Forgot to mention, Soros owns about 2 million shares of Halliburton. He bought it at a time when the 527 groups he funds were heavily criticizing them. After the purchase, the criticism from the Soros' funded groups stopped, and the stock price has been rising ever since.
George Soros is like, what, one of two ertswhile-liberal multibillionaires? (Warren Buffet being the other)
I love how conservatives freak out about Soros (and, to a lesser degree, Gore) and totally ignore the vast amounts of money tied up on "their side". It's akin to how they're going apeshit over Solyndra and wholly failed to shine the light on Halliburton (for whom the budgets of Solyndra, let alone every green initiative on the planet, amount to a rounding error on the balance sheet of).
Yeah, sure. The green conspiracy is all about money. Sure. Go have a look at opensecrets.org and compare the kind of money that green and climate-science entities pour into politics to the dollars that energy, let alone finance and banking, do. Then tell me who has the bigger stake in the status quo.
Campaign contributions don't really tell the whole story, though, since it's all private money (with tightly controlled limits) going into actually election campaigns. You're leaving out all the public money floating around to support climate change memes, all the grants for funding alternative fuels, and all the issue-advocacy lobbying money funneled through various organizations to get public money for spending on "green" projects. In other words, there are far more people that rely on climate change funding, and there is far more funding available to the Al Gores and his ilk.
As for Soros, the guy is the most evil real person I've ever heard of. When Hitler's henchman, Adolf Eichmann, arrived in Hungary to oversee the murder of that country's Jews, George Soros ended up with the man whose job was confiscating property from the Jewish population. Soros went with him on his rounds. Soros has repeatedly called 1944 "the best year of his life." 70% of Mr. Soros's fellow Jews in Hungary, nearly a half-million human beings, were annihilated in that year, yet he gives no sign that this put any damper on his elation, either at the time or indeed in retrospect.
According to the Space Nutters, we'll find magical elements in the Periodic Table of Elements so we can build fantasy-level spaceships to leave "this rock" and spread the species among the stars. Yes, even the dirt-poor third-worlders will magically float away on space elevators made of tachyons. Amazing! Thanks, space!
How asinine! Colonizing space is totally stupid. We need to just eliminate 80% of the population, hunker down, and wait for a comet to wipe us all out. Space travel! Bah!
Warming is bad because it will make the earths inhabitable area diminish.
I don't see how that's true. I get that if enough glaciers fall into the ocean coastal areas will flood, but the temperate zones will also increase. It could be a net gain in inhabitable area. I've seen the Al Gore doomsday everything-is-underwater scenarios, but nothing on how much more arable land becomes available. Note that if the sea level rises, so does the timber line...
The thing about capitalism though is that the players have an incentive to act in ways that destabilize the system. For capitalism to work well you need to have competition, good information on the part of the consumer, and the ability for new players to enter the market. But those supplying the market are incentivised to eliminate competition, hide faults from the consumer, and erect barriers to entry for new players. So seen from this angle, what is happening now is a natural outcome of this system being left to its own devices.
I see this being bandied about a lot, and it's a complete distortion. The initial premise is demonstrably true, but the conclusions are based on fallacies. Here are the major flaws:
"consumer information" is always imperfect for individual consumers. It's not a problem with the system, though, because in aggregate the information consumers act on is more than sufficient
eliminating competition can only happen in two ways: by consistently serving the needs of consumers the best, or through coercive force. Coercive force can only be applied through government intervention.
Consumers share information among themselves, when they are free to communicate. Faults are discovered by consumers and disseminated. Producers have indeed tried to control information in the marketplace, but it is only marginally effective without some significant amount of government intervention.
Erecting barriers to entry for new players is difficult for most producers. Some markets require significant investment, but that's a natural barrier all players deal with. The only other barriers are available are things like patents, franchises, strict licensing, and other regulations that all require government intervention.
So primarily what you are describing far from a system "left to its own devices", rather there are problems with the system caused by external intervention of an actor with a monopoly on force.
