Bwaaa? Capitalism is by definition ruled by a boom/bust cycle. If the bust is bad enough, it can take decades to recover, which is indeed what happened in the great depression.
I'll agree that actions taken by Hoover made things worse, which takes some of the blame off of pure capitalism, but the bust itself was just another cyclical event, which, fed by a semi-natural disaster and an excess of greed, ended up being substantially worse than normal.
Yes, actually. Who else? You think the government can do better? Seriously? You want to have to talk to somebody on the other side of the country for permission to buy staples? Or approve a loan?
Communism is based on the same idea. Newsflash: it doesn't work well. China had a crap economy and couldn't grow enough food to support itself until it allowed farmers say in what crops to grow, and allowed industries to grow and fail based on their own decisions, rather than the will of the government.
And as for my "straw man": what do you think it means when you have to buy clothes from the government owned clothing mills? They're never efficient, so cheap imports can't be allowed. You have to buy what they choose to make, because there is no alternative. Period. That's how it works.
That's how it always works when the government decides what is to be produced. Can't have competition, because you'd be competing against yourself, so innovation goes right out the window.
Really? So, you think that a handful of people off in Washington should tell you what job to work, what house to buy, what food to eat, what clothes to wear, where to send your kid to school?
While they're at it, they should tell the farmers what crops to grow, the factories what products to make, the service industries what services to provide?
Or do you think that those decisions should be made by the owners and consumers who actually have extremely close and detailed knowledge of the situation?
Won't happen. If they did fire 50% of their staff it would be worse for the economy than if we let the auto companies and the banks fail, and it still wouldn't pay for the debt, especially since all those out of work people won't be paying taxes, so tax revenues would go down.
Because our workers are more expensive than workers who can do the same work in other countries.
Or was that rhetorical?
The loss of factory jobs is just a fact of globalization. The product doesn't care where it gets made, and the consumer will buy the best product for the best price. Period. We can jack up tarrifs to make our stuff more competitive in terms of price, but then the people suffer because the products cost a zillion dollars, and their standard of living decreases.
As far as technology, we've always been a backward country in many respects. Slow to accept Evolution. Hell, slow to accept continental drift, which was a no brainer. No metric system, etc. But we're a nice place to live, and we've always done well importing great scientists from other, less nice, places. We made out like bandits in per and post WW2, and we did great in the post soviet world as well.
That's the same thing that made us great in manufacturing: we brought in masses of strong, cheap, willing labor to work our factories. But, of course, once the industry is established, then it's all a case of "We don't need any more, thanks, we've got enough."
To be fair, it was Hoover's fault. Not that he could know; most of the techniques we use today to try and mitigate the effects of a long term downturn weren't even invented during Hoover's administration. It wasn't (at that time) recognized that unregulated capitalism was perfectly capable of committing suicide.
It's not for private enterprise to try and throw itself on the economic grenade. They're SUPPOSED to save themselves, their stockholders can SUE them if they don't try to save themselves, and having the whole crash next year when you could have cut sensibly beforehand is ridiculous.
The whole point of the capitalistic system is that the individual knows what is best for themselves. They need to act to preserve themselves, just as (in better times) they need to act to increase their gains.
Now obviously, this isn't good for the whole in times of crisis. That is where the government can step in, to pump money into the economy through targeted public works and infrastructure projects. Which is what it's been sorta doing...
This bank bailout crap has been a fiasco in terms of loosening up money, which also needs to happen. The other prong of recovery is often new private enterprise, which is fueled by large numbers of skilled workers who are no longer employed, but that usually requires some start-up capital, and that's problematic right now.
Anyway, socialist chicken little freak outs don't really help either. It's not the duty of the company to provide jobs, it's to maintain themselves. In the long run, that preserves more jobs.
I don't know about Intel or Microsoft, but IBM is at a 20 year high for employment; the highest since it dropped 150k workers in the 90's.
Even though they managed to pull some solid growth last year, they're on the heavy side for a significant down turn. For a company that deals in services and hardware, it'd be shortsighted not to tighten up a bit.
Still, no fun. I sympathize with the workers over there. (Before anyone starts calling me heartless; I work for a newspaper company. My department has lost almost 70% of it's staff in the last 3 years. )
A lot of them can pretend it's not an issue. Our minorities represent a huge number of people...Close to seventy million (whitey only accounted for 200,000,000 in the same survey, so 25% if you add them all up). That's more than the total population of most european states.
We have race issues. We have a LOT of race issues. But we deal with them a lot better than most countries would, given similar demographics.
