Any strategy of engaging in a conspiracy of avoiding the low cost alternative is doomed to failure. Some scrappy competitor will always break ranks and gain marketshare because of it and then all hell breaks loose.
On the bright side, with the economy improving new companies will be formed and they'll be hiring.
I guess I hit a nerve. I have an idea of your thoughts. You've put them down in posts and my analysis of your actual words lead to my conclusion that you're a reactionary.
You have no idea what I give in charity, how many people I help, and what impact my charitable actions have. Your analysis is pure fantasy, a projection of your internal prejudice onto the canvas of my pseudonym. So besides being a reactionary, you're a prejudiced one. You're turning out to be a real piece of work.
In my perfect fantasy world where everybody makes choices amenable to my reasoning, GMHC wouldn't be funded and there wouldn't be much of an AIDS epidemic in the US because we wouldn't have spent years worrying about homosexual feelings instead of taking standard anti-epidemic measures like closing down gay bath houses which served as transmission centers and cost so many people their lives.
But I recognize that we don't live in a perfect world and that when organizations that I disagree with fulfill a valid government purpose they deserve funding. That's tolerance and respect for difference. You would rather 10,000 people be helped with X dollars instead of 12,000 people be helped because the more efficient provider happens to be a christian organization. That's cruelty and disregard for the poor in my book. Christianity is not bigotry, no matter how you try to twist the word into making it so.
Yes, Jefferson argued in a private letter that the Constitution that he took no active part in writing (he was an ambassador at the time) should be interpreted in a particular way. Ooooh, because he wrote the Declaration of Indpendence we should only listen to his opinions on the Constitution. If a wall of separation between church and state was envisioned by the founders why was there no protest amongst the delegates who had established state churches? Jefferson was a man of many talents but he was not a saint that was always right. The mere fact that he wrote the letter does not make his interpretation the only acceptable one.
Finally, there's a difference between discrimination based on behavior (pedophiles shouldn't be school employees) and based on their birth (gender, race, national origin). You seem to be incapable of drawing this, and other simple distinctions.
Re:Liberalism != (Communism || Socialism)
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
The current system provides for negative returns. There's a point you seem intent on ignoring. The government, in this case, sets criteria for reputable investment houses and sets statistical risk limits on such accounts. This limits risk and keeps losses to a minimum from the obvious error of exclusively trying high risk investment strategies. It's a loss limiting mechanism. Government's been doing this for many decades when it decides questions of whether the broker gave appropriate devices. If govt. is incompetent at this then why have licenses? It's a similar exercise in giving appropriate advice.
The point isn't that the system is perfect. In a perfect system, everybody would be smart enough to save enough for their own retirement and nobody would ever need social programs. But the current system is on its way to breakdown and it's most cruel effects will be felt by our children who will pay into the current system but never collect. Until we get to an actuarily sound system that is perfect, I'm for reform that will make the system better. You seem to be for the status quo and a cruel joke on the next generation.
What's the alternative for saving social security? Is it tripling tax rates (crushing the poor) raising the retirement age to 80 (forcing the aged to work and breaking our promises to them) or cutting benefits (again, killing off the idea of retirement)? Once you take away privatization, partial or entire, you're left with some cruel choices.
So do you whistle past the graveyard and advocate nothing? Or is there some solution out there you actually like?
You talk about covering the world's oceans with solar cells and accuse someone else of making asinine statements? That wouldn't pass the laugh test in high school science.
Re:Liberalism != (Communism || Socialism)
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
They've been doing this in other countries for some time now and it's been a demonstrated success. When a nation like Chile who has 25% of US salaries is approaching 100% of US pensions because its investment based system outperforms ours we should take a very careful look at how they do it.
In fact, the Chilean system generally approves fund companies and people invest in them and I believe that that's what a few of the current reform proposals out there aim at as well. There's nothing wrong with starting off with limited investments and widening out as you demonstrate that americans are not idiots.
