The entire American capitalist system is predicated on the idea that workers don't have the freedom to just leave their jobs, no matter how bad the conditions.
Not as much as the European system. After all, in places like Germany, you keep your workplace protections only if you don't change jobs. As a result, workers don't change jobs anywhere near as frequently as in the US, and long term unemployment is generally also much higher than in the US.
This is maintained by a careful system of salary collusion, artificial means of keeping wages stagnant and low (using H1B's and outsourcing, among other methods), and union busting.
That's an ironic statement, since national salary collusion and stagnant and low wages are a hallmark of other nations (like Europe). Of course, "unions" are widespread there, but they have simply been subverted to serve those objectives.
You can't fault them for selling debts on and pretending that those debts would never have to be paid?
There was no "pretense" involved; both buyers and sellers believed the risk estimates to be about right, otherwise they wouldn't have made the transaction. Furthermore, if the risk estimates were wrong, it was the responsibility of the buyers to discover that, not of the seller. After all, in all these transactions, both buyers and sellers were financial experts.
that businesses that nearly brought down the world economy should be allowed to continue doing stupid stuff
It wasn't the businesses that "brought down the world economy", it was governments, through careless investments, careless assumption of risk, and through bailouts. In a free market, none of this crap would have happened.
What's your plan. No regulation at all? I'm sure that wouldn't result in anyone being robbed.
I'm sure some percentage of people would lose their money; stupid people who make unwise choices. Hopefully, they would learn from that. Right now, stupid people can make unwise choices and people who make good choices have to bail them out, over and over again. That's wrong.
The French privatised their publicly owned banks and deregulated the rest in 1987 and this led, as did the conversion of building societies to banks in the UK, to more reckless lending.
No doubt it did. Privatization of public assets is an intrinsically corrupt process, and privatization and deregulation usually are incomplete and don't result in a free market, but a crony capitalist system. That is, once you have nationalized banks and industries, getting back to a free market is extremely hard. That's not a fault of free markets.
What citation did you provide to back up your European arguments?
This follows from the tightly regulated European banking sector, its high degree of public ownership in countries like Germany, and the exposure of public and government-regulated pension funds, which are the norm in European countries. That is, most of the people who bought and sold this debt were all under government control. You can verify that for yourself for the countries of your choice.
All I saw was a badly edited video talking about how the Democrats destroyed America.
If you think that was "badly edited" you don't understand how outrageous the statements by those Democrats were, and how corrupt people like Raines were.
Ah so even though the TFA is about the Right, you felt the need to invent some connection to the other side to try and deflect the damage?
Correct. I'm pointing out that conservatives and progressives are largely interchangeable in their tactics and arguments.
Don't worry, this a fairly standard tactic among ideologues who can't face up to reality. We're quite familiar with it.
Of course you are familiar with it, bigoted, uninformed partisan that you have shown yourself to be on numerous occasions. Thanks for reminding everybody.
Gravitation is described by Einstein's non-linear field equations with singularities.
Quantum mechanics yields the best experimental predictions of any theory, but unfortunately is not consistent with relativity.
Inertial mass may be related to Unruh radiation.
Mass may come from the Higgs boson
Physicists can't even agree whether a simple metal cone with some radiation in it is actually producing thrust or not in a repeatable experiment.
It's amazing that given this sorry state of physics, so many physicists have the boldness to make definitive statements about anything concerning gravitation, mass, or reactionless drives. Guys, get your house in order and get your theories cleaned up.
I'm sure if he'd been talking about the sovereign debt crisis he would've used the words sovereign and debt instead of banking.
And if you go back, you'll see that my original statement was true whichever crisis he was referring to. You then asked for a citation and I gave one. Now I have given the other. What else do you need?
the banks creating their exotic financial instruments
I don't see how you can fault them for that. Financial experts created these instruments, and financial experts bought them. Both buyers and sellers were using the same faulty economic theory. Regulators come from the same pool of financial experts and would have shared the same erroneous beliefs about risk.
From what I can see, it was government deregulation that allowed the German (and French) banks to make riskier investments. French banks were privatised to that end. Again, it was the fault of everyone involved that this escalated.
