Awesome show, 1 hour daily, you can catch it in the US on many PBS affiliates I believe, and they've been delivering it through BitTorrent for years now, before anybody was doing that. They interview people that you never see on the corporate media. Today there was this man, Fares Akram, Gaza correspondent for the Independent newspaper, whose father was just killed by the Israeli attacks. And no, he wasn't a terrorist or any other kind of boogeyman, he was a judge working for the PA. This is the complete opposite of the propaganda you get otherwise.
No matter how shitty GM cars are, they can take you from A to B. What has Bear Stearn or Merryll Lynch achieved? Apart from gold plating their executive's turds, that is.
Keynesian theory predicted that we couldn't have unemployment and inflation at the same time...so what did the Keynesians do when their theory was proven wrong?
Krugman has quite a few things to say about that, and it makes a lot more sense than the self-serving(*) friedmanite BS.
(*) Hi! We're the rich guys, and we would like you to know that you'd be soooo much better off if you'd give us all your money! Cause if you don't, it's communism! Don't worry, uncle Milton will explain it to you as soon as he comes back from his visit to his best friend in the world, Pinochet!
They were asking for a loan because the financial system had been fucked up by the bankers, and they couldn't get one the normal way. Just a loan, not a handout, unlike Paulson's buddies who got $700 billions no strings attached.
From what I can tell the Austrian school has just taken the conclusions of the old school liberal economists, dispensed with the basic requirements and pushed it to its absurd extreme. The only thing they keep saying is that when things go bad, that's because the gov't has intervened too much. It's like religion; something bad happened to you? Didn't pray to $deity enough. You prayed 23h a day? Well what were you wasting an hour sleeping for anyway. As for the information thing, again, what I understand it to mean is that there is a reasonable amount information, the more the better, obviously, but more specifically not disinformation. Only "austrians" have that weird non-linear view whereby something either is 100% kosher or it's Soviet Russia. In the real world there are plenty of shades of grey, plus there's two color components. For example the "austrian" critic of FDR and the Great Depression is laughable. Supposedly it happened because of too much interventionism. Well the US 1929 is about as non-interventionist as you can get and see what it did. By contrast Western Europe in the past 50 years is very much Soviet Russia in comparison, and if those fascistoid fucktards were right, we'd be living in slums eating dirt.
In theory, a company could be investing for a major project, esp. if it has lots of money in the bank. But those days, when you have (still) have to compete with hedge fund managers who can (could) generate gobs of money doing nothing, a real company doing some real work doesn't look serious. Hopefully this will change as a result of the current financial crisis, but I'm afraid the right lessons aren't being learned when you see the Big 3 CEOs being lampooned for not taking a bus when they were asking for 20 billions, while nobody asked the bank CEOs how many dozens of millions they spent on blow, hookers and cocaine in the past months, and the fuckers got several hundred billions, for doing nothing but fuck the whole economy up.
It's pretty clear what they (classical liberal economists) mean by rational, information and freedom. The definition is part of the theory. And since this is a theoretical model, it is also understood that nothing in reality fits perfectly.
When people are rational most of the time, are reasonably informed, and have some freedom to buy/sell, market will work for the greater good. That's the theory.
I'm just saying that here people weren't informed, and weren't being rational due to social proof + commitment; and that there's no need to invoke the dreaded loss of freedom to realize that the whole system couldn't work according to freemarket fundies' theories.
Access to information is never perfect -- being subject to scarcity like all other goods
Really? That's a very peculiar statement to make in this day and age, and on this particular site.
In essence, you seem to be treating freedom as an independent (even insignificant) aspect of economics, when in practice you cannot assume either rationality or optimal access to information without it.
I get it, you're a libertarian. You defend your opinions, if only just by parroting your usual lines.
Me, I'm just looking at the underlying theory. Rationality, information, freedom. Three conditions. Two of them are missing; whether the third is present or not is moot.
I disagree, accurate information is required for the market to choose the most efficient price/product.
"In the long run we're all dead" Keynes famously said; and in that case it means that, sure, if we wait long enough, people will stop trusting liars and crooks and they will be weeded out, but by that time damage will have been done, and the market will not have functioned optimally in the mean time.