You assume that depositing money = contributing. But investment is an individual expression of confidence in one economic activity over another. It's becoming one of the tens of millions of hands on our economic ship of state. Doing it well *is* contributing and should be recognized as such. You sound like those communists of the last century railing about the parasitic capitalist class that didn't actually do anything but reaped the benefits of the workers. The poor economic performance of the resulting societies where investment became a govt. job done by the few speak very poorly of that judgement.
That's what's really funny. You equate no govt. charity with no charity. It's such a retro New Deal way of looking at the world. You're a reactionary posing as a progressive. It's just sad.
I'm willing to tolerate people who have a different ideology or philosophy than mine getting govt. funds for legitimate secular purposes and you don't but somehow I'm the bigot. What a sad joke it is when intolerance is gussied up as tolerance and classic tolerance is insulted as bigotry.
Separation of Church and State is a liberal shibbeloth that's never existed which is why we have century old laws suddenly discovered to be unconstitutional. It's not a part of your orthodoxy but its an old and established american tradition for general support of religious institutions for secular purposes as long as no individual church is established. Read some history and you might learn something.
The fact is that we've added trillions of dollars to our economy merely in the last decade. The financial situation we're in now compared to the 1930s or even the 1960s is very different. Stop being such a cruel and unfeeling reactionary. This is about doing our best as a society for the poor.
The point is that private charity is much more efficient, whether it's religiously funded or it's secular. Income is rising much faster than the number of people in poverty. Eventually, the economy will grow to a size where private charities can do it all without the government dime *if* the government will get out of the way. It's been established that government charity crowds out private donation. People don't give if they think that giving is useless as the govt is already taking care of it.
Back in the old days we had non-universal but efficient care for those who could get it. Today we've moved to universal but much less efficient provision because we've had a great shift to govt provided charity. The best overall situation is to have universal and efficient charity so we get the most help to the poor for the money we, as a society, believe we can afford. That's why further reform is needed.
I think the Gay Men's Health Crisis is a very poor use of taxpayer funds. It promotes a morally corrosive message and shouldn't be funded. You seem to think the same of the Salvation Army. That's fair enough but up until now current practice has been to fund the former but not the latter. As long as both can demonstrate with objective evidence that they are accomplishing a secular purpose and helping to solve a problem that's a legitimate government expenditure, I think it's reasonable that both should get govt. contracts to do it as long as they are the best available for the particular job. Unless you want to argue that the best guy for the job shouldn't get hired because you don't like their motivating philosophy, you should too.
Give every 3rd world family a TV, a car, and central heat/air conditioning. What happens to the world economy?
As for the oceans, they're a bit busy creating 1/3 of the world's usable oxygen. If you were to cover them with solar cells, we might have more energy but we'd likely die from lack of oxygen. Don't be a twit.
Re:Liberalism != (Communism || Socialism)
on
Working Hard?
·
· Score: 1
So the average and smart among us must pay in more and have a crappier retirement because someone out there somewhere might have lower returns than they do. That's unfair and frankly not the way this country usually runs.
The Bush plan, for instance, has part of the money going into the current system and part going into investment accounts. Under that plan, your dumb investor would have to really try hard to lose money over decades of investing in order to have a slightly lower retirement income. He would still get Social Security even if his investment portion would go to zero, something that the rest of the system would be rigged not to let happen by the aforementioned exclusion of high risk investment vehicles.
For the smart investor, he'll use his SS private accounts to do his govt. bond and treasury investing sector and his completely private savings for the higher risk portion. This will provide an adjusted yield somewhere in the 10-15% range, more if he's good or lucky. If he's unlucky, he'll still be making 3-5% on his treasuries and somewhat more on his blue chip corporate bonds and crater on his private investments.
The dumb investor won't be able to buy xyz penny stocks with his social security money. He might be able to buy IBM, Microsoft, Coca Cola or any of a number of high quality stocks and bonds but there won't be any margin, short selling, or other forms of leverage that radically increase risk. It's quite likely that the dumb investor won't lose money. The point is that even if they never make a penny, that's a better deal than the current system.