I actually tend to like web radio services like Pandora and Last.fm better for that sort of thing, but I definitely appreciate being able to listen to an entire album before I buy it, and the record companies have zero stake in allowing that to happen.
That got shot down; a judge ruled that just having the file available for download did not constitute damages unless there was proof that that file had been downloaded.
Saying that there is no necessary relation is a huge step, because it throws the whole question open to interpretation. Given that there isn't a one-to-one correlation, it becomes an issue of individual cases as to how many songs are able to be cited as damages by the plaintiff, which does have a major effect on restitution and final costs (since the labels have been basing their claims on a per song basis).
I can only imagine the indignity of being forced to pay whatever obscene per song is required for some crappy piece of music that you downloaded out of curiosity, hated on first listen, and never deleted.
His point is that you should try to live carbon-neutral, not that you should live like a caveman. He pays a premium for his power so that a portion of it has to come from renewable resources, and he puts money in to carbon offset funds. That's more than I do, and my bill is 1/10th of his.
Yea, yea, powering a 10,000 square foot house that functions as the home and office of a guy worth in excess of 100,000,000 dollars...How dare he use a ton of electricity!
Agreed. The batteries are a massive recurring expense that pretty much makes the investment impossible to break even.
Additionally there is so much research going into batteries and super capacitors, that I'd be hesitant to invest in a big battery infrastructure without a clear and pressing need.
I'd be surprised if he didn't make 20 times the average salary per year as well.
News Flash: Rich people consume more resources per capita! News at 11:00!
Nothing like being pro-environment; doesn't matter how much you invest in environmental initiatives...if you don't live in a shack eating raw organic food and making your own clothes, you're a hypocrite.
Yep yep. Living off the grid gets more and more challenging as your consumption increases. Not that the guy in TFA was ever looking to get off the grid. IIRC from the first article, he doesn't have a battery system or anything, he's just using the panels to offset some of his massive electrical bills.
Given his initial outlay of 45k, it's going to take a decade or so to break even, but the active life of the panels is longer than that, so no biggie (Of course, he's going to look silly when we discover profitable cold fusion next year, but that's beside the point).
Just to play devils advocate here, in the old days, the long long ago, when you bought a big app from some development house, it was understood that you were going to customize it, and you licensed the source along with the compiled app.
27 years later, I'm supporting one of those apps, and 27 years of customization has created a monster that I dream nightly of killing (preferably, with fire). Another business unit of the same company (which I also maintain) runs the same software, but their version was customized by different people, and the two systems are wildly divergent.
Individual customizations on software are necessarily not a good thing in the long run.
Meh, I googled you and the first editor and publisher article was how you cut 12,000 circ this year. Even for a big paper like the OWH, that's a hefty chunk, and that sort of measure really kicks your upbeatness in the fork. Not half as bad as the AJC though; those jokers cut almost 6 times that recently.
Nice that you're not corporate owned though. Corporate ownership is the suck. Our profits are eaten up to support larger, less profitable papers, and to pay fat corporate salaries.
Oh I understand the concept. I just think he's underestimating the amount of actual skill and work it takes to create a significant story, as well as the amount of financial backing that is required to support a journalist who is working on investigative stories that can take months.
There is also the issue of legal backing; protecting them from the inevitable people who choose to sue on flimsy pretexts because something made them look bad...Or alternately, providing those legal resources to prosecute lawsuits against government entities who are denying legitimate FOIA requests.
Without those resources, you're not able to do anything but extremely shallow journalism.
I'm right there with you. Who wants to watch 10 minutes of video instead of an article that could be consumed in 90 seconds? (30 seconds for CNN)
I have no problem with video being made available as an extra...If you've got a journalist somewhere, have 'em shoot a little tape while they're there, then post it online with their story, and use that to drive traffic to your website.
But taking away the text article and replacing it with flash or video? That sucks.
Yea, we're still making a 20% margin, so we're profitable as well...Damn profitable. If I could invest my savings at 20% today, I'd retire.
But 10 years ago it was a 35% margin and our circulation was 25% larger. What's yer parent company, just out of curiosity?
Don't kid yourself that the industry is going to do an amazing rebound. The demographics suck, the paper and ink costs are steadily increasing, and the internet is eating up a big chunk of the ad pool.
The thing that bothers me is that the applications of technology suck. Making a widget to view scores is fine, but it's pointless without a top notch web presence, and very few sites have that.
Slashdot Mirror
Bwaaa? Capitalism is by definition ruled by a boom/bust cycle. If the bust is bad enough, it can take decades to recover, which is indeed what happened in the great depression.
