Direct deposit and mail. For cash, I pay $3.50 in ATM fees. That is a lot better than getting nickle and dimed month after month. They can only hit you with fees once and only on money that you withdraw from an ATM. The rest of your savings are safe.
As to ATMs, those are a bit harder to get a monopoly on.
i completely and utterly do not understand why so many see the problem as the poor on welfare, and not the rich ripping off the society that created their riches
Because so-called "welfare" is bribe money for getting ripped off by the politically connected. For example, the primary effect of Social Security has been to allow the federal government to spend considerably more each year for about 70-80 years. We got crap for that money spent aside from a theoretical tens of trillions in obligations we probably aren't ever going to repay fully. The recent health care "reform" was a huge handout to insurers and government bureaucracies at the expense of the public and medical care workers.
Virtually every scheme that alleges to help the poor has ulterior motives and some parasites leaching off the effort. And it's not in any way unique to welfare. National defense, science, education, etc. These all have highly developed and effective parasites consuming public funds.
"That's why I'd rather just take power away from government altogether"
Mon/olig/etc-archies of various kinds have been tried. Sometimes they work well, for a time. Democracy seems to do better on average, over the long run.
Compared to what? There's a few ancient forms of governments that have lasted longer than democracy has existed. For example, the pharaohs of Egypt and the emperors of China.
And one doesn't need to discard democracy in order to weaken the power of a government. In fact, I'd say the converse is true, that government probably needs to be weakened in order to preserve democracy.
Yea great example; a banking industry that has been successively deregulated over the last 30 years
I have to disagree. I can't come up with a good measure of how much additional regulation that the banking sector experiences. But the US government is generating new rules at a rate nearing 100,000 pages a year and I strongly doubt the banking industry magically managed to avoid that deluge of red tape for thirty years. In addition, funding for financial regulation has almost tripled in the last thirty years.
no concept of good regulation
If there was a movement towards good regulation, then you would have something of a point (though you would see a decline in overall regulation just due to the removal of regulation without any redeeming feature). But I tire of hearing of how we should be striving for "good regulation" while simultaneously advocating pretty dumb moves like the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall.
As I mention elsewhere, the primary effect of Glass-Steagall is to create a class structure, those wealthy enough to invest in relatively high yield securities, and those who put their money in savings accounts.
As of it wll ever be the case that trie liberty does not require constant maintenance?
What requires more maintenance? A minimal government or a huge, complex welfare state? Every power given to government requires it's own bit of "maintenance".
So the problem is the deluded fucked up retarded fools who believe their own fucking govt is the problem, and not the parasites corrupting it.
How come I never hear of this complaint from people who don't want a lot of free shit from government? There will always be parasites. There need not be a huge, powerful, unaccountable government eager to be corrupted.
There's over four million people directly employed by the federal government plus a huge but apparently unknown number of contractors (but at least a million of them hold security clearances). Some decent sized percentage of the federal government goes to black projects for which it is probably a felony to distribute cost and budget figures. And the US channels 3.6 trillion dollars a year (plus off budget spending on the military and quantitative easing).
The US code of laws is apparently over 200,000 pages now. That's somewhere around 11 years to read, if you go through 50 pages of law every day.
It's easy to call people lazy and whatnot. It's a hell of a lot harder to keep track of what actually goes on in the US government, much less reduce corruption in that government.
As I see it, size of government correlates with power, unaccountability and difficulty of oversight, complexity of regulation and law, cost, and divergence of interests.
Frankly, I think you'd have to be crazy not to have government reduction near the top of any list of priorities for US society.
The regulation might work better if you didn't have the industry being regulated write the regulations.
I hear the same bleating over and over again. Members of an industry have both the experience and the interest in contributing to regulations over themselves. By the nature of democracy, that means they contribute to regulation. As they should.
Even if everything works as well as it can in a democracy (and many other forms of government for that matter), you still have that narrow, focused interests trump broad, unfocused interests. That's why I'd rather just take power away from government altogether than wistfully agree that it would be nice if complex governments created better law and regulation than they do.