You want to penalize the bright, the average, and a good portion of the slow among us who would do better because some unknown portion of the dumb and unlucky might get a slightly worse deal but still get an adequate pension in the end. That's just stupid and unworthy of a great nation.
By your last statement, and the emphasis you keep putting on it, you're something of a socialist/communist. To make your fantasyland come true, you would have to abolish the stock market and private bonds because the lucky and the hard working and the better stock pickers get a better retirement right now. What the current reform proposals do is give a shot to the lower-middle and poor among us to get a better retirement as well while increasing the pool of money to fund economic growth via stock and bond sales.
The rich already use these superior instruments, why do you stand in the way of the poor to do the same?
A *very* slow news day and quite ignorant of God, prayer, and most religious theology. The NY Times religion dept. must be deeply ashamed at this pap passing in their newspaper.
Whatever failings in finding ineffective private charties are multiplied in the case of public ones. Every charity I know of takes more interest in the people they help than to just mail a check every month.
Charity spending from all sources has oversight. It's just that oversight on public charity is less, of less quality, and has zero effect on funding. Often the response to problems in a program is to increase their budget. Private charities can't usually afford that.
Your analysis is filled with double standards. Hold the govt. charities to the same standard as the private ones and you will find that they don't provide nearly as good a deal for the poor as private charity.
You want me to defend a caricature of actual proposals. When the first work requirements were rammed through Congress and President Clinton reluctantly signed on, there were widespread predictions of mass starvation and cruel conditions for the poor. Today, it's clear that the pro-market pro-accountability reforms were the best thing to happen to the poor in decades.
The same people who brought that success are now suggesting that private charities be given a bigger portion of our money. Now we've got the same voices who were so wrong over the last decade again predicting doom and gloom in the same apocalyptic terms. How often do they have to be wrong before they start to bear the burden of proving their ideas instead of demanding the privatizers prove theirs?
Take the population of the 1st world and how much energy it consumes. Now project how much energy would be needed if *everyone* was in the first world. There just isn't enough to do it right now. So in a way you're right. If you don't give a damn about the rest of the world, it's all cool. But it's dumb though for one big reason.
For national security reasons, it's becoming clear that poor, weak, failed states are either terrorist generation machines or harbors for same. The end result is the completely practical conclusion that the 3rd world must disappear and be integrated into the global system.
But right now there isn't enough capital, there isn't enough energy available. The energy equation is likely to change in 20-30 years with orbital power generation and beaming down to anywhere on earth but we've got to increase capital production several times over to avoid a huge crash.
Generally when we label something biomass it's done when it's a waste product. While you're technically correct, you're pedantic and confusing the issue for the non-specialists. Oh, this is slashdot, you'll fit right in...
Re:Liberalism != (Communism || Socialism)
on
Working Hard?
·
· Score: 1
Every investing 101 course out there talks about diversifying. Start with diversified funds and invest across sectors. When you accumulate enough money, you can go for individual stocks but always keep your sector allocations at fixed percentages.
Those who followed basic investment 101 advice got hurt by the cooked books but they were selling on the way up to keep their sector limits and weren't wiped out on the way down.
All the reform proposals out there strictly control permissible investments to weed out the frauds and the extremely risky stocks. They do it in one way or another. Over the space of decades, the stock market has been returning 12% yearly for well over a century (with the single exception of the 30s). Following basic principles people should be able to match the market by just buying index funds. With current returns for young adults (of any intelligence) being >0% the prospects of 12% seem a vast improvement.
As for the below average intelligence among us. There's dumb and there's not competent. Again, the dumb are protected by limiting participants eligible for investment by SS funds in private accounts. The not competent (in a legal sense) already have guardians who watch over their interests. I assume that these guardians will have custody of their investment accounts and a fiduciary duty to maximize their return.
And finally, if somebody's smart, interested in th market, and wants to have a better old age or even leave a bigger legacy to his descendents, what gives you or I the right to say no to him as long as he's not going to end up a burden on us no matter how well or poorly he does?