What you appear to be trying to describe is the neo-liberal paradigm. That's not really what I'm talking about, although it is my opinion that it is complete bollocks, but that's just my opinion. My point is that you can't take liberal economic theory, keep the conclusions and expect them to hold when you've clearly removed the starting assumptions.
On top of that, what you write isn't even logical:
Or maybe, the assumptions are:
- that individuals make decisions which are more rational than if someone else makes it for them
What does "more rational" mean? Classical economic theory assumes that someone is rational in that it will buy something at a lesser price if it can, and will attempt to sell the least of something it's got (good, service, labor...) for as much money as it can. That's it. How can you be less rational?
In any case, if there is government intervention, which is I suppose what you are against, it's got nothing to do with the rational part of the argument, it has to do with the freedom part of it. And I haven't talked about this.
- that they have access to better information
Again, what does that mean? If gov't regulation forces companies to be more transparent (a la Sarbannes-Oxley), it means less freedom for the company but more information for the market as a whole. It's once more an impact on the third assumption but clearly not on the second.
Liberal economics -- not liberal politics, quite the opposite most of the time -- explicitly derives its conclusions from three assumptions: that individuals make rational decisions, that they have access to information, and that they are free to buy/sell.
Those are pretty reasonable assumptions, and, when they hold, the conclusions tend to hold.
The difference with physics is that when physicists start saying "assuming that this body is of negligible mass and at non-relativistic speeds" they don't end their exposé with "thus we have a solution to the three body problem for three super massive black holes at 0.999 c"
Social psychology has shown repeated instances where rationality is seriously impaired. For example, social proof can make us all really stupid. And cognitive dissonance is a bitch. What do those words mean? When a million idiots do something stupid, you're very likely to think it's a very good idea, too. And the longer you've been doing something stupid without negative consequences, the less likely you are to stop.
Add to that the fact that those "investment vehicles" were designed to conceal information, specifically financial risk, and right here you have two out of three pillars of classic economic theory missing. Is it any wonder the whole thing went down?
Finally, I wonder if any free marketer / libertarian types actually read any Adam Smith. I remember reading a quizz, which unfortunately I can't find anymore, Marx vs. Smith, in which you were asked to identify whom had written what. Very hard to tell them apart in some cases.
It said something like "a bug was found in the Zune 30G from 2006, apparently some weirdos still us it." Cause, you know, 2 year old electronics is junk. Punks.
Just to point this interesting, if far fetched, hypothesis about the origin of Clovis people, based on the striking resemblance of their stone tools and that of those found from the Solutrean. A friend who's studying archaeology told me about this. He's learned to make stone tools, and that made the connection quite appealing. The particularities that both techniques are not found in any other stone using culture. Again, it's far fetched, probably not true but makes for a captivating story to get started in studying the paleolithic.
I don't have time to look further, but here's a link to a Human Rights Watch report that makes such a claim; they could be lying, though, those scumbag human rights fundamentalists.
She was accused of distributing pedo porn, and it had nothing to do with the age of the person who received the image, just that she sent a naked picture of a minor (herself!).
Of course any sane judge would have thrown a division by zero error, but obviously many US judges simply have such very faulty hardware that ECC fails.
TLA=Three Letter Agency They can use tor to download anything they want from any US server, or they can simply connect to any other countries' mirrors. That's why reading this is always mind-boggingly hilarious:
This source code is subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations and other U.S. laws, and may not be exported or re-exported to certain countries (currently Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) or to persons or entities prohibited from receiving U.S. exports (including those (a) on the Bureau of Industry and Security Denied Parties List or Entity List, (b) on the Office of Foreign Assets Control list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons, and (c) involved with missile technology or nuclear, chemical or biological weapons).
It's not like there was another country a few thousand km away that made all sorts of IT products, including but not limited to printers, which just happened to want to buy exactly what Iran had a lot of.
Clearly, without US-made printers, the Iranian military is unable to function properly.