Because the banks convinced Congress to repeal the part of Glass-Steagal
There's always something, no matter how irrational, to transfer blame to. It's really simple - a global flood of easy central bank credit and 50 to 1 or more leverage (borrowed money to assets). Those banks would have blown up even if they were investing in the safest thing out there, US treasuries and Glass-Steagall were still in effect.
Glass-Steagall had the consequence of creating a class structure by wealth, those who have savings accounts in banks and those wealthy enough to invest their money in stocks and other securities.
So we remove govt regulation. Corps cheers because now they can do whatever they want without paying off congresscritters. smaller players get more abused, customers get more shafted.
And how is that's worse than the current state? At least, we've removed a middle man, the congresscritters.
You are assuming a perfect market of a wide availability of choices of middle size playing fairly. The reality is an oligopoly that suppresses competition from small players and squeezes customers for all they are worth. You can't use the fundamentals of capitalism to defend the practices of an oligopoly, please wake up.
Sure, you can.
And no, the government is not to blame for this, this is the natural state of affairs of an unregulated market.
Sure it is. It's worth remembering here that government creates the regulations that these businesses operate under and which inhibit entry by new businesses.
Why do so many fools cling to the myth of the clean unregulated market? An unregulated market naturally gravitates to an oligopoly that colludes and
Why do so many fools cling to the myth of regulation fixing things? Here, I gave an example of a heavily regulated industry, the banking industry that just so happens to have all the characteristics which you allege come from "unregulated markets" such as collusion, squeezing of smaller players, oligopolies.
Clearly, if the cure isn't working,then we need more of it.
Laws can't make legal actions retroactively illegal. They can make illegal actions retroactively legal. Classic example are the numerous immigration amnesties passed over the years.
Now, you might be right about the wrongness of making illegal actions retroactively legal, but that's not something built into the US system. You would need an amendment for that.
Fortunately we have an administration that respects consumer rights and put good people in charge of the regulatory agencies, so that attempted acquisition was blocked.
I recognize there are other countries out there. But I thought we were talking about the US and its approach to things.
And we've already got precedent, with the law that was passed saying that whatever ATT had done, it was ok even if it was illegal, because it was for the government.
If a law was passed, then it's not illegal unless it happens to violate law with higher precedent such as treaty or constitutional law. In that case, the law provides no protection.
Or by having legal protections against that screwing, not to mention mechanisms that lead to competition not collaboration.
Those legal mechanisms work only if they exist and are enforced. As the grandparent post noted, such regulation can be taken away. I can choose to go to another bank. That choice cannot be taken away.
See the banks aren't struggling against each other. Thery're working together to get what they wasn't from the government. All in the name of freedom and liberty.
So what? I don't see the drama in this story. They're pursuing their interests. If you don't like that, then there are a number of legal tools available to you, should you ever choose to employ them.
You might remember sailing ships of early explorers were on multi-year voyages with little hope of communication for much of the time. HMS Beagle's famous voyage was 5 years long, with only occasional stops at foreign ports. People can deal with communication delays, both in robotic systems and manned systems.
What was the point of this example? The HMS Beagle started that voyage with a crew of 70 people. The communication lag was near instantaneous (because the people were there) not five years (because the people weren't in England).
Friedman claims:
humans in modern space systems will be virtual explorers interacting with the environments of distant worlds, but without the baggage of physical transportation or presence.
the reason why we haven't gone anywhere in space is that we're drowning in greed and corruption
Well, the government agency approach has drowned in that. No reason a better structured approach by different parties with more coherent motivations couldn't succeed.
"we" haven't even really been to the moon... only a very small select few astronauts went on very short demonstration trips, in which each only went once, and all on a defense budget
It is a fallacy to attempt to disprove a statement by shifting the semantics. It is fair however to point out what "being there" means.
if we ever are to have any chance of getting anywhere in space, it will require a catastrophe that falls barely short of complete human extinction to make people realise that survival is more important than money and power...
