Ever been to Texas, or Wisconsin? The of the best tailgate parties are far away from the stadium. Definitely some cool WMDs there. Good way to blow off a week's pay in one short afternoon.
...but libel is not and never was protected speech.
And it's not excluded in the first amendment. If you want to exclude it from free spech rights, you should have to codify it into a constitutional amendment at least.
Yeah? And how many thousands of dollars will have to be spent to prove they stuck to the facts? Yeah, they'll be just fine...and broke. All these lawyers are going to end up proving that China has more free speech "rights" than we do. The law says..."congress shall make no law abridging...". If they don't like the law, then they should work to change it, instead of misinterpreting it to suit their desires.
What kinds of homes are being purchased? How long do people end up renting before they can purchase a home? How much money is lost to rent when compared to interest on a loan?
The ones being sold on credit are a tar-paper shack version of cinder blocks. The bricks are half as deep as regular ones. Built more like "townhouses" in that they share walls. By the time they pay it off 25 years later, they will have paid double due to the interest, just like most places. The people that live on their own property(and you might be surprised as to how high a percentage that is. Even I might be if I knew exactly, but the vast majority of people I know don't rent.) build themselves very nice size and well made houses. They spend up to five years or longer to do it, but they do it without borrowing any money. They save on interest and rent. The banks are very corrupt and user fees are enormous. Unfortunately, more people are falling into the trap, and service is getting worse. Now the banks are owned by some Hong Kong bank, Citibank, etc. Hardly any local banks anymore, similar to the Walmart effect. So very little of the profits are spent locally. I'm watching this place turn into Americaville. It's not pretty. Blenders for six dollars a week...Sheeesh!
As for the banks owning everything, I doubt that's what they're hoping for.
Sure it is. It's much easier to simply collect rent than to play money games to suck people in. It's much easier to evict and keep the money train rolling with fresh blood. Long term is not the way anymore, just like employment. Nobody wants to keep you long tern and pay out fat pensions with money that we're now finding out doesn't exist.
People getting loans they can't afford is a bad thing, to be sure, but it's a people problem, not a loan problem.
It's precisely the same thing as drug, alcohol(for those who like to seperate the two), or a gambling addiction. And since loans have become a profit source of its own, the banks are the pushers, painting a nice rosey picture, and believe me, they are pushing it...hard. Loans are supposed to be for people who need money. Unfortunely, you have to prove you don't need it to get one. The banks no longer take any risks. Any losses are simply written off. They don't make money when you use cash. That's why they're pushing so hard for a "plastic" future. They want all transactions to go through them, so they can skim a little.
Your initial point, though, seemed to be that Islamic finance was some sort of utopian solution that wasn't the same thing as an interest carrying loan.
It may have come off that way, but the point is that some people just do the math a little differently. Nothing obfuscates the hidden charges better than the way we do it. We are the kings in that department. We are as slick as it gets.
No, credit doesn't "produce" anything by itself, but it allows a lot of good things to happen that wouldn't otherwise happen. Serious business ventures often require credit. Those ventures would not be undertaken if it weren't for the credit infrastructure.
Yes they would be undertaken. Just not in the time frame of "I want it now". Banks just make it convenient. They don't make it possible. I'm not against convenience. It's much safer to carry a credit card than a wad of cash.
It's not a zero sum game, and it's definitely not the house of cards you seem to think it is.
I'm afraid it is, just like the laws of physics themselves. What you don't see is the slave labor outside of your borders that is required to sustain that standard of living and the money lenders. If this is to keep on growing, then they need more slaves. And there's the fact that you have to allow so many undocumented workers in order to pay out sub-standard wages and no benefits to keep what left of the domestic farm scene and the trinkets factories and some of your finer restaurants running. Our standard of living is the proverbial sausage factory. You don't want to see
I call it a communist policy because it's something that communist regimes have done as a matter of policy.
