I realize you are just going for shock value here. Most of your posts share the same theme of proposing outrageous solutions to problems that no one would ever really impliment but do you have any suggestions to the issue that people WOULD perhaps impliment?
I'm seriously considering starting a corporation that sells shares for $6000 to buy farmland in Eastern Oregon, preferably with steep hills, a riverbank, and hilltops. As well as land on the Oregon Coast. Such land would be fenced off for use by the corporation only. Shareholders would be given RFID tags, armed robots would patrol the border and taser anything that moves. Electricity for the robots would come from one of four sources: Solar, wind, hydroelectric, and wave action. Inside the border, we'd call shareholders "citizens" and use high tech robotics and internet and cyborg technologies to provide as many services as possible to our citizens. Eventually, when we're strong enough and as new shareholders buy in to the Cascadia Project, as I'd call it, we'd start buying up more and more land- with the eventual aim of owning 90% of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and British Columbia. At which point we'd petition for Cascadia to secede from the union(s) of the United States and Canada. If we do our border security right, they'll send troops to keep us from secedeing- but our robots will take care of anybody or anything without the right RFID tag, at the border. Since we'd have robotic labor and a fair cross section of available natural resources, we'd have no need for imports OR exports, or for that matter markets. However, we'd take pity on our impoverished neighbors to the South, the Californicators- and would be willing to export energy & manufactured distilled water to them in return for say, gold.
Of course, that's just a pipe dream too- but it's an acceptible path within the free market to a marketless society. The real key though is basing it on robotic, rather than human/illegal immigrant, labor.
An economist has the advantage of seeing the results, and then telling you which model or theory it conforms to.
The problem is, most of them are liars near as I can tell. They tell me high tech jobs fleeing to India and China is a good thing because of "comparative advantage", but the results so far say that the correct theory would be "absolute advantage".
Could you please explain to me why having a trade deficit is a bad thing?
Same reason as having high credit card bills that you never pay off is a bad thing. In fact, given that is how much of the trade deficit is ultimately financed- it's EXACTLY the same thing. Red ink is not the way to get rich- even though you may be living as if you are rich.
In your explanation, don't forget to mention why it's bad to send other countries useless pieces of paper (we call those scraps of paper "dollars"), and get useful goods in return.
And the answer on this one is National Soverignity- if you sell your freedom, is that any different than giving it away in war? What is to stop China from charging you 500% interest on those dollars and using that debt to enslave your children? Absolutely nothing is the answer. One world government affectionados never seem to ask the question, what if the world government that we end up with isn't a democracy?
If you truly understood the concept of comparative advantage, you'd understand why, when Asian workers make $1-2/hr while American unions demand $20/hr plus benefits for the same work, that jobs flow to Asia, and trade deficits occur.
No, you're getting confused- that's ABSOLUTE advantage. Comparative advantage would mean that even though jobs are flowing to Asia, the American workers can retrain to produce some product that is worth $40/hr plus benefits that they're selling to Asia. Can you name such a product? I know somebody with a huge pile of cargo containers that would be willing to ship that product at a rate of $.01/mile (because currently the ships are returning to Asia empty).
Ricardo assumed that national currencies would rise or fall to reflect trade status - not at all unusual in a world where currencies were backed by gold. In today's fiat currency world, the US dollar continues to do a levitating act that turns David Copperfield green with envy. By all macroeconomic rights, the US dollar should be in the toilet, which would all by itself turn around the trade deficit. It is the US dollar's status as a "reserve" currency that keeps it up, and prolongs the trade and current account deficits.
Which is why we should remove that status, by law- it should be illegal for foreign citizens to own US dollars.
The biggest one is the trade deficit; under the classical description of Comparative Advantage, the free market in currency should have revalued the dollar long ago to eliminate the trade deficit. The fact that this revaluation hasn't happened is a sign that third world countries now hold an absolute advantage in the manufacturing sector. Another sign of this is the rotting, empty factories being demolished in the United States, as well as the growing surplus of empty cargo containers stacking up in our ports. The last is particularily damning to the theory of Comparative Advantage- it means even in sheer tonnage, never mind in dollars, the United States is exporting far less than it is consuming.
Worse than any of that is the trend over the last 30 years- in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we did at times have a positive balance of payments. Now we're losing $68 billion a MONTH to foreign trade, and it's growing.
When I have a business that is losing money, I close it's doors and stop doing that business. This is so incredibly unprofitable for USA, inc that any intelligent executive would have closed the borders long ago. But I guess that's the problem, isn't it?
