where a condition is used to split the next step into path A and path B).
However if we are talking about something else, like being able to hold a large piece of application in one's head while coming up with solutions to the problems, designing algorithms, working with fairly complex data structures, maybe working on with low level stuff, memory management, timing issues, multi threading, communications between components and between computers. Maybe in that case not everybody can become a programmer, it takes persistence, it takes good enough memory of the right kind, it takes ability to concentrate on a problem for hours at a time, it takes ability to be by yourself for an extended time period.
I don't think everybody can be a civil engineer for example for similar reasons.
Not everybody can be a doctor, it takes a different level of patience and ability to remember things that surpasses many people's abilities I think.
Not everybody can be a good 100 meter sprinter for obvious reasons.
Not everybody can be a psychiatrist.
Not everybody can be a kindergarten teacher.
etc., all of these things take a different mind set and different levels of patience, etc.
Neither party really tries to spend more or less than the other.
- what you are really saying is that neither party touches the expenses that are added by the other party. Yeah, that's a fair statement. They have a deal, they have their status quo, the 'compromise'. The compromise is that they'll get their special interests covered and will not fight each other's special interests all while the tax payers (and generally, people in the economy) are being slaughtered (figuratively speaking for now).
However just listen to the news cycle, listen to the talking heads, they are almost all singing the same tune: this is a coming 'fiscal cliff', what a disaster.
The real disaster is in NOT cutting the spending, that's the point. That's the promise by the rating agency (and really, who gives a shit what the bought political rating agencies rate US debt at? It's junk, it's been junk for a long time now).
Look at the 10 year bond, the price went down as Bernanke announced QE3. That's not what normally happened, normally traders would enter in order to front run the sale to the Fed, but not this time.
Bernanke's 40 billion a month will go to asset purchases to try and re-inflate the property and equity bubbles again, that's his goal. He was failing at it even as it was announced. He'll be pumping much more than 40 billion a month, I am sure of it.
But again, the language is such, that this coming deadline is a 'fiscal cliff'. It's most likely that there will be no cuts at all, they'll "avoid the disaster of the fiscal cliff", they'll prevent spending cuts.
Maybe there will be some tiny token cuts, I wouldn't even bet on that, but they are truly irrelevant, just like that rating agency. US debt is junk, just like Greece's debt was junk not only now or 2 years ago, but also 4 years ago and 6 years ago. It's just the market is so corrupted by the central banks and their policy of counterfeiting and setting fake interest rates and stealing property (that's what asset purchases mean when you counterfeit) that the system still kept going for a while probably on inertia only.
Will NASA face these cuts? Maybe. Maybe it will be ONLY NASA that will face these cuts. But most likely there won't be any cuts and even if they have some cuts, most likely there will be another 'round of stimulus' and NASA will get their nominal dollars back.
You can do with yourself as you wish. Rights are not applicable to relationship between individuals, only to relationship between an individual and the collective. Two individuals are not in an inherently unequal power position, collective is by definition much more powerful than an individual. An individual may be punished for acting in a way that is understood as a criminal offense. The collective cannot be punished in any meaningful manner. The rights are a barrier that is set to prevent the collective from abusing its power over an individual.
As to relationship between 2 individuals (who are at least supposed to be equal to each other under the law), their relationship is guided by written contract, by criminal code (this has nothing to do with rights, it only defines criminal acts), and possibly by the unwritten social rules of the time and place in question.
Is that all it takes to make someone personally very interesting? Either your standards are low or your life sheltered.
- it doesn't matter why, there needs to be no reason, there needs to be no purpose, there needs to be only interest and patience.
I am so happy that we are not in the same physical location right now, because I would definitely end up in jail, there is not even a question about it.
(/. moderation forces me to juggle these 2 accounts, otherwise I have to reply as an AC I don't want to).
Right, because mgmt which currently demands a ridiculous rate of return above the market
- you have two words there, that show your confusion.
One is 'currently' and the other is 'market'. Currently the inflation is over 11%, up to 15%, it varies. The management must have returns that are at least as high as inflation just to stay with it. That is specifically the problem with the money printing, which is the inflation that I am talking about.