I've heard this fantasy before. Wouldn't it be a whole lot healthier to develop a belief system that doesn't require global disaster in order to be validated?
unless some robotic thing finds some kind of mineral that will make some corporation a lot of money (akin to the gold rushes of yesteryear or the oil rush of today), no government will bother investing in it. even the space "exploration" going on the surface of mars at the moment is probably a mineral hunt under the guise of searching for ET; the US government (that provides NASA with funding) doesn't give a fuck about ET... all they care about is money and power, and not for the US in general, just for themselves because many politicians have stock in the corporations that would benefit
You do realize that minerals exist off of Earth? And that minerals from Mars would sell just as well as minerals from Earth would. Frankly, I think a driver for space mining will be Earth-side regulation.
until the nuclear winter of post-ww3, when all the fat greedy politicians, welfare bludgers, corporate CEOs and stockholders die of starvation and there are no corporations, and government is actually run by the people for the people (for their very survival), "we" will never have any hope of ever getting to the moon or mars
The disasturbation fantasy rears its ugly little head again. You do realize that the "greedy" class is more likely to survive than the "people" class?
Oh wait, they're already seeking to remove regulatory barriers. You know, the ones that keep companies from screwing their customers.
It's worth remembering here that customers should be working to avoid getting screwed. Say like using competitors who don't screw them? Classic examples are the huge banks with the ridiculous fees.
They might even just say the contractors aren't responsible for government abuses of it simply because they've been paid.
That would be an iffy defense for the contractor to make. The "But I was just following orders", doesn't seem to work that well, but maybe it'd fly in a courtroom.
There's no assumption here, crutchy. They are called "laws of physics" because we observe the universe obeying them.
the problem occurs when physicists (and anyone gullible enough to believe them) claim that perpetual motion is impossible because of the laws of thermodynamics, or that nothing can possibly travel faster than the speed of light because of relativity
That is quite accurate except for your characterization of it as a "problem". That is one of the points to models, to be used to make predictions. And I might add here, there is actual evidence against perpetual motion and faster than light speeds. The former that perpetual motion requires a closed system with either no energy loss (something that has never been observed, but could in theory exist) or a closed system that actually gains energy (in which case, we'd have to explain why the universe hasn't yet been torn apart by energy release from that process).
In the latter case, we have yet to see FTL phenomena.
But sure, we can lazily assert that things could change or not be as we thought they are. But until you show a situation where the models don't work, then there's little point to the exercise.
So they "fucked up" by ending up following Republican policies?
Why do you expect the answer to this question to be anything but "Yes"?
Yet they're the bad guys and the people whose policies they're following are the good guys.
The problem is that in this case, health care policy, the resulting bill was both grossly unconstitutional and a really bad idea to boot. No need to reduce things to white hat/black hat.
Yes. There are historical cases where people who weren't running managed to get nominated, but those are quite infrequent and none has occurred in recent memory.
But that's not going to happen in this election cycle. First, Romney has enough delegates to win outright. Second, some portion of those delegates were won what I see as apparent manipulation of primary/caucus vote tabulation. Which indicates to me that he also has the support from any shadow powers in or behind the Republican party as well.
And trying to split hairs with Chik-Fil-A is ignoring how they are a company that prides itself on its moralistic virtues. Yet you say apparently we can't disagree with them, you say it was opportunistic bigotry.
Did I say that you weren't allowed to engage in opportunistic bigotry? Not at all. The US is a free country. Just don't expect to be respected for doing so.
As it turns out, I support same sex marriages and disagree with Dan Cathy on that subject. What I don't support is the sort of bullying where someone's employer is targeted because the person has unpopular opinions. That's dirty pool.
It doesn't matter if Chick-Fil-A has "moralistic virtues" or not. It doesn't matter if a key official makes bigoted remarks. Is the business actively discriminating in its hiring, promotions, and so on? If so, it is likely breaking the law for which there are remedies (and for which I would respect a boycott). If not, then there's no case for a boycott.
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I'd like some clarification on how that works.
Direct deposit and mail. For cash, I pay $3.50 in ATM fees. That is a lot better than getting nickle and dimed month after month. They can only hit you with fees once and only on money that you withdraw from an ATM. The rest of your savings are safe.