However, microeconomics is substantially less "bullshit-y". In the sense that I have directly applied many principles learned in my micro class to make more money. Which I count as the ultimate sort of scientific validation.
Personal anecdotes are not neccessarily scientific data- in fact, eyewitness reports may be OK in court by they're considered to be extremely bad *science*.
Having said that, I think the real problem is this: There are three main meta-views of economics. The first says it's just a study of what is already happening (I consider this to be the "pure science" form, but also the GIGO form, whatever garbage you bring in as your assumptions is what you come out with). The second says that the purpose of the economy is to maximize efficient use of capital; these economists are always coming up with theories about the free market that don't seem to pan out in real life for everybody because those theories are only useful to the rich. The third says that the purpose of the economy is to keep the poor from killing the rich and simply stealing to survive; to this group savings and credit are horrible mutations to the free market that cause a lot of misery.
In the United States, the second group is very much in charge- they're the ones advising the government, they're the ones who create our myths. If you last name is one of the 2000 approved last names, this is a very good thing- their myths allow you to suck every last penny out of the usury of the "neorich" whose wealth is based entirely on immaginary bubbles (like real estate right now, or.com companies 5 years ago). But if you're NOT in one of those families, the IS-LM-FE model is just another lie that is reducing your standard of living slowly- no matter how much mathematical beauty there is in it, it's ignoring the data on the ground.
Of course- Economics deals with the movement and resource managment of physical goods (primarily). You can't use it to break the laws of physics, and to a large part, how fast a physical good can move or set of physical goods can be distributed is extremely bound by the laws of physics.
Probably not a whole lot, because economics is far from a humanities course -- economics is heavily dependent on maths and physics. Things such as resource optimisation and operations research involves the original concept of programming (LP, for instance), scheduling methodologies, systems analysis, statistical methods and stochastic processes and other very technical things.
Yep, you're completely correct. Too bad most economists don't believe in actual economics engineering as much as they believe in proving stupid assumptions like Comparative Advantage despite 30 years of evidence to the contrary.
I'm a software engineer, and I find Economics to be a very interesting course also- but still bullshit. Economists have *NO* idea how to interpret data- they start with unreasonable assumptions then cherry pick the data that supports those assumptions, and call it a theory.
Which is how we start with David Ricardo's Assumption of Comparative Advantage and end with a $68 Billion/month trade deficit that has been getting worse every month for the past 30 years.
You missed the fact that he's Asian- his parents are from Vietnam- and that he's been working towards this since first grade, driven beyond that which any American kid would be.
Re:Harris Miller is not a good representative
on
Brave New Ballot
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· Score: 1
That's why democracy and paper ballots work in a country like India, with 1 billion citizens and more potential voters than the total US population.
Re:Harris Miller is not a good representative
on
Brave New Ballot
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, but that's in Minnesota where you've got what, maybe 2 million ballots to store after an election? That takes up what, a pallet or two in a warehouse? Now try multiplying it by 100, and you get the nationwide votes if everybody voted. The whole idea of computerized voting is to expand the vote by use of technology, kind of like Oregon's mail in ballots but eventually over the internet. Or at least that's the dream.
In the meantime though, there's all sorts of other issues that need consideration- especially in the area of recounts and tampering with the machines. Your optical scan ballots are the same- there's nothing, for instance, to stop an unscrupulous worker from reprogramming the machine to reject votes for Democrats without showing the error.
It's not wrong, except in the use of one word- replace strong with stable (though weak economies are often unstable, so are strong economies- it's only stagnant ones that are stable).
Harris Miller is not a good representative
on
Brave New Ballot
·
· Score: 1
Of American IT. As the article above states: Similarly, an article I wrote 'E-Voting: It's Security, Stupid' also was the recipient of the wrathful ITAA reply. In their so-called rebuttal mistakenly titled 'E-Voting Does Work', Harris Miller of the ITAA follows his modus operandi of first attacking the person, avoiding the issue, stating vague meaningless comments, and concluding the issue by missing the point.
Yep, that's exactly been my experience with the ITAA- they're not so much interested in facts as truthiness.
I think that quote is part of the reason I consider Common Sense to be an oxymoron- it is neither common, nor is it related to reason and thus does not make sense.
Thanks to that link- you answered my question. Terapin Logo is one of the compilers available for use with the original RX1 and would presumably work with any COM compliant API.
Actually, my main argument is on efficency of the beuracracy- Waste in government results in jail sentences, so there is an attempt made to "save" the project and at least use it for something. Waste in private industry is barely punished at all, and not at all at the decision making (CxO) level, so the "cost savings" method of killing innovation is much more attractive.