The real interest rates in the market are sky high, they are nowhere near the zeroes, the artificial non-existent interest rates created by the Federal reserve machinations, buying of the Treasuries via the proxy-banks with counterfeit currency.
would do a 180 if returns were higher and maybe demand a lower return than the market
- Again, you don't understand the concept of a REAL interest rate vs NOMINAL interest rate.
he was living in a standard engineer's apartment in a housing block, under their normal conditions, and was actually paid by the USSR government.
- my grandmother was pushed back in the queue for a new apartment (she lived in a so called 'vremianka' - temporary accommodations, that means a shack with all amenities OUTSIDE the fucking house, and it was actually in the middle of a large industrial city with a million people, where many lived this way), so she was pushed back in the queue 3 times and waited for a total of 22 years before she got a 'scheduled' apartment, a 1 bedroom actually. Not bad, ha? In a capitalist country she could have bought herself a 1 bedroom in much less time than that just by working almost anywhere, and she wouldn't have to wait for 22 years, given the fact that in capitalist countries it was (still is) possible to get a loan, a mortgage.
So why was she pushed back into the queue? Oh, because the housing was built very slowly, but when it was built and she was ready to move in, 3 times there were circumstances, I remember 2 of them: 1 was that they brought in some families from Cuba and placed them there, because of the 'Cuban brothers' who were also Communists of-course, their gov't needed to be shown how well people are treated in USSR.
Another time was actually simpler than that, somebody with real connections to a local (regional) party leader wanted to have an apartment for their offspring. You think they had to wait for years for this?
Your former colleague, I wonder who got fucked and pushed back in the queue so that back in UK he could tell tails about the wonders of the Soviet planned economy.
--
Oh, and I don't even care much about that, I am much more angry with that former country for what it did to a bunch of relatives of mine, 7 of who got killed only on one side of the family because they had a farm and even hired help to do farming. On the other side of family, where a person owned a shoe factory and obviously it was stolen - nationalized. Another side of family, who actually interestingly enough had in their possession part of a forest and a river and even a village (yeah, they owned a village) in a beautiful place near Moscow. That part of family lost a number of people as well, who couldn't run away quickly enough.
So never mind housing accommodations. As to Thatcher, she inherited a situation, which was so dire, here is what the former PM (before she came to power) said about it:
(a rouble was worth more than a dollar at the time).
- I would like to qualify this statement with an explanation. NOBODY in Russia was allowed to deal in dollars OR gold. Nobody. Such deals were punishable by law with very lengthy prison sentences and confiscation of all private possessions, sometimes also by death.
Due to this, the black market for dollars (or any other foreign money that was called the 'valuta') was almost non-existent among the general public, it was of a very limited use.
Because of that fact only, the government was able to set an artificial, official exchange rate, that had NOTHING to do with the value of Soviet rubbles, nothing at all, the rubbles were printed by the gov't, trillions of rubbles per year. That's the reason everybody was paid similar salaries and similar pensions but there was nothing much to buy in the stores, because nobody really produces anything but everybody gets paid this nearly fixed amount of money, nobody wants to sell.
We had black markets for products and when people had access to foreign goods, they normally sold them inside the country for multiples of year salaries of general public.
Imagine buying a foreign stereo system, maybe 1000 rubbles, when the most of the salaries are in the range of 60-120 rubbles per month. Try and figure that out, how dis some people manage?
That's because even in the most totalitarian states some people manage, there is always division to those who can do something and those who can't. In case of USSR people were stealing quite a lot from their places of work (it was very profitable to be a store manager or a factory director or a farm director, but NOT because you produced to satisfy market demand, but because you had access to items that you could physically remove, steal and sell on a black market).
Piece of slimy pig waste you are. 1970s wasn't the worst in USSR history, do you know what it took to get to 1970s in USSR history, cocksucker? 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.
It is typical for an irrational position to be defended with fear and anger.