Re:Learned Professionals?
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
Actually, not all of them do live here. US income is taxed globally. You have to renounce your citizenship to stop owing US taxes. And yes, shared responsibility which is something that the 'progressives' seem to have forgotten. They're so busy taking the grandkids future away to pay for grandma's vote today that they don't seem to care about that anymore.
But past a certain framerate I can compile in background and still run Quake at an acceptable speed. Sure, it makes the compile slow down some but if you're going to take a 10 minute break, isn't it nice to be able to get some work done in the background at the same time?
Europe has great train systems across the continent because it has 10x the population density of the US. If we were to open our doors to 2.5 billion immigrants and distribute them evenly across the US, trains would work just as well in the US as they do in the EU.
Other than being extremely unrealistic and impractical, nothing wrong with your suggestion. In fact, the areas of the country (like the Boston-Washington corridor) that are highly settled do tend to have much more in the way of rail service.
news flash, there isn't enough on planet energy from any source. biomass is now generally a waste product. To turn it into the input to create a new fuel source is all to the good. We have to get over the hump until we can do orbital solar stations.
When NYC adopted welfare reform and made people show up for their checks, 50% of their caseload disappeared. Half of the people officially on welfare in the city were bogus cases. If a private charity were discovered to do that their contribution base would be decimated. And that's the point, isn't it. I don't give to the United Way because of their past scandals and present policies and choose to donate my charity dollars through other avenues.
Inevitably, any system of charity will have its foul ups as its always going to be run by fallible humans. Private charity lets you cut off the screwups more easily than govt. charity. This ability to easily and personally defund the worst of the programs is a very good thing.
Re:Liberalism != (Communism || Socialism)
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
You could invest in US Treasuries and get a better return than present. If US Treasuries are no good, what makes you think Social Security will survive?
20 year olds actually are projected to get negative returns on their SS taxes. If they put them all in 30 yr Treasuries at 4% they'd do a lot better.
For those of us who understand that over the long haul, the stock market does better than treasuries, we'll make the *choice* to diversify and invest some there to get even better returns.
The stock market isn't about investing lucky but about researching and investing for long-term value over the 40 odd years you'll be saving up for that retirement.
Re:Learned Professionals?
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
Live with it. The 3rd world can't safely be kept down anymore. Eventually they're going to progress and want in to the 1st world club. Either we'll have grown enough economically to accomodate them or they'll underprice us and collapse most of our economy.
The most concern I have about these sorts of rules is that they all negatively impact economic growth. We need a lot of growth to accomodate that Indian without getting hurt in the process.
Re:Learned Professionals?
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
Only stupid employers do that and they aren't likely to survive as independent entitites during the next boom time.
Here's how it works, you screw your labor force excessively during the bad times, your labor force is stuck but has their resumes out and about and when there's a sign of life in the economy, out the door they go. In the meantime you have a horrible corporate culture that poisons any new labor that comes in.
When the next boom times come, everybody who took care of their workers the best they could does well. They have low turnover, high productivity, loyal workers who are actively rooting for the company to succeed. These companies get rich and their stock prices go thorugh the roof. Bad labor policy companies also rise some but nowhere near as much because they have high turnover, poor attitudes and a hostile workplace environment.
The end result is that bad companies lose marketshare or become vulnerable to takeover or both. For management that looks beyond the current phase of the business cycle it makes sense not to take advantage of all your current labor market power.
Re:Learned Professionals?
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
so the top 1% should pay how much of the burden, all of it? This might work if it weren't pathetically easy to move to other countries and renounce citizenship but we don't live in a fascist state.
Where's your sense of shared responsibility? The bottom half pay 4% of income taxes, the top 1% pay 37% or 9 times more. All the evil Republican tax cuts keep knocking more and more people off the tax rolls while they lower rates all around.
I have a feeling I'm feeding a troll.
Re:Learned Professionals?
on
Working Hard?
