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Chinese Billionaire Linked to Giant Aluminum Stockpile in Mexican Desert

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Re: Chinese Billionaire Linked to Giant Aluminum Stockpile in Mexican Desert

#151

Post by colechristensen »

CPLX wrote: post #145
cmarschner wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communism failed because of human nature. It is incentives gone wrong. If there is no pressure to become more efficient, or even remain efficient, things will become less efficient and everybody suffers (to the point of starvation). Central planning failed due to complexity of the task. Free market / small government doesn't work because a) it is inherently unstable due to power laws (rich get richer), b) lots of ext…

Communism failed? Someone should call the Chinese Communist Party and tell them, they're still acting like they run the place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_reform

What the party calls themselves is irrelevant. "communism" as anyone would define it, is not what China's economy looks like today.

Re: Chinese Billionaire Linked to Giant Aluminum Stockpile in Mexican Desert

#152

Post by CPLX »

colechristensen wrote: post #151
CPLX wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communism failed? Someone should call the Chinese Communist Party and tell them, they're still acting like they run the place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_reform What the party calls themselves is irrelevant. "communism" as anyone would define it, is not what China's economy looks like today.

Indeed. The implied point being that capitalism didn't win either, regardless of what we call ourselves.

In both cases what seems to have emerged from the 20th century as the successful governing model is varying degrees of democratic socialism.

Re: Chinese Billionaire Linked to Giant Aluminum Stockpile in Mexican Desert

#153

Post by colechristensen »

slyall wrote: post #124
colechristensen wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all over the place because there's a tree of possibilities that's difficult to cover succinctly. >The food produced in the poor country will sell for "the world price", pretty much the same everywhere. Not "cheap" in the rich countries and "expensive" in the poor ones. Spending power around the world varies by several orders of magnitude. If there's one "world price" for a crop, that price will be incredibly che…

> Spending power around the world varies by several orders of magnitude. If there's one "world price" for a crop, that price will be incredibly cheap for rich countries and incredibly expensive for poor ones. Agricultural poor countries will not be able to afford the food they grow. Significant numbers of both poor and rich countries do not subsidize food today. Many agricultural products are commodities and traded a…

>Food Stamps are not a subsidy to farmers, they are a welfare program for poor people. They just are part of the "farm bill" for political reasons.

Food stamps shape the food choices people are able to (and do) make. Giving people money to buy food and giving farmers money to produce food are two sides of the same coin.

For example:

"SNAP increases the likelihood that participants will consume whole fruit by 23 percentage points"[1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplemental_Nutrition_Assista...

Re: Chinese Billionaire Linked to Giant Aluminum Stockpile in Mexican Desert

#154

Post by vidarh »

trapperkeeper79 wrote: post #138
vidarh wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some places can - if you have huge gardens and areas you're free to make use of. Many can't. Norwegian farming policy is focused on maintaining near-independence in the food supply because the British embargo during the Napoleonic wars in the early 1800's is still seared in the collective consciousness. E.g. every Norwegian primary school child will go through the very long, very tedious poem "Terje Vigen" about a ma…

Terje Vigen is a fascinating tale .. thanks for pointing it out. Does it end in a cliff hanger or does he exact revenge on his captor???

There's a full English translation here [1] with details on Ibsens likely sources of inspiration, if you want to read it. It feels a lot longer when you're 9-10 years old...

But here's a summary of the end:

He is released from prison at the end of the Napoleonic wars, and comes home to find his wife and child died while he was in prison, and were buried in a paupers grave.

Years later he comes across a ship in distress and it is the captain of the British ship that caught him, with his family. He threatens revenge, but on picking up the child changes his mind and saves all of them.

[1] http://www.oftebro.com/Terje_Vigen_english.pdf

Re: Chinese Billionaire Linked to Giant Aluminum Stockpile in Mexican Desert

#155

Post by nkurz »

djrogers wrote: post #133
givinguflac wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with what you're saying, but at the same time it's a hell of a lot easier to end up a wealthy adult if you come from a wealthy family. "Small" loans from family etc.

Roughly 80% of American millionaires are the first generation of their families to be wealthy. Here's the surprising part - most of them get there by working hard and spending less money than they earn... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/stanley-millionaire.ht...

I like your link, but I couldn't find that particular statistic within it. Could you clarify?

Most of the studies I've seen reach the opposite conclusion, that parental lifetime income highly predicts the income of their children. For example, a child of parents in the 90th percentile has an expected income of over $100K, while a child of parents in the 10th percentile has an expected income of less than $40K.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/america-... (which comes from http://inequality.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/economic_...)