Some alternative schools of economics have NOT failed, and in fact have made better predictions of economic events than our current, "mainstream" view of economics that is self-servingly spread by our government and its friends, who always seem to benefit.
And the best thing about economics, is that you can say this no matter *what* happens.
Or, as I prefer: "for every economist, there is an equal and opposite economist".
Congratulations! Your post has been awarded the coveted False Equivalency of the Month trophy!
apparently Android phone makers think they can get you to buy a new phone by making you really unhappy with your current one.
Well I was fairly satisfied with my Motorola phone, which came with 2.1. They were very slow getting updates out, so when 2.2 was finally available I loaded it as part of the early "smoke test" group. Motorola and AT&T both included so much useless bloatware as part of the OS update (locked and unable to be removed, of course), that it essentially has no room left for any other apps. So their update left me even LESS happy with the phone, and just 9 months after purchase (and 15 until the contract ends). So, yea, I want another phone, but I'll never buy another from Motorola.
Could you please at least try to refrain from running your mouth before you check your facts? The largest owner of American debt is not China- Over 40% of US debt is owned domestically. China owns about 10%. These figures are about a year old, but they've changed significantly.
China is, for all intents and purposes, a single creditor. While domestically held debt is a much larger share of the total debt, that is spread out among millions of individual creditors. So, Chiner is still holds the largest share of US debt than any other creditor.
but all I have seen to date leads me to believe there are also many in the "protect our profits" boat as I allege.
Oh, yes, agreed. No denying that. If the government didn't have so much power, though, they wouldn't be soliciting them for use of their coercive government authority. They might even have to actually try properly serving consumers.
Meh. I'm wrong a considerable amount. Forgive me then for being overly boisterous on the few occasions when I'm right.
I doubt policy "came after them" unless it was solicited by a competitor. Or something they simply didn't like. Like I dont like speed limits.
The Gibson case is instructive, here. The only "profit motive" seems to lie entirely with Federal agents or bureaucrats. It's difficult to locate the origins of the targeting of Gibson, but when the company started going through the courts to get its property back, it's clear that the Feds started acting simply to retaliate and pressure Gibson to drop the case. People, especially in LEO, get very nasty when they are trying to cover up a mistake.
Why would government want to pick winners and losers?
It provides them power and press. You see, politicians do not have souls. They also react as reliably to positive and negative reinforcement as Pavlov's dogs. One of the strongest positive reinforcement for a politician is good press. So targeting a company, for whatever reason, real or imagined, can provide them that. So can propping up companies for praise or government programs.
Why is there such resistance to getting corporate money out of politics?
The resistance mainly comes from politicians, because the ideas that can really do that would reduce their power. There is also a question of law. A "corporation" is just a group of people organized as a business. There are very strict rules already in place to limit direct contributions. So lobbyists and lobbyist groups are used. But they represent a huge range of interests, including things like unions, religious groups, specific industries, farmers, citizen groups (really - some fairly small). The NRA and MoveOn both spend a lot of money on K Street lobbyists. None of those people want their ability to have their interests heard, and some of them are even lobbying to end corporate influence.
So what helps politicians is to pass a law that sounds good and praise what a change it's going to make in improving the political process, but what the end up passing is something like McCain/Feingold, which was really just an incumbent protection act, that only served to cause some groups to register their organizations differently, and to prevent another repeat of the success of a third party like the Reform Party had.
You can disagree all you want, and you will still be wrong. A large, interventionist government naturally solicits influence peddlers. That's just a fact, and denying it is just fooling yourself.
The Microsoft example is just one of many. Gibson guitars is another. There are countless smaller companies that I could also site. They didn't try to influence policy until the policies came after them. The government now picks winners and losers, and not just industries, but individual companies within industries. You are forced to join a lobbying effort or you are placed on the "losers" list. Like Peter Shiff, who was fined for hiring too many people.
And if the middle class would stand as a cohesive unit, they could make themselves a lot better off than they are.
Too busy working.