As to ATMs, those are a bit harder to get a monopoly on.
i completely and utterly do not understand why so many see the problem as the poor on welfare, and not the rich ripping off the society that created their riches
Because so-called "welfare" is bribe money for getting ripped off by the politically connected. For example, the primary effect of Social Security has been to allow the federal government to spend considerably more each year for about 70-80 years. We got crap for that money spent aside from a theoretical tens of trillions in obligations we probably aren't ever going to repay fully. The recent health care "reform" was a huge handout to insurers and government bureaucracies at the expense of the public and medical care workers.
Virtually every scheme that alleges to help the poor has ulterior motives and some parasites leaching off the effort. And it's not in any way unique to welfare. National defense, science, education, etc. These all have highly developed and effective parasites consuming public funds.
"That's why I'd rather just take power away from government altogether"
Mon/olig/etc-archies of various kinds have been tried. Sometimes they work well, for a time. Democracy seems to do better on average, over the long run.
Compared to what? There's a few ancient forms of governments that have lasted longer than democracy has existed. For example, the pharaohs of Egypt and the emperors of China.
And one doesn't need to discard democracy in order to weaken the power of a government. In fact, I'd say the converse is true, that government probably needs to be weakened in order to preserve democracy.
Yea great example; a banking industry that has been successively deregulated over the last 30 years
I have to disagree. I can't come up with a good measure of how much additional regulation that the banking sector experiences. But the US government is generating new rules at a rate nearing 100,000 pages a year and I strongly doubt the banking industry magically managed to avoid that deluge of red tape for thirty years. In addition, funding for financial regulation has almost tripled in the last thirty years.
no concept of good regulation
If there was a movement towards good regulation, then you would have something of a point (though you would see a decline in overall regulation just due to the removal of regulation without any redeeming feature). But I tire of hearing of how we should be striving for "good regulation" while simultaneously advocating pretty dumb moves like the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall.
As I mention elsewhere, the primary effect of Glass-Steagall is to create a class structure, those wealthy enough to invest in relatively high yield securities, and those who put their money in savings accounts.
Well, there's Indianapolis nearby. It's just not that hard to use banks that are elsewhere.
For example, I use a credit union that doesn't have a branch within 400 miles of where I work.
As of it wll ever be the case that trie liberty does not require constant maintenance?
What requires more maintenance? A minimal government or a huge, complex welfare state? Every power given to government requires it's own bit of "maintenance".
So the problem is the deluded fucked up retarded fools who believe their own fucking govt is the problem, and not the parasites corrupting it.
How come I never hear of this complaint from people who don't want a lot of free shit from government? There will always be parasites. There need not be a huge, powerful, unaccountable government eager to be corrupted.
There's over four million people directly employed by the federal government plus a huge but apparently unknown number of contractors (but at least a million of them hold security clearances). Some decent sized percentage of the federal government goes to black projects for which it is probably a felony to distribute cost and budget figures. And the US channels 3.6 trillion dollars a year (plus off budget spending on the military and quantitative easing).
The US code of laws is apparently over 200,000 pages now. That's somewhere around 11 years to read, if you go through 50 pages of law every day.
It's easy to call people lazy and whatnot. It's a hell of a lot harder to keep track of what actually goes on in the US government, much less reduce corruption in that government.
As I see it, size of government correlates with power, unaccountability and difficulty of oversight, complexity of regulation and law, cost, and divergence of interests.
Frankly, I think you'd have to be crazy not to have government reduction near the top of any list of priorities for US society.
The regulation might work better if you didn't have the industry being regulated write the regulations.
I hear the same bleating over and over again. Members of an industry have both the experience and the interest in contributing to regulations over themselves. By the nature of democracy, that means they contribute to regulation. As they should.
Even if everything works as well as it can in a democracy (and many other forms of government for that matter), you still have that narrow, focused interests trump broad, unfocused interests. That's why I'd rather just take power away from government altogether than wistfully agree that it would be nice if complex governments created better law and regulation than they do.
