Yup, but this is already (sometimes) part of our system. The defendant in a lawsuit can ask the judge to require a bond for the reimbursement of expenses. It is a main part of the Japanese justice system.
You can only do two things with money; spend it or invest it. Under a Fair Tax Plan you are always paying your "fair share" of taxes whenever you buy something. Even underground economies must buy stuff, so the illegal proceeds of various endeavors still generate a "fair share".
When you place your money for investment, you create the means for producing goods and services. (Remember, even putting it in the bank is a type of investment in the economy.)
The questions of "due process", personal privacy and interfering with sovereign nations disappear if there is no basis for tax evasion. People who sell and buy underground to avoid paying the taxes would then be committing tax fraud, and that is a "serious crime" and does not come under the protection of Swiss bank secrecy.
Good idea. It's called "reparative justice". And how about if you are NOT convicted, the prosecuting government has to reimburse you for all YOUR expenses incurred in defending yourself?
What I'd like to see is a visual trace through the map. Click on something to start a visual trip through the objects and modules, possibly with cool explanations on the side while they are running.
The Oberon Project started in 1985 and I think it had independent screenspaces from the start. Smalltalk was developed in the early 70's at PARC, and and I'm not sure what the relationship is with the disputed patent, but independent screen space management was a feature.
While UNIX didn't have X-Windows in the early very early 80's, it did have multiple screens, virtual TTY's, and multiple screenspaces. The extensive documentation that came with SystemV rel3.x told how to create applications in C that used independent screen space. All Xenix, Cromix, Esix and Kodak versions included this documetation, and so did the official Bell documentation.
It's not jobs that create a stronger economy; it's productivity!
For years politicians have pandered to certain mythical beliefs held by the most ignorant of the voting populace, and one of the main beliefs is that "jobs" are good for the economy. Jobs, unless they produce something worth while, are a drain on the econmy and in general and the consumers in particular. Caplan's book also makes the point that the "aggregate wisdom" of the population is reduced to the sociological phenomonen of "crowd behavior" by the pervasiveness of these underlying myths.
I found an interesting essay on Mark Skousen's site: http://www.mskousen.com/Books/Articles/economics1.html Caplan makes the point in his book that Economists, while disagreeing in the details, actually agree on major principles. This essay summarizes those priciples pretty well.
An associate of mine opened the first retail computer store in Anchorage selling the Apple II and the Commodore PET and hired me (supposedly on a share of the profits) to run it for him. I could have sold at least one Apple II each day, but the distributer in Seattle was hording the inventory and distributing it to local stores. I could only get one Apple II per week. I called Apple, talked to Steve Jobs, and he passed me off to someone else who flat-out told me they depended on the distributor so much that they couldn't do anything to make the distribution more fair, and I couldn't order directly from Apple because they had a territory agreement with the distributor. (I felt that orders should be filled on a first-ordered, first-filled basis, and we were paying cash up front for our inventory, so there was no credit problem. Dumb move; the distributer was probably using the money we sent with the order to finance their friends' stores.) It got worse when Apple came out with the hard drive. I was selling accessories, but they weren't moving very fast when nobody could get the computers to attach them to. I remember ordering a digitizer tablet from Houston Instruments, and how surprised I was that I couldn't just plug it into the computer and make it work. There was no interface, and I ended up buying the parts and soldering them together to make a serial port. (Lucky background in connecting modems, teletypes and CDC 160A and 160G systems earlier in my career.) Then I had to write the software: I tried to write it in the BASIC that was included on the Apple, but a couple of conversations with Bill Gates and he convinced me to write it assembly language. I spent many hours after work writing, first the communications code (which we would now call drivers), and then a small application to draw geometric shapes using the tablet. I had some help from Steve Wozniak and a lot of help from a guy named Chris Espinoza who was absolutely brilliant at explaining things over the phone. I was also lucky that I had a good background in assembly language programming from the Army and subsequent stints with CDC and Honeywell writing things like light pen interfaces. I managed to write the software and sell both tablets and two Apple II's to a couple of Burroughs guys for enough money to keep the store open a little longer.