- I don't normally will it upon anybody, but I think now it would be a great teaching experience for you, to have the same history repeat in USA, and so when 80 years from the start it also collapses, because such things always collapse, and when your relatives are wasted, murdered actually in an equivalent of USSR 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, then 40 ears later, some despicable slime ball, who never actually knew anything in his life started theorizing on how much better it was, when it was the iron curtain, the iron fist and for the people, who later on had the terrible disadvantage to live in conditions that came out of the destruction of their former 'glory' of a country.
Anyone who thinks that life wasn't better in Russia in the 1970s eithe
- you are a pathetic individual, you shouldn't be called a human, you are slime.
Life in the 1970s in USSR? For who exactly? For the top party elite, yes. For the people in the concentration camps in the former USSR in 1970s? For the incarcerated in the mental institutions, because they were not in lockstep with the party in USSR in 1970s? For the young kids that were forced to march into Afghanistan in the late 1970s in the USSR?
For the people living on forver Soviet farms, resembling stone age villages in the 1970s (well, actually this part didn't change much since then).
Maybe it was for all the people whose dreams of becoming something more than just a fucking cog in that meat grinder?
I have no words to express my disgust with the slime like you.
Oh, man, oh, how sad, how sad, I can't express sadness enough, there is no such HTML tag unfortunately.
The people working for Indian space program are on government welfare, more precisely they are paid by the people whose heads will be bashed if they don't give up portion of their time, portion of their effort in life to run this program.
How sad and pathetic your comment is... and the moderation......
Private business prefers a stable predictable government, uncertainty delays investment
- there is no uncertainty, the people are certain that USA is done, it's destroyed, the US dollar is destroyed, the US bond is destroyed, the US economy is fake, the 1 Trillion dollar a year deficit for 20 years shows that US economy cannot produce. Gov't borrowing is a certainty, government growth is a certainty, class warfare is a certainty, more regulations is a certainty, there is nothing uncertain about it.
Uncertainty is the property of gov't changing laws, changing tax code, creating money supply on a whim, changing interest rates on a whim, all of it, all these things that are done by government prevent certainty.
Certainty is created by the free market setting prices on things, including price of money (interest rates). Certainty is in knowing that your purchasing power is not going to be destroyed, that your money is a hard equivalent of some measure, for example weight in gold.
So if you have a contract that states you will be paid 20 ounces of gold, the government cannot change the value of what you are getting, because it cannot print gold.
In fact government deadlocks is a much better situation for certainty, then government compromise. Compromise always leads to more spending, more laws, more regulations, more taxes.
Deadlock at least prevents this from going forward.
. For example, if the government operated factories they could reduce the trade deficit. I
- wrong.
Even if government operated factories it couldn't reduce the trade deficit. Back in USSR, where I was in fact born, the government operated every single factory, every single thing that was happening, every farm, every shipment lane, everything.
SO WHAT? Couldn't feed the people. Couldn't reduce the deficits. Couldn't compete in the global market with ANYBODY.
Government is absolutely, inherently incapable of doing anything productive that the market desires. That's an inherent property of government, because it has goals that are fundamentally opposite to the goals of the free market enterprise.
In a free market enterprise the businessmen are trying to make as much profit as possible, but this means cutting costs and increasing efficiencies.
NO GOVERNMENT OPERATES THIS WAY. Government is not about cutting efficiencies, it is about growing power. No government office manager wants to see his power diminished under any circumstances, he wants to see his power grow and his power cannot grow if his function is made more efficient and his office is reduced because of efficiencies.
Further: the government is not in a business of satisfying customer demand, never was, never will be, cannot do it.
Cannot do it. It has never been done and it will never be done. Government cannot satisfy customer demand, government does not create new products, does not think of new services that people want to pay for without being COERCED into any of it.
Government operates on the principle of collecting taxes, which is NOT a VOLUNTARY arrangement. Nobody who buys iPhones buys them under the barrel of a gun.
So you think somebody the specific early men that were sitting there, rubbing some sticks together were forced into that program by the leader of their tribe?
You there, instead of going hunting and gathering, so you can have something to eat and some new skins for protection against the elements and instead of looking for clean water, you are going to be sitting there, rubbing sticks together.
If you don't, I'll bash your head with this stone until either you start rubbing the sticks or the sparks from your eyes light up this wood.
