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Occupy George

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Re: Occupy George

#81

Post by nknight »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #77
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. 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,…

The bailouts are a result of brokenness, I never said they were a property. But I think we have rather different ideas of what "fundamental" means, if you're arguing that it's not fundamentally broken, but that "core changes are necessary".

I guess I'll leave it at that.

Re: Occupy George

#82

Post by fiesycal »

te_chris wrote: post #73
fiesycal wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Through the repayments announced Wednesday, as well as dividends and interest, taxpayers have recovered about $244 billion of the $245 billion in TARP funds disbursed to banks, the Treasury said. The Treasury currently estimates that bank programs within TARP will ultimately provide a lifetime profit of nearly $20 billion to taxpayers."

Blame the government for that, not Wall Street. Also how much of Apple's 70 billion or so in cash flows through to the economy?

Re: Occupy George

#83

Post by jamieb »

mseebach wrote: post #72
jamieb wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

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.

This would be a reasonable analogy if the hackers (bankers) hadn't spent the last decade paying the sysadmins (congress) to remove the safeties and add vulnerabilities.

Indeed you say this as if in the computer world, the idea of hackers just paying a sysadmin for access would be unimaginable. Certainly it appears that you haven't thought of it.

Re: Occupy George

#84

Post by kevingadd »

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.

Limitless spending? Do you know anything about regular people? To suggest that the TARP banks are in any way more responsible than the average consumer is simply ignorant. 'Regular people' these days are not spending more than they used to, and they're not examples of limitless spending: http://www.yale.edu/law/leo/052005/papers/Warren.pdf

Furthermore, TARP being repaid is not an inherently good thing. Who cares whether we got the bailout money back if the system is still completely broken? We're still in a situation where those banks can do whatever they want, and when things collapse the government will have no choice but to bail them out again because the alternatives are unacceptable. Now that the banks don't owe the government TARP money it has even less leverage than it might have had before.

Re: Occupy George

#85

Post by forensic »

mseebach wrote: post #72
jamieb wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

It's more like the hackers bribed the sysadmins to give them root access, and the users couldn't afford big enough bribes for the sysadmin to care about them.

Re: Occupy George

#86

Post by forensic »

antihero wrote: post #53
mappu wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the most interesting part of this 'hack' is how it's next to impossible to pull off a successful protest in civilised society: The greatest trick the upper echelon have pulled, is convincing the masses that using violence to achieve your ends is uncivilised. As a non-US-er, we sometimes look down on the US for having a gun obsession, but there's no way anything OWS does would escalate to the point of seriously…

"The greatest trick the upper echelon have pulled, is convincing the masses that using violence to achieve your ends is uncivilised." Bam. I amazes me that when 500,000 people marched in London on the 26th of March, people were dumb enough to ignore the messages being sent, and instead focus on some superficial property damage.

Next time, the 500,000 should forcibly take over the media outlets ala V for Vendetta.

Re: Occupy George

#87

Post by yread »

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…

if you look at table 6 in the paper you can see the distribution of income was in 2006 the most unequal in the last ~25 years

Re: Occupy George

#88

Post by forensic »

greyman wrote: post #42
potatolicious wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OWS movement is certainly pretty confused and vague when it comes to demands. It would be a mistake, IMO, to use this to dismiss the reasons why people have chosen this time to protest. If you look at the people and signs at a #Occupy protest, you will find a familiar theme: income disparity and unemployment. People are running scared in an economy where social mobility has been utterly destroyed, unemployment ru…

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.

Re: Occupy George

#89

Post by mseebach »

jamieb wrote: post #83
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…

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. This would be a reasonable analogy if the hackers (bankers) hadn't spent the last decade paying the sysadmins (congress) to remove the safeties and add vulnerabilities. Indeed you…

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, but appearances can be deceptive. By all means, lets have a debate based on what the other side appears to think.

Re: Occupy George

#90

Post by seven_stones »

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 stipulation!

PG:

> In restoring your old car you have made yourself richer.

If both your time and all the physical goods needed are free. Sure.

PG's examples here are really not illustrative of the point he was trying to make, which is that the pie CAN be grown.

But WHERE is that money coming from? If you make a killing off the stock market, someone else necessarily loses.

A startup that is sold or goes public is just an abstraction for transferring money from other people to yourself.

You can ONLY get money from people who have it already. Of course, more is created all the time by the Federal Reserve, in order to inexorably inflate the currency and decrease the value of cash holdings.

The treatment of the distinction between "money" and "wealth" is a little sleight-of-hand here. If he just wants to make "wealth", stick to Open Source. There is demonstrably LESS wealth in keeping things proprietary, but demonstrably MORE money. It's all about control.

Money is specifically and ALWAYS about the withholding and control of resources. Why do you need it? Because the basic things you need to LIVE are still controlled by other people at this point in history.

It's also not true that creating new things is the same as creating more "wealth". Some things are NET DRAINS on productivity or welfare.

For example, Zynga's Skinner boxes. Or slot machines. Devices created to suck money out of people with addiction problems.

Investors want returns in money. "Wealth" is a function of R&D, which costs money. The two are orthogonal; just look at the money made by toilet paper companies. Or PepsiCo. For a sugar water company it's not too shabby to be worth $100 billion with $17.5 billion in revenue and $2 billion net income for this quarter.

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