The only think I know close to that 2900+ number would be the number of troops lost in Iraq- arguably that isn't due to an invasion of us, but rather due to our invasion of somebody else. I have a big tendency to disagree with the use of US troops to attack people outside of our border; the real problem is invasion and the best thing we could do to stop it would be to control borders to the point that we have a *complete* background of anybody we allow into the country and tracking devices attached to visitors. Such a system would make international terrorism impossible very quickly, and we wouldn't have to mess around protecting Iraq.
So while investing in the markets doesn't directly enable you to eat, it does set off a chain of events on which our entire economic system is based and which eventually lead to people buying food and eating it.
Yes, but why mess with such a convoluted waste of resources, when instead we could cut out the middle man of the banking and finance system and just provide government grants to people directly, without the hassle of feeding a bunch of con artists? The point is, the stock brokers could be better employed driving tractors in the field creating food, or driving trucks to the third world to deliver that food, than creating a bunch of useless paperwork.
See, the problem to me is that I see profit as a waste of resources that could be better used in R&D or PRODUCTION. Better to be in a system of plenty than in a system of scarcity.
Wouldn't it be more efficient just to provide the capital investments directly from the Government Treasury, and then use the people freed up from the dissolution of the financial industry to build the tractors and pick the crops? In other words, actually have them do real production instead of just producing a bunch of worthless paperwork?
It's a rough period but hey- 75% of people in Europe died from the plague. I'd rather this than that.
Before this ends, we'll have that. Our current population of 300 million at a standard of living 40x the rest of the world simply can't be sustained if we have no jobs to be productive in. The government is already bankrupt- welfare won't save us if there is no income to be taxed.
Division of labour and capital investment are the only way the production of necessities can possibly scale to support the world's current population.
Correct, so maybe we shouldn't be supporting the world's current population.
The elimination of the social division of labour would condemn a significant fraction of that population to death by starvation in short order, to say nothing of the decline in general standards of living. Even if you allow for exchange within family groups (which your "philosophy" of complete self-sufficiency did not) there are not enough resources to support that level of population in the absence of capital investments.
Correct. But what you fail to realize is that capital investments are mythical- they aren't real. There aren't enough resources to support that level of population even WITH capital investments- we're spending millions of years worth of oil, for instance, with no realistic way to replace it.
Remember that without division of labour you have no technology to speak of, and individual food production requires far more work for a given level of output than group production, technology or no.
True, but at least that would keep human populations within the carrying capacity of their local environment, instead of destroying that environment to prop them up artificially.
Human ingenuity is not infinite in abundance. It is limited by both time and scarcity of individual experiences (incidently one of the reasons for division of labour). As such human ingenuity readily commands a non-zero price.
Thank you for admiting that the economy really is a zero sum game.
Your support of complete self-sufficiency stands in contradiction to your sig (condemning capitalism but supporting democracy). If you can't trust others you should oppose democracy just as much as capitalism, and probably more -- democracy legitimizes the mob, leaving them less inhibited about interfering with you, whereas a basic aspect of capitalism is strong support for individual choice. No true capitalist would attempt to aggress against you; your philosophy may be fundamentally stupid, but it remains your right to follow it. The same cannot be said for the citizens or officers of a democratic government.
If that's the case- why is it that the capitalists have been aggressing against me?
I already transfered the funds out, around 42K worth (around 200% more than my contribution), and into a completely different fund as I'm self employed now -- no significant hit. If I took it completely out of a qualified fund, the government would penalize me with taxes.
So basically you took it from one broker, and gave it to a different broker.
So I guess the internal combustion engine, penicillin, municipal water/waste, nitrogenated soil, mechanized farming, airplanes, computers.... they have no "value".
If they become of infinite supply, they have no value. Human ingenuity is in infinite supply, thus has no value.
I guess that simple mathematical facts like that American farms have increased their corn output from roughly 40 bushels/acre in 1900 to more than 150 bushels/acre today, with less labor input, have not resulted in a net increase in wealth (250%+ efficiency boost). Please. Without these kinds of improvements in efficiency (which results in net wealth creation) you wouldn't have been able to afford the time to bitch and wine on slashdot all day long -- you'd still be on the farm trying to eak out a living.
All that has done is created cheap food for export- causing farms elsewhere to collapse and a net *decrease* in world food production. My family farm is one of those.
I used to. Then I got laid off. Now I don't believe in it so much anymore.