Yes, but Google is much bigger..... it can do Santorum in a scalable, sustainable, timeless manner that I don't think you can appreciate well enough just yet.
It's not a 'conspiracy theory' to say that government prevents companies from going IPO without a process that prevent general public from investing in the companies in their early stages, it's a fact.
You can't go IPO before you comply with all the regulations, you can't start a company and go IPO within a short period of time, you are forced to search for funding with private investors, with banks, with VCs.
I never said it was a conspiracy, I said that the problem is the consequence of gov't regulations.
Kickstarter is a free market attempt at solving this problem, I wonder how much time goes by, before gov't steps in and applies a bunch of regulations to it, so people can't use it for initial funding.
Google's IPO could be a success and it could be a failure, it's a crap shoot, a gamble. Google's IPO happened in 2004 while the company formed in 1998.
That's 6 years between the time that Brin and Page actually really needed money and the time they used IPO to raise shit ton of money. Yes, Google did a good job with earning, but it doesn't have anything to do with my argument, which is that general public wasn't allowed to participate in the early financing of the company through IPO.
Your comment shows lack of understanding of the underlying point.
Slashdot Mirror
So people want to be able to buy something, government says: you can't. This always leads to black markets.
Inflation (money printing) in Argentina is high, their prices are going up 24% per year, which is the consequence of high inflation. Instead of stopping the inflation (stopping the money printing), the government wants to stop people from saving their purchasing power, however they do it. Apparently to the people of Argentina USD seem to be more attractive then their own currency.
In USA inflation is also high, 11-15%, but prices are not going up as quickly as in Argentina, because other countries are still willing to absorb the new dollars and exchange their goods for them, so prices are going up in other countries, who respond with their own inflation, they print their own currencies in response to USA printing and they are willing so far to exchange their own productivity (products they manufacture and make) for US dollars. This pushes prices up for those productive nations and this still acts as a price buffer for USA.
But look at this obvious response by government of Argentina: it's not that the government is plainly wrong in what it is doing, destroying the currency of the people.
The government says: it is the people, who are wrong for wanting to save their own savings, their purchasing power. Let's take the purchasing power away from the people. What it means is that the government wants to keep its high levels of spending but cannot or will not raise taxes, so it wants to steal from people. Printing money is theft of productivity and it's most obvious to the people when their prices go up.
Of-course very few people can understand the link between their prices going up and their government printing the currency, it's not a link that is necessarily very obvious directly to people, that's because people are not taught economics and the version of economics that they are taught is really not economics, it's propaganda that allows the government elite to keep people in check by denying them the real understanding of what is going on.
What is happening in Argentina is nothing new. Many countries did the same thing - printed money, set exchange controls, price controls, all it ever does is it creates black markets and very quickly creates very wide separation onto the poor and rich, even among people that maybe didn't have that huge of a separation before the gov't actions.
The newly printed money does not equal wealth. The amount of production stays the same (or it is decreased because people move their savings somewhere else and this means moving production somewhere else, so the country suffers decrease of productivity and increase of money supply), so the new money simply ends up bidding up prices for the existing assets and goods.
This is why inflation (money printing) hurts the poor much more than the wealthy, because the poor live on various fixed incomes, they are getting less and less with every check, be it a salary or a dividend or a pension check, whatever.
The wealthy end up bidding up prices for existing assets. Everything becomes a fight for a fixed or a decreasing pie, the pie is not growing. Only savings and production grows the pie, money printing destroys savings and productivity and re-allocates the pie from middle and poor to the top.
That's why there is a higher and higher wealth disparity, it's not because the 1% is stealing something, it's because the government is stealing something, the government is stealing purchasing power, it's destroying the savings, productivity, it's destroying the currency.
Of-course as people try to avoid their purchasing power from being destroyed by the government, the government sees this as something to be prevented, so it sets exchange controls, currency controls, wage and price controls. Minimum wage is just an attempt to hide levels of inflation, like many other things that gov't does it backfires and creates more unemployment and dependency and decreases productivity and standa
Back in the eighties I spent 6 years in Udachny (see the nick?) What are and were near 20,000 people doing so far north? Why was there an underground nuclear explosion there? Diamonds. For the longest time that place supplied 80% of Soviet and then Russian diamonds. Udachny is the deepest open diamond mine at 610 meters. The largest diamond in Russia was found there on the 23 of December 1980. It was 48x36x25 mm, at 342.5ct, it was very clear, yellow stone.
