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Swimmy
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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 Posted: Thu Nov 18, 2010 4:37 am |
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Here's a bit more on the general populace not having a clue when it comes to money and banking. It applies to journalists as well:
Interest Rates Rise Despite Launch of Treasury Buying as Investors Take Profits
Um. Because, not despite. That is exactly what we would expect. The author writes it up like it's some mystery effect, the interest rates ponderously defying Bernanke's attempts to influence them, as if we haven't known this relationship for a century or more.
Edit: Here is a handy graph! (Source.)
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Swimmy
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Nov 18, 2010 2:40 pm |
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| psiga wrote: |
| Of course, at that point, we could comfortably say that most people don't know shit about economics, most journalists don't know shit about economics, most politicians don't know shit about economics, and most of the people actually running the Fed don't know shit about economics. |
Well, no, that's also kind of my point. The people running the Fed know a lot about economics. In Talbain's QE video, the characters questioned the qualifications of Bernanke: He wasn't elected, he's never run a business, what qualifications does he have at all? Well, first of all, unlike politicians and businessmen and even journalists who write about economics professionally, he can explain why the arguments in that video are fucking ridiculous. I disagree with some of the things he's done, but is he qualified? He's one of the most qualified people on the planet. Same for the others running the Fed, unless you meant to implicate the politicians making the appointments.
| negativedge wrote: |
| You could say this about anything--I don't know why it is such a surprise that it also applies to economics. |
Of course. But 1) There are negative externalities when people vote based on their shitty knowledge of economics whereas there usually aren't when they vote based on their shitty knowledge of 18th century Russian literature, and 2) Isn't it kind of weird how people act like they know something about economics? How Paulites storm every blog post that so much as mentions Ron Paul's name to rail against the Fed; how Tea Partiers march on Washington to advocate fewer business regulations and higher immigration restrictions; how journalists and politicians wail and gnash teeth about the size of the national debt, without being able to explain what the costs of having a large debt even are? People don't do that about 18th century Russian literature. They shrug their shoulders and say, "Idunno." But economics is political, and politicis makes people crazy, so I think the world would be better off if people were reminded, occasionally: "Hey, here's a simple graph that shows you're being insane. Cut it out."
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Swimmy
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Nov 18, 2010 4:02 pm |
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Update on that geocentrism conference: A Young Earth Creationist attended and took notes. Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5. Part 4 is my favorite, when someone brings up an obvious speed-of-light problem and the presenter glosses over it with the most insane shit you've ever heard.
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Swimmy
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2010 8:11 pm |
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He votes against anything he doesn't believe the Federal government has any business doing, especially anything they do that you can't find the Constitution telling them to do. Since it's not in the Constitution that the federal government has the power to honor people, he votes no. Doesn't matter if it's a good idea or a harmless gesture or something that wouldn't even really take any money to do.
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Swimmy
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Mon Dec 13, 2010 5:45 pm |
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| internisus wrote: |
| I'm not saying that this is surprising, but I think it might be the most important thing right now. If companies like Twitter, Facebook, Paypal, and Visa can completely shut down people's speech about and attempts to financially support an organization like WikiLeaks, which has not yet been proved to be engaged in an illegal form of "espionage," then what power do the citizenry have at all? |
Blame Joe Lieberman. To stand up to him, you'd have to bet that he won't retaliate against your company somehow, which he totally has the power and inclination to do. And as long as the government has the power to do so, the government will draw people with the inclination to do so, here and forevermore, amen.
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Swimmy
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Tue Dec 14, 2010 3:28 pm |
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This is what "the citizenry" wants. (That is, if you can even say "the citizenry" has collective desires, which you can't.)
| internisus wrote: |
| but I would like to think that my inability right now to make a digital donation to WikiLeaks can be construed as unconstitutional. |
Jurisprudence would say "absolutely not." The government making threats to private organizations for providing a platform? Possibly. Your not having a platform? Has been defended as Constitutional over and over and over again. And there's a good reason for it too: maintaining a platform has a cost, and you have no right to other people's money, only a right to NOT be censored by the government. Of course, in this case, you are being censored by the government, but in such a roundabout way that the Supreme Court will never do anything about it; indeed, in such a roundabout way that you are oddly imagining the government would help you fight those evil corporations that are doing exactly what it told them to do.