Even now, it is fixing the problem by causing dramatic pressures on indian compensation (up to 40% in a year).
At the current rate, they will make what we make in about 8 years.
Too little too late- I've already been forced out of private industry, and I ain't going back. You can't trust any boss that you can't vote out of office.
Yes it will be a rough 8 years (well more like a rough 4 years- already some companies are withdrawing from offshoring because the savings are not as advertised).
The idiots running the companies deserve what they get. When they finally come begging us for work, ask them why you can trust them when they abandoned us for 8 years.
I'm glad I found this again. I thought I had lost it during the several hours I couldn't post today.
Hmm, whenever there is one of these globalization discussions on Slashdot it always seems like the antis are more angry & hostile, more victimized and inclined to blame others for their problems, and less sophisticated in their use of language and logic.
PTSD of a form. Getting laid off will do that to you, regardless of the reason. Spending 5 years after being laid off always wondering where your next meal will come from will have a tendency to do that as well.
I wonder if there is some correlation between that, and their employers' apparent enthusiasm for laying them off?
Absolutely- but I believe you've got cause and effect mixed up. Most of the people who are against outsourcing today, were upper middle class 5 years ago. What do you think would happen to you if you were thrown out of work and not allowed to work for 5 years, and if every company you started brought the big scary guys to your door warning you out of the market?
If economics were truly operating at zero sum(I will concede that there is a theoretical maximum to the amount of economic activity possible with a given volume), the global population could not grow, as you would have to take food away from everyone in order to feed the new people, which just doesn't seem to be happening.
Funny, I can name many countries where EXACTLY THAT IS HAPPENING. And because of it, World Population is finally begining to stabilize- from starvation. Is that what you're espousing? Growing our economy to limit world population by starvation? If so, globalization is succeeding wildly, even as close as Mexico.
Your views are honestly a little ridiculous. Simple economics dictate that $200K for anyone with a college degree is lunacy. Especially since a lot of people with college degrees actually suck.
In that case, colleges need to reduce tuition, books, room and board down to a much more reasonable level. Otherwise the payoff for getting a college degree is simply not there- a college degree is a bad investment. You'd be better off putting that $120k into a bank account at 2.5% interest than going to college.
As for me being dysfunctional- I am now. Once again you're getting cause and effect mixed up though- dysfunctionalism is the effect, not the cause.
Does this resemble your neighborhood? I doubt it unless you live in a trailerpark and even then...
In 2002 I lived in Beaverton, OR. There were so few jobs in the Silicon Forest at that time that the UHaul place ran out of trucks to rent and the residential vacancy rate was 25%. So yes, that rate looked *very* realistic to me.
The best time to buy is when the stocks are cheap - you get more for your money.
When I need the money to live on, the stocks are cheap. When I don't need the money to live on, the stocks are expensive. Therefore, any money somebody like me can afford to put into the stock market is going to disappear as the price of stocks go down, and isn't going to be there when I need it.
And if it is such an investment, then why did mine get 14.5% last year? I'm just an engineer, I'm no stock broker... it doesn't take a genious to make money on the stock market. It is good for me and it is good for the business I invest in.
Your investments didn't get 14.5% last year- your broker did. If you tried to withdraw that 14.5% it would all disappear into brokerage fees. The stock market is a game for chumps.
Economics is not zero sum, there are unlimited amounts of the most valuable resource - human ingenuity.
With 7 billion humans, human ingenuity is not a valuable resource. Anything that has a virtually unlimited supply has NO value, by the simple law of supply and demand. So your entire statement is based upon a premise that is a myth. Come back when you can analyse things starting with facts rather than myths.
I don't really see a difference between your method and the Maximum Wage, except in degree. A Maximum wage law in Plato was always some multiplier of the minimum wage; stating that the most successful person imaginable was in reality only worth 10x the worst loser on the planet. WITHIN that range, all possible human success is contained- thus it's not an artificial limit on SUCCESS, just an artificial limit on REWARD FOR SUCCESS. You can have more success, but we'll just reset the curve so that your reward is porportional to other people's success.
Specialization is not secure. It ties your well being to the goodwill of other men.
The last 5 years have taught me you can't trust other human beings with your well being. Either do it yourself, or you WILL be cheated into having somebody else do it for you. Either kill the man who comes to steal your food, or he will steal your food. Trust is worth nothing. And that's why, yes, I am rearranging my life to make everything I need out of my own labor.