Some pictures.
Russia is full of diamonds, but mostly they are small, used to make drill bits, parts of machines.
I thought I typed /. but it looks like I am on playboy letters to the editor section, and it's not very good.
I could tell you stories about office situations like that but that's the thing, I don't think people who have stories to tell actually want to tell them to anybody, the world is too small.
Yeah, American "school lag" does not matter, but it doesn't matter for a different reason. It doesn't matter because education is irrelevant in USA, there is no new manufacturing, old manufacturing is leaving. The people who care about their kids will send them to private schools and probably those kids will not have a 'lag' or it will be a smaller 'lag' and kids that are not sent to private schools are on a lower socio-economic status, probably would have been factory workers in the past, but since today there are no factories, they'll end up serving fries and in other various service sector jobs until the service sector economy melts down and once it does, it won't matter at all what your education was in the past life.
The only thing that will matter in the new life is how well you are able to survive in really harsh economic conditions, no jobs, no money. Does education lag matter in those conditions? Unlikely.
Maybe programming should be defined first. I am almost certain that excluding people with various mental and cognitive problems, any person can put together a simple flow chart, with conditions in it (doesn't have to have loops, but any non-trivial problem sketched with a flow chart will likely have a loop or two, where a condition is used to split the next step into path A and path B).
However if we are talking about something else, like being able to hold a large piece of application in one's head while coming up with solutions to the problems, designing algorithms, working with fairly complex data structures, maybe working on with low level stuff, memory management, timing issues, multi threading, communications between components and between computers. Maybe in that case not everybody can become a programmer, it takes persistence, it takes good enough memory of the right kind, it takes ability to concentrate on a problem for hours at a time, it takes ability to be by yourself for an extended time period.
I don't think everybody can be a civil engineer for example for similar reasons.
Not everybody can be a doctor, it takes a different level of patience and ability to remember things that surpasses many people's abilities I think.
Not everybody can be a good 100 meter sprinter for obvious reasons.
Not everybody can be a psychiatrist.
Not everybody can be a kindergarten teacher.
etc., all of these things take a different mind set and different levels of patience, etc.
Neither party really tries to spend more or less than the other.
- what you are really saying is that neither party touches the expenses that are added by the other party. Yeah, that's a fair statement. They have a deal, they have their status quo, the 'compromise'. The compromise is that they'll get their special interests covered and will not fight each other's special interests all while the tax payers (and generally, people in the economy) are being slaughtered (figuratively speaking for now).
Spending is going to grow under Obama, Bernanke has already cast his vote (so it's most likely Obama for another term, especially given the stupid road that Romney took, trying to out-Democrat the Democrats)..
This sequestration is very unlikely to take place. Don't forget why the idea even exists in the first place, that's because Rs and Ds couldn't agree what to cut and in order to appease the rating agency in question, there was the idea that there would be automatic cuts.
However just listen to the news cycle, listen to the talking heads, they are almost all singing the same tune: this is a coming 'fiscal cliff', what a disaster.
The real disaster is in NOT cutting the spending, that's the point. That's the promise by the rating agency (and really, who gives a shit what the bought political rating agencies rate US debt at? It's junk, it's been junk for a long time now).
Look at the 10 year bond, the price went down as Bernanke announced QE3. That's not what normally happened, normally traders would enter in order to front run the sale to the Fed, but not this time.
Bernanke's 40 billion a month will go to asset purchases to try and re-inflate the property and equity bubbles again, that's his goal. He was failing at it even as it was announced. He'll be pumping much more than 40 billion a month, I am sure of it.
But again, the language is such, that this coming deadline is a 'fiscal cliff'. It's most likely that there will be no cuts at all, they'll "avoid the disaster of the fiscal cliff", they'll prevent spending cuts.
