Regulation is not central planning, it is an alarm system.
Banks do something idiotic: a bell rings somewhere, the banks are fined heavily, their actions corrected, and then it is business as usual.
San limits are imposed in how they work, new financial products are properly scrutinized before allowing them to be traded, international cooperation ensures that everybody knows when these instruments become available with a list of perceived strengths and weaknesses.
There are many things that can be done that have absolutely nothing to do with central planning.
Honestly, what does SOX have *anything* to do with the current financial crisis?
The regulations that kept separated consumer banking from financial banking (as, guess what, a consequence of the Great Depression) were dismantled by the NeoCons.
Also banking authorities had no idea (admitted by Greenspan and in the UK by the head of the Bank of England) what many of the financial instruments based in bad mortgages were, or how it came that these things could be traded several times without any real transmission of wealth.
All the experts say that lack of regulation, not an excess of it, is the governments' (UK,US) most important contributing factor to this unholy mess.
How you are arriving to the conclusion that excessive regulation was a problem is a mystery in par with the best ones Sherlock Holmes had to undo.
Capitalism may be the best economic model (or perhaps is the least bad one, which would be fitting since it normally couples with democratic societies) but that does not mean it is perfect, the simple fact is that the bastards with all their shiny University Diplomas from exclusive universities forgot about the most basic rules of banking or (most damning: and) tried to be too clever for their (and our) own good.
They were so good at creating their financial shit that they bought that same shit from other banks. Really, read about it, people that knew about the securitazation of mortgages actually bought some of them from other banks...
In developed countries the worst that we will see is 1 in 10 people out of work (note, not necessarily broke), in some countries like Germany the government pays a generous unemployment check to keep skilled people on their jobs for as long as possible. Similar measures exist in other rich countries with the most notable exceptions of the US and UK amongst rich countries, whose response is to impoverish people before helping them.
So everybody? Nah, but lets not allow facts get in the way of a very good lie.
Nobody in the US and other Western countries live like many Chinese live nowadays.
Many *did* live like that or worse some time in the past (USians very often forget the nature of their apartheid society until quite recently, but let that one pass, and refer to factory conditions in the XIX century. You had riots, killed workers, the full lot).
So capitalism *raised* the living conditions of all those countries in an era where this could not be attributed to colonialism any more.
Now it is doing the same for China, which has been growing at an staggering 8% a year for the best part of the last 20 years, in coincidence with China embracing the capitalist economic model.
But here you are, saying that economic growth in China, contrary to all economic and anecdotal evidence, is actually making people poorer.
Sometimes I just wonder in which alternative Universe some people live...
Well, gee, thanks mate. Now those people in China will go back to a backwater Chinese province to face destitution.
Buy that fucking keyboard (it is what you are supposed to do as an intelligent economic agent in capitalism) and then join a human rights organization to continue to pester the Chinese government into taking working conditions seriously.
During wars countries involved normally see an economic contraction.
The only silent case of the opposite is the US: because its geographical location its infrastructure has not been damaged during a war. A taster of what it would be for the US to be actually attacked was 9/11: I didn't see the US economy boom after that (GDP growth fell from almost 4% in 2000 to less than 1% in 2001. And this was a single attack. Imagine the amount of damage countries whose infrastructure is hit suffer).
Another silent case we have is the Soviet Block, they never became an industrial powerhouse, not even an agricultural one, after WWII.
The USSR was pretty much bankrupt by trying to match US's spending the in military, in spite that was the most damaged country in WWII and the country that most contributed to the Allied War effort.
50 years ago Chinese were starving to death under the crazied leadership of a charismatic leader.
30 years ago there was no prognosis whatsoever that private enterprise would ever enter China.
20 years ago China was nowhere to be seen as an industrial and manufacturing power.
Now peasants, that would otherwise be jobless, have a job that pays a relatively decent wage (for Chinese standards). The conditions are unpalatable for certain, but this is progress. Once people get more money they will look at employers and make sure they are not abusive.
Certainly Western companies can help with making working conditions better, but to forget where China is coming from is uncultured to be frank.
"The reason Americans lost all the manufacturing job to China was because their government was willing to say, "Fuck worker safety - we can get that work done for $0.40 an hour. You can charge the consumers the same price and make more profit!"
Try corporations, the government *and* consumers.
Or what? Are you seriously suggesting that people did not have an inkling about the bad working conditions necessary to make many items in supermarkets much cheaper?
This was just joyful curiosity, so the plugin has been removed now, I emailed the website asking why something I can do in YouTube can't be done on their website.
Slashdot Mirror
Dream on ...
Show me your balance sheet.
When it is in the black then we can talk.
My elderly mother (hi mum) can do all that (Ubuntu), she was computer illiterate until her early sixties.
I know it is not exactly the same, the only thing I am saying is that your computer may be misconfigured somehow.
Or in any other currency that is perceived as to be stable.
In Zimbabwe (your example) people trade using hard currecny.
The same would happen in the world economy if the US dollar became the world's Zimbabwean currency...
And if the government would not allow it, your currency would become monopoly money.
USians: you are a bunch of wackos...
The more the merrier.
Anything else is a cop-out.
1.- Your country is fucked up.
2.- Your business model is a joke.
3,- All of the above.
You keep erecting those nice strawmen...