And as for human ingenuity- anything which is infinite in abundance is worth nothing- that's the law of supply and demand. Infinite supply, finite demand, makes your argument for human ingenuity a total non-starter.
All you've proven to me with this post is that economics is more myth and religion than fact and science- free trade is the modern pablum of the masses.
Oh, and yes, a country like the United States DOES have enough natural resources to create everything we need internally. Maybe not all we WANT, but certainly all we NEED.
If you had invested 10K dollars in 1963 into the S&P 500, that investment would only be worth more half a million dollars today. Please let me know where I can get my money "stolen" like this.
Bullshit. If you had invested 10k dollars in 1963, it would all be gone into Brokerage fees by now and be worth NOTHING, because all the stock would have been sold long ago to pay for the brokerage fees. Or at least, that was the story with my meager 10k 401k in 2001. I now don't trust bankers OR stock brokers.
Maybe, just maybe, if we close our borders to foreign trade you can pay $500 for a DVD player.
I've got no problem with that- as long as the minimum wage is $20/hr. In fact, it's not that much different from paying $100 for a DVD player when the minimum wage is $5.15/hr. The trick though is to keep the DVD player at $500 and not $5000- and for that you need a Maximum Wage to match your Minimum Wage.
Let me know when you can make laws and enforce laws without creating a government, or when you can create a government without loyalty to that government. And also, let me know please how you would die to prevent your family from being hurt by invasion, yet still let 4,380 of your fellow contrymen die from that same invasion.
Could be. I'm still trying to figure out how a number I've been quoting for years (64 million in the labor force in 2002) became a historical number nearly twice that on the DOL website (117 million in the labor force in 2002).
Slashdot Mirror
Wow! Thanks for the stat, it clearly illustrates the problem. Do you have a cite handy that I could show others?
Biting the hand that feeds you a speech from the floor of the House of Representatives by Steve King, R Iowa.
Hmm? Sorry, I don't follow.
The only think I know close to that 2900+ number would be the number of troops lost in Iraq- arguably that isn't due to an invasion of us, but rather due to our invasion of somebody else. I have a big tendency to disagree with the use of US troops to attack people outside of our border; the real problem is invasion and the best thing we could do to stop it would be to control borders to the point that we have a *complete* background of anybody we allow into the country and tracking devices attached to visitors. Such a system would make international terrorism impossible very quickly, and we wouldn't have to mess around protecting Iraq.
So while investing in the markets doesn't directly enable you to eat, it does set off a chain of events on which our entire economic system is based and which eventually lead to people buying food and eating it.
Yes, but why mess with such a convoluted waste of resources, when instead we could cut out the middle man of the banking and finance system and just provide government grants to people directly, without the hassle of feeding a bunch of con artists? The point is, the stock brokers could be better employed driving tractors in the field creating food, or driving trucks to the third world to deliver that food, than creating a bunch of useless paperwork.
See, the problem to me is that I see profit as a waste of resources that could be better used in R&D or PRODUCTION. Better to be in a system of plenty than in a system of scarcity.
Wouldn't it be more efficient just to provide the capital investments directly from the Government Treasury, and then use the people freed up from the dissolution of the financial industry to build the tractors and pick the crops? In other words, actually have them do real production instead of just producing a bunch of worthless paperwork?
Yuppie kids or their parents also produce
Exactly WHAT are they producing? You can't eat stock options you know.
It's a rough period but hey- 75% of people in Europe died from the plague. I'd rather this than that.
Before this ends, we'll have that. Our current population of 300 million at a standard of living 40x the rest of the world simply can't be sustained if we have no jobs to be productive in. The government is already bankrupt- welfare won't save us if there is no income to be taxed.
The average for 2006 was 12 American citizens per DAY being killed by illegal immigrants. The 2,973 weren't in this country.
Economic trade is a form of warfare- and deserves to be treated as such.
Division of labour and capital investment are the only way the production of necessities can possibly scale to support the world's current population.
Correct, so maybe we shouldn't be supporting the world's current population.
The elimination of the social division of labour would condemn a significant fraction of that population to death by starvation in short order, to say nothing of the decline in general standards of living. Even if you allow for exchange within family groups (which your "philosophy" of complete self-sufficiency did not) there are not enough resources to support that level of population in the absence of capital investments.