Because the banks convinced Congress to repeal the part of Glass-Steagal
There's always something, no matter how irrational, to transfer blame to. It's really simple - a global flood of easy central bank credit and 50 to 1 or more leverage (borrowed money to assets). Those banks would have blown up even if they were investing in the safest thing out there, US treasuries and Glass-Steagall were still in effect.
Glass-Steagall had the consequence of creating a class structure by wealth, those who have savings accounts in banks and those wealthy enough to invest their money in stocks and other securities.
So we remove govt regulation. Corps cheers because now they can do whatever they want without paying off congresscritters. smaller players get more abused, customers get more shafted.
And how is that's worse than the current state? At least, we've removed a middle man, the congresscritters.
You are assuming a perfect market of a wide availability of choices of middle size playing fairly. The reality is an oligopoly that suppresses competition from small players and squeezes customers for all they are worth. You can't use the fundamentals of capitalism to defend the practices of an oligopoly, please wake up.
Sure, you can.
And no, the government is not to blame for this, this is the natural state of affairs of an unregulated market.
Sure it is. It's worth remembering here that government creates the regulations that these businesses operate under and which inhibit entry by new businesses.
Why do so many fools cling to the myth of the clean unregulated market? An unregulated market naturally gravitates to an oligopoly that colludes and
Why do so many fools cling to the myth of regulation fixing things? Here, I gave an example of a heavily regulated industry, the banking industry that just so happens to have all the characteristics which you allege come from "unregulated markets" such as collusion, squeezing of smaller players, oligopolies.
Clearly, if the cure isn't working,then we need more of it.
Laws can't make legal actions retroactively illegal. They can make illegal actions retroactively legal. Classic example are the numerous immigration amnesties passed over the years.
Now, you might be right about the wrongness of making illegal actions retroactively legal, but that's not something built into the US system. You would need an amendment for that.
Fortunately we have an administration that respects consumer rights and put good people in charge of the regulatory agencies, so that attempted acquisition was blocked.
I recognize there are other countries out there. But I thought we were talking about the US and its approach to things.
And we've already got precedent, with the law that was passed saying that whatever ATT had done, it was ok even if it was illegal, because it was for the government.
If a law was passed, then it's not illegal unless it happens to violate law with higher precedent such as treaty or constitutional law. In that case, the law provides no protection.
Or by having legal protections against that screwing, not to mention mechanisms that lead to competition not collaboration.
Those legal mechanisms work only if they exist and are enforced. As the grandparent post noted, such regulation can be taken away. I can choose to go to another bank. That choice cannot be taken away.
See the banks aren't struggling against each other. Thery're working together to get what they wasn't from the government. All in the name of freedom and liberty.
So what? I don't see the drama in this story. They're pursuing their interests. If you don't like that, then there are a number of legal tools available to you, should you ever choose to employ them.
You might remember sailing ships of early explorers were on multi-year voyages with little hope of communication for much of the time. HMS Beagle's famous voyage was 5 years long, with only occasional stops at foreign ports. People can deal with communication delays, both in robotic systems and manned systems.
What was the point of this example? The HMS Beagle started that voyage with a crew of 70 people. The communication lag was near instantaneous (because the people were there) not five years (because the people weren't in England).
Friedman claims:
humans in modern space systems will be virtual explorers interacting with the environments of distant worlds, but without the baggage of physical transportation or presence.
He ignores communication lag.
the reason why we haven't gone anywhere in space is that we're drowning in greed and corruption
Well, the government agency approach has drowned in that. No reason a better structured approach by different parties with more coherent motivations couldn't succeed.
"we" haven't even really been to the moon... only a very small select few astronauts went on very short demonstration trips, in which each only went once, and all on a defense budget
It is a fallacy to attempt to disprove a statement by shifting the semantics. It is fair however to point out what "being there" means.
if we ever are to have any chance of getting anywhere in space, it will require a catastrophe that falls barely short of complete human extinction to make people realise that survival is more important than money and power...