Really? Genocide by tuberculosis is actually codified into law? Was Hitler a communist? He certainly did practice genocide as a matter of policy. And the original question still remains. Is the method suppressing dissent used by your average tin-pot Latin American dictator, or Saddam during the 80s somehow better? I'll have to reiterate here that just because they might call themselves communists, it does not meant that they are. Bush calls American "a peaceful country", but history has shown it to be anything but. This is authoritarians protecting their authority. It's not a communist thing.
Cheap credit helped create the middle class, allowing the average person to own a decent home.
I believe you will find that the GI Bill, sponsered by the US govt after WWII for the vets, did more to create and expand the middle class more than any single other thing did.
Before the average person could borrow money, the average person rented.
In the city, yes. And now the banks own it all, and you're paying double.
Please do show your work on this one. I guess if you follow the loans -> inflation line, yes, homes could cost $1000 each.
I was talking about real tar-paper shacks. Made out of 2 by 4s and corrugated tar paper. Not the the $100,000 matsh stick homes that blow down when the wind gets above 60 mph. Down here, they provide shelter for the family while the concrete one is under construction, also built with savings, not credit. Until the WTO blew through here with that damn NAFTA and super easy credit, most everybody outside the city owned their property. Now the banks are going to own everything.
This entire document is just an exercise in obfuscating the terminology that any economist would use to describe the lending process. If it makes you feel holier, that's great, but it doesn't change reality any more than calling the your lunch side dish freedom fries.
Obfuscation is what makes the economy work at all. It's all based on pure faith. We will always depend on the next generation to pay our bills. Credit doesn't produce anything. It's nothing more than one more guy skimming a little from every transaction. It speeds up the flow of money, and it's this flow that generates profits. And like Las Vegas, the house always wins. It all works great as long as everybody keeps the faith.
Loans do little more than cause inflation. If loans weren't available, your tar-paper shack wouldn't even cost $1,000 usd. Hell, for that kind of money, I can put on a second floor AND put up a satellite dish. Oh, and there are institutions that provide financing without charging interest, but I'm sure present day zenophobias will prevent many people from consulting them.
Hmmm, China has been under this "communist" rule for some 56 years now? Let's go back to 1845 when the US was about the same age. The people the govt was killing weren't even dissidents. They were just "in the way". It was another 120 years before people of African descent had any voice in the govt. It's okay to criticise the Chinese, but remember, what the US/UK does outside their borders is every bit as horrible. They have no monopoly on atrocity.
Of course, they do kill dissidents by infecting them with tuberculosis, so I'd still call that a communist policy.
What in the world makes this exclusively, or even particularly a communist policy? Would it be more "American" if we pushed them off the roof on the Letterman show?
My father grew up within a society that valued "being a man": being responsible for your own station in life...
Would this be the same times when a woman "did what she was told", "children were seen, not heard", or when civil rights for minorities were but a pipe-dream? Would this be the time when McCarthyism was running rampant out of control? Or while Hoover was "dressing up"? Maybe it was while the Americans were fulfilling their "Manifest Destiny". Maybe it was during the depression...oh, those were the days. And you knew who you were then... Girls were girls and men were men...
Whatever happened to "there's no time like the present"? We only have two things that we didn't have in the past, easy travel(made needlessly difficult by bureaucracy) and instant communications. Other that those, very little has changed in 5000 years. War, famine, and disease have not diminished much. They simply relocate.
I'm not talking about just any kind of law. I'm discussing censorship and how it's accomplished. IP law is censorship by corporate proxy. It was designed to silence criticism of the authorities by restricting access to a printing press, which was a new and very dangerous invention at the time. P2P is villified for the same reasons, due to its abilities to take away control from greedy information hoarders and speculators. However, you are quite free to believe the spin of "advancing the arts and sciences" if you wish. Most everybody else does. Otherwise laws like these wouldn't have a chnce in hell... China is just bypassing the middleman. Here, we use the Church of Scientology, for example. Got any embarrassing information or criminal evidence? Copyright it, make it a state secret, or write an Enabling...er...I mean Patriot Act to keep it out of the papers. It's still censorship.
