Ahem - they are **reporting** that they have better mental health. Doesn't mean they're actually healthier.
In fact, they could just be more fearful that other people will think they're nuts.
So...Bush was too stupid to pay attention to EIGHT MONTHS of warnings, because Democrats are weak?
Or, Bush was too stupid to pay attention to eight months of warnings, because Clinton had sex?
This chain of thought makes sense to you?
Me, I prefer to give credit or blame on the people who actually did things.
As for "purely recreational war", come on. You know better. There was no pleasure here, it was all business: get control over all that sweet crude oil, and get a bigger foothold in a region that has most of the rest of it.
This regulation kept firewalls between types of investments, so that a huge a meltdown in one part would be contained to that part.
This was put in place after the last meltdown as big as this week's - the kickoff of the Great Depression.
Glass-Steagal was repealed thanks to efforts by Phil Gramm and John McCain, in 1999.
It's amazing what **doesn't** get blamed on de-regulation. De-regulation of major businesses, ventures and the stock market are almost always negative. That's simple history - look it up.
Enron...who was Ken Lay buddies with again?
Oh, and:
a) - no, Clinton's "lax regulation" (something which was lustfully pursued by the entire GOP) didn't "lead to" the.com bubble. What led to that was a bunch of greedy idiots who just kept thinking they could sell quickly enough that someone else would be holding the bag.
Gee, just like the real estate bubble. Imagine that.
b) the.com bubble didn't "lead to" Enron deciding to make poor investments, and then defrauding their employees and stockholders rather than face the music.
c) The repeal of the Glass-Steagal act actualy **has** led to our current mess because it removed firewalls that we've had since the Great Depression. This repeal was pushed through by the usual conservative de-regulation dogmatists, most specifically Phil Gramm and John McCain.
Information - it's good for you.
That's funny! I thought Bush was president when we invaded Iraq.
Oh, and you DO know that Iraq had NOTHING TO DO WITH 9/11 OR TERRORISM, right?
If not, please read the above sentence again. You need to. You should have read it 7 years ago.
So, here's how it actually breaks down:
- Clinton invaded Lewinsky's bush, and screwed her
- Bush invaded Iraq, and screwed America
A hockey game has two teams competing. Both want to win. Clear so far?
If there were no rules and regulations, or if some important regulations were removed, then the players could compete in ways that are harmful to each other and even the fans, and so wreck each other that the game would actually become useless.
This relates *exactly* to human endeavors like the market. If the ways in which people compete, sell, and interact through money and value has no set structure which is **above** personal interpretation, people will be presented with the choice of competing in productive ways or destructive ways. And guess what? if the destructive way that's worse for everyone else is cheaper, they will go with that way.
And they will go that way, because that's the very nature of the free market. Think about it. If people are presented with a possible way to make $100 that does no harm, or an almost certain way to make $10000 that puts great risk on a bunch of strangers, a lot of them will pick the second, won't they?
Do you understand what I'm saying now?
And I'm sorry, but this statement is absolutely not true:
The only things that are required for any human interaction are the rational minds of those involved in the interaction.
If this were true, we would not need any laws at all.
But:
1. everyone is not rational, but we all have to live together
2. even people who are rational disagree, sometimes in ways that can't be worked out
3. even people who are rational, aren't necessarily honest
Even IF everyone was rational - who's to say that they haven't rationally concluded they should rip you off? Or sell houses to other people which are made of tissue paper - and screw what happens to the rest of the town if the whole town burns down? Or any number of other real-world situations.
It's a nice ideal world that people don't need some sort of regulatory structure in their interactions, including the free market. It's just that this ideal world simply doesn't fit the messiness of reality at all.
Which future? Tomorrow? Next Thursday? A decade from now? Who decides which days of whose future get to be desirable while others' do not?
We all decide, because it's a democracy. We elect people who (theoretically at least) are responsible to all of us to make decisions that a majority agrees with.
If you don't like the calls that your representatives make, you can bring it up with them or elect someone else. That's the greatness of our current form of government. It's not the best possible, just the best we've found so far.
The fact that traders have become addicted to government intervention in the economy does not imply that such intervention is justifiable, or that it leads to sustainability.
