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Occupy George

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Re: Occupy George

#131

Post by ericd »

jamieb wrote: post #123
ericd wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They haven't stopped, many thousands of people still work for them. And please don't downplay what Gates has done. He may have been a ruthlessly competitive businessman, but he has had a larger positive impact on the world than almost anyone else alive.

My point is, if these people are magically special, why are they not able to create more jobs now? How come they stopped creating jobs? How come 50 million americans are without jobs? Is it not, perhaps, the case that the situation was such that these jobs would have been created anyway? My complaint is this. There are 400 rich people. There are jobs. You attribute a causal relationship. I say, you could have killed…

Wow. Way to keep it civil. Thanks for cursing me out.

I had written up a long response trying to explain how much the large companies these people have founded have helped the American economy compete and people prosper. Then I got to your section implying that crash testing was primarily a way for incumbents to keep startups down rather than being for the public good and I realized that you were either trolling me or are so unreasonable right now that it's pointless trying to argue with you.

Re: Occupy George

#132

Post by akg0 »

forensic wrote: post #88
greyman wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is something fundamentally broken?

Because democracy and equality is fundamentally superior to feudalism, therefore any system that is on an unstoppable slide toward feudalism is fundamentally broken.

How is the system in an unstoppable slide towards feudalism? Is this the same feudalism I studied in European History, with the land-holders and vassals and all? If not, why are you using that word?

Re: Occupy George

#133

Post by viggity »

jamieb wrote: post #108
mseebach wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it happens that it is effective to make money by repeatedly crashing and booming the stock market, then that is exactly what they will do. The two crashes of the past decade were painful exactly because "they" expressly failed to make money. They caused a lot of pain to a lot of 1%ers. If you think the financial sector likes, and purposefully causes, crashes, well, you're wrong. > Our economy has been rooted. Th…

They caused a lot of pain to a lot of 1%ers. If you think the financial sector likes, and purposefully causes, crashes, well, you're wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday George Soros made $1bn in a day. The UK Gvt lost 3.3bn UKP. Some people believe that Norman Lamont rose to the highest office of economics in the united kingdom without the knowledge of how currency markets work, and that he could not…

And yet, curiously, George Soros and #Occupy are both leftists

Re: Occupy George

#134

Post by jjmaxwell4 »

deadmansshoes wrote: post #105
scottjad wrote: post #35

"The richest 1% of Americans control over 1/3 of the wealth, leaving the bottom 80% with less than 1/5." This suffers from the pie fallacy covered in http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html Also if you look at http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html table 3 you'll see that the distribution of wealth between 1% and 99% in 2007 (which I assume is pretty much the same today) was essentially identical t…

Am I missing something with this "pie fallacy"? If you restore a car and then sell it to someone that needs a car then surely there is someone else who has sold one less car. The same principle applies to crop prices when all the farmers have a bountiful year. Surely the reason that wealth has grown, is that the human population has grown - creating more needs and desires, and more workers to meet them.

By taking a beat up car worth $200, and buying some parts for $400, and fixing it up and selling it for $1500, you just created $900 for yourself. This is growing the pie. The is not a set amount of wealth in the world.

Think about the creation of entirely new industries. Think of how much would be spent on cell phones today were it not for the innovation caused by RIM, Motorola and then Apple. Or cloud computing were it not for Amazon, Dropbox ect. These companies create wealth, by creating value for consumers. Banking is a little more complicated, but they provide capital to allow the aforementioned companies to grow and innovate.

Re: Occupy George

#135

Post by jamieb »

fiesycal wrote: post #68
jforman wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the common outcomes I've heard called for is a "separation of corporation and state," in response to what people feel is an outsized voice in the democratic process for corporations at the expense of individual citizens. The backlash against TARP is a good example of fairly broad sentiment that federal policy favors financial institutions and high-value investors over "Main Street." Lawrence Lessig has spoken…

You should read this http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870426150457620... 99% of TARP has been repaid already. That's more than you can say about regular people paying back their credit card debts due to limitless spending.

TARP! Yes TARP has been repaid! Why are people complaining, when the money has been repaid? Who are these people who are clearly ignorant of the facts?!!?

That would be you.

We loaned citibank $25bn with TARP. They paid that back. You seem to think that thats the end of the story. Thanks for telling us what we should read.

Turns out we also guaranteed losses on $300bn of assets, added an additional $20bn, and a further credit line of $45bn.

From were I'm standing, that should mean we own citibank. If my company was in that situation, you think investors would offer me a loan? You think that's gonna be the deal you get next time your company is in trouble?

We should own it, dismantle it, break it up. Do that for every big bank down the line.

But forget the $350bn. You think that if your business needs $25bn or it goes under tomorrow, that one of these rich people will just loan you $25bn and let you pay it back when you can? LOL. In my world, $25bn bought citibank outright, and we overpaid. Instead we got 36%. Joke.

Two sets of rules. One for them. One for us.