I know that with China being a communist nation...
China is NOT a communist nation. It is an authoritarian nation. Big difference there. In other words, The authorities are asserting their authority. Tell me something new. It happens all over the planet. We don't need to single them out. We use IP law to do precisely the same thing. It all depends on the spin that's put upon it. You can use censorship to protect property or one's power over others. It makes no difference. It's still censorship. Your entire post sounds a little like a 1950s propaganda piece.
Britain, Russia, and China are the closest thing to a sovereign nation on the planet at the moment. Even that's in doubt with the way the world is being controlled by "trans-nationals". Sovereignty is a quaint term used by 18th and 19th Century thinkers. It really doesn't exist.
"Judge not..." And now for something completely different...Just thought I'd throw that in for...no reason really. Must've been something I ate. An "undigested bit of beef", perhaps I see more evidence every day that free will is indeed an illusion. "The mind is what the brain does" --Nat Geo, March 2005 issue. It's quoted elsewhere, but that's where I first saw it. So...who's going to be the first to use the "parasite" defense in a murder case? The "twinkie" defense might have some merit after all. Some people do react rather intensly to suger alergies. Maybe all that soda pop you drink could actually make you crazy. Watch out Coca-Cola. There could be a lawsuit coming.
Slashdot Mirror
The of the best tailgate parties are far away from the stadium.
Some of the best...awww, screw it.
...fewer guns at a tailgate party
Ever been to Texas, or Wisconsin? The of the best tailgate parties are far away from the stadium. Definitely some cool WMDs there. Good way to blow off a week's pay in one short afternoon.
...tailgate party or in a traffic jam.
Aren't they the same thing?
If they had opposed patents and copyright, they would have written their ban into the Constitution.
Heh. That's just like saying "If they had opposed yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater, they have written the exclusion into the first amendment."
Now you've done it. You opened a real can of worms there :-) All I can say is, Good luck.
...but libel is not and never was protected speech.
And it's not excluded in the first amendment. If you want to exclude it from free spech rights, you should have to codify it into a constitutional amendment at least.
Just stick to the facts and they should be fine.
Yeah? And how many thousands of dollars will have to be spent to prove they stuck to the facts? Yeah, they'll be just fine...and broke. All these lawyers are going to end up proving that China has more free speech "rights" than we do. The law says..."congress shall make no law abridging...". If they don't like the law, then they should work to change it, instead of misinterpreting it to suit their desires.
Well, let's just see who would win a chair throwing contest. How about a spittin' an' cussin' competitiion? Place your bets.
What kinds of homes are being purchased? How long do people end up renting before they can purchase a home? How much money is lost to rent when compared to interest on a loan?
The ones being sold on credit are a tar-paper shack version of cinder blocks. The bricks are half as deep as regular ones. Built more like "townhouses" in that they share walls. By the time they pay it off 25 years later, they will have paid double due to the interest, just like most places. The people that live on their own property(and you might be surprised as to how high a percentage that is. Even I might be if I knew exactly, but the vast majority of people I know don't rent.) build themselves very nice size and well made houses. They spend up to five years or longer to do it, but they do it without borrowing any money. They save on interest and rent. The banks are very corrupt and user fees are enormous. Unfortunately, more people are falling into the trap, and service is getting worse. Now the banks are owned by some Hong Kong bank, Citibank, etc. Hardly any local banks anymore, similar to the Walmart effect. So very little of the profits are spent locally. I'm watching this place turn into Americaville. It's not pretty. Blenders for six dollars a week...Sheeesh!
As for the banks owning everything, I doubt that's what they're hoping for.
Sure it is. It's much easier to simply collect rent than to play money games to suck people in. It's much easier to evict and keep the money train rolling with fresh blood. Long term is not the way anymore, just like employment. Nobody wants to keep you long tern and pay out fat pensions with money that we're now finding out doesn't exist.
People getting loans they can't afford is a bad thing, to be sure, but it's a people problem, not a loan problem.