The fact that *you* think that traders have 'become addicted to government intervention' does not imply that such intervention is NOT justifiable.
Furthermore, this notion that traders have become 'addicted' to it is not historically feasible. it is 100% your notion that is not in contact with reality.
It's a straight historical fact that unregulated markets, like ANY mass aspects of human interaction, spiral out of control. Go research the Holland tulip craze, any of the money issues the US had in the 1800's, or our current housing crisis which was made possible by the repeal of Glass-Steagal.
History proves you wrong, period. We have regulations because before we had them, we had disasters instead.
Alright, now you just have to show that this is the only thing that matters.
No, I don't **have to** do any such thing. But I will tell you why I think it's what matters. And then you are free to tell me if you disagree.
From my perspective, *i* am interested in what's best for the majority of people, that's where I'm arguing from.
If you don't want what's best for the majority of people, fair enough - that's your position. But it's no more an unassailable position of absolute truth than mine - it's just another starting point.
However, even from the point of view where you don't care about the welfare of the majority, some regulation of the stock market is still required - because lack of regulation and rules creates the conditions for stock market crashes, which hurt *everyone*, not just in the present but more importantly in the long term.
If people have power over others, they are violating their rights and the government should step in to protect them.
Thanks for at least agreeing to that.
If you're simply talking about prices being too high
I'll stop you right there - no I'm not.
I'm talking about regulation of the free market. That's not just 'keeping prices down'.
Please take a look at our current situation, and how it relates to Glass-Steagal. In fact, please review the Glass-Steagal act.
Do you really believe that competition leads to sustained higher prices, less efficiency, and lower quality of service?
Sure, direct economic competition is great. The problem is, entities in an unregulated free market don't necessarily restrict themselves to direct economic competition. Why should it? As stated in the very name, it's free.
So with no regulation there's market manipulation to contend with, there's people creating dangerously fragile schemes which can collapse and take down entire institutions, there are monopolies which are directly anti-competitive by their nature, and there's many other things which are unsafe to allow because they create volatility.
It's like having housing codes. Theoretically I should be able to build my house any way I want. In reality if I decide to build a house made of paper and power it with kerosene lamps while I make my own dynamite, I could burn down the whole town. So there has to be building codes to restrict what I can do.
This is part of the complexity of the real world, as opposed to the theoretical world of the Fr
Here's a metaphor of what I'm talking about:
Picture a hockey game. There's rules and regulations that limit what players can and can't do. Those rules work or are changed until they do. The hockey game makes money.
Now imagine a hockey game without rules regulations. How well does that work? It doesn't. Even the UFC has rules.
Every human interaction requires a structure to be useful to it's participants. Rules and regulations provide a needed part of that structure.
1. desirable to the majority of American citizens
2. desirable for the future of ALL Americans
A stable regulated market helps create an environment where people have:
a) justified confidence in the stock market, which helps the market itself
b) justified confidence in the future of the entire country, which helps them formulate plans to succeed.
when I say useful I mean:
1. to the majority of people in the stock market
2. to the majority of people in the US economy
as for How do you claim that could happen in a society for which the only purpose served by the government is to protect and uphold the rights of its citizenry?
- I claim it by looking out the window! Powerless people get ripped off by more powerful people all the freaking time, since the beginning of history. Successful societies are able to separate this from healthy competition. Unhealthy societies degenerate into totalitarianism as the powerful bend laws to aid them, over the poor.
Hence the creation of our country's constitution, to keep the power balanced towards the interests of the less powerful.
Any other questions?
How do you propose that one person gain power over another without the use of force?
A convenient theory, which ignores the most important fact of the Clinton administration: Clinton **reversed** the "trickle-down" tax theory, and cut taxes on the poor and middle-class instead of the rich.
This policy resulted in a greater flow of money throughout the economy - because when people who aren't rich get money, they are much more likely to spend it.
Clinton then invested the money received into infrastructure and programs for the poor and middle class - further empowering them to lift themselves up, and the economy with them.
THEN the Gingrich GOP started demanding tax cuts, and Clinton steadfastly refused - going as far as shutting down the actual government because Clinton kept vetoing them. They wanted trickle-down fantasy tax cuts - Clinton wanted to pay down the debt. Thus we got the surplus.