As bad as my experience with Apple was, my relationship with Commodore pissed me off each time I had to deal with them. We had to buy 5 Commodore PET systems at a time. We had to put up $5000, which gave us a "credit line" of $5000 dollars, and which was enough to buy 5 systems (which sold retail for $1499). However, the manufacturing of the PET was sloppy, to say the least. I've had as many as 4 of the 5 in my order come in DOA. So I had to RMA the defective systems for repair. Then, in order to get more inventory, I had to put up another $5000 to "increase my credit line". In order to keep enough stock to sell, we ended up letting Commodore have $15,000 of deposit money. This shouldn't have been news to me: Before I worked for Honeywell in 1968, I sold business machines in Minneapolis. The guy I worked for sold Commodore calculators. Commodore actually came out with the first truly programmable calculator, which used a Nixie-tube display and magnetic cards to preserve the programs. (Marchant and Friden also had "programmable" calculators, but neither of them did recursion and both of them were twice the size of the Commodore.) My boss used to complain about the way Commodore treated him, for the same reasons. In 1990, in Houston, the vendor I worked for who sold the Amiga was still complaining about the same problems. (Rumor has it that Commodore was a Mafia-owned company and very risk-aversive while not being particularly customer-sensitive.)
Eventually, the owner/investor of the store decided that there was no point in keeping it open since there was not enough saleable stock to satisfy the customers or make a profit.
The "copyright police" are irrelevant to the question. The question is, "What's the right thing to do?" For an out-of-print book, it seems like the right thing to do is buy it wherever possible, and make your own e-book as backup. If you can't buy it, there is no ethical problem with acquiring the book in what ever form you can find it. There is, however, an ethical question about whether you should enable the persons who created a "pirated" e-book to enjoy financial or psychological rewards for their un-ethical behavior. How about contacting the copyright holder and getting permission to create/publish the e-book ethically?
OK, obvious flamebait. However, there must be an explanation somewhere for how people will work for weeks (BOTH patrties) to get someone elected and they don't even know the job descriptions or the candidate's background.
It may be "plain English" instead of "politispeak", but it's just more BS. The Economy page for instance, takes flawed and skewed statistics and asserts them as fact, then tries to create a solution based on these so-called "facts". The whole approach is laced with rhetorical fallacies built on a massive instance of the "straw man" fallacy.
I am not a McCain supporter, not an Obama supporter, and I'm discouraged that this approach will probably work for both parties.
If it is true that a country really does get the government they deserve, then I am even more discouraged.
You have already "jumped to solutions" with this question. You have made decisions about the outcome that you haven't related to the actual problem. For instance, you have specified Cocoa, but you don't say why that specification solves a specific problem.
So, I guess I'd recommend asking a few questions like:
What do you want? What problem are you trying to solve? How many alternative ways could you solve this problem? What are the necessary constraints? What is the best alternative that satisfies solving the problem within those constraints?
For instance: You need to have a program that does "X". The program solves the problem of calculating and communicating by typewriter or longhand. The program could be written in C/C++, Qt, Python, Smalltalk, etc., etc.. The program must be maintainable by you and you only know C++ and Cocoa. Therefore you must select an alternative that includes these languages...
Most decisions are sub-optimal because people don't evaluate enough alternatives. This is OK if the decision is not important or easy to change, but the more time and money invested, and the more people involved in the use of the solution, requires you try to create an optimized decision.
Then you start picking the programmers. Under similar circumstances, I have found it best to check with the employment agencies, and ask around among my IT friends for referrals. Get references.
This is a solution to an un-defined problem. We should only implement solutions AFTER we have defined a problem. "Jumping to Solutions" is why so many decision-making processes go wrong.
Expanding the Presidential Empire is not necessarily the answer to our current problems. Government interference in the distribution of goods and services normally reduces the effectiveness and efficient workings of the marketplace, thus depriving the potential customers.
I've been busy, but I want to let you know that I agree with you on this last post.
As I said before, I can't imagine how an executive gets to the point where he's making decisions so inimical to the health of the company. 50% exposure to high-risk loans is almost unfathomable.
And, I agree with your assessment of the way Economists are listened to.
I have no interest in "blaming" anyone. What works, works. What doesn't work, doesn't work. You can do what doesn't work over and over again, and it still won't work. If our legislators were evaluated on their management skills and judgment instead of the pap they sell on election day, they would have been removed pretty quickly. My point is this: Candidates and lawmakers have been deliberately ignoring a segment of the population that could give them good advice; the Economists. Although no one bats 1.000, the Economic hits would be higher by listening to what a competent Economic coach says about Economics.
I was there: I'm a Management Accountant doing computer work. In the last two years I've given advice that saved some of my clients hundreds of thousands of dollars when the crises hit (for those who listened). A couple of my builder clients didn't listen, and they are now out of business.