When the French government bails out private banks to the tune of EU 360 bn, that's not deregulation or privatization, that is crony capitalism. The fault there is the bailout, not the banks. Without the bailout, the fools on either side of those investments would be bankrupt and wouldn't have been able to repeat this stupidity again, which I guarantee they are going to do.
Furthermore, in a free market, no bank is "too big to fail". The reason these banks are "too big to fail" is because of massive barriers to entry into the financial sector, and because governments themselves have built economic fictions and promises around our banking and financial institutions. That is, political promises rely on certain performance from the financial sector, and if the financial sector doesn't deliver, the government steps in and makes it appear that it did by filling the gaps with tax dollars.
I'm mystified as to why you think the UK bailed everyone out.
I wasn't referring to the financial crisis per se but the EU budget. Without the large net contributions of the UK and Germany, the EU budget is in deep trouble.
Sure, but Andrew Jackson was not one of the people working to end slavery.
So? I wasn't commenting on Jackson, I was commenting on irving47's racist rant.
He belongs on the $20 bill as much as Mussolini belongs on the 20 euro bill
Well, Europeans did the smart thing for once and didn't put any people on euro bills. And the US should do the same.
(And if we are going to put people on money, it should be American scientists and engineers, not activists and politicians, no matter how worthy their cause.)
I'm not sure I see the advantage of this over just putting a horizontal case (maybe even a 1U or 2U enclosure with a 90 degree connector for the graphics card) on top of a regular desk.
PC fans frequently point against the wall, without causing fire. PC exhaust isn't normally hot, and walls, being made mostly of gypsum, aren't normally flammable.
Both Firefox and Chrome support SOCKS, which is just as good as VPN for web browsing and a lot easier to set up (most hosting accounts effectively include it as part of SSH service).
Also, all experiments start with a hypothesis; that does not imply that experimental results that falsify the hypothesis are considered a "waste"
The hypothesis is that "C causes D" (climate change causes particular damage). Falsifying that hypothesis doesn't falsify the hypothesis that climate change is occurring.
Except for the other sources of funding I mentioned. The government is not the only entity with money. There's no shortage of researchers on corporate payrolls, too.
For academic researchers, to go onto corporate payrolls is considered a failure, so they are strongly incentivized only to pursue government grant funding. Furthermore, once they are on corporate payrolls, you discount their findings as biased.
No argument there either. But to date the prime examples of such in this issue have been to suppress the science, when scientists found evidence of AGW.
The prime examples throughout history of the misuse of science in government have been that there was a firmly established scientific "consensus" for decades before people revised their ideas, often causing grave harm to people in the process.
Also agreed. But that's a separate issue. The science informs the policies but does not dictate them.
In order to adopt meaningful climate change policies, you need to establish (1) that climate change is happening and caused by humans, (2) that it is on balance harmful, and (3) that the proposed interventions actually have a meaningful impact. There is plausible scientific evidence only for (1); points (2) and (3) have not been established scientifically. Climate change activists talk about evidence for (1) and then pretend that that covers (2) and (3) as well.
I repeat: The question of whether governmental climate change programs are going to be effective is necessarily rooted in opinion, not fact. But given the numerous failures caused by similar attempts of governments to intervene in markets and human behavior, you better have a good answer for why climate change policy would work and how you would actually manage to implement it globally. So far, the policies that the US government has put in place have been ineffective and crony capitalist. The only two factors that have substantially reduced carbon emissions have been market innovations (shale gas) and the economic slowdown.
In fact, I maintain that the fastest way to bring about a post-fossil-fuel economy is for the US government to do nothing and let the market take care of it. Without government intervention, solar cells will be actually competitive with fossil fuel electricity generation in 10-20 years. Government intervention (subsidies, research, etc.) will do nothing to speed that up, it can only slow it down.
It might be wise for them to do so, because their grandchildren may have heard the story about how sociopathic your grandfather was and have reason to believe that you have a tendency towards the same behavior.
My grandfather didn't "punch anybody in the face". He wasn't even in the US. Being neither British nor American by birth, I am totally unrelated to American slave owners. Yet because my skin is light and the skin of British colonial slave owners is white, you lump us together. That makes you a stinking racist.