Just before the islamic revolution, the Shah had acquired US made bank note printing presses, the exact same used to make US dollars. So they can already make the most real fake notes.
A long time ago, I had just configured qmail on a server and was monitoring the "alias" mailbox where "postmaster@domain" ends up, and noticed that someone had replied to the unknown user error message, which reads something like:
Hi, this is the qmail-daemon program at domainname. I tried to deliver your message to username, but couldn't find the destination. Sorry it didn't work out.
The lady responded very politely Dear Mr Qmail Daemon,..., asking if it had any idea where she could reach her friend.
I replied back, thanking her for being so nice to Qmail Daemon, unlike most people who pick on him for being a Daemon and whatnot. She replied that she was a good christian and was trying to be nice to everyone, but that a name like Daemon is quite strange indeed.
Non-compete clauses are mostly unenforceable around here (same is true of many other European countries) *unless*:
the company pays a significant compensation for the duration of the non-compete (something like 1/4 to 1/2 a pay check from what I've seen on my contracts)
it must be a direct competitor or supplier / client, no blanket non-compete forcing you to switch careers
it must be spelled out very clearly in the employment contract
they can't reasonably exercise it if they let you go
they can choose to, and usually do, waive their right to the non-compete (and your compensation) when you resign; but when that happens you can directly go work for the competitor, there's nothing they can do about it.
Elsevier, just like other large commercial publishers of scientific journals, offers libraries a significant discount if they subscribe to their whole catalog. By including crappy, useless and inexpensive (for them) journals, they can siphon more money out of universities and into the pockets of their shareholders, as is their god-given duty as capitalists.
I have to endure this stupid nonsense, where we have to change password every month, and it must have enough different characters, and it must have at least one number, and at least one punctuation, and you can't reuse a previous password,... to achieve what?
Care to guess what everybody's password ends up looking like? qwerty!1 qwerty!2 the next month qwerty!3 qwerty!4 qwerty!5...
Result = opposite of intent
My luks passphrase has only letters, and you won't bruteforce it, trust me.
Slashdot Mirror
Awesome show, 1 hour daily, you can catch it in the US on many PBS affiliates I believe, and they've been delivering it through BitTorrent for years now, before anybody was doing that.
They interview people that you never see on the corporate media. Today there was this man, Fares Akram, Gaza correspondent for the Independent newspaper, whose father was just killed by the Israeli attacks. And no, he wasn't a terrorist or any other kind of boogeyman, he was a judge working for the PA.
This is the complete opposite of the propaganda you get otherwise.
No matter how shitty GM cars are, they can take you from A to B. What has Bear Stearn or Merryll Lynch achieved? Apart from gold plating their executive's turds, that is.
Keynesian theory predicted that we couldn't have unemployment and inflation at the same time...so what did the Keynesians do when their theory was proven wrong?
Krugman has quite a few things to say about that, and it makes a lot more sense than the self-serving(*) friedmanite BS.
(*) Hi! We're the rich guys, and we would like you to know that you'd be soooo much better off if you'd give us all your money! Cause if you don't, it's communism! Don't worry, uncle Milton will explain it to you as soon as he comes back from his visit to his best friend in the world, Pinochet!
They were asking for a loan because the financial system had been fucked up by the bankers, and they couldn't get one the normal way. Just a loan, not a handout, unlike Paulson's buddies who got $700 billions no strings attached.
From what I can tell the Austrian school has just taken the conclusions of the old school liberal economists, dispensed with the basic requirements and pushed it to its absurd extreme. The only thing they keep saying is that when things go bad, that's because the gov't has intervened too much. It's like religion; something bad happened to you? Didn't pray to $deity enough. You prayed 23h a day? Well what were you wasting an hour sleeping for anyway.
As for the information thing, again, what I understand it to mean is that there is a reasonable amount information, the more the better, obviously, but more specifically not disinformation. Only "austrians" have that weird non-linear view whereby something either is 100% kosher or it's Soviet Russia. In the real world there are plenty of shades of grey, plus there's two color components.
