Most of the traders were college football players/econ majors. I kid you not. They need to be large and imposing to get seen/push their way around on the trading floor.
Yeah, the minute the internet is used to bring democracy to an oppressive dictatorship, it's time to announce another round of pork for network providers:
It's a code. If you spell it backwards and remove the 'y' you get TEN ROTS. This is obviously telling us that these 'stories' they want to come up with will really be secret messages encoded in ROT10. I've probably said too much.
Once an island is densely populated, I'm not sure the same freedoms are possible.
Of course they aren't. Which is the reason I intend to keep my corner of the island as sparsely populated as possible. As for the rest of you, enjoy your Hobbesean hellhole.
Is there some objective standard that we can mathematically derive, or some deterministic algorithm we can apply?
Yes of course there is. But this is basic American history stuff, here, so you should be embarrassed to quote that tripe from the UN.
The Lockean standard of rights: "All mankind... being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions."
The objectivist standard of rights: "I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
The libertarian standard of rights: "To oppose the initiation of force."
The objective definition is that if you can provide it for yourself on a deserted island, it's a natural right. In practice that means anything that doesn't infringe on the rights of others. If it involves forcing someone else to do something for you or taking someone else's property or infringing on their rights, it's not a natural right but a privilege or possibly a crime.
And I'm in a town of 300,000 in the midwest, with over a million people in the metro area. There's a bus stop right in front of my house that I have never once used because it is completely worthless. It doesn't go anywhere I have ever wanted to go. It doesn't go anywhere at anything resembling a reasonable rate of speed. And it costs like $2/trip, which is more than gas and maintenance on a relatively efficient car. Even the bus systems in cities of 2 million people are fairly worthless if you have to commute or need to get someplace faster than riding a bicycle.
I think the best hopes are for dual-mode-transport, that is, vehicles that can drive both on normal roads -and- on special-purpose tracks of some sort.
I agree with this. This is where electric cars are headed. It would make much more sense to abandon high-speed rail in favor of some proof of concept installations of something like this.
The technology was popular for the transport of wood and wood products
I can see how it would be useful for something like logging. It's like a train track with moveable endpoints. You could harvest a huge area without an investment in fixed capital. Mining would be similar. It's like a Cat truck if you don't have liquid fuels or rubber.
Almost predictably, the first search return for "ropecon" is an article about extracting resources from some third world country with one of these contraptions that can bypass "obstacles such as houses, roads or rivers". All that's missing is a Marine detachment and a group of local freedom fighters to blow the thing up periodically.
No it isn't. It's because reproduction is a response to environmental stress. That neatly explains both religion and poverty, along with the feedback loop created between them.
Using tax money to front-run the Federal Reserve's printing press by making forced loans to illegally bailed-out financial institutions isn't really an "investment".
*Some* rich were transferring the money of *other* more moderately rich, and making huge fees in the process. The government's action before the crash was to make this legal (Glass-Steagall) and then to encourage it (FNMA/FMCC).
So, frankly, it doesn't matter what these reports say. When a government creates a 'private' corporation and then bankrolls all of it's investments, it's reasonable to assume that that government will use the force of law to ensure those investments against failure. In that case, it's also reasonable for private investors to make similar investments and to rely on the equal protection of the law to ensure their own. So that's what investors did.
Of course we all know what happened instead was the complete abandonment of the rule of law and the institution of cronyism and illegal bailouts.
The failure is crystal clear: preferential, government interference in the mortgage market from top to bottom.
It's been my experience that showing the cheater that there are significant consequences to their actions, does work.
And... it's been my experience that corporations which take punitive measures against their customers typically get sued all to hell. Your customers aren't contracting for psychological services (which are typically regulated). They're purchasing video games.
You've made an excellent case that these companies have the resources and ability to simply prevent cheats instead of engaging in a public smear campaign and for some reason choose the latter. Enjoy your lawsuit.
Bullshit. People making $0.50/hr do so because the states in which they live have utterly failed. They have too many people, and not enough resources. Workers in the US make ten times as much because we have ten times as many resources per capita. It is that simple.