Every President that's tried trickle-down: massive debt. The one president so far that's tried tax cuts for the poor and middle-class: one of the greatest economic upturns of the last 100 years.
Thats' how it is. Reality actually may have a liberal bias.
An entirely unregulated free market is not desirable, even if it were possible. The market, like any interaction between humans, requires structures such as regulations in order to actually be stable and useful. And also, perhaps even more importantly, not just screw over the less powerful at will.
Consider: our current housing meltdown would have been impossible without the removal of the regulation known as the Glass-Steagal act.
Consider: the party which champions the removal of regulations on big business, the GOP, has presided over FAR worse economic results than the Democratic party since before the time of Hoover.
Perhaps more economists are Democratic, because the Democrats tend to have a more sensible policy that's grounded in reality, rather than just dressing up giveaways to the %1 at the top of the pyramid.
It's a pragmatic reality that Presidents tend to set the tone, and the Congress tends to respond to that tone.
This isn't written into the Constitution - it's just a consequence of human interaction. One person's will is always going to be clearer than several hundred people's wills.
This is in fact why our founding fathers, in their considerable wisdom, placed the legislative powers AND judicial powers outside of the realm of the President.
An economist and an accountant are walking down the street. They see a pile of dog crap. The economist says to the accountant, "I'll bet you $20 you won't eat that."
The accountant takes the bet, kneels down and eats the crap. The economist pays him $20. They start walking again.
Around the next corner, they see another pile of dog crap. The accountant says, "I'll bet you $20 you won't eat *that*." The economist thinks about it, and wants his $20 back, so he kneels down and eats it. The accountant pays him.
They continue walking. About a block later the accountant says, "Hey, wait a minute. We've both eaten dog crap, and neither of us have any more money than when we started."
The economist says, "Yes - but between us we've generated $40 for the economy!"
Ah, skipped over the-partition-itself-is-PGP-encrypted part. I stand corrected.
I still expect this is more about taking another notch out of the 5th amendment than catching this specific potential criminal.
Especially after reading this update to the cited article:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9854034-38.html?hhTest=1
The Fed appeal and the plaintiff's response in this case are all under seal. Sounds like Patriot Act crap.
Gee. A former prosecutor thinks protecting the 5th amendment is wrong "in this case".
Why doesn't that surprise me.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
I cynically expect that the Feds probably could brute-force crack the password - or just make it boot up to Linux via CD or USB drive, and read or change the password.
No, this smells to me like another test case to try take away another of our few remaining rights as innocent citizens, with "scary child pornographers" as an excuse. The sad thing is, if this guy really is a child porn-hawking scumbag, he might get off because the Feds want more power over the rest of us. Which shows you what their priorities really are.
Let me solve one of those questions for you: whoever fed false info of Iraqi involvement to Brian Ross is probably currently at 1600 Pennsylvania avenue. Or, alternately, at a residence they had blurred by Google.
No, he's asking us to embrace a new energy because our current one sucks.
What he's offering here is one possible factor that make it easier to switch to a new policy.
"Climate change" is a phrase that was popularized by the Bush administration, as a way of avoiding acknowledging the scientific reality that the Earth is getting warmer due to humanity.
So don't blame those who want to do something about global warming which will probably require regulation - blame those who want to avoid doing anything that might hurt oil company profits.
As a side note, regulation makes it possible for us to have food that isn't poisoned and contracts that aren't frauds. And the current housing meltdown is at least partly due to a relaxing of regulation on Wall St. investing in mortgage companies. So, regulation in it's place is not only beneficial, it can be vitally important.
There is actually a bar in San Francisco where people can smoke, because the bar is more of a co-operative - all the workers are considered owners, so no the workplace-enforcement aspect of California smoking laws doesn't apply.
It's a nice place to go to, every now and then - but only if you feel like smoking. It's ridiculous in there.
You're right. Pot absolutely cannot give you physical flashbacks. As I understand it, frequent LSD use can lead to flashbacks because it can get stored in fat cells, and then later released when the fat cells release their storage for consumption.