·
· Score: 1
The rich do lots for the poor. They not only pay more in taxes, they also give in much higher amounts to charity. They will found entire institutions when the fancy strikes them and they engage on a regular basis in the world's most effective poverty ender, they hire people.
Slashdot Mirror
Any strategy of engaging in a conspiracy of avoiding the low cost alternative is doomed to failure. Some scrappy competitor will always break ranks and gain marketshare because of it and then all hell breaks loose.
On the bright side, with the economy improving new companies will be formed and they'll be hiring.
You are a greedy, self-serving, miser
I guess I hit a nerve. I have an idea of your thoughts. You've put them down in posts and my analysis of your actual words lead to my conclusion that you're a reactionary.
You have no idea what I give in charity, how many people I help, and what impact my charitable actions have. Your analysis is pure fantasy, a projection of your internal prejudice onto the canvas of my pseudonym. So besides being a reactionary, you're a prejudiced one. You're turning out to be a real piece of work.
In my perfect fantasy world where everybody makes choices amenable to my reasoning, GMHC wouldn't be funded and there wouldn't be much of an AIDS epidemic in the US because we wouldn't have spent years worrying about homosexual feelings instead of taking standard anti-epidemic measures like closing down gay bath houses which served as transmission centers and cost so many people their lives.
But I recognize that we don't live in a perfect world and that when organizations that I disagree with fulfill a valid government purpose they deserve funding. That's tolerance and respect for difference. You would rather 10,000 people be helped with X dollars instead of 12,000 people be helped because the more efficient provider happens to be a christian organization. That's cruelty and disregard for the poor in my book. Christianity is not bigotry, no matter how you try to twist the word into making it so.
Yes, Jefferson argued in a private letter that the Constitution that he took no active part in writing (he was an ambassador at the time) should be interpreted in a particular way. Ooooh, because he wrote the Declaration of Indpendence we should only listen to his opinions on the Constitution. If a wall of separation between church and state was envisioned by the founders why was there no protest amongst the delegates who had established state churches? Jefferson was a man of many talents but he was not a saint that was always right. The mere fact that he wrote the letter does not make his interpretation the only acceptable one.
Finally, there's a difference between discrimination based on behavior (pedophiles shouldn't be school employees) and based on their birth (gender, race, national origin). You seem to be incapable of drawing this, and other simple distinctions.
The current system provides for negative returns. There's a point you seem intent on ignoring. The government, in this case, sets criteria for reputable investment houses and sets statistical risk limits on such accounts. This limits risk and keeps losses to a minimum from the obvious error of exclusively trying high risk investment strategies. It's a loss limiting mechanism. Government's been doing this for many decades when it decides questions of whether the broker gave appropriate devices. If govt. is incompetent at this then why have licenses? It's a similar exercise in giving appropriate advice.
The point isn't that the system is perfect. In a perfect system, everybody would be smart enough to save enough for their own retirement and nobody would ever need social programs. But the current system is on its way to breakdown and it's most cruel effects will be felt by our children who will pay into the current system but never collect. Until we get to an actuarily sound system that is perfect, I'm for reform that will make the system better. You seem to be for the status quo and a cruel joke on the next generation.
What's the alternative for saving social security? Is it tripling tax rates (crushing the poor) raising the retirement age to 80 (forcing the aged to work and breaking our promises to them) or cutting benefits (again, killing off the idea of retirement)? Once you take away privatization, partial or entire, you're left with some cruel choices.
So do you whistle past the graveyard and advocate nothing? Or is there some solution out there you actually like?
You talk about covering the world's oceans with solar cells and accuse someone else of making asinine statements? That wouldn't pass the laugh test in high school science.
They've been doing this in other countries for some time now and it's been a demonstrated success. When a nation like Chile who has 25% of US salaries is approaching 100% of US pensions because its investment based system outperforms ours we should take a very careful look at how they do it.