The fix is simple too: CLOSE THE BORDERS. We keep our resources, our high living standards, and a citizenry devoted to mostly-functional government instead of some third-world kleptocracy. The rest of the world can 'compete' over everything else. Who cares if we get priced out of the opportunity to do more work? We're already better-off than nearly everyone on the planet. Why should we work to dilute that wealth when the only direction we can go is down?
Saying that "free trade" is untested because subsidies exist is like saying gravity is untested because the electric force exists. It's not that complicated to those who understand it. Unfortunately in economics, unlike most sciences, politics tends to have undue influence.
But I agree that we don't really live in a free market. There are many large, unaccounted-for externalities that still exist, and would need to be eliminated, before that could be the case. Regardless, even in the ideal sense, the idea of "free markets" doesn't mean that everyone always benefits regardless of what they do. It means that assets are transferred from those who squander them to those who manage them responsibly.
It opened Mexican markets to cheap (due to subsidies) American agricultural which was intended. That the price of corn, a staple in Mexico, would go "through the roof" when ethanol fuel was being pushed by the US as an alternative fuel was unintended. As was the inability of the Mexicans to increase production due to the destruction of their agricultural sector.
But this is just nonsensical. Between 1997-2005, US corn was sold to Mexico at 19% less than the cost to produce it. The price (in Pesos) rose for a few years, between 1994-1996, but fell afterwards by nearly 50%. Recent food riots are more the result of notorious corruption in Mexico's own subsidy handouts, and importantly the rising consumption of Asia, than US ethanol subsidies. Food cost and ethanol demand have risen recently with rising oil prices, but those are global phenomena. The US has been subsidizing ethanol at nearly the same rates since the 70s and, if anything, this has only offset a tiny fraction of the massive oil imports that benefit oil-producing countries like Mexico. So there is plenty of wealth in Mexico (now home to the world's richest man), and those who have escaped it's horrible government by immigrating to the US have done very well. But of course free trade doesn't work in a corrupt oligarchy, and it's stupid to believe that this could possibly be the fault of the US or of free trade.
So, your argument is that NAFTA worked as designed therefore it needs to go? I'm not saying you're wrong, but maybe you could develop this a bit more.
have economies and financial systems that serve people, not vice versa
This is what I'd call "naive socialism". It's what liberals have been pushing for in one way or another ever since the rise of fascism in Europe -- merging the magic of the free market with the magic of socialism. It only works as long as the Morlocks are sufficiently segregated from the Eloi. And, these days, that means "on the other side of the planet and speaking a completely different language".
The problem is that rational actors don't participate in the free market in order to "serve people". They work in order to profit. And socialism is not profitable; it subsidizes consumers who offset the work done by producers.
"Capitalism with a human face" could certainly exist, but it has been brutally repressed in every functional empire since the Romans. And fascism requires empire, in order to provide resources to create jobs to provide for all of the excess worthless eaters created by having an economic system that "serves people".
This is the basis of Christian socialist technocratic utopianism: we can waste all available energy and resources keeping old people alive indefinitely with free healthcare and having more kids than we can feed and opening the borders to immigrants and as long as we educate them then technology (or Jesus) will save us and failing that then we can just bomb some country full of brown people and take their resources, amen.
I don't understand how that even made it into a point in your comment.
All people who consume, must give something in return.
I mention it because your concept of consumerism seems off. Americans are typically consumers because a few hundred years ago they stumbled upon some of the largest stores of wealth in all of human history. No one gave it to them, at least not voluntarily.
But, more fundamentally, the modern global economy is not a system of balanced trade, even though it may seem to be. It is a one-way process of resource consumption. Those who control the resources are the 'consumers'. Those who do not, are the 'producers'.
The entire system is promulgated on the lie that consumerism is beneficial. And it *is* beneficial, of course, to the working classes who have no assets and are completely dependent upon consumer spending. It is also beneficial to the giant corporations who own the media and the factories and who use consumerism to consolidate wealth.