It's precisely the same thing as drug, alcohol(for those who like to seperate the two), or a gambling addiction. And since loans have become a profit source of its own, the banks are the pushers, painting a nice rosey picture, and believe me, they are pushing it...hard. Loans are supposed to be for people who need money. Unfortunely, you have to prove you don't need it to get one. The banks no longer take any risks. Any losses are simply written off. They don't make money when you use cash. That's why they're pushing so hard for a "plastic" future. They want all transactions to go through them, so they can skim a little.
Your initial point, though, seemed to be that Islamic finance was some sort of utopian solution that wasn't the same thing as an interest carrying loan.
It may have come off that way, but the point is that some people just do the math a little differently. Nothing obfuscates the hidden charges better than the way we do it. We are the kings in that department. We are as slick as it gets.
No, credit doesn't "produce" anything by itself, but it allows a lot of good things to happen that wouldn't otherwise happen. Serious business ventures often require credit. Those ventures would not be undertaken if it weren't for the credit infrastructure.
Yes they would be undertaken. Just not in the time frame of "I want it now". Banks just make it convenient. They don't make it possible. I'm not against convenience. It's much safer to carry a credit card than a wad of cash.
It's not a zero sum game, and it's definitely not the house of cards you seem to think it is.
I'm afraid it is, just like the laws of physics themselves. What you don't see is the slave labor outside of your borders that is required to sustain that standard of living and the money lenders. If this is to keep on growing, then they need more slaves. And there's the fact that you have to allow so many undocumented workers in order to pay out sub-standard wages and no benefits to keep what left of the domestic farm scene and the trinkets factories and some of your finer restaurants running. Our standard of living is the proverbial sausage factory. You don't want to see
...if a way can be found to get enough gas through it.
It still won't as simple as this.
I call it a communist policy because it's something that communist regimes have done as a matter of policy.
Really? Genocide by tuberculosis is actually codified into law? Was Hitler a communist? He certainly did practice genocide as a matter of policy. And the original question still remains. Is the method suppressing dissent used by your average tin-pot Latin American dictator, or Saddam during the 80s somehow better? I'll have to reiterate here that just because they might call themselves communists, it does not meant that they are. Bush calls American "a peaceful country", but history has shown it to be anything but. This is authoritarians protecting their authority. It's not a communist thing.
Cheap credit helped create the middle class, allowing the average person to own a decent home.
I believe you will find that the GI Bill, sponsered by the US govt after WWII for the vets, did more to create and expand the middle class more than any single other thing did.
Before the average person could borrow money, the average person rented.
In the city, yes. And now the banks own it all, and you're paying double.
Please do show your work on this one. I guess if you follow the loans -> inflation line, yes, homes could cost $1000 each.
I was talking about real tar-paper shacks. Made out of 2 by 4s and corrugated tar paper. Not the the $100,000 matsh stick homes that blow down when the wind gets above 60 mph. Down here, they provide shelter for the family while the concrete one is under construction, also built with savings, not credit. Until the WTO blew through here with that damn NAFTA and super easy credit, most everybody outside the city owned their property. Now the banks are going to own everything.
This entire document is just an exercise in obfuscating the terminology that any economist would use to describe the lending process. If it makes you feel holier, that's great, but it doesn't change reality any more than calling the your lunch side dish freedom fries.
Obfuscation is what makes the economy work at all. It's all based on pure faith. We will always depend on the next generation to pay our bills. Credit doesn't produce anything. It's nothing more than one more guy skimming a little from every transaction. It speeds up the flow of money, and it's this flow that generates profits. And like Las Vegas, the house always wins. It all works great as long as everybody keeps the faith.
Loans do little more than cause inflation. If loans weren't available, your tar-paper shack wouldn't even cost $1,000 usd. Hell, for that kind of money, I can put on a second floor AND put up a satellite dish. Oh, and there are institutions that provide financing without charging interest, but I'm sure present day zenophobias will prevent many people from consulting them.