I'll agree that actions taken by Hoover made things worse, which takes some of the blame off of pure capitalism, but the bust itself was just another cyclical event, which, fed by a semi-natural disaster and an excess of greed, ended up being substantially worse than normal.
Yes, actually. Who else? You think the government can do better? Seriously? You want to have to talk to somebody on the other side of the country for permission to buy staples? Or approve a loan?
Communism is based on the same idea. Newsflash: it doesn't work well. China had a crap economy and couldn't grow enough food to support itself until it allowed farmers say in what crops to grow, and allowed industries to grow and fail based on their own decisions, rather than the will of the government.
And as for my "straw man": what do you think it means when you have to buy clothes from the government owned clothing mills? They're never efficient, so cheap imports can't be allowed. You have to buy what they choose to make, because there is no alternative. Period. That's how it works.
That's how it always works when the government decides what is to be produced. Can't have competition, because you'd be competing against yourself, so innovation goes right out the window.
Really? So, you think that a handful of people off in Washington should tell you what job to work, what house to buy, what food to eat, what clothes to wear, where to send your kid to school?
While they're at it, they should tell the farmers what crops to grow, the factories what products to make, the service industries what services to provide?
Or do you think that those decisions should be made by the owners and consumers who actually have extremely close and detailed knowledge of the situation?
My personal view is here.
Trees don't matter. The content matters.
Won't happen. If they did fire 50% of their staff it would be worse for the economy than if we let the auto companies and the banks fail, and it still wouldn't pay for the debt, especially since all those out of work people won't be paying taxes, so tax revenues would go down.
Because our workers are more expensive than workers who can do the same work in other countries.
Or was that rhetorical?
The loss of factory jobs is just a fact of globalization. The product doesn't care where it gets made, and the consumer will buy the best product for the best price. Period. We can jack up tarrifs to make our stuff more competitive in terms of price, but then the people suffer because the products cost a zillion dollars, and their standard of living decreases.
As far as technology, we've always been a backward country in many respects. Slow to accept Evolution. Hell, slow to accept continental drift, which was a no brainer. No metric system, etc. But we're a nice place to live, and we've always done well importing great scientists from other, less nice, places. We made out like bandits in per and post WW2, and we did great in the post soviet world as well.
That's the same thing that made us great in manufacturing: we brought in masses of strong, cheap, willing labor to work our factories. But, of course, once the industry is established, then it's all a case of "We don't need any more, thanks, we've got enough."
This sound familiar?
To be fair, it was Hoover's fault. Not that he could know; most of the techniques we use today to try and mitigate the effects of a long term downturn weren't even invented during Hoover's administration. It wasn't (at that time) recognized that unregulated capitalism was perfectly capable of committing suicide.
It's not for private enterprise to try and throw itself on the economic grenade. They're SUPPOSED to save themselves, their stockholders can SUE them if they don't try to save themselves, and having the whole crash next year when you could have cut sensibly beforehand is ridiculous.
The whole point of the capitalistic system is that the individual knows what is best for themselves. They need to act to preserve themselves, just as (in better times) they need to act to increase their gains.
Now obviously, this isn't good for the whole in times of crisis. That is where the government can step in, to pump money into the economy through targeted public works and infrastructure projects. Which is what it's been sorta doing...
This bank bailout crap has been a fiasco in terms of loosening up money, which also needs to happen. The other prong of recovery is often new private enterprise, which is fueled by large numbers of skilled workers who are no longer employed, but that usually requires some start-up capital, and that's problematic right now.
Anyway, socialist chicken little freak outs don't really help either. It's not the duty of the company to provide jobs, it's to maintain themselves. In the long run, that preserves more jobs.
I don't know about Intel or Microsoft, but IBM is at a 20 year high for employment; the highest since it dropped 150k workers in the 90's.
Even though they managed to pull some solid growth last year, they're on the heavy side for a significant down turn. For a company that deals in services and hardware, it'd be shortsighted not to tighten up a bit.
Still, no fun. I sympathize with the workers over there. (Before anyone starts calling me heartless; I work for a newspaper company. My department has lost almost 70% of it's staff in the last 3 years. )
Wow. Has political correctness gone that far? Poor rednecks, so oppressed. ROFL.
It's absolutely NOT an analogous situation: Kentucky is a tiny little redneck state...No more populous than Ireland, Norway, or Croatia.
Comparing that to California, the 8th largest economy in the world...Now that's just wrong.
A lot of them can pretend it's not an issue. Our minorities represent a huge number of people...Close to seventy million (whitey only accounted for 200,000,000 in the same survey, so 25% if you add them all up). That's more than the total population of most european states.