Regulation is not central planning, it is an alarm system.
Banks do something idiotic: a bell rings somewhere, the banks are fined heavily, their actions corrected, and then it is business as usual.
San limits are imposed in how they work, new financial products are properly scrutinized before allowing them to be traded, international cooperation ensures that everybody knows when these instruments become available with a list of perceived strengths and weaknesses.
There are many things that can be done that have absolutely nothing to do with central planning.
Honestly, what does SOX have *anything* to do with the current financial crisis?
The regulations that kept separated consumer banking from financial banking (as, guess what, a consequence of the Great Depression) were dismantled by the NeoCons.
Also banking authorities had no idea (admitted by Greenspan and in the UK by the head of the Bank of England) what many of the financial instruments based in bad mortgages were, or how it came that these things could be traded several times without any real transmission of wealth.
All the experts say that lack of regulation, not an excess of it, is the governments' (UK,US) most important contributing factor to this unholy mess.
How you are arriving to the conclusion that excessive regulation was a problem is a mystery in par with the best ones Sherlock Holmes had to undo.
Capitalism may be the best economic model (or perhaps is the least bad one, which would be fitting since it normally couples with democratic societies) but that does not mean it is perfect, the simple fact is that the bastards with all their shiny University Diplomas from exclusive universities forgot about the most basic rules of banking or (most damning: and) tried to be too clever for their (and our) own good.
They were so good at creating their financial shit that they bought that same shit from other banks. Really, read about it, people that knew about the securitazation of mortgages actually bought some of them from other banks ...
In developed countries the worst that we will see is 1 in 10 people out of work (note, not necessarily broke), in some countries like Germany the government pays a generous unemployment check to keep skilled people on their jobs for as long as possible. Similar measures exist in other rich countries with the most notable exceptions of the US and UK amongst rich countries, whose response is to impoverish people before helping them.
So everybody? Nah, but lets not allow facts get in the way of a very good lie.
Nobody in the US and other Western countries live like many Chinese live nowadays.
Many *did* live like that or worse some time in the past (USians very often forget the nature of their apartheid society until quite recently, but let that one pass, and refer to factory conditions in the XIX century. You had riots, killed workers, the full lot).
So capitalism *raised* the living conditions of all those countries in an era where this could not be attributed to colonialism any more.
Now it is doing the same for China, which has been growing at an staggering 8% a year for the best part of the last 20 years, in coincidence with China embracing the capitalist economic model.
But here you are, saying that economic growth in China, contrary to all economic and anecdotal evidence, is actually making people poorer.
Sometimes I just wonder in which alternative Universe some people live...
... because the patrioterism self parodies itself for all to see.
Hunting gathering is hard, thankless and difficult work.
There is a reason why hunter-gatherer societies are generally primitive: they had precious little time to do anything else.
So you did not buy a cheap keyboard?
Well, gee, thanks mate. Now those people in China will go back to a backwater Chinese province to face destitution.
Buy that fucking keyboard (it is what you are supposed to do as an intelligent economic agent in capitalism) and then join a human rights organization to continue to pester the Chinese government into taking working conditions seriously.
The US is perhaps the only country in the world that does not commemorate the Chicago Martyrs the 1st of May....
Anybody that has walked today's African streets in stabler countries knows the Chinese are there already.
Obviously you don't understand the hardship of working in a rice paddy...
During wars countries involved normally see an economic contraction.
The only silent case of the opposite is the US: because its geographical location its infrastructure has not been damaged during a war. A taster of what it would be for the US to be actually attacked was 9/11: I didn't see the US economy boom after that (GDP growth fell from almost 4% in 2000 to less than 1% in 2001. And this was a single attack. Imagine the amount of damage countries whose infrastructure is hit suffer).
Another silent case we have is the Soviet Block, they never became an industrial powerhouse, not even an agricultural one, after WWII.
The USSR was pretty much bankrupt by trying to match US's spending the in military, in spite that was the most damaged country in WWII and the country that most contributed to the Allied War effort.
50 years ago Chinese were starving to death under the crazied leadership of a charismatic leader.
30 years ago there was no prognosis whatsoever that private enterprise would ever enter China.
20 years ago China was nowhere to be seen as an industrial and manufacturing power.
Now peasants, that would otherwise be jobless, have a job that pays a relatively decent wage (for Chinese standards). The conditions are unpalatable for certain, but this is progress. Once people get more money they will look at employers and make sure they are not abusive.
Certainly Western companies can help with making working conditions better, but to forget where China is coming from is uncultured to be frank.
"The reason Americans lost all the manufacturing job to China was because their government was willing to say, "Fuck worker safety - we can get that work done for $0.40 an hour. You can charge the consumers the same price and make more profit!"
Try corporations, the government *and* consumers.
Or what? Are you seriously suggesting that people did not have an inkling about the bad working conditions necessary to make many items in supermarkets much cheaper?
That way we can film it and post it in YouTube!
Be careful though I've got a cat who is a wire chewer so you may just be adding another cable destroyer to the mix.
It comes to show you can't trust anybody nowadays.
Sad state of affairs ...
Tried with http://www.classicaltv.com/
Didn't work.
This was just joyful curiosity, so the plugin has been removed now, I emailed the website asking why something I can do in YouTube can't be done on their website.
I await with interest their answer ....