What do you suppose would happen if they decided to scrap ALL Federal tax code, and declare an unconditional tax holiday for 6 months while they work out a new system for collecting revenue. Seriously, what would happen?
They are sitting in the park because they don't have the stomach to do the deed themselves. They are looking to hire some thugs that already have so much firepower they can't be opposed, to go and do the dirty work for them.
We've all got to eat. Those who control the means of production control who eats. Those who control the finance system control who works and who doesn't, and who has a home to go to at night. That is every bit as coercive as any governmental power.
No, it's not. Or, it is because you say it is?
Did you see the thugs dragging Gaddafi through the streets? Terry Greenburg blown up by an unmanned drone? The thousands of dead in Iraq and the bombed-out shell of what was once Afghanistan? All done by governments.
Why do you think corporations would gain enough control of all means of production to threaten the food supply? Oh, yea, because Monsanto and ADM are supported by government patents and the FDA. And governments layer on regulations to farms until small farmers become disadvantaged compared to the corporations that make it all up on volume. What would they do without all the government support and sanction and subsidizing? Topple over from the weight of their own bureaucracy, most likely, or enough to allow the little guys to compete, especially in an environment today when people will pay more for local and organically produced food.
Defend individuals, mainly from corporations. Unfortunately, our government is wholly owned by those very corporations we need to be protected from.
Yes, exactly, and that situation will continue as long as the government is as big and powerful as it is. The only way to reverse that is to reduce the power of the government itself. It is so large now that many industries and companies must pay tribute to the policy-makers, or they will find themselves run over by the competitors with Washington pull. Case in point is Microsoft itself. They were once just as large and overbearing, but basically ignored federal politics. Until they politicians got wind of the money and came calling, using Andreeson as the excuse. Microsoft now has one of the largest DC lobbying budgets of any US corporation. And it pays off for them handsomely. No politician will even condemn them now - because Gates is now playing ball.
You're leaving out an important component of a free market: Those with the most resources are also the ones with the greatest ability to acquire resources. Efficiency has to work for the entire population, not just certain segments that you pick out so you can come up with some fake moral claim on others' property. If you start allocating resources based on need, instead, eventually there won't be any resources for anyone, because the reward system for pressuring actors to increase their efficiency vanishes, resources diminish, and eventually everyone starves.
The greatest moral right presumably goes to whoever is hungriest / most in need of nutrition to survive.
No, I'm sorry, but it is completely IMMORAL to allocate resources based on NEED. It's a morality of death, which is no morality at all. It enslaves those with the most ability, who will eventually starve because all the resources have been allocated to those less able to supply resources. That's a diminishing return on resources that will eventually lead do the death of the entire species.
The intrinsic problem with a completely free economy is that... poverty attracts poverty.
Of course! Poor people love poor people. They are so attractive! People see that ghetto lifestyle and hanging out on street corners with cardboard signs, and their like "woohoo! I can do that too - and there's not government intervention to stop me!"
That god we have so much government intervention in the economy here, or there would be poor people on every damn busy street corner. AmIRite?
I think that most would argue that the leftists want to do this, but know that there are still too many right wing voters who will turn out to the polls if they ever legalized (they know it's a losing proposition for them, even if the majority want legalization because the majority doesn't vote).
Well they might argue that, but they would be wrong. It's because all the politicians in Washington don't work for the voters at all, they work for Somebody Else.
What other party? America has one right wing party with two factions. The big scary socialist in office right now has policies that are mostly to the right of Nixon and Reagan.
Well I guess that was kind of my point. Although I characterize them as "fascist", not "right wing".
Yes, of course, it's only right-wing politicians that use science or reject it to fit their agenda. If only some time since Nixon there was an opportunity when both houses and the president were controlled by the other party, marijuana decriminalization would happen right away!... oh, wait.
Anyone who claims that it is does not understand and appreciate the rigors that make for good science.
FTFA (which you apparently didn't bother to read)
But for Richard Muller, this free circulation also marks a return to how science should be done.
"That is the way I practised science for decades; it was the way everyone practised it until some magazines - particularly Science and Nature - forbade it," he said.