For example the "austrian" critic of FDR and the Great Depression is laughable. Supposedly it happened because of too much interventionism. Well the US 1929 is about as non-interventionist as you can get and see what it did. By contrast Western Europe in the past 50 years is very much Soviet Russia in comparison, and if those fascistoid fucktards were right, we'd be living in slums eating dirt.
In theory, a company could be investing for a major project, esp. if it has lots of money in the bank.
But those days, when you have (still) have to compete with hedge fund managers who can (could) generate gobs of money doing nothing, a real company doing some real work doesn't look serious.
Hopefully this will change as a result of the current financial crisis, but I'm afraid the right lessons aren't being learned when you see the Big 3 CEOs being lampooned for not taking a bus when they were asking for 20 billions, while nobody asked the bank CEOs how many dozens of millions they spent on blow, hookers and cocaine in the past months, and the fuckers got several hundred billions, for doing nothing but fuck the whole economy up.
It's pretty clear what they (classical liberal economists) mean by rational, information and freedom. The definition is part of the theory.
And since this is a theoretical model, it is also understood that nothing in reality fits perfectly.
When people are rational most of the time, are reasonably informed, and have some freedom to buy/sell, market will work for the greater good. That's the theory.
I'm just saying that here people weren't informed, and weren't being rational due to social proof + commitment; and that there's no need to invoke the dreaded loss of freedom to realize that the whole system couldn't work according to freemarket fundies' theories.
Access to information is never perfect -- being subject to scarcity like all other goods
Really? That's a very peculiar statement to make in this day and age, and on this particular site.
In essence, you seem to be treating freedom as an independent (even insignificant) aspect of economics, when in practice you cannot assume either rationality or optimal access to information without it.
I get it, you're a libertarian. You defend your opinions, if only just by parroting your usual lines.
Me, I'm just looking at the underlying theory. Rationality, information, freedom. Three conditions. Two of them are missing; whether the third is present or not is moot.
What's so hard about it?
I'm just stating the so-called liberal economic theory. It's not my opinion; it's a fact that it is a starting point of that theory.
I disagree, accurate information is required for the market to choose the most efficient price/product.
"In the long run we're all dead" Keynes famously said; and in that case it means that, sure, if we wait long enough, people will stop trusting liars and crooks and they will be weeded out, but by that time damage will have been done, and the market will not have functioned optimally in the mean time.
What you appear to be trying to describe is the neo-liberal paradigm. That's not really what I'm talking about, although it is my opinion that it is complete bollocks, but that's just my opinion.
My point is that you can't take liberal economic theory, keep the conclusions and expect them to hold when you've clearly removed the starting assumptions.
On top of that, what you write isn't even logical:
Or maybe, the assumptions are:
- that individuals make decisions which are more rational than if someone else makes it for them
What does "more rational" mean? Classical economic theory assumes that someone is rational in that it will buy something at a lesser price if it can, and will attempt to sell the least of something it's got (good, service, labor ...) for as much money as it can. That's it. How can you be less rational?
In any case, if there is government intervention, which is I suppose what you are against, it's got nothing to do with the rational part of the argument, it has to do with the freedom part of it. And I haven't talked about this.
- that they have access to better information
Again, what does that mean? If gov't regulation forces companies to be more transparent (a la Sarbannes-Oxley), it means less freedom for the company but more information for the market as a whole. It's once more an impact on the third assumption but clearly not on the second.
Liberal economics -- not liberal politics, quite the opposite most of the time -- explicitly derives its conclusions from three assumptions: that individuals make rational decisions, that they have access to information, and that they are free to buy/sell.
Those are pretty reasonable assumptions, and, when they hold, the conclusions tend to hold.
The difference with physics is that when physicists start saying "assuming that this body is of negligible mass and at non-relativistic speeds" they don't end their exposé with "thus we have a solution to the three body problem for three super massive black holes at 0.999 c"
Social psychology has shown repeated instances where rationality is seriously impaired. For example, social proof can make us all really stupid. And cognitive dissonance is a bitch. What do those words mean? When a million idiots do something stupid, you're very likely to think it's a very good idea, too. And the longer you've been doing something stupid without negative consequences, the less likely you are to stop.