Maybe there will be some tiny token cuts, I wouldn't even bet on that, but they are truly irrelevant, just like that rating agency. US debt is junk, just like Greece's debt was junk not only now or 2 years ago, but also 4 years ago and 6 years ago. It's just the market is so corrupted by the central banks and their policy of counterfeiting and setting fake interest rates and stealing property (that's what asset purchases mean when you counterfeit) that the system still kept going for a while probably on inertia only.
Will NASA face these cuts? Maybe. Maybe it will be ONLY NASA that will face these cuts. But most likely there won't be any cuts and even if they have some cuts, most likely there will be another 'round of stimulus' and NASA will get their nominal dollars back.
What do you mean, who? /. moderators get to decide
You can do with yourself as you wish. Rights are not applicable to relationship between individuals, only to relationship between an individual and the collective. Two individuals are not in an inherently unequal power position, collective is by definition much more powerful than an individual. An individual may be punished for acting in a way that is understood as a criminal offense. The collective cannot be punished in any meaningful manner. The rights are a barrier that is set to prevent the collective from abusing its power over an individual.
As to relationship between 2 individuals (who are at least supposed to be equal to each other under the law), their relationship is guided by written contract, by criminal code (this has nothing to do with rights, it only defines criminal acts), and possibly by the unwritten social rules of the time and place in question.
Is that all it takes to make someone personally very interesting? Either your standards are low or your life sheltered.
- it doesn't matter why, there needs to be no reason, there needs to be no purpose, there needs to be only interest and patience.
Yeah, names. Like /.
http:///..com gotcha.
I am so happy that we are not in the same physical location right now, because I would definitely end up in jail, there is not even a question about it.
(/. moderation forces me to juggle these 2 accounts, otherwise I have to reply as an AC I don't want to).
Right, because mgmt which currently demands a ridiculous rate of return above the market
- you have two words there, that show your confusion.
One is 'currently' and the other is 'market'. Currently the inflation is over 11%, up to 15%, it varies. The management must have returns that are at least as high as inflation just to stay with it. That is specifically the problem with the money printing, which is the inflation that I am talking about.
The real interest rates in the market are sky high, they are nowhere near the zeroes, the artificial non-existent interest rates created by the Federal reserve machinations, buying of the Treasuries via the proxy-banks with counterfeit currency.
would do a 180 if returns were higher and maybe demand a lower return than the market
- Again, you don't understand the concept of a REAL interest rate vs NOMINAL interest rate.
1970s wasn't the worst in USSR history,
Of course. Just as it took Victorian Britain,
Victorian Britain, the USSR history.
Everything I said still applies, you are what you are.
he was living in a standard engineer's apartment in a housing block, under their normal conditions, and was actually paid by the USSR government.
- my grandmother was pushed back in the queue for a new apartment (she lived in a so called 'vremianka' - temporary accommodations, that means a shack with all amenities OUTSIDE the fucking house, and it was actually in the middle of a large industrial city with a million people, where many lived this way), so she was pushed back in the queue 3 times and waited for a total of 22 years before she got a 'scheduled' apartment, a 1 bedroom actually. Not bad, ha? In a capitalist country she could have bought herself a 1 bedroom in much less time than that just by working almost anywhere, and she wouldn't have to wait for 22 years, given the fact that in capitalist countries it was (still is) possible to get a loan, a mortgage.
So why was she pushed back into the queue? Oh, because the housing was built very slowly, but when it was built and she was ready to move in, 3 times there were circumstances, I remember 2 of them: 1 was that they brought in some families from Cuba and placed them there, because of the 'Cuban brothers' who were also Communists of-course, their gov't needed to be shown how well people are treated in USSR.
Another time was actually simpler than that, somebody with real connections to a local (regional) party leader wanted to have an apartment for their offspring. You think they had to wait for years for this?
Your former colleague, I wonder who got fucked and pushed back in the queue so that back in UK he could tell tails about the wonders of the Soviet planned economy.