Consumers are portrayed as precious snowflakes who must be nurtured and coddled. Everyone should aspire to be a lofty consumer. This is an easy sell, of course, since consumers are always relatively well-off pretty much by definition. It is not really beneficial, though, to the consumers themselves, in the long run. It is just "eating the seed corn".
After WWII the 'middle class' of America was actually the working class, which didn't have competition from outside countries, because most countries outside of USA didn't have any capital and infrastructure left after the war.
Your 'middle class' idea is a fluke, caused by war and lack of competition.
That's true, the post-WWII American middle class was a fluke.. a load of Platonic republican bullshit. But there has always been a middle class in America since day one. It has mostly been comprised of self-sufficient family farmers. And when all the jell-o factories close up and move to China, they will still be here.
The GOOD and SERVICE is what WEALTH IS.
Well, capital is what wealth is. Goods and services are things that wealthy people can afford.
The 290 million US consumers are a drop in a bucket at this point. Real consumers today are in Asia, because they are producers, and people who do not produce have nothing to exchange for, so they are no longer real consumers.
First of all, it's entirely possible to consume assets without producing anything. Saying "all consumers must produce" is just a restatement of the broken window fallacy.
Secondly, the terms 'producer' and 'consumer' mean 'net producer' and 'net consumer'. You're using them interchangeably when they are in fact mutually exclusive.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the traders were college football players/econ majors. I kid you not. They need to be large and imposing to get seen/push their way around on the trading floor.
From the field to the trading floor, alumni links help athletes find jobs
This is fairly well established. I've had two people tell me this before, both in positions to know.
Yeah, the minute the internet is used to bring democracy to an oppressive dictatorship, it's time to announce another round of pork for network providers:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2380048,00.asp
To encourage tech innovation, Obama's plan also calls for a $3 billion Wireless Innovation (WIN) Fund
Funding Access to Internet Lolcats (FAIL)
Truely you have a dizzying intellect.
It's a code. If you spell it backwards and remove the 'y' you get TEN ROTS. This is obviously telling us that these 'stories' they want to come up with will really be secret messages encoded in ROT10. I've probably said too much.
Once an island is densely populated, I'm not sure the same freedoms are possible.
Of course they aren't. Which is the reason I intend to keep my corner of the island as sparsely populated as possible. As for the rest of you, enjoy your Hobbesean hellhole.
Is there some objective standard that we can mathematically derive, or some deterministic algorithm we can apply?
Yes of course there is. But this is basic American history stuff, here, so you should be embarrassed to quote that tripe from the UN.
The Lockean standard of rights:
"All mankind... being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions."
The objectivist standard of rights:
"I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
The libertarian standard of rights:
"To oppose the initiation of force."
The objective definition is that if you can provide it for yourself on a deserted island, it's a natural right. In practice that means anything that doesn't infringe on the rights of others. If it involves forcing someone else to do something for you or taking someone else's property or infringing on their rights, it's not a natural right but a privilege or possibly a crime.
What do we gain besides a huge dependence on things outside of our immediate control.
Data concurrency.
I had a cellphone on my belt, which was the style at the time.
roast beast sandwich
And I'm in a town of 300,000 in the midwest, with over a million people in the metro area. There's a bus stop right in front of my house that I have never once used because it is completely worthless. It doesn't go anywhere I have ever wanted to go. It doesn't go anywhere at anything resembling a reasonable rate of speed. And it costs like $2/trip, which is more than gas and maintenance on a relatively efficient car. Even the bus systems in cities of 2 million people are fairly worthless if you have to commute or need to get someplace faster than riding a bicycle.
It's all fine and dandy to calculate mpg, but your figures are wildly optimistic. A diesel bus commuter service in Santa Barbara, CA, USA found average diesel bus efficiency of 6.0 mpg. At the typical average passenger load of 9 people, the efficiency is only 54 passenger-mpg. So hybrids are already pushing past the average commuter bus efficiency even in purely energy terms, three people in a sedan have been more efficient for a couple of decades now, and motorcycles had them both beat a long time ago. But even if energy efficiency is slightly greater for buses, it is nowhere near worth the time and inconvenience of walking a mile and standing around in the weather for twenty minutes waiting for one to arrive.