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Swimmy
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Tue Dec 14, 2010 4:04 pm |
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Yes, but those payments make it a transaction, covered by contract law. Since the owner of the platform could have rescinded use of the platform had they known how you were going to use it, and would have had a right to do so, it's easiest to use pre-use agreements to determine how to decide things after the fact. (This is why many contracts are so complicated; people want to make sure all probable situations are taken care of, and there's a huge body of law that covers what to do when they're not.) The contracts in this case are the user agreements: if you agree that you won't use the product for certain kinds of speech, that's self-binding, and courts won't do anything about it. If you never signed a user agreement, and a company shut you down for your speech, then you may have a case, but that case will be determined by contract law jurisprudence, not free speech. (Hey Cuba, any court cases of this nature you know of, where the incomplete terms specifically related to speech?)
Being roundabout isn't an absolute obstacle. Note that Amazon is denying that they're conforming to government pressure. They claim that Wikileaks violated the terms of service (though they won't specify which). Others are following suit (though in the case of those putting an end to Anonymous activities, I would imagine Anonymous really were violating terms of use). I imagine you'd have to prove that Lieberman et al. threatened Amazon (and others), however subtly. We don't have public record of their communications with those companies just yet. I'm not sure about past cases on issues like this.
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Swimmy
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Wed Dec 15, 2010 1:04 am |
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If that is workable as a general cure, the fallout will be amazing. "You want to kill babies so you can keep having gay sex? We'll see what GOD has to say about that!"
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Swimmy
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Wed Dec 15, 2010 2:44 am |
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Conditional on it being a viable cure, I bet there will be outrage anyway. Callin' it now. Doesn't matter that it isn't the fetus-y goodness kind of stem cell. A cure for AIDS lowers the cost of being gay, and much as Gardasil managed to get a bunch of people on the anti-vaccine bandwagon, so will an AIDS cure cause people to say and believe outrageously stupid shit.
Example: Day of Truth. Efforts to reduce the incidence of anti-gay bullying have brought people out of the woodwork who oppose those efforts because, they believe, gays aren't killing themselves because of bullying--they're doing it because they know they're not right with god. (Others who aren't right with god, like people who have sex before marriage, are for some reason unaffected by this vicious internal conflict.) The natural, sane response is that bullying is bad no matter why gay kids are killing themselves, and Christians should oppose bullying wherever it occurs. That some of them don't is decent evidence that they want gay kids to be bullied, because anything that increases the cost of being gay means there'll be fewer gays they have to live with.
I'll wager that the same people want AIDS around, and will say batshit stuff about any AIDS cure that comes about, no matter what that cure is.
Edit: Not to shoot your post down. It was informative! Just sayin', people is crazy.
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Last edited by Swimmy on Wed Dec 15, 2010 3:35 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Swimmy
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sat May 14, 2011 1:29 am |
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| Toptube wrote: |
| I like how they snuck in there that Americans are more productive than Chinese |
We are, on average. This isn't some kind of superiority thing. It's a statistic, equal to total value of product made / hours worked.
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Swimmy
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Tue May 17, 2011 4:29 pm |
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| RobotRocker wrote: |
| psiga wrote: |
Quite conceivable. Also conceivable: damn near every spot on the planet might get hit, like pointing a spraypaint can at a spinning globe.
It might be super little, and only interfere with some old nav satellites; it might be huge and blow every exposed transformer in the developed world.
~Nobody knows for sure!~ |
Late to the party, but NASA have an amazing page that debunk a lot of this stuff and other myths. The Solar Peak coming was thought to be extremely high powered in 2006, but its been downgraded to a more standard solar flare storm that might cause some satellite communications to be a spotty for a while and possibly blow a few transformers. Nothing too severe as thought.
Also conformation that NASA is the best thing America has. |
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0419373/
The sun is much older than we thought, run!
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Swimmy
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Swimmy
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sat Jun 18, 2011 3:42 pm |
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Oh, and speaking of Libya, everyone and his mother agrees that continuing our war there is illegal, but Obama insists that lobbing missiles at a country doesn't count as "hostilities."
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Swimmy
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Swimmy
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Wed Jul 06, 2011 5:00 pm |
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Hahaha what's his problem?
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Swimmy
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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Swimmy
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sun Jul 31, 2011 1:13 am |
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http://www.juliansanchez.com/2011/07/28/madman-theory-2-0/
| Scott Sumner wrote: |
| PS. I’ve avoided talking about the debt ceiling thus far, partly because I don’t know much about it, partly because these things always seem to get resolved at the last minute, but mostly because the whole idea of a debt ceiling seems incredibly stupid. This morning when I woke up up the first thing I heard was that the Gang of Six had agreed to massive spending cuts, abolition of the hated AMT, and reduction of the top rate to between 23-29%. Oh, and a slash in the corporate top rate too. I thought I was dreaming. Surely this is too good to be true! And then I heard that Obama endorsed the plan. Now I knew I was dreaming. Then I heard that it wouldn’t pass because of GOP opposition in the House. Ouch, I was brutally shaken out of my reverie. If only life could be like our dreams. Unfortunately, there’s always the House GOP to keep it real. |
Even conservative-ish economists hate the GOP right now.