So I guess the solution there is, exercise and get high again for free.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahem - they are **reporting** that they have better mental health. Doesn't mean they're actually healthier. In fact, they could just be more fearful that other people will think they're nuts.
Or, Bush was too stupid to pay attention to eight months of warnings, because Clinton had sex?
This chain of thought makes sense to you?
Me, I prefer to give credit or blame on the people who actually did things.
As for "purely recreational war", come on. You know better. There was no pleasure here, it was all business: get control over all that sweet crude oil, and get a bigger foothold in a region that has most of the rest of it.
But hey, no big whoop. Prosperity's just around the corner. Maybe China will buy us out.
This regulation kept firewalls between types of investments, so that a huge a meltdown in one part would be contained to that part.
This was put in place after the last meltdown as big as this week's - the kickoff of the Great Depression.
Glass-Steagal was repealed thanks to efforts by Phil Gramm and John McCain, in 1999.
It's amazing what **doesn't** get blamed on de-regulation. De-regulation of major businesses, ventures and the stock market are almost always negative. That's simple history - look it up.
Enron...who was Ken Lay buddies with again? Oh, and: a) - no, Clinton's "lax regulation" (something which was lustfully pursued by the entire GOP) didn't "lead to" the .com bubble. What led to that was a bunch of greedy idiots who just kept thinking they could sell quickly enough that someone else would be holding the bag.
Gee, just like the real estate bubble. Imagine that.
b) the .com bubble didn't "lead to" Enron deciding to make poor investments, and then defrauding their employees and stockholders rather than face the music.
c) The repeal of the Glass-Steagal act actualy **has** led to our current mess because it removed firewalls that we've had since the Great Depression. This repeal was pushed through by the usual conservative de-regulation dogmatists, most specifically Phil Gramm and John McCain.
Information - it's good for you.
That's funny! I thought Bush was president when we invaded Iraq. Oh, and you DO know that Iraq had NOTHING TO DO WITH 9/11 OR TERRORISM, right? If not, please read the above sentence again. You need to. You should have read it 7 years ago. So, here's how it actually breaks down: - Clinton invaded Lewinsky's bush, and screwed her - Bush invaded Iraq, and screwed America
A hockey game has two teams competing. Both want to win. Clear so far?
If there were no rules and regulations, or if some important regulations were removed, then the players could compete in ways that are harmful to each other and even the fans, and so wreck each other that the game would actually become useless.
This relates *exactly* to human endeavors like the market. If the ways in which people compete, sell, and interact through money and value has no set structure which is **above** personal interpretation, people will be presented with the choice of competing in productive ways or destructive ways. And guess what? if the destructive way that's worse for everyone else is cheaper, they will go with that way.
And they will go that way, because that's the very nature of the free market. Think about it. If people are presented with a possible way to make $100 that does no harm, or an almost certain way to make $10000 that puts great risk on a bunch of strangers, a lot of them will pick the second, won't they?
Do you understand what I'm saying now?
And I'm sorry, but this statement is absolutely not true:
The only things that are required for any human interaction are the rational minds of those involved in the interaction.
If this were true, we would not need any laws at all.
But:
1. everyone is not rational, but we all have to live together
2. even people who are rational disagree, sometimes in ways that can't be worked out
3. even people who are rational, aren't necessarily honest
Even IF everyone was rational - who's to say that they haven't rationally concluded they should rip you off? Or sell houses to other people which are made of tissue paper - and screw what happens to the rest of the town if the whole town burns down? Or any number of other real-world situations.
It's a nice ideal world that people don't need some sort of regulatory structure in their interactions, including the free market. It's just that this ideal world simply doesn't fit the messiness of reality at all.
Which future? Tomorrow? Next Thursday? A decade from now? Who decides which days of whose future get to be desirable while others' do not?
We all decide, because it's a democracy. We elect people who (theoretically at least) are responsible to all of us to make decisions that a majority agrees with.
If you don't like the calls that your representatives make, you can bring it up with them or elect someone else. That's the greatness of our current form of government. It's not the best possible, just the best we've found so far.
The fact that traders have become addicted to government intervention in the economy does not imply that such intervention is justifiable, or that it leads to sustainability.