I've heard this fantasy before. Wouldn't it be a whole lot healthier to develop a belief system that doesn't require global disaster in order to be validated?
unless some robotic thing finds some kind of mineral that will make some corporation a lot of money (akin to the gold rushes of yesteryear or the oil rush of today), no government will bother investing in it. even the space "exploration" going on the surface of mars at the moment is probably a mineral hunt under the guise of searching for ET; the US government (that provides NASA with funding) doesn't give a fuck about ET... all they care about is money and power, and not for the US in general, just for themselves because many politicians have stock in the corporations that would benefit
You do realize that minerals exist off of Earth? And that minerals from Mars would sell just as well as minerals from Earth would. Frankly, I think a driver for space mining will be Earth-side regulation.
until the nuclear winter of post-ww3, when all the fat greedy politicians, welfare bludgers, corporate CEOs and stockholders die of starvation and there are no corporations, and government is actually run by the people for the people (for their very survival), "we" will never have any hope of ever getting to the moon or mars
The disasturbation fantasy rears its ugly little head again. You do realize that the "greedy" class is more likely to survive than the "people" class?
Well, you could trust the government, but what would be the point?
Oh wait, they're already seeking to remove regulatory barriers. You know, the ones that keep companies from screwing their customers.
It's worth remembering here that customers should be working to avoid getting screwed. Say like using competitors who don't screw them? Classic examples are the huge banks with the ridiculous fees.
They might even just say the contractors aren't responsible for government abuses of it simply because they've been paid.
That would be an iffy defense for the contractor to make. The "But I was just following orders", doesn't seem to work that well, but maybe it'd fly in a courtroom.
Then it is indeed an insight. Maybe you should take heed rather than drop a bunch of one line quips.
the problem occurs when physicists (and anyone gullible enough to believe them) claim that perpetual motion is impossible because of the laws of thermodynamics, or that nothing can possibly travel faster than the speed of light because of relativity
That is quite accurate except for your characterization of it as a "problem". That is one of the points to models, to be used to make predictions. And I might add here, there is actual evidence against perpetual motion and faster than light speeds. The former that perpetual motion requires a closed system with either no energy loss (something that has never been observed, but could in theory exist) or a closed system that actually gains energy (in which case, we'd have to explain why the universe hasn't yet been torn apart by energy release from that process).
In the latter case, we have yet to see FTL phenomena.
But sure, we can lazily assert that things could change or not be as we thought they are. But until you show a situation where the models don't work, then there's little point to the exercise.
So they "fucked up" by ending up following Republican policies?
Why do you expect the answer to this question to be anything but "Yes"?
Yet they're the bad guys and the people whose policies they're following are the good guys.
The problem is that in this case, health care policy, the resulting bill was both grossly unconstitutional and a really bad idea to boot. No need to reduce things to white hat/black hat.
Yes. There are historical cases where people who weren't running managed to get nominated, but those are quite infrequent and none has occurred in recent memory.
But that's not going to happen in this election cycle. First, Romney has enough delegates to win outright. Second, some portion of those delegates were won what I see as apparent manipulation of primary/caucus vote tabulation. Which indicates to me that he also has the support from any shadow powers in or behind the Republican party as well.
I frequently make typos. You're free to start caring about them. Just don't expect them to be corrected because I don't have the means to do so.
And trying to split hairs with Chik-Fil-A is ignoring how they are a company that prides itself on its moralistic virtues. Yet you say apparently we can't disagree with them, you say it was opportunistic bigotry.
Did I say that you weren't allowed to engage in opportunistic bigotry? Not at all. The US is a free country. Just don't expect to be respected for doing so.
As it turns out, I support same sex marriages and disagree with Dan Cathy on that subject. What I don't support is the sort of bullying where someone's employer is targeted because the person has unpopular opinions. That's dirty pool.
It doesn't matter if Chick-Fil-A has "moralistic virtues" or not. It doesn't matter if a key official makes bigoted remarks. Is the business actively discriminating in its hiring, promotions, and so on? If so, it is likely breaking the law for which there are remedies (and for which I would respect a boycott). If not, then there's no case for a boycott.