Correct. But what you fail to realize is that capital investments are mythical- they aren't real. There aren't enough resources to support that level of population even WITH capital investments- we're spending millions of years worth of oil, for instance, with no realistic way to replace it.
Remember that without division of labour you have no technology to speak of, and individual food production requires far more work for a given level of output than group production, technology or no.
True, but at least that would keep human populations within the carrying capacity of their local environment, instead of destroying that environment to prop them up artificially.
Human ingenuity is not infinite in abundance. It is limited by both time and scarcity of individual experiences (incidently one of the reasons for division of labour). As such human ingenuity readily commands a non-zero price.
Thank you for admiting that the economy really is a zero sum game.
Your support of complete self-sufficiency stands in contradiction to your sig (condemning capitalism but supporting democracy). If you can't trust others you should oppose democracy just as much as capitalism, and probably more -- democracy legitimizes the mob, leaving them less inhibited about interfering with you, whereas a basic aspect of capitalism is strong support for individual choice. No true capitalist would attempt to aggress against you; your philosophy may be fundamentally stupid, but it remains your right to follow it. The same cannot be said for the citizens or officers of a democratic government.
If that's the case- why is it that the capitalists have been aggressing against me?
Investing isn't a game for people who can't pay their day to day expenses
And that's why telling a person who was laid off for multiple years that they should have "saved more" is worthless advice.
I already transfered the funds out, around 42K worth (around 200% more than my contribution), and into a completely different fund as I'm self employed now -- no significant hit. If I took it completely out of a qualified fund, the government would penalize me with taxes.
So basically you took it from one broker, and gave it to a different broker.
So I guess the internal combustion engine, penicillin, municipal water/waste, nitrogenated soil, mechanized farming, airplanes, computers.... they have no "value".
If they become of infinite supply, they have no value. Human ingenuity is in infinite supply, thus has no value.
I guess that simple mathematical facts like that American farms have increased their corn output from roughly 40 bushels/acre in 1900 to more than 150 bushels/acre today, with less labor input, have not resulted in a net increase in wealth (250%+ efficiency boost). Please. Without these kinds of improvements in efficiency (which results in net wealth creation) you wouldn't have been able to afford the time to bitch and wine on slashdot all day long -- you'd still be on the farm trying to eak out a living.
All that has done is created cheap food for export- causing farms elsewhere to collapse and a net *decrease* in world food production. My family farm is one of those.
I believe in capitalism.
I used to. Then I got laid off. Now I don't believe in it so much anymore.
Even now, it is fixing the problem by causing dramatic pressures on indian compensation (up to 40% in a year). At the current rate, they will make what we make in about 8 years.
Too little too late- I've already been forced out of private industry, and I ain't going back. You can't trust any boss that you can't vote out of office.
Yes it will be a rough 8 years (well more like a rough 4 years- already some companies are withdrawing from offshoring because the savings are not as advertised).
The idiots running the companies deserve what they get. When they finally come begging us for work, ask them why you can trust them when they abandoned us for 8 years.
I'm glad I found this again. I thought I had lost it during the several hours I couldn't post today.
Hmm, whenever there is one of these globalization discussions on Slashdot it always seems like the antis are more angry & hostile, more victimized and inclined to blame others for their problems, and less sophisticated in their use of language and logic.
PTSD of a form. Getting laid off will do that to you, regardless of the reason. Spending 5 years after being laid off always wondering where your next meal will come from will have a tendency to do that as well.
I wonder if there is some correlation between that, and their employers' apparent enthusiasm for laying them off?
Absolutely- but I believe you've got cause and effect mixed up. Most of the people who are against outsourcing today, were upper middle class 5 years ago. What do you think would happen to you if you were thrown out of work and not allowed to work for 5 years, and if every company you started brought the big scary guys to your door warning you out of the market?
Try withdrawing that 401k because you need to have an MRI done on a sick child, and see how much of that they actually let you keep.
Numbers on paper mean NOTHING. Cash in hand means EVERYTHING. Until you cash out, you don't really know what you've earned and what you haven't.
If economics were truly operating at zero sum(I will concede that there is a theoretical maximum to the amount of economic activity possible with a given volume), the global population could not grow, as you would have to take food away from everyone in order to feed the new people, which just doesn't seem to be happening.
Funny, I can name many countries where EXACTLY THAT IS HAPPENING. And because of it, World Population is finally begining to stabilize- from starvation. Is that what you're espousing? Growing our economy to limit world population by starvation? If so, globalization is succeeding wildly, even as close as Mexico.