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Swimmy
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sun Sep 04, 2011 3:11 am |
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Conditional on this working out more generally, this is probably the biggest medical breakthrough since. . . uh, antibiotics or vaccines, take your pick.
Short story: it's a potential cure for all viruses. Obviously there are caveats, you can read for yourself. I don't think I've ever read a potential medical breakthrough I more hoped to work out. I know they usually don't.
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Swimmy
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sun Sep 04, 2011 3:25 am |
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BTW, wanted to say something about this:
| psiga wrote: |
~Hooray for allowing psychopaths to climb the ranks of organizations that should otherwise call for empathy and ethical behavior.~
If we don't let the minority of people with the genetically imposed disability of red-green color confusion become fighter pilots, then why on earth do we let etc etc I'm going to sleep |
In a conversation with my fiancée's father, a lifelong bureaucrat, I said that I was a pacifist, that the evidence required to overcome the presumption against war is extremely high, and that I was therefore quite unhappy with Barack Obama (escalation in Afghanistan, a second fake end to Iraq, bombing Libya, and shadow wars in Pakistan and Yemen). He responded that he understood, but he felt like Obama had handled the Libya situation well--there was an international consensus, of sorts, on action, there were calculations about body counts with/without intervention, and politically, it was justifiable/appealing to voters.
Two problems, which I thought of later: the calculations about body counts are bullshit, because we don't know what will happen with Gaddafi gone. If Libya is even remotely like Egypt, guess what? After their revolution, they'll still be a horrible military dictatorship.
The bigger problem, in my view, is appealing to voters, international or national, to justify war.
I say: if the voters want a president who brings death and carnage and murder, then that is no fucking moral excuse for any president. You won't get reelected if you don't murder the shit out of people? Then the only moral thing to do is to not get reelected. You're a goddamn monster any other way.
The counterpart: as long as voters do want death and carnage and murder, then the only people who will get elected (and especially reelected) are those who are goddamn monsters.
So yes, we have psychopaths climbing to the tops of our organizations that should require empathy and morals and such, but that is the only way it can possibly be, as long as voters are happy with bombing the darkies. (Remember that, before the big popularity decline late in Bush's career, the Iraq war was popular and supported across bipartisan lines.)
On average, we want criminals in office.
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Swimmy
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Sep 22, 2011 6:15 am |
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He's not the first, and he won't be the last.
I don't know, I've been trying to think of something more interesting to say, but that's all there is. Various state governments execute innocent people on a regular basis, and the people who enable and defend such actions get to be popular presidential candidates.
I disagree with Balko on one major point, though. The ability to execute is not at all the most awesome power our government has. It pales in comparison to our ability to bomb the fuck out of innocent people worldwide.
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Swimmy
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Sat Oct 01, 2011 10:40 pm |
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"What would be worse: that the State assassination of al Awlaki was illegal? Or that it was legal?"
Just a Sheldon Richman tweet, but it made me sad nonetheless.
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Swimmy
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Oct 06, 2011 3:00 am |
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| CubaLibre wrote: |
| Vikram Ray wrote: |
| They are a direct result of the government propping up certain economic sectors (like housing or education). |
Why would the government support policies that benefit the few at the expense of the many? A rich man's vote counts the same as a poor man's, and there are way, way more poor people than rich. Bare self-interest would dictate massive redistribution of wealth.
The answer is, because the capitalists are already rich before they corrupt government. You have a chicken and egg problem. |
Or you have the public generally supporting the very measures the captialists want in place, because they are presented to the public as a public interest story when in fact they only have a slight or non-existent public interest component.
Also, the impoverished (and the rich!) rarely vote their self interest (PDF), and haven't for centuries.
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Swimmy
Joined: 04 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2011 7:32 pm |
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| Toptube wrote: |
| Why? Well its not very big, relative to other programs. and secondly, any cuts will surely take away from the pay and benefits of the men and women in uniform, as well as veterans. |
It is the second-largest item in the federal budget after social security. The men and women in uniform are getting paid to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people; we probably shouldn't pay them to do that.
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