And the real irony behind your "inheritable sociopathy" argument is that the population with the largest percentage of slave owner ancestry in their genes in the US is actually African Americans, because African American slaves were frequently raped by their owners, and genetics doesn't depend on whether the sex was consensual or not.
Totally. If I punch you in the face constantly for an hour, when I stop I am a hero and you should definitely thank me.
So when a black man kills someone, you go around looking for some black man to lynch; anybody will do as long as he has the same skin color? Thanks for clearing up what a despicable racist you are.
The fact is that slavery in the US was an institution created by the British empire and maintained by a minority of Southerners. At the time, the majority of Americans was opposed to it, and many Americans lost their lives fighting against it. And the majority of Americans today are descendants of people who arrived after slavery was abolished, often fleeing economic servitude and oppression themselves, starting from nothing in the US, and facing massive discrimination themselves. To lump all these people together based on nothing more than skin color makes you no different from a typical white supremacist.
So the banking crisis that began in the US with sub prime loans and credit default swaps was caused by German banks lending money to Greece?
There are several crises: the US financial "crisis" and its worldwide consequences, and the Eurozone "crisis". In the context of EU discussions, I was assuming NotInHere was referring to the latter.
The Eurozone crisis was caused by irresponsible lending with in Europe due to European government interference; that is, European governments pressured lenders to make loans to risky countries in order to spur export. The US financial crisis was caused by irresponsible lending within the US due to US government interference; that is, the US government pressured lenders to make loans to high risk customers in order to get home ownership rates up and satisfy activists. In their own words.
No, the liberals just think that white men have so long been so responsible for so much MORE pain and suffering and other horrible things, that they become better people if they make concerted efforts to undo those 'atrocities'
Odd, given that it was white men who ended slavery, forcefully, across the world. Odd also given that white men and women were victims of slavery by the millions, at the hands of slave masters of all races.
It's not hard to see. For example, the biggest Greek lender is Germany, which has a tightly regulated banking system that is half government owned. And these loans were often made for political reasons, that is, to support German exports, help German companies, and create German union jobs. The banks didn't worry much because they can simply socialize the cost; that is, the German tax payer ultimately foots the bill no matter what, since these banks are guaranteed not to fail. It's similar in other countries. I suggest you check the numbers and ownership relations yourself.
You need to be more specific. Which EU corporation exactly is competing with Android? Nokia and Ericsson have already left the handheld market.
European telecom carriers want more control, and they want to take away power from Google. Furthermore, many people have an economic interest in hurting Google, foremost European publishers, newspapers, media, and telecom companies.
Enough to make up for the global warming they cause? The other pollution?
Yes. If you go by climate activist arguments about externalities, fossil fuel taxes are at least comparable to the claimed externalities. There are some papers on that; you can track them down.
No. Just no. Study basic microeconomics, or....If the Koch brothers are selling coal at a certain price, they can sell a certain amount. Raise the price and they sell less, lower and they sell more.
True, but the demand for fossil fuel is quite inelastic, as past price fluctuations have shown. That is, a doubling of fossil fuel prices only produces a modest reduction in fossil fuel usage. If you want to reduce fossil fuel by a large amount, you have to raise prices to astronomical levels through taxes, far beyond anything you could possibly justify through "externalities".
Passing costs on to consumers is a myth.
That is completely unrelated to your elasticity of demand argument. In fact, price is roughly profit plus cost and taxes. Profit is largely determined by an annual return on investment and risk; if profits fall below that, investors will leave the market, if profits go above that, competition will drive them down. So, yes, any taxes or cost increases will be passed on to consumers, in the sense that taxes will just get added to prices.
...
What you have still failed to address is what motivation a couple of MIT-educated 70 something libertarian philanthropist billionaire engineers would possibly have to worry about profit margins ten years from now anyway, or why they would pick fights with politicians that can only hurt their businesses. If they wanted to lobby and corrupt the process, they'd simply shift their investment to "green energy" and then corrupt the political process like Tom Steyer and George Soros are doing. You may not like what the Koch brothers are saying and doing, but the idea that it is motivated by greed or self-interest is completely unreasonable and inconsistent with facts.