In fact, the Chilean system generally approves fund companies and people invest in them and I believe that that's what a few of the current reform proposals out there aim at as well. There's nothing wrong with starting off with limited investments and widening out as you demonstrate that americans are not idiots.
You assume that depositing money = contributing. But investment is an individual expression of confidence in one economic activity over another. It's becoming one of the tens of millions of hands on our economic ship of state. Doing it well *is* contributing and should be recognized as such. You sound like those communists of the last century railing about the parasitic capitalist class that didn't actually do anything but reaped the benefits of the workers. The poor economic performance of the resulting societies where investment became a govt. job done by the few speak very poorly of that judgement.
That's what's really funny. You equate no govt. charity with no charity. It's such a retro New Deal way of looking at the world. You're a reactionary posing as a progressive. It's just sad.
I'm willing to tolerate people who have a different ideology or philosophy than mine getting govt. funds for legitimate secular purposes and you don't but somehow I'm the bigot. What a sad joke it is when intolerance is gussied up as tolerance and classic tolerance is insulted as bigotry.
Separation of Church and State is a liberal shibbeloth that's never existed which is why we have century old laws suddenly discovered to be unconstitutional. It's not a part of your orthodoxy but its an old and established american tradition for general support of religious institutions for secular purposes as long as no individual church is established. Read some history and you might learn something.
The fact is that we've added trillions of dollars to our economy merely in the last decade. The financial situation we're in now compared to the 1930s or even the 1960s is very different. Stop being such a cruel and unfeeling reactionary. This is about doing our best as a society for the poor.
The point is that private charity is much more efficient, whether it's religiously funded or it's secular. Income is rising much faster than the number of people in poverty. Eventually, the economy will grow to a size where private charities can do it all without the government dime *if* the government will get out of the way. It's been established that government charity crowds out private donation. People don't give if they think that giving is useless as the govt is already taking care of it.
Back in the old days we had non-universal but efficient care for those who could get it. Today we've moved to universal but much less efficient provision because we've had a great shift to govt provided charity. The best overall situation is to have universal and efficient charity so we get the most help to the poor for the money we, as a society, believe we can afford. That's why further reform is needed.
I think the Gay Men's Health Crisis is a very poor use of taxpayer funds. It promotes a morally corrosive message and shouldn't be funded. You seem to think the same of the Salvation Army. That's fair enough but up until now current practice has been to fund the former but not the latter. As long as both can demonstrate with objective evidence that they are accomplishing a secular purpose and helping to solve a problem that's a legitimate government expenditure, I think it's reasonable that both should get govt. contracts to do it as long as they are the best available for the particular job. Unless you want to argue that the best guy for the job shouldn't get hired because you don't like their motivating philosophy, you should too.
Give every 3rd world family a TV, a car, and central heat/air conditioning. What happens to the world economy?
As for the oceans, they're a bit busy creating 1/3 of the world's usable oxygen. If you were to cover them with solar cells, we might have more energy but we'd likely die from lack of oxygen. Don't be a twit.
So the average and smart among us must pay in more and have a crappier retirement because someone out there somewhere might have lower returns than they do. That's unfair and frankly not the way this country usually runs.
The Bush plan, for instance, has part of the money going into the current system and part going into investment accounts. Under that plan, your dumb investor would have to really try hard to lose money over decades of investing in order to have a slightly lower retirement income. He would still get Social Security even if his investment portion would go to zero, something that the rest of the system would be rigged not to let happen by the aforementioned exclusion of high risk investment vehicles.
For the smart investor, he'll use his SS private accounts to do his govt. bond and treasury investing sector and his completely private savings for the higher risk portion. This will provide an adjusted yield somewhere in the 10-15% range, more if he's good or lucky. If he's unlucky, he'll still be making 3-5% on his treasuries and somewhat more on his blue chip corporate bonds and crater on his private investments.
The dumb investor won't be able to buy xyz penny stocks with his social security money. He might be able to buy IBM, Microsoft, Coca Cola or any of a number of high quality stocks and bonds but there won't be any margin, short selling, or other forms of leverage that radically increase risk. It's quite likely that the dumb investor won't lose money. The point is that even if they never make a penny, that's a better deal than the current system.