I think the best hopes are for dual-mode-transport, that is, vehicles that can drive both on normal roads -and- on special-purpose tracks of some sort.
I agree with this. This is where electric cars are headed. It would make much more sense to abandon high-speed rail in favor of some proof of concept installations of something like this.
The technology was popular for the transport of wood and wood products
I can see how it would be useful for something like logging. It's like a train track with moveable endpoints. You could harvest a huge area without an investment in fixed capital. Mining would be similar. It's like a Cat truck if you don't have liquid fuels or rubber.
Almost predictably, the first search return for "ropecon" is an article about extracting resources from some third world country with one of these contraptions that can bypass "obstacles such as houses, roads or rivers". All that's missing is a Marine detachment and a group of local freedom fighters to blow the thing up periodically.
No it isn't. It's because reproduction is a response to environmental stress. That neatly explains both religion and poverty, along with the feedback loop created between them.
Using tax money to front-run the Federal Reserve's printing press by making forced loans to illegally bailed-out financial institutions isn't really an "investment".
*Some* rich were transferring the money of *other* more moderately rich, and making huge fees in the process. The government's action before the crash was to make this legal (Glass-Steagall) and then to encourage it (FNMA/FMCC).
So, frankly, it doesn't matter what these reports say. When a government creates a 'private' corporation and then bankrolls all of it's investments, it's reasonable to assume that that government will use the force of law to ensure those investments against failure. In that case, it's also reasonable for private investors to make similar investments and to rely on the equal protection of the law to ensure their own. So that's what investors did.
Of course we all know what happened instead was the complete abandonment of the rule of law and the institution of cronyism and illegal bailouts.
The failure is crystal clear: preferential, government interference in the mortgage market from top to bottom.
It's been my experience that showing the cheater that there are significant consequences to their actions, does work.
And... it's been my experience that corporations which take punitive measures against their customers typically get sued all to hell. Your customers aren't contracting for psychological services (which are typically regulated). They're purchasing video games.
You've made an excellent case that these companies have the resources and ability to simply prevent cheats instead of engaging in a public smear campaign and for some reason choose the latter. Enjoy your lawsuit.
There is no fix.
Bullshit. People making $0.50/hr do so because the states in which they live have utterly failed. They have too many people, and not enough resources. Workers in the US make ten times as much because we have ten times as many resources per capita. It is that simple.
The fix is simple too: CLOSE THE BORDERS. We keep our resources, our high living standards, and a citizenry devoted to mostly-functional government instead of some third-world kleptocracy. The rest of the world can 'compete' over everything else. Who cares if we get priced out of the opportunity to do more work? We're already better-off than nearly everyone on the planet. Why should we work to dilute that wealth when the only direction we can go is down?
Saying that "free trade" is untested because subsidies exist is like saying gravity is untested because the electric force exists. It's not that complicated to those who understand it. Unfortunately in economics, unlike most sciences, politics tends to have undue influence.
But I agree that we don't really live in a free market. There are many large, unaccounted-for externalities that still exist, and would need to be eliminated, before that could be the case. Regardless, even in the ideal sense, the idea of "free markets" doesn't mean that everyone always benefits regardless of what they do. It means that assets are transferred from those who squander them to those who manage them responsibly.
It opened Mexican markets to cheap (due to subsidies) American agricultural which was intended. That the price of corn, a staple in Mexico, would go "through the roof" when ethanol fuel was being pushed by the US as an alternative fuel was unintended. As was the inability of the Mexicans to increase production due to the destruction of their agricultural sector.