Income isn't wealth, but I'd be surprised if the correlation isn't strong. What percentage of individuals in the US of 90th percent household wealth came from families in the top half versus bottom half growing up? I don't know off hand, but if I had to bet blindly on outcomes I'd strongly favor betting on the individual who started out better off.

Re: Chinese Billionaire Linked to Giant Aluminum Stockpile in Mexican Desert

#156

Post by yuhong »

tesseract wrote: post #81
cperciva wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A similar, and perhaps more amusing, situation happened in Canada a few years ago. We have a 245.5% import tariff on cheese (why? Because dairy farmers are more important than poor people, apparently) but there was a much lower tax on "food preparations", including packaged pizza toppings. So companies would package up "pizza topping kits" in the USA, import them to Canada as "food preparations"... and then remove th…

This kind of waste seems common and from an outside perspective very frustrating. There is a famous example where Ford imported cargo vans from Europe to the US with disposable seats in them so they would be taxed (more cheaply) as passenger vans. I think the tax in question was referred to as the "chicken tax". The situation is a bit different but China's value-added tax scheme combined with the prevalence of factor…

This also reminds that Hynix had to be bailed out in 2001 and in 2003, US and EU imposed high tariffs as a a consequence. I wonder what would happen if Hynix actually failed and had to be bought by Micron.

Re: Chinese Billionaire Linked to Giant Aluminum Stockpile in Mexican Desert

#158

Post by sfifs »

Kenji wrote: post #55
cperciva wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A similar, and perhaps more amusing, situation happened in Canada a few years ago. We have a 245.5% import tariff on cheese (why? Because dairy farmers are more important than poor people, apparently) but there was a much lower tax on "food preparations", including packaged pizza toppings. So companies would package up "pizza topping kits" in the USA, import them to Canada as "food preparations"... and then remove th…

I loathe farmer subsidies. I have no idea why our government gives farmers so much money and so many advantages - nobody in our society really benefits from those incredible spendings and it's a significant fraction of our state budget.

In general, the reason to have farm subsidies is to maintain sufficient farming capability to provide food to the population in case a major disruption (blockade, war etc) that makes it difficult to import food. If not present, this dependency on outside for food can be used as leverage by others and not providing population with food is recipe for civil unrest at the weakest moment.

If you don't provide farming subsidies, farming will move to countries with cheap labor and people with knowledge and capability for farming will become too few to ramp up quickly in case of emergency.

Re: Chinese Billionaire Linked to Giant Aluminum Stockpile in Mexican Desert

#159

Post by kwhitefoot »

vidarh wrote: post #111
Kenji wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, in war times, we can plant potatoes in all our gardens and take our spare meadows. We don't need these farmers in peace time; we really don't. They are leeches.

Some places can - if you have huge gardens and areas you're free to make use of. Many can't. Norwegian farming policy is focused on maintaining near-independence in the food supply because the British embargo during the Napoleonic wars in the early 1800's is still seared in the collective consciousness. E.g. every Norwegian primary school child will go through the very long, very tedious poem "Terje Vigen" about a ma…

That's not the only reason for Norwegian farming policy. Another is to ensure that non-industrial areas and areas where it is simply difficult to live do not become entirely depopulated. I live and work and pay tax in Norway and I am quite happy with the basic principle that the country should produce most of its own food; it helps to reduce the tendency to race to the bottom of the market and, if done well, promotes pride in quality. Of course it is not easy to export the Norwegian experience to a much larger country like the US with a different political system and much higher concentration of ownership of the farms and also difficult to export it to a smaller much more densely populated country like the UK. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be worth trying to learn from it.

Don't mistake me, I'm not claiming that Norwegian farming policy is perfect, merely that it does seem to work at the moment.

Re: Chinese Billionaire Linked to Giant Aluminum Stockpile in Mexican Desert

#160

Post by kwhitefoot »

valvar wrote: post #132
Kenji wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loathe farmer subsidies. I have no idea why our government gives farmers so much money and so many advantages - nobody in our society really benefits from those incredible spendings and it's a significant fraction of our state budget.

Farmers do! And farmers also vote. And that's the reason for why they are subsidised. Farmers have a special interest in receiving subsidies, and politicians gain far more by pandering to them than by saving a little bit of money for everyone else.

I presume you are thinking mostly of the west here. Farmers voting has little or no impact on policy. In most developed countries total employment in farming is less than 5% of the population.
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