You want to penalize the bright, the average, and a good portion of the slow among us who would do better because some unknown portion of the dumb and unlucky might get a slightly worse deal but still get an adequate pension in the end. That's just stupid and unworthy of a great nation.
By your last statement, and the emphasis you keep putting on it, you're something of a socialist/communist. To make your fantasyland come true, you would have to abolish the stock market and private bonds because the lucky and the hard working and the better stock pickers get a better retirement right now. What the current reform proposals do is give a shot to the lower-middle and poor among us to get a better retirement as well while increasing the pool of money to fund economic growth via stock and bond sales.
The rich already use these superior instruments, why do you stand in the way of the poor to do the same?
A *very* slow news day and quite ignorant of God, prayer, and most religious theology. The NY Times religion dept. must be deeply ashamed at this pap passing in their newspaper.
Welcome to slashdot
Whatever failings in finding ineffective private charties are multiplied in the case of public ones. Every charity I know of takes more interest in the people they help than to just mail a check every month.
Charity spending from all sources has oversight. It's just that oversight on public charity is less, of less quality, and has zero effect on funding. Often the response to problems in a program is to increase their budget. Private charities can't usually afford that.
Your analysis is filled with double standards. Hold the govt. charities to the same standard as the private ones and you will find that they don't provide nearly as good a deal for the poor as private charity.
You want me to defend a caricature of actual proposals. When the first work requirements were rammed through Congress and President Clinton reluctantly signed on, there were widespread predictions of mass starvation and cruel conditions for the poor. Today, it's clear that the pro-market pro-accountability reforms were the best thing to happen to the poor in decades.
The same people who brought that success are now suggesting that private charities be given a bigger portion of our money. Now we've got the same voices who were so wrong over the last decade again predicting doom and gloom in the same apocalyptic terms. How often do they have to be wrong before they start to bear the burden of proving their ideas instead of demanding the privatizers prove theirs?
Take the population of the 1st world and how much energy it consumes. Now project how much energy would be needed if *everyone* was in the first world. There just isn't enough to do it right now. So in a way you're right. If you don't give a damn about the rest of the world, it's all cool. But it's dumb though for one big reason.
For national security reasons, it's becoming clear that poor, weak, failed states are either terrorist generation machines or harbors for same. The end result is the completely practical conclusion that the 3rd world must disappear and be integrated into the global system.
But right now there isn't enough capital, there isn't enough energy available. The energy equation is likely to change in 20-30 years with orbital power generation and beaming down to anywhere on earth but we've got to increase capital production several times over to avoid a huge crash.
Generally when we label something biomass it's done when it's a waste product. While you're technically correct, you're pedantic and confusing the issue for the non-specialists. Oh, this is slashdot, you'll fit right in...
Every investing 101 course out there talks about diversifying. Start with diversified funds and invest across sectors. When you accumulate enough money, you can go for individual stocks but always keep your sector allocations at fixed percentages.
Those who followed basic investment 101 advice got hurt by the cooked books but they were selling on the way up to keep their sector limits and weren't wiped out on the way down.
All the reform proposals out there strictly control permissible investments to weed out the frauds and the extremely risky stocks. They do it in one way or another. Over the space of decades, the stock market has been returning 12% yearly for well over a century (with the single exception of the 30s). Following basic principles people should be able to match the market by just buying index funds. With current returns for young adults (of any intelligence) being >0% the prospects of 12% seem a vast improvement.
As for the below average intelligence among us. There's dumb and there's not competent. Again, the dumb are protected by limiting participants eligible for investment by SS funds in private accounts. The not competent (in a legal sense) already have guardians who watch over their interests. I assume that these guardians will have custody of their investment accounts and a fiduciary duty to maximize their return.