Again, no. If Joe and Bob sell solar panels, and there's an increase in demand, they make more money. Now, suppose Bob invests some money in more efficient panels, and then he can make panels of a given power for 10% less than Joe can. Bob can capture most of the market, and it's a bigger market now,
It doesn't matter whether Bob invests in more efficient panels or not; improvements in solar cell efficiency depend on many advances across broad industries and are unaffected by such investments. Your "kick the engineers in the nuts" theory of innovation just doesn't work. Bob knows this (it's obvious from the cost curve that I pointed you at), which is why he won't even bother. Bob isn't even going to ramp up solar cell production much in response to government policies because Bob isn't going to make large multiyear investments subject to the vagaries of political support for such subsidies, so the usual market mechanisms won't work either. Instead, Joe and Bob will enjoy the windfall from the scarcity of solar panels for as long as it lasts and donate heavily to the politicians who make it all happen.
If you subsidize solar cells directly or by taxing the alternatives, the price of solar cells will go up until you stop the subsidies. That's not theory, it's what actually happened if you look at the effects at past subsidies on solar cell cost curves.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe among Apple fans, not among the public at large.
By Apple's own admission, Apple devices are not secure.
Not as much as the European system. After all, in places like Germany, you keep your workplace protections only if you don't change jobs. As a result, workers don't change jobs anywhere near as frequently as in the US, and long term unemployment is generally also much higher than in the US.
That's an ironic statement, since national salary collusion and stagnant and low wages are a hallmark of other nations (like Europe). Of course, "unions" are widespread there, but they have simply been subverted to serve those objectives.
There was no "pretense" involved; both buyers and sellers believed the risk estimates to be about right, otherwise they wouldn't have made the transaction. Furthermore, if the risk estimates were wrong, it was the responsibility of the buyers to discover that, not of the seller. After all, in all these transactions, both buyers and sellers were financial experts.
It wasn't the businesses that "brought down the world economy", it was governments, through careless investments, careless assumption of risk, and through bailouts. In a free market, none of this crap would have happened.
I'm sure some percentage of people would lose their money; stupid people who make unwise choices. Hopefully, they would learn from that. Right now, stupid people can make unwise choices and people who make good choices have to bail them out, over and over again. That's wrong.
No doubt it did. Privatization of public assets is an intrinsically corrupt process, and privatization and deregulation usually are incomplete and don't result in a free market, but a crony capitalist system. That is, once you have nationalized banks and industries, getting back to a free market is extremely hard. That's not a fault of free markets.
This follows from the tightly regulated European banking sector, its high degree of public ownership in countries like Germany, and the exposure of public and government-regulated pension funds, which are the norm in European countries. That is, most of the people who bought and sold this debt were all under government control. You can verify that for yourself for the countries of your choice.
If you think that was "badly edited" you don't understand how outrageous the statements by those Democrats were, and how corrupt people like Raines were.
Correct. I'm pointing out that conservatives and progressives are largely interchangeable in their tactics and arguments.
Of course you are familiar with it, bigoted, uninformed partisan that you have shown yourself to be on numerous occasions. Thanks for reminding everybody.
So...
Gravitation is described by Einstein's non-linear field equations with singularities.
Quantum mechanics yields the best experimental predictions of any theory, but unfortunately is not consistent with relativity.
Inertial mass may be related to Unruh radiation.
Mass may come from the Higgs boson
Physicists can't even agree whether a simple metal cone with some radiation in it is actually producing thrust or not in a repeatable experiment.
It's amazing that given this sorry state of physics, so many physicists have the boldness to make definitive statements about anything concerning gravitation, mass, or reactionless drives. Guys, get your house in order and get your theories cleaned up.
And if you go back, you'll see that my original statement was true whichever crisis he was referring to. You then asked for a citation and I gave one. Now I have given the other. What else do you need?
I don't see how you can fault them for that. Financial experts created these instruments, and financial experts bought them. Both buyers and sellers were using the same faulty economic theory. Regulators come from the same pool of financial experts and would have shared the same erroneous beliefs about risk.