The fact that *you* think that traders have 'become addicted to government intervention' does not imply that such intervention is NOT justifiable.
Furthermore, this notion that traders have become 'addicted' to it is not historically feasible. it is 100% your notion that is not in contact with reality.
It's a straight historical fact that unregulated markets, like ANY mass aspects of human interaction, spiral out of control. Go research the Holland tulip craze, any of the money issues the US had in the 1800's, or our current housing crisis which was made possible by the repeal of Glass-Steagal.
History proves you wrong, period. We have regulations because before we had them, we had disasters instead.
Alright, now you just have to show that this is the only thing that matters.
No, I don't **have to** do any such thing. But I will tell you why I think it's what matters. And then you are free to tell me if you disagree.
From my perspective, *i* am interested in what's best for the majority of people, that's where I'm arguing from.
If you don't want what's best for the majority of people, fair enough - that's your position. But it's no more an unassailable position of absolute truth than mine - it's just another starting point.
However, even from the point of view where you don't care about the welfare of the majority, some regulation of the stock market is still required - because lack of regulation and rules creates the conditions for stock market crashes, which hurt *everyone*, not just in the present but more importantly in the long term.
If people have power over others, they are violating their rights and the government should step in to protect them.
Thanks for at least agreeing to that.
If you're simply talking about prices being too high
I'll stop you right there - no I'm not.
I'm talking about regulation of the free market. That's not just 'keeping prices down'.
Please take a look at our current situation, and how it relates to Glass-Steagal. In fact, please review the Glass-Steagal act.
Do you really believe that competition leads to sustained higher prices, less efficiency, and lower quality of service?
Sure, direct economic competition is great. The problem is, entities in an unregulated free market don't necessarily restrict themselves to direct economic competition. Why should it? As stated in the very name, it's free.
So with no regulation there's market manipulation to contend with, there's people creating dangerously fragile schemes which can collapse and take down entire institutions, there are monopolies which are directly anti-competitive by their nature, and there's many other things which are unsafe to allow because they create volatility.
It's like having housing codes. Theoretically I should be able to build my house any way I want. In reality if I decide to build a house made of paper and power it with kerosene lamps while I make my own dynamite, I could burn down the whole town. So there has to be building codes to restrict what I can do.
This is part of the complexity of the real world, as opposed to the theoretical world of the Fr
Here's a metaphor of what I'm talking about: Picture a hockey game. There's rules and regulations that limit what players can and can't do. Those rules work or are changed until they do. The hockey game makes money. Now imagine a hockey game without rules regulations. How well does that work? It doesn't. Even the UFC has rules. Every human interaction requires a structure to be useful to it's participants. Rules and regulations provide a needed part of that structure.
when I say desirable I mean:
1. desirable to the majority of American citizens 2. desirable for the future of ALL Americans
A stable regulated market helps create an environment where people have:
a) justified confidence in the stock market, which helps the market itself
b) justified confidence in the future of the entire country, which helps them formulate plans to succeed.
when I say useful I mean:
1. to the majority of people in the stock market
2. to the majority of people in the US economy
as for How do you claim that could happen in a society for which the only purpose served by the government is to protect and uphold the rights of its citizenry? - I claim it by looking out the window! Powerless people get ripped off by more powerful people all the freaking time, since the beginning of history. Successful societies are able to separate this from healthy competition. Unhealthy societies degenerate into totalitarianism as the powerful bend laws to aid them, over the poor. Hence the creation of our country's constitution, to keep the power balanced towards the interests of the less powerful. Any other questions? How do you propose that one person gain power over another without the use of force?
The 'invisible hand of the free market' tends to punch the worker in the nuts.
This policy resulted in a greater flow of money throughout the economy - because when people who aren't rich get money, they are much more likely to spend it.
Clinton then invested the money received into infrastructure and programs for the poor and middle class - further empowering them to lift themselves up, and the economy with them.
THEN the Gingrich GOP started demanding tax cuts, and Clinton steadfastly refused - going as far as shutting down the actual government because Clinton kept vetoing them. They wanted trickle-down fantasy tax cuts - Clinton wanted to pay down the debt. Thus we got the surplus.