And finally, if somebody's smart, interested in th market, and wants to have a better old age or even leave a bigger legacy to his descendents, what gives you or I the right to say no to him as long as he's not going to end up a burden on us no matter how well or poorly he does?
Actually, not all of them do live here. US income is taxed globally. You have to renounce your citizenship to stop owing US taxes. And yes, shared responsibility which is something that the 'progressives' seem to have forgotten. They're so busy taking the grandkids future away to pay for grandma's vote today that they don't seem to care about that anymore.
But past a certain framerate I can compile in background and still run Quake at an acceptable speed. Sure, it makes the compile slow down some but if you're going to take a 10 minute break, isn't it nice to be able to get some work done in the background at the same time?
Europe has great train systems across the continent because it has 10x the population density of the US. If we were to open our doors to 2.5 billion immigrants and distribute them evenly across the US, trains would work just as well in the US as they do in the EU.
Other than being extremely unrealistic and impractical, nothing wrong with your suggestion. In fact, the areas of the country (like the Boston-Washington corridor) that are highly settled do tend to have much more in the way of rail service.
news flash, there isn't enough on planet energy from any source. biomass is now generally a waste product. To turn it into the input to create a new fuel source is all to the good. We have to get over the hump until we can do orbital solar stations.
When NYC adopted welfare reform and made people show up for their checks, 50% of their caseload disappeared. Half of the people officially on welfare in the city were bogus cases. If a private charity were discovered to do that their contribution base would be decimated. And that's the point, isn't it. I don't give to the United Way because of their past scandals and present policies and choose to donate my charity dollars through other avenues.
Inevitably, any system of charity will have its foul ups as its always going to be run by fallible humans. Private charity lets you cut off the screwups more easily than govt. charity. This ability to easily and personally defund the worst of the programs is a very good thing.
You could invest in US Treasuries and get a better return than present. If US Treasuries are no good, what makes you think Social Security will survive?
20 year olds actually are projected to get negative returns on their SS taxes. If they put them all in 30 yr Treasuries at 4% they'd do a lot better.
For those of us who understand that over the long haul, the stock market does better than treasuries, we'll make the *choice* to diversify and invest some there to get even better returns.
The stock market isn't about investing lucky but about researching and investing for long-term value over the 40 odd years you'll be saving up for that retirement.
Live with it. The 3rd world can't safely be kept down anymore. Eventually they're going to progress and want in to the 1st world club. Either we'll have grown enough economically to accomodate them or they'll underprice us and collapse most of our economy.
The most concern I have about these sorts of rules is that they all negatively impact economic growth. We need a lot of growth to accomodate that Indian without getting hurt in the process.
Only stupid employers do that and they aren't likely to survive as independent entitites during the next boom time.
Here's how it works, you screw your labor force excessively during the bad times, your labor force is stuck but has their resumes out and about and when there's a sign of life in the economy, out the door they go. In the meantime you have a horrible corporate culture that poisons any new labor that comes in.
When the next boom times come, everybody who took care of their workers the best they could does well. They have low turnover, high productivity, loyal workers who are actively rooting for the company to succeed. These companies get rich and their stock prices go thorugh the roof. Bad labor policy companies also rise some but nowhere near as much because they have high turnover, poor attitudes and a hostile workplace environment.
The end result is that bad companies lose marketshare or become vulnerable to takeover or both. For management that looks beyond the current phase of the business cycle it makes sense not to take advantage of all your current labor market power.
so the top 1% should pay how much of the burden, all of it? This might work if it weren't pathetically easy to move to other countries and renounce citizenship but we don't live in a fascist state.
Where's your sense of shared responsibility? The bottom half pay 4% of income taxes, the top 1% pay 37% or 9 times more. All the evil Republican tax cuts keep knocking more and more people off the tax rolls while they lower rates all around.
I have a feeling I'm feeding a troll.
The rich do lots for the poor. They not only pay more in taxes, they also give in much higher amounts to charity. They will found entire institutions when the fancy strikes them and they engage on a regular basis in the world's most effective poverty ender, they hire people.