Thomas Gilovich wrote a book titled, "How We Know What Isn't So," in which he showed how so many of the things we think are true are really false. A study was done at Ohio State University a few years back, which concluded that executives made wrong decisions over 50% of the time, yet were convinced they were in the top 10% of decision makers.
One mortgage company we worked with here in Houston consistently turned away mortgages that were iffy. My builders (the ones out of business now) would then go shopping for someone to take the mortgages (Countrywide, for instance). The mortgage company is still in business, my builders can't get construction financing, and you know what happened to Countrywide and their type... I'm pretty sure that if Countrywide had to live with their loans instead of selling them off, they would have evaluated them differently.
I will say this: I have no clue what dynamics led supposedly competent managers to make decisions inimical to the health of their companies. I am told by one manager that they were pressured to make some of the loans (particularly minority housing loans) because of the penalties involved if they didn't. (This same manager expressed his concerns well before the crises, but, like you, he had to answer to higher-ups.)
And as for self-regulating: The market forces did the regulating when the managers failed to make decisions in line with good judgment.
I've had to do some reading since your post. Apparently I mis-communicated somehow. The article you mention talks about Greenspan admitting that the "models" generated by our know economic principles are too simple to yield precise results. This is true of a lot of dynamic models, including those used for weather forecasting and social behavior, but statistically the underlying principles of weather and social behavior hold true, even if real precision is absent. This isn't much help in individual instances, but it's the same type of thinking that, say, insurance companies use: If your age is 60 years old this year and you are not a smoker, your life expectancy is "x" years. this does not mean that you will certain live for "x" years, nor does it mean you will die in your "x" year if you live that long. It is a general observation about the way the world works.
Economics is younger than Statistics or Actuarial studies, but the same type of observations have the same type of utility. Ignoring the overall concept and relying on the extreme outlying case is not Science; it is wishful thinking. My point is that the Politicians consistently ignore the overall principles and try to sell the extremes, when it would be good to listen to some people who actually study these conditions.
Well, the topic was about the elections and Economics, and my point is that no one is listening to the Economists, who are, after all, the people who make a study of Economics.
Consider these situations: One Economist is contemplating the way resources should be used in an economy. One Economist is observing the behavior of economic actions (transactions) and trying to derive the principles that drive that behavior. One Economist is trying to arrange thing so that the Economy shapes itself to his ideal state (more or less).
The first Economist is doing Economic Philosophy. The third Economist is doing Economic Technology. the second Economist is the Scientist, trying to be objective about discovering the principles that predict what happens when economic events take place under certain conditions. The Economists practicing in this second domain have discovered many principles that the others now take for granted. In most respects, Economic thought orbits these principles pretty closely, and it would behoove the candidates to listen closely to what these Economists have to say, particularly those that practice in the middle, objective domain.
Neither candidate's Economic views are consistent with Economic Principles. I believe that reflects the observations by the author of the PDF I referred to, entitled, "The Myth of the Rational Voter."
You might be interested to know that Paul Krugman, in his book, "The Accidental Theorist," agrees with you. He likens the current economy as more like a society of prospectors where some get very lucky no matter how little they work, and some remain poor no matter how hard they work. His contention is that the society is no longer a meritocracy where people are rewarded proportionately to their effort, and that the lucky have an obligation to see that the unlucky survive or thrive.
Your observations about laissez-faire are not supported by any empirical fact. As far as I know, laisez-faire has never gotten beyond the domain of Economic Philosophy.
I read a lot on Economics because I intend to go back to school and get a PhD so I can teach during my retirement years. Paul Krugman, recent Noble winner, wrote a book called, "The Accidental Theorist." Now Paul is surely a Democrat, critical of right-wing politics, and inclined toward a liberal government, but he still sounds like a conservative when he talks about Economics. Why? Because there exist some discovered economic principles, proven over time, that even the most liberal Economists don't dispute. The problem is, neither Congress nor the Executive Branch listens to Economists. In the past, when they listened to Milton Friedman we got taxes taken from our paychecks, and when they listened to Alan Greenspan we got pretty good money management. Score: 1 1.
(To ward off a minor distraction; it was Congress, not Alan Greenspan, who dictated the "easy money" policies for sub-standard mortgage loans which precipitated our current situation.)