Darn. I'd LIKE somebody to try to explain this to me. If Globalization and the WTO are so great because of comparative advantage, why is the Trade Deficit going UP? Why are Oaxaca Indians leaving their land for the first time ever, and migrating to the United States (Mexicans who don't know Spanish OR English are now 25% of illegal aliens in Oregon) saying that NAFTA will no longer let them compete as farmers? Why are farmers in India commiting suicide instead of "retraining" if anybody can be retrained to do anything?
Someday I'd like to find somebody explain these items to me, because right now, all the evidence I can see points to economic theory being a highly dangerous lie.
The very first Lego Robotics kit, back in the early 1980s, was a turtle robot. To program it, you used Lego Logo- a special version of the Logo programming language, which was well known as a teaching tool for object orientation (before it was popular) and top-down design, by using turtle graphics. Lego Logo was indeed text based, using such commands as FW (Forward, with a units parameter), RT and LT (Right and Left with a degrees parameter), PU and PD (Pen Up and Pen Down). Thank you for the link though.
I think you miss my point. Private industry, because of the focus on profit, kills useful projects far to early. They do so because their concentration, due to SEC regulations, is on the quarterly bottom line, not on the future. Government has a similar short sightedness, but depending upon the budget cycle, will spend the extra money at the end to finish a project within the budget cycle instead of just killing it outright and wasting man-hours.
Exactly right- I can't think of a single more pro-corporation anti-American organization. Corporatism is the new communism- seeking to use the power of the corporate dollar through lobbyists to restrict the free market down to just a few oligarchial players.
When exactly did corporate lobbyists BECOME our government?
1896, when the Supreme Court said they could. They did this basically by giving corporations superior rights to citizens. Most people think this just gave corporations equal rights, but since corporations are allowed to control the money of many citizens, this allows them the bankroll to hire lobbyists and bribe politicians through "Campaign Contributions". Several Supreme Court Cases later, and corporate lobbyists became our government.
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I realize you are just going for shock value here. Most of your posts share the same theme of proposing outrageous solutions to problems that no one would ever really impliment but do you have any suggestions to the issue that people WOULD perhaps impliment?
I'm seriously considering starting a corporation that sells shares for $6000 to buy farmland in Eastern Oregon, preferably with steep hills, a riverbank, and hilltops. As well as land on the Oregon Coast. Such land would be fenced off for use by the corporation only. Shareholders would be given RFID tags, armed robots would patrol the border and taser anything that moves. Electricity for the robots would come from one of four sources: Solar, wind, hydroelectric, and wave action. Inside the border, we'd call shareholders "citizens" and use high tech robotics and internet and cyborg technologies to provide as many services as possible to our citizens. Eventually, when we're strong enough and as new shareholders buy in to the Cascadia Project, as I'd call it, we'd start buying up more and more land- with the eventual aim of owning 90% of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and British Columbia. At which point we'd petition for Cascadia to secede from the union(s) of the United States and Canada. If we do our border security right, they'll send troops to keep us from secedeing- but our robots will take care of anybody or anything without the right RFID tag, at the border. Since we'd have robotic labor and a fair cross section of available natural resources, we'd have no need for imports OR exports, or for that matter markets. However, we'd take pity on our impoverished neighbors to the South, the Californicators- and would be willing to export energy & manufactured distilled water to them in return for say, gold.
Of course, that's just a pipe dream too- but it's an acceptible path within the free market to a marketless society. The real key though is basing it on robotic, rather than human/illegal immigrant, labor.
An economist has the advantage of seeing the results, and then telling you which model or theory it conforms to.
The problem is, most of them are liars near as I can tell. They tell me high tech jobs fleeing to India and China is a good thing because of "comparative advantage", but the results so far say that the correct theory would be "absolute advantage".
Could you please explain to me why having a trade deficit is a bad thing?
Same reason as having high credit card bills that you never pay off is a bad thing. In fact, given that is how much of the trade deficit is ultimately financed- it's EXACTLY the same thing. Red ink is not the way to get rich- even though you may be living as if you are rich.
In your explanation, don't forget to mention why it's bad to send other countries useless pieces of paper (we call those scraps of paper "dollars"), and get useful goods in return.
And the answer on this one is National Soverignity- if you sell your freedom, is that any different than giving it away in war? What is to stop China from charging you 500% interest on those dollars and using that debt to enslave your children? Absolutely nothing is the answer. One world government affectionados never seem to ask the question, what if the world government that we end up with isn't a democracy?