We have race issues. We have a LOT of race issues. But we deal with them a lot better than most countries would, given similar demographics.
I actually tend to like web radio services like Pandora and Last.fm better for that sort of thing, but I definitely appreciate being able to listen to an entire album before I buy it, and the record companies have zero stake in allowing that to happen.
That got shot down; a judge ruled that just having the file available for download did not constitute damages unless there was proof that that file had been downloaded.
Saying that there is no necessary relation is a huge step, because it throws the whole question open to interpretation. Given that there isn't a one-to-one correlation, it becomes an issue of individual cases as to how many songs are able to be cited as damages by the plaintiff, which does have a major effect on restitution and final costs (since the labels have been basing their claims on a per song basis).
I can only imagine the indignity of being forced to pay whatever obscene per song is required for some crappy piece of music that you downloaded out of curiosity, hated on first listen, and never deleted.
His point is that you should try to live carbon-neutral, not that you should live like a caveman. He pays a premium for his power so that a portion of it has to come from renewable resources, and he puts money in to carbon offset funds. That's more than I do, and my bill is 1/10th of his.
Yea, yea, powering a 10,000 square foot house that functions as the home and office of a guy worth in excess of 100,000,000 dollars...How dare he use a ton of electricity!
Seriously.
Agreed. The batteries are a massive recurring expense that pretty much makes the investment impossible to break even.
Additionally there is so much research going into batteries and super capacitors, that I'd be hesitant to invest in a big battery infrastructure without a clear and pressing need.
I'd be surprised if he didn't make 20 times the average salary per year as well.
News Flash: Rich people consume more resources per capita! News at 11:00!
Nothing like being pro-environment; doesn't matter how much you invest in environmental initiatives...if you don't live in a shack eating raw organic food and making your own clothes, you're a hypocrite.
Yep yep. Living off the grid gets more and more challenging as your consumption increases. Not that the guy in TFA was ever looking to get off the grid. IIRC from the first article, he doesn't have a battery system or anything, he's just using the panels to offset some of his massive electrical bills.
Given his initial outlay of 45k, it's going to take a decade or so to break even, but the active life of the panels is longer than that, so no biggie (Of course, he's going to look silly when we discover profitable cold fusion next year, but that's beside the point).
Just to play devils advocate here, in the old days, the long long ago, when you bought a big app from some development house, it was understood that you were going to customize it, and you licensed the source along with the compiled app.
27 years later, I'm supporting one of those apps, and 27 years of customization has created a monster that I dream nightly of killing (preferably, with fire). Another business unit of the same company (which I also maintain) runs the same software, but their version was customized by different people, and the two systems are wildly divergent.
Individual customizations on software are necessarily not a good thing in the long run.
Meh, I googled you and the first editor and publisher article was how you cut 12,000 circ this year. Even for a big paper like the OWH, that's a hefty chunk, and that sort of measure really kicks your upbeatness in the fork. Not half as bad as the AJC though; those jokers cut almost 6 times that recently.
Nice that you're not corporate owned though. Corporate ownership is the suck. Our profits are eaten up to support larger, less profitable papers, and to pay fat corporate salaries.
Oh I understand the concept. I just think he's underestimating the amount of actual skill and work it takes to create a significant story, as well as the amount of financial backing that is required to support a journalist who is working on investigative stories that can take months.
There is also the issue of legal backing; protecting them from the inevitable people who choose to sue on flimsy pretexts because something made them look bad...Or alternately, providing those legal resources to prosecute lawsuits against government entities who are denying legitimate FOIA requests.
Without those resources, you're not able to do anything but extremely shallow journalism.
I'm right there with you. Who wants to watch 10 minutes of video instead of an article that could be consumed in 90 seconds? (30 seconds for CNN)
I have no problem with video being made available as an extra...If you've got a journalist somewhere, have 'em shoot a little tape while they're there, then post it online with their story, and use that to drive traffic to your website.
But taking away the text article and replacing it with flash or video? That sucks.
Yea, we're still making a 20% margin, so we're profitable as well...Damn profitable. If I could invest my savings at 20% today, I'd retire.
But 10 years ago it was a 35% margin and our circulation was 25% larger. What's yer parent company, just out of curiosity?
Don't kid yourself that the industry is going to do an amazing rebound. The demographics suck, the paper and ink costs are steadily increasing, and the internet is eating up a big chunk of the ad pool.
The thing that bothers me is that the applications of technology suck. Making a widget to view scores is fine, but it's pointless without a top notch web presence, and very few sites have that.