This election, is probably better analyzed by Sociologists than Economists. The models of crowd behavior certainly show what's going on better than any analysis of public economic opinion. Most of the population is woefully ignorant about even the most basic Economics principles. So, by pandering to the crowd's superstitions, candidates get elected on the size of their fans, not the issues. Here is a nice little article for those with the motivation to read it:
I remember that about 25 years ago in Alaska we had a number of cases where the Citabria would crash because a wing came off. (And the Citabria was supposed to be aerobatic-certified aircraft. It just wasn't rugged enough for bush flying.) As I understand it, an AD was issued that should have corrected all the defects, but just knowing the problem existed is enough to dismiss early conclusions as to the reason behind the crash.
Yup, you've been paying IN. So have a lot of other people. Many of them delusionally think that because they paid in, they are entitled to take out. This would be true if there actually was anything there, but the Johnson Administration started putting the funds collected into Treasury Bonds, meaning that they were used to finance the over-spending of the government. It's not there.
10 Trillion dollars is about $250,000 for every man, woman and child in the USA. This mostly Medicaid and Medicare "entitlements". This will come due at about a trillion dollars a year in about 5-8 years. Since there is no money, it will be paid out of current collections. Since current collections are not nearly enough to cover the payments, they will have to increase collections (taxes). High taxes imposed on our industries will reduce productivity, and make investing in USA business less desirable. People will bitch about the high taxes, so they will inflate the currency so the "dollar" amount of the taxes is a smaller percentage of the gross pay, and, although this may cover the dollar amount of the payments, the amount paid will buy less services and goods. Retirees will bitch and insist that the payments be pegged to the cost of living, indexed in dollars. So the Government will look at what they did for Veterans: They will reduce benefits for new people signing up, and they will "triage" the beneficiaries based on income and urgency. So, you will be entitled to benefits, but only able to collect them if you are desperately poor or in urgent need of medical care. This will disenfranchise about 50-70% of the retirees, who will then use their own resources to provide their own care.
"Supplemental Social Security" was originally initiated to provide some extra benefits for those who didn't have enough retirement income, not as a universal retirement fund for everyone. Even then, it was wrong for the government to steal money from people under the guise of paternal care. It became worse when the money was not invested, but used to pay current government expenses. The government is not responsible for our retirement; we are. If you had been investing the amount you paid into SS privately, and you expect to live another 30 years, look at the amount of money you would be able to live on versus what you would get from SS. In my case, assuming I retire at 72, I would be getting about $70,000/yr (assuming 7% return), and I would be able to maintain my own health insurance for catastrophic care and pay the minor stuff out of my own pocket without government interference.
BTW, huge amounts of real retirement funds are invested in the stock market. What's going to happen when these funds start liquidating to cover retirement? Typically, a stock glut means cheaper prices, so The later you retire, the less you will be able to collect from your investments. The last retirees will end up needing the "government benefits", costs will climb for medical care, and when people see what's happening they will rush to retirement before they lose too much money. Unless we are willing to establish a system like Singapore's Central Provident Fund, we have no business letting the government manage our retirement. [BIAS ALERT! I do not think the government should be involved in my retirement at all, except for the legitimate use of the Justice system to prevent or prosecute fraud.]
The USA has 10 Trillion dollars in off-balance-sheet liabilities. Because of the way Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare are funded, when people in my age group (I'm 60) really start retiring, it's going to be expensive. There is no money there. If a private company ran it's finances the way the government does, somebody would go to prison.
Ok, ask anyone if they expect to collect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; everyone says yes, they paid, they're entitled. However, 80% of the people drawing these benefits will be capable of paying their own expenses. They are not poor. I am all for helping the economically disadvantaged, but why should the government steal money from productive workers and re-distribute it to people who are not needy?
I suspect that sometime in the next eight years, the money will be purposely inflated (making the benefits debt less expensive to pay out), taxes will rise dramatically, the retirement age will be pushed close to age 70, and finally, after all fails, the government will establish a means test, so that only the most desparate will be able to go to the front of the line for benefits.
Privatization of benefits actually worked for Chile. It could work for us, but it is almost too late.
Don't put it in the dumpster. It will just pollute the environment a bit more, especially tubes like CRT's. In fact, in Houston, it is verboten to put your electronics in the regular trash.
It's a hassle to take it to the recycle center, but that's the best thing to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, but this is already (sometimes) part of our system. The defendant in a lawsuit can ask the judge to require a bond for the reimbursement of expenses. It is a main part of the Japanese justice system.
This would be a non-issue in the US if we adopted the Fair Tax Plan ( http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_main ) or something similar.
You can only do two things with money; spend it or invest it. Under a Fair Tax Plan you are always paying your "fair share" of taxes whenever you buy something. Even underground economies must buy stuff, so the illegal proceeds of various endeavors still generate a "fair share".