"That was not a good change, and still many fields such as string theory practice the traditional method wholeheartedly."
This open "wiki" method of review is regularly employed in physics, the home field for seven of the 10 Berkeley team.
So your premise is bogus. You should be criticizing the people that decided that openness wasn't needed because "we are the experts and that's all you need to know".
Slashdot Mirror
failed to shine the light on Halliburton
Forgot to mention, Soros owns about 2 million shares of Halliburton. He bought it at a time when the 527 groups he funds were heavily criticizing them. After the purchase, the criticism from the Soros' funded groups stopped, and the stock price has been rising ever since.
George Soros is like, what, one of two ertswhile-liberal multibillionaires? (Warren Buffet being the other)
I love how conservatives freak out about Soros (and, to a lesser degree, Gore) and totally ignore the vast amounts of money tied up on "their side". It's akin to how they're going apeshit over Solyndra and wholly failed to shine the light on Halliburton (for whom the budgets of Solyndra, let alone every green initiative on the planet, amount to a rounding error on the balance sheet of).
Yeah, sure. The green conspiracy is all about money. Sure. Go have a look at opensecrets.org and compare the kind of money that green and climate-science entities pour into politics to the dollars that energy, let alone finance and banking, do. Then tell me who has the bigger stake in the status quo.
Campaign contributions don't really tell the whole story, though, since it's all private money (with tightly controlled limits) going into actually election campaigns. You're leaving out all the public money floating around to support climate change memes, all the grants for funding alternative fuels, and all the issue-advocacy lobbying money funneled through various organizations to get public money for spending on "green" projects. In other words, there are far more people that rely on climate change funding, and there is far more funding available to the Al Gores and his ilk.
As for Soros, the guy is the most evil real person I've ever heard of. When Hitler's henchman, Adolf Eichmann, arrived in Hungary to oversee the murder of that country's Jews, George Soros ended up with the man whose job was confiscating property from the Jewish population. Soros went with him on his rounds. Soros has repeatedly called 1944 "the best year of his life." 70% of Mr. Soros's fellow Jews in Hungary, nearly a half-million human beings, were annihilated in that year, yet he gives no sign that this put any damper on his elation, either at the time or indeed in retrospect.
According to the Space Nutters, we'll find magical elements in the Periodic Table of Elements so we can build fantasy-level spaceships to leave "this rock" and spread the species among the stars. Yes, even the dirt-poor third-worlders will magically float away on space elevators made of tachyons. Amazing! Thanks, space!
How asinine! Colonizing space is totally stupid. We need to just eliminate 80% of the population, hunker down, and wait for a comet to wipe us all out. Space travel! Bah!
Warming is bad because it will make the earths inhabitable area diminish.
I don't see how that's true. I get that if enough glaciers fall into the ocean coastal areas will flood, but the temperate zones will also increase. It could be a net gain in inhabitable area. I've seen the Al Gore doomsday everything-is-underwater scenarios, but nothing on how much more arable land becomes available. Note that if the sea level rises, so does the timber line...
Hotter summers make for colder winters.
Ummm... No. No, they don't.
The thing about capitalism though is that the players have an incentive to act in ways that destabilize the system. For capitalism to work well you need to have competition, good information on the part of the consumer, and the ability for new players to enter the market. But those supplying the market are incentivised to eliminate competition, hide faults from the consumer, and erect barriers to entry for new players. So seen from this angle, what is happening now is a natural outcome of this system being left to its own devices.
I see this being bandied about a lot, and it's a complete distortion. The initial premise is demonstrably true, but the conclusions are based on fallacies. Here are the major flaws:
So primarily what you are describing far from a system "left to its own devices", rather there are problems with the system caused by external intervention of an actor with a monopoly on force.
And the best thing about economics, is that you can say this no matter *what* happens.
Or, as I prefer: "for every economist, there is an equal and opposite economist".
Congratulations! Your post has been awarded the coveted False Equivalency of the Month trophy!
apparently Android phone makers think they can get you to buy a new phone by making you really unhappy with your current one.