Add to that the fact that those "investment vehicles" were designed to conceal information, specifically financial risk, and right here you have two out of three pillars of classic economic theory missing. Is it any wonder the whole thing went down?
Finally, I wonder if any free marketer / libertarian types actually read any Adam Smith. I remember reading a quizz, which unfortunately I can't find anymore, Marx vs. Smith, in which you were asked to identify whom had written what. Very hard to tell them apart in some cases.
It said something like "a bug was found in the Zune 30G from 2006, apparently some weirdos still us it." Cause, you know, 2 year old electronics is junk. Punks.
Just to point this interesting, if far fetched, hypothesis about the origin of Clovis people, based on the striking resemblance of their stone tools and that of those found from the Solutrean.
A friend who's studying archaeology told me about this. He's learned to make stone tools, and that made the connection quite appealing. The particularities that both techniques are not found in any other stone using culture.
Again, it's far fetched, probably not true but makes for a captivating story to get started in studying the paleolithic.
Slavery's been abolished, supposedly.
I swear I hate those fascist apologist, your employer is NOT your owner.
Let me fucking google that for you.
I don't have time to look further, but here's a link to a Human Rights Watch report that makes such a claim; they could be lying, though, those scumbag human rights fundamentalists.
She was accused of distributing pedo porn, and it had nothing to do with the age of the person who received the image, just that she sent a naked picture of a minor (herself!).
Of course any sane judge would have thrown a division by zero error, but obviously many US judges simply have such very faulty hardware that ECC fails.
Your neighbour can use this lie because there ARE actually people to whom it happened.
TLA=Three Letter Agency
They can use tor to download anything they want from any US server, or they can simply connect to any other countries' mirrors.
That's why reading this is always mind-boggingly hilarious:
This source code is subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations and other U.S. laws, and may not be exported or re-exported to certain countries (currently Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) or to persons or entities prohibited from receiving U.S. exports (including those (a) on the Bureau of Industry and Security Denied Parties List or Entity List, (b) on the Office of Foreign Assets Control list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons, and (c) involved with missile technology or nuclear, chemical or biological weapons).
Hm, yeah, right, sure.
It's not like there was another country a few thousand km away that made all sorts of IT products, including but not limited to printers, which just happened to want to buy exactly what Iran had a lot of.
Clearly, without US-made printers, the Iranian military is unable to function properly.
Just before the islamic revolution, the Shah had acquired US made bank note printing presses, the exact same used to make US dollars.
So they can already make the most real fake notes.
A long time ago, I had just configured qmail on a server and was monitoring the "alias" mailbox where "postmaster@domain" ends up, and noticed that someone had replied to the unknown user error message, which reads something like:
Hi, this is the qmail-daemon program at domainname. I tried to deliver your message to username, but couldn't find the destination.
Sorry it didn't work out.
The lady responded very politely Dear Mr Qmail Daemon,..., asking if it had any idea where she could reach her friend.
I replied back, thanking her for being so nice to Qmail Daemon, unlike most people who pick on him for being a Daemon and whatnot. She replied that she was a good christian and was trying to be nice to everyone, but that a name like Daemon is quite strange indeed.
Sadly I lost the file, it was quite amusing.
Non-compete clauses are mostly unenforceable around here (same is true of many other European countries) *unless*:
It can't? But it did!
Elsevier, just like other large commercial publishers of scientific journals, offers libraries a significant discount if they subscribe to their whole catalog.
By including crappy, useless and inexpensive (for them) journals, they can siphon more money out of universities and into the pockets of their shareholders, as is their god-given duty as capitalists.
I have to endure this stupid nonsense, where we have to change password every month, ...
and it must have enough different characters,
and it must have at least one number,
and at least one punctuation,
and you can't reuse a previous password,
to achieve what?
Care to guess what everybody's password ends up looking like? ...
qwerty!1
qwerty!2 the next month
qwerty!3
qwerty!4
qwerty!5
Result = opposite of intent
My luks passphrase has only letters, and you won't bruteforce it, trust me.