When you place your money for investment, you create the means for producing goods and services. (Remember, even putting it in the bank is a type of investment in the economy.)
The questions of "due process", personal privacy and interfering with sovereign nations disappear if there is no basis for tax evasion. People who sell and buy underground to avoid paying the taxes would then be committing tax fraud, and that is a "serious crime" and does not come under the protection of Swiss bank secrecy.
Good idea. It's called "reparative justice". And how about if you are NOT convicted, the prosecuting government has to reimburse you for all YOUR expenses incurred in defending yourself?
What I'd like to see is a visual trace through the map. Click on something to start a visual trip through the objects and modules, possibly with cool explanations on the side while they are running.
Oh, yeah. I forgot about viewports. I remember those on PDP8 and PDP10 systems, and UNIX was pretty popular on those systems.
The Oberon Project started in 1985 and I think it had independent screenspaces from the start. Smalltalk was developed in the early 70's at PARC, and and I'm not sure what the relationship is with the disputed patent, but independent screen space management was a feature.
While UNIX didn't have X-Windows in the early very early 80's, it did have multiple screens, virtual TTY's, and multiple screenspaces. The extensive documentation that came with SystemV rel3.x told how to create applications in C that used independent screen space. All Xenix, Cromix, Esix and Kodak versions included this documetation, and so did the official Bell documentation.
It's not jobs that create a stronger economy; it's productivity!
For years politicians have pandered to certain mythical beliefs held by the most ignorant of the voting populace, and one of the main beliefs is that "jobs" are good for the economy. Jobs, unless they produce something worth while, are a drain on the econmy and in general and the consumers in particular. Caplan's book also makes the point that the "aggregate wisdom" of the population is reduced to the sociological phenomonen of "crowd behavior" by the pervasiveness of these underlying myths.
I found a good review of Bryan Caplan's book, "The Myth of the Rational Voter," here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter
The book itself is very good reading.
I found an interesting essay on Mark Skousen's site: http://www.mskousen.com/Books/Articles/economics1.html Caplan makes the point in his book that Economists, while disagreeing in the details, actually agree on major principles. This essay summarizes those priciples pretty well.
Muslim Overlord.
An associate of mine opened the first retail computer store in Anchorage selling the Apple II and the Commodore PET and hired me (supposedly on a share of the profits) to run it for him. I could have sold at least one Apple II each day, but the distributer in Seattle was hording the inventory and distributing it to local stores. I could only get one Apple II per week. I called Apple, talked to Steve Jobs, and he passed me off to someone else who flat-out told me they depended on the distributor so much that they couldn't do anything to make the distribution more fair, and I couldn't order directly from Apple because they had a territory agreement with the distributor. (I felt that orders should be filled on a first-ordered, first-filled basis, and we were paying cash up front for our inventory, so there was no credit problem. Dumb move; the distributer was probably using the money we sent with the order to finance their friends' stores.) It got worse when Apple came out with the hard drive. I was selling accessories, but they weren't moving very fast when nobody could get the computers to attach them to. I remember ordering a digitizer tablet from Houston Instruments, and how surprised I was that I couldn't just plug it into the computer and make it work. There was no interface, and I ended up buying the parts and soldering them together to make a serial port. (Lucky background in connecting modems, teletypes and CDC 160A and 160G systems earlier in my career.) Then I had to write the software: I tried to write it in the BASIC that was included on the Apple, but a couple of conversations with Bill Gates and he convinced me to write it assembly language. I spent many hours after work writing, first the communications code (which we would now call drivers), and then a small application to draw geometric shapes using the tablet. I had some help from Steve Wozniak and a lot of help from a guy named Chris Espinoza who was absolutely brilliant at explaining things over the phone. I was also lucky that I had a good background in assembly language programming from the Army and subsequent stints with CDC and Honeywell writing things like light pen interfaces. I managed to write the software and sell both tablets and two Apple II's to a couple of Burroughs guys for enough money to keep the store open a little longer.