Well I was fairly satisfied with my Motorola phone, which came with 2.1. They were very slow getting updates out, so when 2.2 was finally available I loaded it as part of the early "smoke test" group. Motorola and AT&T both included so much useless bloatware as part of the OS update (locked and unable to be removed, of course), that it essentially has no room left for any other apps. So their update left me even LESS happy with the phone, and just 9 months after purchase (and 15 until the contract ends). So, yea, I want another phone, but I'll never buy another from Motorola.
You lie!
Could you please at least try to refrain from running your mouth before you check your facts? The largest owner of American debt is not China- Over 40% of US debt is owned domestically. China owns about 10%. These figures are about a year old, but they've changed significantly.
China is, for all intents and purposes, a single creditor. While domestically held debt is a much larger share of the total debt, that is spread out among millions of individual creditors. So, Chiner is still holds the largest share of US debt than any other creditor.
but all I have seen to date leads me to believe there are also many in the "protect our profits" boat as I allege.
Oh, yes, agreed. No denying that. If the government didn't have so much power, though, they wouldn't be soliciting them for use of their coercive government authority. They might even have to actually try properly serving consumers.
Must be nice being right all the time. :-)
Meh. I'm wrong a considerable amount. Forgive me then for being overly boisterous on the few occasions when I'm right.
I doubt policy "came after them" unless it was solicited by a competitor. Or something they simply didn't like. Like I dont like speed limits.
The Gibson case is instructive, here. The only "profit motive" seems to lie entirely with Federal agents or bureaucrats. It's difficult to locate the origins of the targeting of Gibson, but when the company started going through the courts to get its property back, it's clear that the Feds started acting simply to retaliate and pressure Gibson to drop the case. People, especially in LEO, get very nasty when they are trying to cover up a mistake.
Why would government want to pick winners and losers?
It provides them power and press. You see, politicians do not have souls. They also react as reliably to positive and negative reinforcement as Pavlov's dogs. One of the strongest positive reinforcement for a politician is good press. So targeting a company, for whatever reason, real or imagined, can provide them that. So can propping up companies for praise or government programs.
Why is there such resistance to getting corporate money out of politics?
The resistance mainly comes from politicians, because the ideas that can really do that would reduce their power. There is also a question of law. A "corporation" is just a group of people organized as a business. There are very strict rules already in place to limit direct contributions. So lobbyists and lobbyist groups are used. But they represent a huge range of interests, including things like unions, religious groups, specific industries, farmers, citizen groups (really - some fairly small). The NRA and MoveOn both spend a lot of money on K Street lobbyists. None of those people want their ability to have their interests heard, and some of them are even lobbying to end corporate influence.
So what helps politicians is to pass a law that sounds good and praise what a change it's going to make in improving the political process, but what the end up passing is something like McCain/Feingold, which was really just an incumbent protection act, that only served to cause some groups to register their organizations differently, and to prevent another repeat of the success of a third party like the Reform Party had.
You can disagree all you want, and you will still be wrong. A large, interventionist government naturally solicits influence peddlers. That's just a fact, and denying it is just fooling yourself.
The Microsoft example is just one of many. Gibson guitars is another. There are countless smaller companies that I could also site. They didn't try to influence policy until the policies came after them. The government now picks winners and losers, and not just industries, but individual companies within industries. You are forced to join a lobbying effort or you are placed on the "losers" list. Like Peter Shiff, who was fined for hiring too many people.
And if the middle class would stand as a cohesive unit, they could make themselves a lot better off than they are.
Too busy working.
What do you suppose would happen if they decided to scrap ALL Federal tax code, and declare an unconditional tax holiday for 6 months while they work out a new system for collecting revenue. Seriously, what would happen?
They are sitting in the park because they don't have the stomach to do the deed themselves. They are looking to hire some thugs that already have so much firepower they can't be opposed, to go and do the dirty work for them.