Re: Occupy George

#136

Post by CWuestefeld »

jamieb wrote: post #97
mseebach wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And of course the analogy is flawed, as analogies tend to be. Yes, what has happened essentially amounts to corruption. How do you usually approach corruption, by going after the corrupted officials or the people paying the bribes? Both, especially at this scale, but no-one expects corruption to go away while there are corruptible officials. > Certainly it appears that you haven't thought of it. It might appear so, b…

I stated explicitly that the bankers had bribed the politicians. You responded with a statement that the bankers did not do so, and that in fact the politicians had caused the damage, and then blamed the bankers. A direct contradiction of my assertion. You are now claiming that "of course the analogy is flawed". No sir. The analogy was effective. It was the logical conclusion that you made using the analogy that was…

I stated explicitly that the bankers had bribed the politicians.

It seems to me that it was mutual, sort of a ouroboros snake swallowing its tail. Just as we could say that bankers offered promises to politicians in order to secure favorable regulations, so did the politicians offer favorable regulation in order to secure their own re-election. As far as I can see, they're two sides of the same coin.

That being the case, it doesn't make sense to demand that the politicians wield great power in order to exercise greater control over the bankers. We know that the politicians are corrupt, so why would we give them more power?

Re: Occupy George

#137

Post by arcdrag »

furyg3 wrote: post #4
c4urself wrote: post #2

Very innovative idea. There is probably a law against writing/printing on money in the U.S., though.

It's sad to think that the organizers of this will probably be arrested for "conspiracy to deface government property" or something. Or, since they're also advancing a political message of 'fear', maybe it will be terrorism?

>Or, since they're also advancing a political message of 'fear', maybe it will be terrorism?

I think you're really reaching there. Things are bad, but lets not kid ourselves from pretending that things are that bad. If we mindfuck ourselves into believing that the government wants to label everyone that disagrees as a terrorist, are we really any better than those that believe Obama is a Kenyan born muslim whose sole purpose in life is to invoke Sharia law on the US?

Re: Occupy George

#138

Post by jamieb »

ericd wrote: post #131
jamieb wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is, if these people are magically special, why are they not able to create more jobs now? How come they stopped creating jobs? How come 50 million americans are without jobs? Is it not, perhaps, the case that the situation was such that these jobs would have been created anyway? My complaint is this. There are 400 rich people. There are jobs. You attribute a causal relationship. I say, you could have killed…

Wow. Way to keep it civil. Thanks for cursing me out. I had written up a long response trying to explain how much the large companies these people have founded have helped the American economy compete and people prosper. Then I got to your section implying that crash testing was primarily a way for incumbents to keep startups down rather than being for the public good and I realized that you were either trolling me o…

To which I would have asked "compete against who?" And you would have said "china etc" and I would have said, "Who the fuck do you think let these cheap chinese goods in here in the first place"?

You would have then started talking about how economists have proved that international trade is good for jobs.

To which I would have replied that americans leading economist said that in 2005 we should all be using ARMs to buy houses.

You believe the bullshit. I don't.

You get upset when people type characters like 'f' 'u' 'c' and 'k' in sequence.

I get upset when people justify a government-economic-hierarchy that kills fucking children with bombs because of oil and tell us "we're better off for it".

Yes it is pointless trying to argue with me. Enjoy your flat earth. I must be the crazy one.

Re: Occupy George

#139

Post by tome »

seven_stones wrote: post #90
scottjad wrote: post #35

"The richest 1% of Americans control over 1/3 of the wealth, leaving the bottom 80% with less than 1/5." This suffers from the pie fallacy covered in http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html Also if you look at http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html table 3 you'll see that the distribution of wealth between 1% and 99% in 2007 (which I assume is pretty much the same today) was essentially identical t…

That dismissal is a bit oversimplistic. With increases in productivity, it is possible for everyone to have more; but almost all the gains have been concentrated toward the top. PG: > I can remember believing, as a child, that if a few rich people had all the money, it left less for everyone else. This is provably true. Just because PG believed it as a child doesn't mean he was incorrect then. It's true by stipulatio…

> If you make a killing off the stock market, someone else necessarily loses.

Suppose I hold $100 of XYZ stock. Then the value jumps to $500. I've effectively made $400. Who has lost?

Re: Occupy George

#140

Post by kokey »

ppereira wrote: post #119

There is a lot of interesting research on wealth inequality in the US and around the world. For those interested in looking at data, I suggest the following as a starting point: A historical database of top incomes in several countries: http://184.168.89.58/sketch/ A nice theoretical starting point on taxation and inequality: http://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/0002374 Note that the term used to express trade in the first…

Nice to see someone who looks into this in better detail.

Another thing I think we should consider is that as innovation drives up the productivity per person, inequality will always rise, significantly.

The value of a mostly unproductive person will remain very low, while the highly productive will go even higher, so the gap will grow. This is normal, but the problem is that people also now have the ability to destroy value in even greater amounts than before, in the way that lottery winners and subprime borrowers can destroy value. I think this is even more important to address than just taxing progressively on earnings. It doesn't even have to be a tax, it could simply be a throttle on the ability for some to move money around in a bad way.

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