If you truly understood the concept of comparative advantage, you'd understand why, when Asian workers make $1-2/hr while American unions demand $20/hr plus benefits for the same work, that jobs flow to Asia, and trade deficits occur.
No, you're getting confused- that's ABSOLUTE advantage. Comparative advantage would mean that even though jobs are flowing to Asia, the American workers can retrain to produce some product that is worth $40/hr plus benefits that they're selling to Asia. Can you name such a product? I know somebody with a huge pile of cargo containers that would be willing to ship that product at a rate of $.01/mile (because currently the ships are returning to Asia empty).
Ricardo assumed that national currencies would rise or fall to reflect trade status - not at all unusual in a world where currencies were backed by gold. In today's fiat currency world, the US dollar continues to do a levitating act that turns David Copperfield green with envy. By all macroeconomic rights, the US dollar should be in the toilet, which would all by itself turn around the trade deficit. It is the US dollar's status as a "reserve" currency that keeps it up, and prolongs the trade and current account deficits.
Which is why we should remove that status, by law- it should be illegal for foreign citizens to own US dollars.
The biggest one is the trade deficit; under the classical description of Comparative Advantage, the free market in currency should have revalued the dollar long ago to eliminate the trade deficit. The fact that this revaluation hasn't happened is a sign that third world countries now hold an absolute advantage in the manufacturing sector. Another sign of this is the rotting, empty factories being demolished in the United States, as well as the growing surplus of empty cargo containers stacking up in our ports. The last is particularily damning to the theory of Comparative Advantage- it means even in sheer tonnage, never mind in dollars, the United States is exporting far less than it is consuming.
Worse than any of that is the trend over the last 30 years- in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we did at times have a positive balance of payments. Now we're losing $68 billion a MONTH to foreign trade, and it's growing.
When I have a business that is losing money, I close it's doors and stop doing that business. This is so incredibly unprofitable for USA, inc that any intelligent executive would have closed the borders long ago. But I guess that's the problem, isn't it?
However, microeconomics is substantially less "bullshit-y". In the sense that I have directly applied many principles learned in my micro class to make more money. Which I count as the ultimate sort of scientific validation.
.com companies 5 years ago). But if you're NOT in one of those families, the IS-LM-FE model is just another lie that is reducing your standard of living slowly- no matter how much mathematical beauty there is in it, it's ignoring the data on the ground.
Personal anecdotes are not neccessarily scientific data- in fact, eyewitness reports may be OK in court by they're considered to be extremely bad *science*.
Having said that, I think the real problem is this: There are three main meta-views of economics. The first says it's just a study of what is already happening (I consider this to be the "pure science" form, but also the GIGO form, whatever garbage you bring in as your assumptions is what you come out with). The second says that the purpose of the economy is to maximize efficient use of capital; these economists are always coming up with theories about the free market that don't seem to pan out in real life for everybody because those theories are only useful to the rich. The third says that the purpose of the economy is to keep the poor from killing the rich and simply stealing to survive; to this group savings and credit are horrible mutations to the free market that cause a lot of misery.
In the United States, the second group is very much in charge- they're the ones advising the government, they're the ones who create our myths. If you last name is one of the 2000 approved last names, this is a very good thing- their myths allow you to suck every last penny out of the usury of the "neorich" whose wealth is based entirely on immaginary bubbles (like real estate right now, or
Economics is dependent on physics?
Of course- Economics deals with the movement and resource managment of physical goods (primarily). You can't use it to break the laws of physics, and to a large part, how fast a physical good can move or set of physical goods can be distributed is extremely bound by the laws of physics.
Given that- wouldn't it be best for a growing economy to have a law defining interest rates above inflation as usury?
Probably not a whole lot, because economics is far from a humanities course -- economics is heavily dependent on maths and physics. Things such as resource optimisation and operations research involves the original concept of programming (LP, for instance), scheduling methodologies, systems analysis, statistical methods and stochastic processes and other very technical things.
Yep, you're completely correct. Too bad most economists don't believe in actual economics engineering as much as they believe in proving stupid assumptions like Comparative Advantage despite 30 years of evidence to the contrary.
I'm a software engineer, and I find Economics to be a very interesting course also- but still bullshit. Economists have *NO* idea how to interpret data- they start with unreasonable assumptions then cherry pick the data that supports those assumptions, and call it a theory.
Which is how we start with David Ricardo's Assumption of Comparative Advantage and end with a $68 Billion/month trade deficit that has been getting worse every month for the past 30 years.