We've all got to eat. Those who control the means of production control who eats. Those who control the finance system control who works and who doesn't, and who has a home to go to at night. That is every bit as coercive as any governmental power.
No, it's not. Or, it is because you say it is?
Did you see the thugs dragging Gaddafi through the streets? Terry Greenburg blown up by an unmanned drone? The thousands of dead in Iraq and the bombed-out shell of what was once Afghanistan? All done by governments.
Why do you think corporations would gain enough control of all means of production to threaten the food supply? Oh, yea, because Monsanto and ADM are supported by government patents and the FDA. And governments layer on regulations to farms until small farmers become disadvantaged compared to the corporations that make it all up on volume. What would they do without all the government support and sanction and subsidizing? Topple over from the weight of their own bureaucracy, most likely, or enough to allow the little guys to compete, especially in an environment today when people will pay more for local and organically produced food.
Defend individuals, mainly from corporations. Unfortunately, our government is wholly owned by those very corporations we need to be protected from.
Yes, exactly, and that situation will continue as long as the government is as big and powerful as it is. The only way to reverse that is to reduce the power of the government itself. It is so large now that many industries and companies must pay tribute to the policy-makers, or they will find themselves run over by the competitors with Washington pull. Case in point is Microsoft itself. They were once just as large and overbearing, but basically ignored federal politics. Until they politicians got wind of the money and came calling, using Andreeson as the excuse. Microsoft now has one of the largest DC lobbying budgets of any US corporation. And it pays off for them handsomely. No politician will even condemn them now - because Gates is now playing ball.
I think the GP was referring to parallelization options, not optimization flags. Maybe you didn't read the post?
You're leaving out an important component of a free market: Those with the most resources are also the ones with the greatest ability to acquire resources. Efficiency has to work for the entire population, not just certain segments that you pick out so you can come up with some fake moral claim on others' property. If you start allocating resources based on need, instead, eventually there won't be any resources for anyone, because the reward system for pressuring actors to increase their efficiency vanishes, resources diminish, and eventually everyone starves.
The greatest moral right presumably goes to whoever is hungriest / most in need of nutrition to survive.
No, I'm sorry, but it is completely IMMORAL to allocate resources based on NEED. It's a morality of death, which is no morality at all. It enslaves those with the most ability, who will eventually starve because all the resources have been allocated to those less able to supply resources. That's a diminishing return on resources that will eventually lead do the death of the entire species.
The intrinsic problem with a completely free economy is that ... poverty attracts poverty.
Of course! Poor people love poor people. They are so attractive! People see that ghetto lifestyle and hanging out on street corners with cardboard signs, and their like "woohoo! I can do that too - and there's not government intervention to stop me!"
That god we have so much government intervention in the economy here, or there would be poor people on every damn busy street corner. AmIRite?
show me some legitimate examples of "free markets." No, I mean real examples, not fantasies quoted from airhead "philosophers."
Obviously never been to a Grateful Dead concert.
I think that most would argue that the leftists want to do this, but know that there are still too many right wing voters who will turn out to the polls if they ever legalized (they know it's a losing proposition for them, even if the majority want legalization because the majority doesn't vote).
Well they might argue that, but they would be wrong. It's because all the politicians in Washington don't work for the voters at all, they work for Somebody Else.
What other party? America has one right wing party with two factions. The big scary socialist in office right now has policies that are mostly to the right of Nixon and Reagan.
Well I guess that was kind of my point. Although I characterize them as "fascist", not "right wing".
Right wingers are immune to science.
Yes, of course, it's only right-wing politicians that use science or reject it to fit their agenda. If only some time since Nixon there was an opportunity when both houses and the president were controlled by the other party, marijuana decriminalization would happen right away! ... oh, wait.
It may be a reasonable concern, but I don't really find it credible claim.
.. deniers, like yourself ..[sic]
Anyone who claims that it is does not understand and appreciate the rigors that make for good science.
FTFA (which you apparently didn't bother to read)
So your premise is bogus. You should be criticizing the people that decided that openness wasn't needed because "we are the experts and that's all you need to know".