--
Oh, and I don't even care much about that, I am much more angry with that former country for what it did to a bunch of relatives of mine, 7 of who got killed only on one side of the family because they had a farm and even hired help to do farming. On the other side of family, where a person owned a shoe factory and obviously it was stolen - nationalized. Another side of family, who actually interestingly enough had in their possession part of a forest and a river and even a village (yeah, they owned a village) in a beautiful place near Moscow. That part of family lost a number of people as well, who couldn't run away quickly enough.
So never mind housing accommodations. As to Thatcher, she inherited a situation, which was so dire, here is what the former PM (before she came to power) said about it:
We used to think you could spend your way out of recession and increase employment by boosting government spending, I tell you, in all candour, that that option no longer exists. And in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion⦠by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next stepâ¦
That was by a former UK PM, James Callaghan, at the 1976 Labour Party conference.
(a rouble was worth more than a dollar at the time).
- I would like to qualify this statement with an explanation. NOBODY in Russia was allowed to deal in dollars OR gold. Nobody. Such deals were punishable by law with very lengthy prison sentences and confiscation of all private possessions, sometimes also by death.
Due to this, the black market for dollars (or any other foreign money that was called the 'valuta') was almost non-existent among the general public, it was of a very limited use.
Because of that fact only, the government was able to set an artificial, official exchange rate, that had NOTHING to do with the value of Soviet rubbles, nothing at all, the rubbles were printed by the gov't, trillions of rubbles per year. That's the reason everybody was paid similar salaries and similar pensions but there was nothing much to buy in the stores, because nobody really produces anything but everybody gets paid this nearly fixed amount of money, nobody wants to sell.
We had black markets for products and when people had access to foreign goods, they normally sold them inside the country for multiples of year salaries of general public.
Imagine buying a foreign stereo system, maybe 1000 rubbles, when the most of the salaries are in the range of 60-120 rubbles per month. Try and figure that out, how dis some people manage?
That's because even in the most totalitarian states some people manage, there is always division to those who can do something and those who can't. In case of USSR people were stealing quite a lot from their places of work (it was very profitable to be a store manager or a factory director or a farm director, but NOT because you produced to satisfy market demand, but because you had access to items that you could physically remove, steal and sell on a black market).
Piece of slimy pig waste you are. 1970s wasn't the worst in USSR history, do you know what it took to get to 1970s in USSR history, cocksucker? 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.
It is typical for an irrational position to be defended with fear and anger.
- I don't normally will it upon anybody, but I think now it would be a great teaching experience for you, to have the same history repeat in USA, and so when 80 years from the start it also collapses, because such things always collapse, and when your relatives are wasted, murdered actually in an equivalent of USSR 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, then 40 ears later, some despicable slime ball, who never actually knew anything in his life started theorizing on how much better it was, when it was the iron curtain, the iron fist and for the people, who later on had the terrible disadvantage to live in conditions that came out of the destruction of their former 'glory' of a country.
Your brains a mush.
Anyone who thinks that life wasn't better in Russia in the 1970s eithe
- you are a pathetic individual, you shouldn't be called a human, you are slime.
Life in the 1970s in USSR? For who exactly? For the top party elite, yes. For the people in the concentration camps in the former USSR in 1970s? For the incarcerated in the mental institutions, because they were not in lockstep with the party in USSR in 1970s? For the young kids that were forced to march into Afghanistan in the late 1970s in the USSR?
For the people living on forver Soviet farms, resembling stone age villages in the 1970s (well, actually this part didn't change much since then).
Maybe it was for all the people whose dreams of becoming something more than just a fucking cog in that meat grinder?
I have no words to express my disgust with the slime like you.
Saying that something that is even known as 'Anonymous' can 'claim responsibility' makes no sense.
A group, like the IRA can claim responsibility. The Anonymous can try and take credit.
Oh, man, oh, how sad, how sad, I can't express sadness enough, there is no such HTML tag unfortunately.
The people working for Indian space program are on government welfare, more precisely they are paid by the people whose heads will be bashed if they don't give up portion of their time, portion of their effort in life to run this program.
How sad and pathetic your comment is... and the moderation......