When the French government bails out private banks to the tune of EU 360 bn, that's not deregulation or privatization, that is crony capitalism. The fault there is the bailout, not the banks. Without the bailout, the fools on either side of those investments would be bankrupt and wouldn't have been able to repeat this stupidity again, which I guarantee they are going to do.
Furthermore, in a free market, no bank is "too big to fail". The reason these banks are "too big to fail" is because of massive barriers to entry into the financial sector, and because governments themselves have built economic fictions and promises around our banking and financial institutions. That is, political promises rely on certain performance from the financial sector, and if the financial sector doesn't deliver, the government steps in and makes it appear that it did by filling the gaps with tax dollars.
I wasn't referring to the financial crisis per se but the EU budget. Without the large net contributions of the UK and Germany, the EU budget is in deep trouble.
So? I wasn't commenting on Jackson, I was commenting on irving47's racist rant.
Well, Europeans did the smart thing for once and didn't put any people on euro bills. And the US should do the same.
(And if we are going to put people on money, it should be American scientists and engineers, not activists and politicians, no matter how worthy their cause.)
I'm not sure I see the advantage of this over just putting a horizontal case (maybe even a 1U or 2U enclosure with a 90 degree connector for the graphics card) on top of a regular desk.
PC fans frequently point against the wall, without causing fire. PC exhaust isn't normally hot, and walls, being made mostly of gypsum, aren't normally flammable.
Both Firefox and Chrome support SOCKS, which is just as good as VPN for web browsing and a lot easier to set up (most hosting accounts effectively include it as part of SSH service).
I gave the citation; read it.
The hypothesis is that "C causes D" (climate change causes particular damage). Falsifying that hypothesis doesn't falsify the hypothesis that climate change is occurring.
For academic researchers, to go onto corporate payrolls is considered a failure, so they are strongly incentivized only to pursue government grant funding. Furthermore, once they are on corporate payrolls, you discount their findings as biased.
The prime examples throughout history of the misuse of science in government have been that there was a firmly established scientific "consensus" for decades before people revised their ideas, often causing grave harm to people in the process.
In order to adopt meaningful climate change policies, you need to establish (1) that climate change is happening and caused by humans, (2) that it is on balance harmful, and (3) that the proposed interventions actually have a meaningful impact. There is plausible scientific evidence only for (1); points (2) and (3) have not been established scientifically. Climate change activists talk about evidence for (1) and then pretend that that covers (2) and (3) as well.
I repeat: The question of whether governmental climate change programs are going to be effective is necessarily rooted in opinion, not fact. But given the numerous failures caused by similar attempts of governments to intervene in markets and human behavior, you better have a good answer for why climate change policy would work and how you would actually manage to implement it globally. So far, the policies that the US government has put in place have been ineffective and crony capitalist. The only two factors that have substantially reduced carbon emissions have been market innovations (shale gas) and the economic slowdown.
In fact, I maintain that the fastest way to bring about a post-fossil-fuel economy is for the US government to do nothing and let the market take care of it. Without government intervention, solar cells will be actually competitive with fossil fuel electricity generation in 10-20 years. Government intervention (subsidies, research, etc.) will do nothing to speed that up, it can only slow it down.
My grandfather didn't "punch anybody in the face". He wasn't even in the US. Being neither British nor American by birth, I am totally unrelated to American slave owners. Yet because my skin is light and the skin of British colonial slave owners is white, you lump us together. That makes you a stinking racist.
And the real irony behind your "inheritable sociopathy" argument is that the population with the largest percentage of slave owner ancestry in their genes in the US is actually African Americans, because African American slaves were frequently raped by their owners, and genetics doesn't depend on whether the sex was consensual or not.
So when a black man kills someone, you go around looking for some black man to lynch; anybody will do as long as he has the same skin color? Thanks for clearing up what a despicable racist you are.
The fact is that slavery in the US was an institution created by the British empire and maintained by a minority of Southerners. At the time, the majority of Americans was opposed to it, and many Americans lost their lives fighting against it. And the majority of Americans today are descendants of people who arrived after slavery was abolished, often fleeing economic servitude and oppression themselves, starting from nothing in the US, and facing massive discrimination themselves. To lump all these people together based on nothing more than skin color makes you no different from a typical white supremacist.