RTFA- they didn't all count. The sidebar box had him graduating with 15 extra credits- 8 dupes.
You missed the fact that he's Asian- his parents are from Vietnam- and that he's been working towards this since first grade, driven beyond that which any American kid would be.
That's why democracy and paper ballots work in a country like India, with 1 billion citizens and more potential voters than the total US population.
Interesting example, considering that India has given up counting votes by hand.
Yeah, but that's in Minnesota where you've got what, maybe 2 million ballots to store after an election? That takes up what, a pallet or two in a warehouse? Now try multiplying it by 100, and you get the nationwide votes if everybody voted. The whole idea of computerized voting is to expand the vote by use of technology, kind of like Oregon's mail in ballots but eventually over the internet. Or at least that's the dream.
In the meantime though, there's all sorts of other issues that need consideration- especially in the area of recounts and tampering with the machines. Your optical scan ballots are the same- there's nothing, for instance, to stop an unscrupulous worker from reprogramming the machine to reject votes for Democrats without showing the error.
It's not wrong, except in the use of one word- replace strong with stable (though weak economies are often unstable, so are strong economies- it's only stagnant ones that are stable).
Of American IT. As the article above states:
Similarly, an article I wrote 'E-Voting: It's Security, Stupid' also was the recipient of the wrathful ITAA reply. In their so-called rebuttal mistakenly titled 'E-Voting Does Work', Harris Miller of the ITAA follows his modus operandi of first attacking the person, avoiding the issue, stating vague meaningless comments, and concluding the issue by missing the point.
Yep, that's exactly been my experience with the ITAA- they're not so much interested in facts as truthiness.
I think that quote is part of the reason I consider Common Sense to be an oxymoron- it is neither common, nor is it related to reason and thus does not make sense.
Thanks to that link- you answered my question. Terapin Logo is one of the compilers available for use with the original RX1 and would presumably work with any COM compliant API.
Actually, my main argument is on efficency of the beuracracy- Waste in government results in jail sentences, so there is an attempt made to "save" the project and at least use it for something. Waste in private industry is barely punished at all, and not at all at the decision making (CxO) level, so the "cost savings" method of killing innovation is much more attractive.
Darn. I'd LIKE somebody to try to explain this to me. If Globalization and the WTO are so great because of comparative advantage, why is the Trade Deficit going UP? Why are Oaxaca Indians leaving their land for the first time ever, and migrating to the United States (Mexicans who don't know Spanish OR English are now 25% of illegal aliens in Oregon) saying that NAFTA will no longer let them compete as farmers? Why are farmers in India commiting suicide instead of "retraining" if anybody can be retrained to do anything?
Someday I'd like to find somebody explain these items to me, because right now, all the evidence I can see points to economic theory being a highly dangerous lie.
Never heard of Lego Logo, what is it?
The very first Lego Robotics kit, back in the early 1980s, was a turtle robot. To program it, you used Lego Logo- a special version of the Logo programming language, which was well known as a teaching tool for object orientation (before it was popular) and top-down design, by using turtle graphics. Lego Logo was indeed text based, using such commands as FW (Forward, with a units parameter), RT and LT (Right and Left with a degrees parameter), PU and PD (Pen Up and Pen Down). Thank you for the link though.
I think you miss my point. Private industry, because of the focus on profit, kills useful projects far to early. They do so because their concentration, due to SEC regulations, is on the quarterly bottom line, not on the future. Government has a similar short sightedness, but depending upon the budget cycle, will spend the extra money at the end to finish a project within the budget cycle instead of just killing it outright and wasting man-hours.
I would assume with a supercapacitor....
Exactly right- I can't think of a single more pro-corporation anti-American organization. Corporatism is the new communism- seeking to use the power of the corporate dollar through lobbyists to restrict the free market down to just a few oligarchial players.
The ITAA is for: Replacing all American high-tech workers with H-1b indentured servants, Removing Verifiable voting from American voters, is for guest worker visas to replace American Workers, and is headed by the guy who destroyed Cesar Chaverez's attempt to unionize farm workers back in the 1970s. And we expect a man named GARCIA from this group to be pro-USA enough to head such an important post?
When exactly did corporate lobbyists BECOME our government?
1896, when the Supreme Court said they could. They did this basically by giving corporations superior rights to citizens. Most people think this just gave corporations equal rights, but since corporations are allowed to control the money of many citizens, this allows them the bankroll to hire lobbyists and bribe politicians through "Campaign Contributions". Several Supreme Court Cases later, and corporate lobbyists became our government.