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Occupy George

occupygeorge.com

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Re: Occupy George

#71

Post by JoshTriplett »

potatolicious wrote: post #63
JoshTriplett wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your assessment of why the protesters protest, and that they don't have a clue how to "fix" things. I disagree with your claim that this indicates anything "fundamentally broken", other than the mindset of the protesters in thinking someone else should step in and make their lives better in all the individual ways they consider their personal situations undesirable. Edit: Clearly people disagree. I'd app…

I'd venture to say that the downvotes are coming from the very broad brush with which you're painting tens of thousands of people, few of which you personally know. I'd argue that the unprecedented unemployment rate represents a clear systemic dysfunction. These aren't temporary job losses due to the natural boom-bust cycle, a very large portion of these jobs are simply never coming back. Whose fault that is is hard…

Funny, I'd actually intended my comment as a complaint about the very broad brush with which the protesters paint all the world's problems, or at least the ones they personally see. I'd argue that we don't have a "fundamentally broken" system which we could simply fix and solve all the problems at once. A large number of people have a large number of individual problems, and some of those problems look superficially similar. I'm pointedly trying to not paint a huge number of people with a broad brush. :)

Re: Occupy George

#72

Post by mseebach »

jamieb wrote: post #30
Shenglong wrote: post #11

Can someone brief me on what Occupy Wall Street is trying to do? I can't quite figure it out. If they're mad about being unemployed, marching sure isn't going to fix their situation. If they're mad about government corruption, what exactly would they like done? If they're mad about the economy in general, isn't Wall Street the worst place to be protesting? I feel like the traders on Wall Street would be the first peo…

I feel like the traders on Wall Street would be the first people to want an economic bounce back. Hence your failure to understand OWS. Wall Street's job is to make money. Period. 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. Well, it turns out that it is extremely effective to make money by repeatedly crashing and booming…

> 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.

Thing is, the box was left with numerous unpatched known vulnerabilities for the better part of half a century. Whenever it got sluggish, the sys admins eagerly added memory and processors, not bothering to consider what might be wrong. And when the box finally collapsed the sysadmins are more than happy that all the anger is directed at the hackers.

Re: Occupy George

#73

Post by te_chris »

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.

And how much of that profit flowed through into the real economy? That's the protesters' point.

Re: Occupy George

#74

Post by mseebach »

nknight wrote: post #60
JoshTriplett wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your assessment of why the protesters protest, and that they don't have a clue how to "fix" things. I disagree with your claim that this indicates anything "fundamentally broken", other than the mindset of the protesters in thinking someone else should step in and make their lives better in all the individual ways they consider their personal situations undesirable. Edit: Clearly people disagree. I'd app…

I have two very simple questions for you: 1) Do you believe it right that the financial sector was, and is still being, bailed out? 2) If not, how do you describe the system producing that result, if not "fundamentally broken"?

1) No

2) Because bail-outs aren't a fundamental property of "the system".

Re: Occupy George

#75

Post by sambeau »

maigret wrote: post #37
sambeau wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To quote a recent trader: "Governments don't rule the world; Goldman Sachs rules the world" If you need any more explanation, ponder this question: Who is the national debt owed to? Hint: it's not China

A trader? This guy was proved to be a joke. http://www.businessinsider.com/turns-out-the-trader-who-scar...

Clearly he wasn't much of a trader.

I did read another article where they interviews other traders about what he had said. While they disagreed with some of his other points they were in general agreement about that one.

Re: Occupy George

#76

Post by scottjad »

jamieb wrote: post #59
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…

which I assume is pretty much the same today a) Why would you assume that after a major crash the distribution is the same? b) And the paper that you quoted says this: "So as of April 2010, it looks like the wealth distribution is even more unequal than it was in 2007."

a) My best guess at the weather tomorrow is the weather today. 2007 was the latest data I saw. I did not read 99% of that document. After the dot-com crash the wealth distribution became much more equal, so a major crash can go either way.

b) You're right, my assumption was wrong. Thanks for finding that quote and sharing it.

Re: Occupy George

#77

Post by JoshTriplett »

nknight wrote: post #60
JoshTriplett wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your assessment of why the protesters protest, and that they don't have a clue how to "fix" things. I disagree with your claim that this indicates anything "fundamentally broken", other than the mindset of the protesters in thinking someone else should step in and make their lives better in all the individual ways they consider their personal situations undesirable. Edit: Clearly people disagree. I'd app…

I have two very simple questions for you: 1) Do you believe it right that the financial sector was, and is still being, bailed out? 2) If not, how do you describe the system producing that result, if not "fundamentally broken"?

1) No. I also don't consider said bailouts the root cause of anything except one more instance of wasteful spending.

2) "Too busy fighting over local minima/maxima to ever escape them and make core changes, but as a result at least mostly harmless except as a drag force on productivity." We could argue all day about core changes that might fix the system, but we'll never agree on precisely which core changes to make, so they'll never happen. And that still probably works better than the case where the wrong core changes occur.

(And a meta-level comment about search heuristics comes about as close to a political comment as I'd like to get.)

Re: Occupy George

#78

Post by nknight »

mseebach wrote: post #74
nknight wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have two very simple questions for you: 1) Do you believe it right that the financial sector was, and is still being, bailed out? 2) If not, how do you describe the system producing that result, if not "fundamentally broken"?

1) No 2) Because bail-outs aren't a fundamental property of "the system".

They are a result of the system. I find it hard to believe that a not-fundamentally-broken system would produce that result.

What non-fundamental properties of the system do you think should change to halt now, and prevent in the future, bailouts and related actions (e.g. corporate subsidies)?

Re: Occupy George

#79

Post by JoshTriplett »

yosheryosh wrote: post #43
Shenglong wrote: post #11

Can someone brief me on what Occupy Wall Street is trying to do? I can't quite figure it out. If they're mad about being unemployed, marching sure isn't going to fix their situation. If they're mad about government corruption, what exactly would they like done? If they're mad about the economy in general, isn't Wall Street the worst place to be protesting? I feel like the traders on Wall Street would be the first peo…

Going to march is better than sitting at home saying "marching sure isn't going to fix my situation."

Only if that statement is false.

Re: Occupy George

#80

Post by tjmc »

Shenglong wrote: post #11

Can someone brief me on what Occupy Wall Street is trying to do? I can't quite figure it out. If they're mad about being unemployed, marching sure isn't going to fix their situation. If they're mad about government corruption, what exactly would they like done? If they're mad about the economy in general, isn't Wall Street the worst place to be protesting? I feel like the traders on Wall Street would be the first peo…

Some illustrative charts from Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-a...
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