But this is just nonsensical. Between 1997-2005, US corn was sold to Mexico at 19% less than the cost to produce it. The price (in Pesos) rose for a few years, between 1994-1996, but fell afterwards by nearly 50%. Recent food riots are more the result of notorious corruption in Mexico's own subsidy handouts, and importantly the rising consumption of Asia, than US ethanol subsidies. Food cost and ethanol demand have risen recently with rising oil prices, but those are global phenomena. The US has been subsidizing ethanol at nearly the same rates since the 70s and, if anything, this has only offset a tiny fraction of the massive oil imports that benefit oil-producing countries like Mexico. So there is plenty of wealth in Mexico (now home to the world's richest man), and those who have escaped it's horrible government by immigrating to the US have done very well. But of course free trade doesn't work in a corrupt oligarchy, and it's stupid to believe that this could possibly be the fault of the US or of free trade.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/07/world/la-fg-mexico-farm-subsidies7-2010mar07
http://richardbrenneman.wordpress.com/2010/12/21/nafta-and-the-destruction-of-mexican-farming/
So, your argument is that NAFTA worked as designed therefore it needs to go? I'm not saying you're wrong, but maybe you could develop this a bit more.
have economies and financial systems that serve people, not vice versa
This is what I'd call "naive socialism". It's what liberals have been pushing for in one way or another ever since the rise of fascism in Europe -- merging the magic of the free market with the magic of socialism. It only works as long as the Morlocks are sufficiently segregated from the Eloi. And, these days, that means "on the other side of the planet and speaking a completely different language".
The problem is that rational actors don't participate in the free market in order to "serve people". They work in order to profit. And socialism is not profitable; it subsidizes consumers who offset the work done by producers.
"Capitalism with a human face" could certainly exist, but it has been brutally repressed in every functional empire since the Romans. And fascism requires empire, in order to provide resources to create jobs to provide for all of the excess worthless eaters created by having an economic system that "serves people".
This is the basis of Christian socialist technocratic utopianism: we can waste all available energy and resources keeping old people alive indefinitely with free healthcare and having more kids than we can feed and opening the borders to immigrants and as long as we educate them then technology (or Jesus) will save us and failing that then we can just bomb some country full of brown people and take their resources, amen.
government agencies that actually provide a service/product
lol
And apparently we need to do it by selling out US tech workers and subsidizing dangerous, low-skill manufacturing*.
*hamburger manufacturing
I don't understand how that even made it into a point in your comment.
All people who consume, must give something in return.
I mention it because your concept of consumerism seems off. Americans are typically consumers because a few hundred years ago they stumbled upon some of the largest stores of wealth in all of human history. No one gave it to them, at least not voluntarily.
But, more fundamentally, the modern global economy is not a system of balanced trade, even though it may seem to be. It is a one-way process of resource consumption. Those who control the resources are the 'consumers'. Those who do not, are the 'producers'.
The entire system is promulgated on the lie that consumerism is beneficial. And it *is* beneficial, of course, to the working classes who have no assets and are completely dependent upon consumer spending. It is also beneficial to the giant corporations who own the media and the factories and who use consumerism to consolidate wealth.
Consumers are portrayed as precious snowflakes who must be nurtured and coddled. Everyone should aspire to be a lofty consumer. This is an easy sell, of course, since consumers are always relatively well-off pretty much by definition. It is not really beneficial, though, to the consumers themselves, in the long run. It is just "eating the seed corn".
After WWII the 'middle class' of America was actually the working class, which didn't have competition from outside countries, because most countries outside of USA didn't have any capital and infrastructure left after the war.
Your 'middle class' idea is a fluke, caused by war and lack of competition.
That's true, the post-WWII American middle class was a fluke.. a load of Platonic republican bullshit. But there has always been a middle class in America since day one. It has mostly been comprised of self-sufficient family farmers. And when all the jell-o factories close up and move to China, they will still be here.
The GOOD and SERVICE is what WEALTH IS.
Well, capital is what wealth is. Goods and services are things that wealthy people can afford.
It's not the worthless currency.
True.
And we get less in return.
The 290 million US consumers are a drop in a bucket at this point. Real consumers today are in Asia, because they are producers, and people who do not produce have nothing to exchange for, so they are no longer real consumers.
First of all, it's entirely possible to consume assets without producing anything. Saying "all consumers must produce" is just a restatement of the broken window fallacy.
Secondly, the terms 'producer' and 'consumer' mean 'net producer' and 'net consumer'. You're using them interchangeably when they are in fact mutually exclusive.