Private business prefers a stable predictable government, uncertainty delays investment
- there is no uncertainty, the people are certain that USA is done, it's destroyed, the US dollar is destroyed, the US bond is destroyed, the US economy is fake, the 1 Trillion dollar a year deficit for 20 years shows that US economy cannot produce. Gov't borrowing is a certainty, government growth is a certainty, class warfare is a certainty, more regulations is a certainty, there is nothing uncertain about it.
Uncertainty is the property of gov't changing laws, changing tax code, creating money supply on a whim, changing interest rates on a whim, all of it, all these things that are done by government prevent certainty.
Certainty is created by the free market setting prices on things, including price of money (interest rates). Certainty is in knowing that your purchasing power is not going to be destroyed, that your money is a hard equivalent of some measure, for example weight in gold.
So if you have a contract that states you will be paid 20 ounces of gold, the government cannot change the value of what you are getting, because it cannot print gold.
In fact government deadlocks is a much better situation for certainty, then government compromise. Compromise always leads to more spending, more laws, more regulations, more taxes.
Deadlock at least prevents this from going forward.
. For example, if the government operated factories they could reduce the trade deficit. I
- wrong.
Even if government operated factories it couldn't reduce the trade deficit. Back in USSR, where I was in fact born, the government operated every single factory, every single thing that was happening, every farm, every shipment lane, everything.
SO WHAT? Couldn't feed the people. Couldn't reduce the deficits. Couldn't compete in the global market with ANYBODY.
Government is absolutely, inherently incapable of doing anything productive that the market desires. That's an inherent property of government, because it has goals that are fundamentally opposite to the goals of the free market enterprise.
In a free market enterprise the businessmen are trying to make as much profit as possible, but this means cutting costs and increasing efficiencies.
NO GOVERNMENT OPERATES THIS WAY. Government is not about cutting efficiencies, it is about growing power. No government office manager wants to see his power diminished under any circumstances, he wants to see his power grow and his power cannot grow if his function is made more efficient and his office is reduced because of efficiencies.
Further: the government is not in a business of satisfying customer demand, never was, never will be, cannot do it.
Cannot do it. It has never been done and it will never be done. Government cannot satisfy customer demand, government does not create new products, does not think of new services that people want to pay for without being COERCED into any of it.
Government operates on the principle of collecting taxes, which is NOT a VOLUNTARY arrangement. Nobody who buys iPhones buys them under the barrel of a gun.
So you think somebody the specific early men that were sitting there, rubbing some sticks together were forced into that program by the leader of their tribe?
You there, instead of going hunting and gathering, so you can have something to eat and some new skins for protection against the elements and instead of looking for clean water, you are going to be sitting there, rubbing sticks together.
If you don't, I'll bash your head with this stone until either you start rubbing the sticks or the sparks from your eyes light up this wood.
Is that your idea?
Yes, but Google is much bigger..... it can do Santorum in a scalable, sustainable, timeless manner that I don't think you can appreciate well enough just yet.
Be careful, jellie (949898), you don't want Google to go Santorum on your ass.
Google should rethink their position. They should know that when and/or if they break European libel laws, then they absolutely
- oh, come on, then they absolutely........ go berserk? fall apart? call the escort service and ask for Bettina Wulff services?
What?
Too easy. He should have to go through analog logic to figure it out when his program blows because of a vacuum tube failure.
It's not a 'conspiracy theory' to say that government prevents companies from going IPO without a process that prevent general public from investing in the companies in their early stages, it's a fact.
You can't go IPO before you comply with all the regulations, you can't start a company and go IPO within a short period of time, you are forced to search for funding with private investors, with banks, with VCs.
I never said it was a conspiracy, I said that the problem is the consequence of gov't regulations.
Kickstarter is a free market attempt at solving this problem, I wonder how much time goes by, before gov't steps in and applies a bunch of regulations to it, so people can't use it for initial funding.
Google's IPO could be a success and it could be a failure, it's a crap shoot, a gamble. Google's IPO happened in 2004 while the company formed in 1998.
That's 6 years between the time that Brin and Page actually really needed money and the time they used IPO to raise shit ton of money. Yes, Google did a good job with earning, but it doesn't have anything to do with my argument, which is that general public wasn't allowed to participate in the early financing of the company through IPO.
Your comment shows lack of understanding of the underlying point.