As bad as my experience with Apple was, my relationship with Commodore pissed me off each time I had to deal with them. We had to buy 5 Commodore PET systems at a time. We had to put up $5000, which gave us a "credit line" of $5000 dollars, and which was enough to buy 5 systems (which sold retail for $1499). However, the manufacturing of the PET was sloppy, to say the least. I've had as many as 4 of the 5 in my order come in DOA. So I had to RMA the defective systems for repair. Then, in order to get more inventory, I had to put up another $5000 to "increase my credit line". In order to keep enough stock to sell, we ended up letting Commodore have $15,000 of deposit money. This shouldn't have been news to me: Before I worked for Honeywell in 1968, I sold business machines in Minneapolis. The guy I worked for sold Commodore calculators. Commodore actually came out with the first truly programmable calculator, which used a Nixie-tube display and magnetic cards to preserve the programs. (Marchant and Friden also had "programmable" calculators, but neither of them did recursion and both of them were twice the size of the Commodore.) My boss used to complain about the way Commodore treated him, for the same reasons. In 1990, in Houston, the vendor I worked for who sold the Amiga was still complaining about the same problems. (Rumor has it that Commodore was a Mafia-owned company and very risk-aversive while not being particularly customer-sensitive.)
Eventually, the owner/investor of the store decided that there was no point in keeping it open since there was not enough saleable stock to satisfy the customers or make a profit.
The "copyright police" are irrelevant to the question. The question is, "What's the right thing to do?" For an out-of-print book, it seems like the right thing to do is buy it wherever possible, and make your own e-book as backup. If you can't buy it, there is no ethical problem with acquiring the book in what ever form you can find it. There is, however, an ethical question about whether you should enable the persons who created a "pirated" e-book to enjoy financial or psychological rewards for their un-ethical behavior. How about contacting the copyright holder and getting permission to create/publish the e-book ethically?
OK, obvious flamebait. However, there must be an explanation somewhere for how people will work for weeks (BOTH patrties) to get someone elected and they don't even know the job descriptions or the candidate's background.
It may be "plain English" instead of "politispeak", but it's just more BS. The Economy page for instance, takes flawed and skewed statistics and asserts them as fact, then tries to create a solution based on these so-called "facts". The whole approach is laced with rhetorical fallacies built on a massive instance of the "straw man" fallacy.
I am not a McCain supporter, not an Obama supporter, and I'm discouraged that this approach will probably work for both parties.
If it is true that a country really does get the government they deserve, then I am even more discouraged.
The www.change.com is much more interesting than Obama's site.
You have already "jumped to solutions" with this question. You have made decisions about the outcome that you haven't related to the actual problem. For instance, you have specified Cocoa, but you don't say why that specification solves a specific problem.
So, I guess I'd recommend asking a few questions like:
What do you want? What problem are you trying to solve? How many alternative ways could you solve this problem? What are the necessary constraints? What is the best alternative that satisfies solving the problem within those constraints?
For instance: You need to have a program that does "X". The program solves the problem of calculating and communicating by typewriter or longhand. The program could be written in C/C++, Qt, Python, Smalltalk, etc., etc.. The program must be maintainable by you and you only know C++ and Cocoa. Therefore you must select an alternative that includes these languages...
Most decisions are sub-optimal because people don't evaluate enough alternatives. This is OK if the decision is not important or easy to change, but the more time and money invested, and the more people involved in the use of the solution, requires you try to create an optimized decision.
Then you start picking the programmers. Under similar circumstances, I have found it best to check with the employment agencies, and ask around among my IT friends for referrals. Get references.
Good luck on your project.
This is a solution to an un-defined problem. We should only implement solutions AFTER we have defined a problem. "Jumping to Solutions" is why so many decision-making processes go wrong.
Expanding the Presidential Empire is not necessarily the answer to our current problems. Government interference in the distribution of goods and services normally reduces the effectiveness and efficient workings of the marketplace, thus depriving the potential customers.
I've been busy, but I want to let you know that I agree with you on this last post.
As I said before, I can't imagine how an executive gets to the point where he's making decisions so inimical to the health of the company. 50% exposure to high-risk loans is almost unfathomable.
And, I agree with your assessment of the way Economists are listened to.
Thanks for taking time to share your views.
I have no interest in "blaming" anyone. What works, works. What doesn't work, doesn't work. You can do what doesn't work over and over again, and it still won't work. If our legislators were evaluated on their management skills and judgment instead of the pap they sell on election day, they would have been removed pretty quickly. My point is this: Candidates and lawmakers have been deliberately ignoring a segment of the population that could give them good advice; the Economists. Although no one bats 1.000, the Economic hits would be higher by listening to what a competent Economic coach says about Economics.
I was there: I'm a Management Accountant doing computer work. In the last two years I've given advice that saved some of my clients hundreds of thousands of dollars when the crises hit (for those who listened). A couple of my builder clients didn't listen, and they are now out of business.