There are several crises: the US financial "crisis" and its worldwide consequences, and the Eurozone "crisis". In the context of EU discussions, I was assuming NotInHere was referring to the latter.
The Eurozone crisis was caused by irresponsible lending with in Europe due to European government interference; that is, European governments pressured lenders to make loans to risky countries in order to spur export. The US financial crisis was caused by irresponsible lending within the US due to US government interference; that is, the US government pressured lenders to make loans to high risk customers in order to get home ownership rates up and satisfy activists. In their own words.
Hence my comment: "conservatives are learning from the left"
Odd, given that it was white men who ended slavery, forcefully, across the world. Odd also given that white men and women were victims of slavery by the millions, at the hands of slave masters of all races.
And you are a fraud who is trying to demonstrate moral superiority through platitudes.
Why don't we do what the EU does and not put individuals on money at all? Let's put natural wonders on US bills.
It's not hard to see. For example, the biggest Greek lender is Germany, which has a tightly regulated banking system that is half government owned. And these loans were often made for political reasons, that is, to support German exports, help German companies, and create German union jobs. The banks didn't worry much because they can simply socialize the cost; that is, the German tax payer ultimately foots the bill no matter what, since these banks are guaranteed not to fail. It's similar in other countries. I suggest you check the numbers and ownership relations yourself.
European telecom carriers want more control, and they want to take away power from Google. Furthermore, many people have an economic interest in hurting Google, foremost European publishers, newspapers, media, and telecom companies.
Yes. If you go by climate activist arguments about externalities, fossil fuel taxes are at least comparable to the claimed externalities. There are some papers on that; you can track them down.
True, but the demand for fossil fuel is quite inelastic, as past price fluctuations have shown. That is, a doubling of fossil fuel prices only produces a modest reduction in fossil fuel usage. If you want to reduce fossil fuel by a large amount, you have to raise prices to astronomical levels through taxes, far beyond anything you could possibly justify through "externalities".
That is completely unrelated to your elasticity of demand argument. In fact, price is roughly profit plus cost and taxes. Profit is largely determined by an annual return on investment and risk; if profits fall below that, investors will leave the market, if profits go above that, competition will drive them down. So, yes, any taxes or cost increases will be passed on to consumers, in the sense that taxes will just get added to prices.
What you have still failed to address is what motivation a couple of MIT-educated 70 something libertarian philanthropist billionaire engineers would possibly have to worry about profit margins ten years from now anyway, or why they would pick fights with politicians that can only hurt their businesses. If they wanted to lobby and corrupt the process, they'd simply shift their investment to "green energy" and then corrupt the political process like Tom Steyer and George Soros are doing. You may not like what the Koch brothers are saying and doing, but the idea that it is motivated by greed or self-interest is completely unreasonable and inconsistent with facts.
It doesn't matter whether Bob invests in more efficient panels or not; improvements in solar cell efficiency depend on many advances across broad industries and are unaffected by such investments. Your "kick the engineers in the nuts" theory of innovation just doesn't work. Bob knows this (it's obvious from the cost curve that I pointed you at), which is why he won't even bother. Bob isn't even going to ramp up solar cell production much in response to government policies because Bob isn't going to make large multiyear investments subject to the vagaries of political support for such subsidies, so the usual market mechanisms won't work either. Instead, Joe and Bob will enjoy the windfall from the scarcity of solar panels for as long as it lasts and donate heavily to the politicians who make it all happen.
If you subsidize solar cells directly or by taxing the alternatives, the price of solar cells will go up until you stop the subsidies. That's not theory, it's what actually happened if you look at the effects at past subsidies on solar cell cost curves.
This may come as a complete surprise to you, but not all European banks are in the UK.
Your response is as predictable as it is stupid and trite.
I'm sorry you can't figure out the logical error in your original statement even with this much help.
You're right: the nature of a law doesn't depend on whether it is applied or whether people obey it.
For example, the Nuremberg Laws were anti-Semitic even though many Germans didn't actually follow them.
You mean like this?