Every President that's tried trickle-down: massive debt. The one president so far that's tried tax cuts for the poor and middle-class: one of the greatest economic upturns of the last 100 years.
Thats' how it is. Reality actually may have a liberal bias.
An entirely unregulated free market is not desirable, even if it were possible. The market, like any interaction between humans, requires structures such as regulations in order to actually be stable and useful. And also, perhaps even more importantly, not just screw over the less powerful at will. Consider: our current housing meltdown would have been impossible without the removal of the regulation known as the Glass-Steagal act. Consider: the party which champions the removal of regulations on big business, the GOP, has presided over FAR worse economic results than the Democratic party since before the time of Hoover. Perhaps more economists are Democratic, because the Democrats tend to have a more sensible policy that's grounded in reality, rather than just dressing up giveaways to the %1 at the top of the pyramid.
It's a pragmatic reality that Presidents tend to set the tone, and the Congress tends to respond to that tone. This isn't written into the Constitution - it's just a consequence of human interaction. One person's will is always going to be clearer than several hundred people's wills. This is in fact why our founding fathers, in their considerable wisdom, placed the legislative powers AND judicial powers outside of the realm of the President.
The accountant takes the bet, kneels down and eats the crap. The economist pays him $20. They start walking again.
Around the next corner, they see another pile of dog crap. The accountant says, "I'll bet you $20 you won't eat *that*." The economist thinks about it, and wants his $20 back, so he kneels down and eats it. The accountant pays him.
They continue walking. About a block later the accountant says, "Hey, wait a minute. We've both eaten dog crap, and neither of us have any more money than when we started."
The economist says, "Yes - but between us we've generated $40 for the economy!"
Ah, skipped over the-partition-itself-is-PGP-encrypted part. I stand corrected. I still expect this is more about taking another notch out of the 5th amendment than catching this specific potential criminal. Especially after reading this update to the cited article: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9854034-38.html?hhTest=1 The Fed appeal and the plaintiff's response in this case are all under seal. Sounds like Patriot Act crap.
Gee. A former prosecutor thinks protecting the 5th amendment is wrong "in this case". Why doesn't that surprise me. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
No, this smells to me like another test case to try take away another of our few remaining rights as innocent citizens, with "scary child pornographers" as an excuse. The sad thing is, if this guy really is a child porn-hawking scumbag, he might get off because the Feds want more power over the rest of us. Which shows you what their priorities really are.
Let me solve one of those questions for you: whoever fed false info of Iraqi involvement to Brian Ross is probably currently at 1600 Pennsylvania avenue. Or, alternately, at a residence they had blurred by Google.
No, he's asking us to embrace a new energy because our current one sucks. What he's offering here is one possible factor that make it easier to switch to a new policy.
"Climate change" is a phrase that was popularized by the Bush administration, as a way of avoiding acknowledging the scientific reality that the Earth is getting warmer due to humanity. So don't blame those who want to do something about global warming which will probably require regulation - blame those who want to avoid doing anything that might hurt oil company profits. As a side note, regulation makes it possible for us to have food that isn't poisoned and contracts that aren't frauds. And the current housing meltdown is at least partly due to a relaxing of regulation on Wall St. investing in mortgage companies. So, regulation in it's place is not only beneficial, it can be vitally important.
There is actually a bar in San Francisco where people can smoke, because the bar is more of a co-operative - all the workers are considered owners, so no the workplace-enforcement aspect of California smoking laws doesn't apply. It's a nice place to go to, every now and then - but only if you feel like smoking. It's ridiculous in there.
You're right. Pot absolutely cannot give you physical flashbacks. As I understand it, frequent LSD use can lead to flashbacks because it can get stored in fat cells, and then later released when the fat cells release their storage for consumption. So I guess the solution there is, exercise and get high again for free.
Well, the poor mortal husk dweller should be informed, no?
A fraction of US Defense spending for ONE YEAR could feed every man, woman and child on Earth. http://millionsofmouths.com/blog/nfblog/2006/11/13/global-expenditure-on-defense-over-1000-billion/ Overpopulation isn't the problem. Prioritizing how leaders spend their nation's money - that's the real problem.