Thomas Gilovich wrote a book titled, "How We Know What Isn't So," in which he showed how so many of the things we think are true are really false. A study was done at Ohio State University a few years back, which concluded that executives made wrong decisions over 50% of the time, yet were convinced they were in the top 10% of decision makers.
One mortgage company we worked with here in Houston consistently turned away mortgages that were iffy. My builders (the ones out of business now) would then go shopping for someone to take the mortgages (Countrywide, for instance). The mortgage company is still in business, my builders can't get construction financing, and you know what happened to Countrywide and their type... I'm pretty sure that if Countrywide had to live with their loans instead of selling them off, they would have evaluated them differently.
I will say this: I have no clue what dynamics led supposedly competent managers to make decisions inimical to the health of their companies. I am told by one manager that they were pressured to make some of the loans (particularly minority housing loans) because of the penalties involved if they didn't. (This same manager expressed his concerns well before the crises, but, like you, he had to answer to higher-ups.)
And as for self-regulating: The market forces did the regulating when the managers failed to make decisions in line with good judgment.
I've had to do some reading since your post. Apparently I mis-communicated somehow. The article you mention talks about Greenspan admitting that the "models" generated by our know economic principles are too simple to yield precise results. This is true of a lot of dynamic models, including those used for weather forecasting and social behavior, but statistically the underlying principles of weather and social behavior hold true, even if real precision is absent. This isn't much help in individual instances, but it's the same type of thinking that, say, insurance companies use: If your age is 60 years old this year and you are not a smoker, your life expectancy is "x" years. this does not mean that you will certain live for "x" years, nor does it mean you will die in your "x" year if you live that long. It is a general observation about the way the world works.
Economics is younger than Statistics or Actuarial studies, but the same type of observations have the same type of utility. Ignoring the overall concept and relying on the extreme outlying case is not Science; it is wishful thinking. My point is that the Politicians consistently ignore the overall principles and try to sell the extremes, when it would be good to listen to some people who actually study these conditions.
Well, the topic was about the elections and Economics, and my point is that no one is listening to the Economists, who are, after all, the people who make a study of Economics.
Consider these situations: One Economist is contemplating the way resources should be used in an economy. One Economist is observing the behavior of economic actions (transactions) and trying to derive the principles that drive that behavior. One Economist is trying to arrange thing so that the Economy shapes itself to his ideal state (more or less).
The first Economist is doing Economic Philosophy. The third Economist is doing Economic Technology. the second Economist is the Scientist, trying to be objective about discovering the principles that predict what happens when economic events take place under certain conditions. The Economists practicing in this second domain have discovered many principles that the others now take for granted. In most respects, Economic thought orbits these principles pretty closely, and it would behoove the candidates to listen closely to what these Economists have to say, particularly those that practice in the middle, objective domain.
Neither candidate's Economic views are consistent with Economic Principles. I believe that reflects the observations by the author of the PDF I referred to, entitled, "The Myth of the Rational Voter."
You might be interested to know that Paul Krugman, in his book, "The Accidental Theorist," agrees with you. He likens the current economy as more like a society of prospectors where some get very lucky no matter how little they work, and some remain poor no matter how hard they work. His contention is that the society is no longer a meritocracy where people are rewarded proportionately to their effort, and that the lucky have an obligation to see that the unlucky survive or thrive.
Your observations about laissez-faire are not supported by any empirical fact. As far as I know, laisez-faire has never gotten beyond the domain of Economic Philosophy.
I read a lot on Economics because I intend to go back to school and get a PhD so I can teach during my retirement years. Paul Krugman, recent Noble winner, wrote a book called, "The Accidental Theorist." Now Paul is surely a Democrat, critical of right-wing politics, and inclined toward a liberal government, but he still sounds like a conservative when he talks about Economics. Why? Because there exist some discovered economic principles, proven over time, that even the most liberal Economists don't dispute. The problem is, neither Congress nor the Executive Branch listens to Economists. In the past, when they listened to Milton Friedman we got taxes taken from our paychecks, and when they listened to Alan Greenspan we got pretty good money management. Score: 1 1.
(To ward off a minor distraction; it was Congress, not Alan Greenspan, who dictated the "easy money" policies for sub-standard mortgage loans which precipitated our current situation.)