Your views are honestly a little ridiculous. Simple economics dictate that $200K for anyone with a college degree is lunacy. Especially since a lot of people with college degrees actually suck.
In that case, colleges need to reduce tuition, books, room and board down to a much more reasonable level. Otherwise the payoff for getting a college degree is simply not there- a college degree is a bad investment. You'd be better off putting that $120k into a bank account at 2.5% interest than going to college.
As for me being dysfunctional- I am now. Once again you're getting cause and effect mixed up though- dysfunctionalism is the effect, not the cause.
Does this resemble your neighborhood? I doubt it unless you live in a trailerpark and even then...
In 2002 I lived in Beaverton, OR. There were so few jobs in the Silicon Forest at that time that the UHaul place ran out of trucks to rent and the residential vacancy rate was 25%. So yes, that rate looked *very* realistic to me.
The best time to buy is when the stocks are cheap - you get more for your money.
... it doesn't take a genious to make money on the stock market. It is good for me and it is good for the business I invest in.
When I need the money to live on, the stocks are cheap. When I don't need the money to live on, the stocks are expensive. Therefore, any money somebody like me can afford to put into the stock market is going to disappear as the price of stocks go down, and isn't going to be there when I need it.
And if it is such an investment, then why did mine get 14.5% last year? I'm just an engineer, I'm no stock broker
Your investments didn't get 14.5% last year- your broker did. If you tried to withdraw that 14.5% it would all disappear into brokerage fees. The stock market is a game for chumps.
Economics is not zero sum, there are unlimited amounts of the most valuable resource - human ingenuity.
With 7 billion humans, human ingenuity is not a valuable resource. Anything that has a virtually unlimited supply has NO value, by the simple law of supply and demand. So your entire statement is based upon a premise that is a myth. Come back when you can analyse things starting with facts rather than myths.
I don't really see a difference between your method and the Maximum Wage, except in degree. A Maximum wage law in Plato was always some multiplier of the minimum wage; stating that the most successful person imaginable was in reality only worth 10x the worst loser on the planet. WITHIN that range, all possible human success is contained- thus it's not an artificial limit on SUCCESS, just an artificial limit on REWARD FOR SUCCESS. You can have more success, but we'll just reset the curve so that your reward is porportional to other people's success.
Specialization is not secure. It ties your well being to the goodwill of other men.
The last 5 years have taught me you can't trust other human beings with your well being. Either do it yourself, or you WILL be cheated into having somebody else do it for you. Either kill the man who comes to steal your food, or he will steal your food. Trust is worth nothing. And that's why, yes, I am rearranging my life to make everything I need out of my own labor.
And as for human ingenuity- anything which is infinite in abundance is worth nothing- that's the law of supply and demand. Infinite supply, finite demand, makes your argument for human ingenuity a total non-starter.
All you've proven to me with this post is that economics is more myth and religion than fact and science- free trade is the modern pablum of the masses.
Oh, and yes, a country like the United States DOES have enough natural resources to create everything we need internally. Maybe not all we WANT, but certainly all we NEED.
If you had invested 10K dollars in 1963 into the S&P 500, that investment would only be worth more half a million dollars today. Please let me know where I can get my money "stolen" like this.
Bullshit. If you had invested 10k dollars in 1963, it would all be gone into Brokerage fees by now and be worth NOTHING, because all the stock would have been sold long ago to pay for the brokerage fees. Or at least, that was the story with my meager 10k 401k in 2001. I now don't trust bankers OR stock brokers.
Maybe, just maybe, if we close our borders to foreign trade you can pay $500 for a DVD player.
I've got no problem with that- as long as the minimum wage is $20/hr. In fact, it's not that much different from paying $100 for a DVD player when the minimum wage is $5.15/hr. The trick though is to keep the DVD player at $500 and not $5000- and for that you need a Maximum Wage to match your Minimum Wage.
Let me know when you can make laws and enforce laws without creating a government, or when you can create a government without loyalty to that government. And also, let me know please how you would die to prevent your family from being hurt by invasion, yet still let 4,380 of your fellow contrymen die from that same invasion.
Could be. I'm still trying to figure out how a number I've been quoting for years (64 million in the labor force in 2002) became a historical number nearly twice that on the DOL website (117 million in the labor force in 2002).