Hmmm, China has been under this "communist" rule for some 56 years now? Let's go back to 1845 when the US was about the same age. The people the govt was killing weren't even dissidents. They were just "in the way". It was another 120 years before people of African descent had any voice in the govt. It's okay to criticise the Chinese, but remember, what the US/UK does outside their borders is every bit as horrible. They have no monopoly on atrocity.
Of course, they do kill dissidents by infecting them with tuberculosis, so I'd still call that a communist policy.
What in the world makes this exclusively, or even particularly a communist policy? Would it be more "American" if we pushed them off the roof on the Letterman show?
My father grew up within a society that valued "being a man": being responsible for your own station in life...
Would this be the same times when a woman "did what she was told", "children were seen, not heard", or when civil rights for minorities were but a pipe-dream? Would this be the time when McCarthyism was running rampant out of control? Or while Hoover was "dressing up"? Maybe it was while the Americans were fulfilling their "Manifest Destiny". Maybe it was during the depression...oh, those were the days.
And you knew who you were then... Girls were girls and men were men...
Whatever happened to "there's no time like the present"? We only have two things that we didn't have in the past, easy travel(made needlessly difficult by bureaucracy) and instant communications. Other that those, very little has changed in 5000 years. War, famine, and disease have not diminished much. They simply relocate.
I'm not talking about just any kind of law. I'm discussing censorship and how it's accomplished. IP law is censorship by corporate proxy. It was designed to silence criticism of the authorities by restricting access to a printing press, which was a new and very dangerous invention at the time. P2P is villified for the same reasons, due to its abilities to take away control from greedy information hoarders and speculators. However, you are quite free to believe the spin of "advancing the arts and sciences" if you wish. Most everybody else does. Otherwise laws like these wouldn't have a chnce in hell... China is just bypassing the middleman. Here, we use the Church of Scientology, for example. Got any embarrassing information or criminal evidence? Copyright it, make it a state secret, or write an Enabling...er...I mean Patriot Act to keep it out of the papers. It's still censorship.
Wonder if Vegas is giving any odds on this. Might be easy money.
That would be Wall Street. They don't gamble in Vegas.
There is no 13th floor.
Oh please! Do you think China's rulers spend their time discussing Marxist theory all day? What nonsense. They balance their check books, play their stock options, are fretting over the costs and potential profits of Three Gorges, are shorting Microsoft(heh, they could pull it off)...just like everybody else. Communism never left the class room. Mere humans are all they are. No different than any other. What they do inside their borders, we do outside ours. I believe you are the one hair-splitting what are simply different forms of authoritarianism.
I know that with China being a communist nation...
China is NOT a communist nation. It is an authoritarian nation. Big difference there. In other words, The authorities are asserting their authority. Tell me something new. It happens all over the planet. We don't need to single them out. We use IP law to do precisely the same thing. It all depends on the spin that's put upon it. You can use censorship to protect property or one's power over others. It makes no difference. It's still censorship. Your entire post sounds a little like a 1950s propaganda piece.
Britain, Russia, and China are the closest thing to a sovereign nation on the planet at the moment. Even that's in doubt with the way the world is being controlled by "trans-nationals". Sovereignty is a quaint term used by 18th and 19th Century thinkers. It really doesn't exist.
I suppose if it made you more passive, it would be called Toxoplasma gondhi.
Thankyouverymuch.
Come on OSDN, how stupid do you think your audience is?
Are you sure you want to know?
Sorry. Must've been the parasites.
"Judge not..." And now for something completely different...Just thought I'd throw that in for...no reason really. Must've been something I ate. An "undigested bit of beef", perhaps I see more evidence every day that free will is indeed an illusion. "The mind is what the brain does" --Nat Geo, March 2005 issue. It's quoted elsewhere, but that's where I first saw it. So...who's going to be the first to use the "parasite" defense in a murder case? The "twinkie" defense might have some merit after all. Some people do react rather intensly to suger alergies. Maybe all that soda pop you drink could actually make you crazy. Watch out Coca-Cola. There could be a lawsuit coming.