This election, is probably better analyzed by Sociologists than Economists. The models of crowd behavior certainly show what's going on better than any analysis of public economic opinion. Most of the population is woefully ignorant about even the most basic Economics principles. So, by pandering to the crowd's superstitions, candidates get elected on the size of their fans, not the issues. Here is a nice little article for those with the motivation to read it:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa594.pdf
For those of you who would criticize me for being a libertarian (small "l"), you might like to look at this chart:
http://blog.createdebate.com/2008/04/07/writing-strong-arguments/
There is a link on this page to the original article by Paul Graham.
I remember that about 25 years ago in Alaska we had a number of cases where the Citabria would crash because a wing came off. (And the Citabria was supposed to be aerobatic-certified aircraft. It just wasn't rugged enough for bush flying.) As I understand it, an AD was issued that should have corrected all the defects, but just knowing the problem existed is enough to dismiss early conclusions as to the reason behind the crash.
Yup, you've been paying IN. So have a lot of other people. Many of them delusionally think that because they paid in, they are entitled to take out. This would be true if there actually was anything there, but the Johnson Administration started putting the funds collected into Treasury Bonds, meaning that they were used to finance the over-spending of the government. It's not there.
10 Trillion dollars is about $250,000 for every man, woman and child in the USA. This mostly Medicaid and Medicare "entitlements". This will come due at about a trillion dollars a year in about 5-8 years. Since there is no money, it will be paid out of current collections. Since current collections are not nearly enough to cover the payments, they will have to increase collections (taxes). High taxes imposed on our industries will reduce productivity, and make investing in USA business less desirable. People will bitch about the high taxes, so they will inflate the currency so the "dollar" amount of the taxes is a smaller percentage of the gross pay, and, although this may cover the dollar amount of the payments, the amount paid will buy less services and goods. Retirees will bitch and insist that the payments be pegged to the cost of living, indexed in dollars. So the Government will look at what they did for Veterans: They will reduce benefits for new people signing up, and they will "triage" the beneficiaries based on income and urgency. So, you will be entitled to benefits, but only able to collect them if you are desperately poor or in urgent need of medical care. This will disenfranchise about 50-70% of the retirees, who will then use their own resources to provide their own care.
"Supplemental Social Security" was originally initiated to provide some extra benefits for those who didn't have enough retirement income, not as a universal retirement fund for everyone. Even then, it was wrong for the government to steal money from people under the guise of paternal care. It became worse when the money was not invested, but used to pay current government expenses. The government is not responsible for our retirement; we are. If you had been investing the amount you paid into SS privately, and you expect to live another 30 years, look at the amount of money you would be able to live on versus what you would get from SS. In my case, assuming I retire at 72, I would be getting about $70,000/yr (assuming 7% return), and I would be able to maintain my own health insurance for catastrophic care and pay the minor stuff out of my own pocket without government interference.
BTW, huge amounts of real retirement funds are invested in the stock market. What's going to happen when these funds start liquidating to cover retirement? Typically, a stock glut means cheaper prices, so The later you retire, the less you will be able to collect from your investments. The last retirees will end up needing the "government benefits", costs will climb for medical care, and when people see what's happening they will rush to retirement before they lose too much money. Unless we are willing to establish a system like Singapore's Central Provident Fund, we have no business letting the government manage our retirement. [BIAS ALERT! I do not think the government should be involved in my retirement at all, except for the legitimate use of the Justice system to prevent or prosecute fraud.]
The USA has 10 Trillion dollars in off-balance-sheet liabilities. Because of the way Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare are funded, when people in my age group (I'm 60) really start retiring, it's going to be expensive. There is no money there. If a private company ran it's finances the way the government does, somebody would go to prison.
Ok, ask anyone if they expect to collect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; everyone says yes, they paid, they're entitled. However, 80% of the people drawing these benefits will be capable of paying their own expenses. They are not poor. I am all for helping the economically disadvantaged, but why should the government steal money from productive workers and re-distribute it to people who are not needy?
I suspect that sometime in the next eight years, the money will be purposely inflated (making the benefits debt less expensive to pay out), taxes will rise dramatically, the retirement age will be pushed close to age 70, and finally, after all fails, the government will establish a means test, so that only the most desparate will be able to go to the front of the line for benefits.
Privatization of benefits actually worked for Chile. It could work for us, but it is almost too late.
Don't put it in the dumpster. It will just pollute the environment a bit more, especially tubes like CRT's. In fact, in Houston, it is verboten to put your electronics in the regular trash.
It's a hassle to take it to the recycle center, but that's the best thing to do.
In his book, "A Whole New Mind", he said that if your job can be outsourced or automated, it's in danger. go back to school. Study Art.