11–20 of 85 posts
The financial sector provides no services? What? If I want to sell my company, the banks sure as hell provide a service. They provide a valuation, put together a pitch book, shop the company around and close the deal. How is that not a service?
You can be a parasite and still provide a service, no?
The military has been worse historically surely? At least the financial sector has some function you'd miss if they didn't exist - banks, insurers etc are useful although I'll give you that about half their activities are parasite like. I'm basing that number on Krugman http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/opinion/27krugman.html?_r=...
The financial sector provides no services? What? If I want to sell my company, the banks sure as hell provide a service. They provide a valuation, put together a pitch book, shop the company around and close the deal. How is that not a service?
You can be a parasite and still provide a service, no?
The financial sector provides no services? What? If I want to sell my company, the banks sure as hell provide a service. They provide a valuation, put together a pitch book, shop the company around and close the deal. How is that not a service?
You can be a parasite and still provide a service, no?
If you have someone willing to provide a service, and someone else willing to buy the service that is offered, how is this a problem?
If the service provider doesn't provide the service that was agreed upon, the parties work to find a remedy, perhaps by going to court, or arbitration, etc.
Are you including more than the buyer and the seller in your analysis?
I just quickly glanced at some figures, like "Have they earned it?", and it seemed wrong.
The author says the total return for say Barclay was 12.61%.
bc -l running in a terminal disagree
Taking 100 as the base value to ease our math:
100x1.112x1.0825x0.9452x1.1088=126.156497322240000
That's a 26% something cumulative return in 4 years. What is this 12.61% meant to represent?? The average per year was closer to 6.5% if that's what he meant.
(Edit- replaced the * by x and added an =)
The military has been worse historically surely? At least the financial sector has some function you'd miss if they didn't exist - banks, insurers etc are useful although I'll give you that about half their activities are parasite like. I'm basing that number on Krugman http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/opinion/27krugman.html?_r=...
Ask Ukraine about the consequences of getting rid of your military.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can be a parasite and still provide a service, no?
Can you elaborate on this? I'm not seeing it. If you have someone willing to provide a service, and someone else willing to buy the service that is offered, how is this a problem? If the service provider doesn't provide the service that was agreed upon, the parties work to find a remedy, perhaps by going to court, or arbitration, etc. Are you including more than the buyer and the seller in your analysis?
Bigger than government? Arguably at least the military and internal-to-government overhead is a direct parasite on everyone else, and its only value is fighting other parasites (other governments). Some parts of government seem to be very useful, but it's a big enough sector that just the parasite parts are probably the biggest parasite.
yes. why even bother to argue your point? while a lot of government spending might not benefit you directly, the odds are that someone out there is getting some kind of service from it. Also, a sizable fraction of government money is going to salaries of middle-class workers. They, in turn, are likely to spend that money on things you might consider useful or neat, thereby helping the overall economy. The process mig…
A competent engineer designing weapons, even if he makes $150k to spend on food/cars/etc. and support those people, is still depriving humanity of the $100k to near-infinity of positive contribution ("consumer surplus") he could be making, some of which he'd capture as additional expected income, if he worked on something genuinely useful to humanity.
The only reason we have a military is to protect from other militaries; therefore, militarism is a parasite.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
yes. why even bother to argue your point? while a lot of government spending might not benefit you directly, the odds are that someone out there is getting some kind of service from it. Also, a sizable fraction of government money is going to salaries of middle-class workers. They, in turn, are likely to spend that money on things you might consider useful or neat, thereby helping the overall economy. The process mig…
The military part is negative-sum for the world. A competent engineer designing weapons, even if he makes $150k to spend on food/cars/etc. and support those people, is still depriving humanity of the $100k to near-infinity of positive contribution ("consumer surplus") he could be making, some of which he'd capture as additional expected income, if he worked on something genuinely useful to humanity. The only reason w…
Money seems to be an excellent motivator, but when death is on the line people seem to embrace a little more out of the box thinking. Rent seeking and collusion to avoid innovation seem to be problems with both the money and violence types of power.