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Japanese Lawyers’ Problem: Too Few Cases
A government-engineered boom in lawyers ends badly, with low crime and falling bankruptcies
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Becker update V1.3.2
How America was neoconned into World War IV
Japanese dentists have a similar problem. Too many clinics, too few customers.
Russians have a reputation for not smiling much because they don't value happiness as their main purpose in life, but I suspect their bad teeth have something to do with that as well.Replies: @5371, @Jefferson
The boom of Africans in Tokyo should give them some business.
Maybe they could import some Africans!
Where are the Japanese Hart and Cellar?
Of course, those lawyers would mostly be dealing with immigration issues. Criminal lawyers wouldn’t have much work as our African friends adopt peaceful Japanese ways.
Finally! A problem “Diversity” could actually solve!
A dose of third world immigration would fix that in a jiffy!
Ah, a homogeneous society of intelligent, respectful citizens; proud of their heritage and their people. I’m envious of their ability to select “non traitors” as political leaders..
Japanese apparently aren’t suehappy. Not yet, anyway. It’s hard to feel sorry for the lawyers.
Japan already has a system that works, though, at least for consumer product stuff. The head of the transgressing company is publicly humiliated (which is a much bigger deal to a Japanese person). He gets in front of the camera and bows and scrapes and cries until the victims are satisfied.
The bureaucracy is incredibly powerful – you wouldn’t be too far wrong to say politics is mostly a side show, and the real power is in the bureaucracy. It’s the bureaucracy that makes sure everyone plays their parts.
Not enough crime in Japan and not enough bad teeth. The solution is obvious.
Trump should propose importing the extra Japanese lawyers. Guys in Brooks Brothers suits and wingtips will suddenly start showing up trying to build walls at our borders.
Good Lord, you wouldn’t think so in such an image-conscious society and so many people (really referring to the women here) with…awkward looking teeth. I mean, it’s not as bad as the stereotype England ran with for awhile…but then again, the last time I went for some dental work in Osaka the bill ran a lot larger than it would’ve been in the US.
I guess this is what they call an embarrassment of riches.
There is a good old independent movie called Let’s Kill All The Lawyers that specifically mentions Japan having (at the time) far more gardeners than lawyers as proof of their societal harmony.
—————-
Unrelated
A journalism project called infamy.org is following statements, deals and big names, connecting private sector bigwigs, US government leading lights, Gulf despots and terrorists, under the title Silicon Jihad. Very severe tldr – Google has extensive para-intelligence agency activities involving listed terorist groups along Sorosian lines of regime change. The stories also mention clean energy investment a lot because, as with regime change happening in the right places, this is about Gulf despots retaining power.
This leads into a multitude of lawyer jokes. But if they are true, are they really jokes?
“With every new auto regulation out of DC, Japanese car companies hire 200 more engineers; US companies hire 200 more lawyers.”
“If there is just one lawyer in town, he starves. If there are two lawyers, they both eat well.”
Japan has idle lawyers, homogeneity and low crime. Syrians, Sudanese, and Afghanis can solve all three “problems.” Sounds to me like a match made in heaven.
My brother lives in Japan. Years ago, he was visiting me and I had “The McLaughlin Group” on, with all the panelists shouting over each other as usual. I asked my brother if they had shows like that in Japan. He said, “No, in Japan most people pretty much agree on everything.”
Of course, the Yakuza provide certain services that otherwise might be handled by attorneys, like persuading a homeowner to sell a property that a developer has his eye on.
http://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Rapeman
OT
‘Undercover Economist” Tim Harford in the FT admits that against the received wisdom of economists Trump is right that free trade can be highly destrutive. But like a good economist he alludes to Ricardo and conveniently ignores the notion that China et al might be engaged in industrial scorched earth policies designed to lock in long-term dominance.
“Fifteen years ago, the conventional economic wisdom was that free trade was almost unambiguously a good idea. Here’s the basic logic. There are two ways for the British to get hold of wine. We can grow and press our own grapes, or we can make something that the French want and trade with them. If we’re good at making, say, computer games and the French are good at making wine, then trading is the better way to get what we want.
The idea that we might, Trumpishly, “beat the French in trade” sounds appealing but is incoherent. And while a British Sanders might point to the loss of jobs in the UK wine industry, that would miss the gains in the software industry. There is little economic difference between a tariff on the import of French wine and a tariff on the export of British software…
“In the long run, of course, that adjustment will happen — just as we have adjusted to the decline of agricultural labour or the need for typewriter repairs. But the long run is longer than many economists feared. It is easy to see why supporters of Trump and Sanders have run out of patience.”
http://timharford.com/
Harford quotes a paper “The China Shock” by Dorn et al that notes that imports from China caused 2.4 million Americans to lose their jobs between 1999 and 2011, adding that this figure was likely too low.
That gloomy paper closes brightly by suggesting that as China moves up into being a Middle Income country rising labour costs will undercut its exporting prowess. Nowhere does the paper discussed China’s multilayered resistance to imports, its coordinated dumping actions and the widely accepted national policy of de facto mercantilism in regards the outside world.
http://www.ddorn.net/papers/Autor-Dorn-Hanson-ChinaShock.pdf
The idea that we might, Trumpishly, “beat the French in trade” sounds appealing but is incoherent. And while a British Sanders might point to the loss of jobs in the UK wine industry, that would miss the gains in the software industry. There is little economic difference between a tariff on the import of French wine and a tariff on the export of British software…
The problem with the basic logic is that it only makes sense pre-industrial revolution where what can be produced per man-hour of work never changes for generations.
Economists are morons more in love with their theories than how the real world works. This is why they are clueless about Trump's appeal. Trump lives in the real world.Replies: @Dave Pinsen, @TomSchmidt
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/716518097591603200Replies: @Bill B.
A land where lawyers labour is in oversupply and their wages might decline?!
Bring in the Sunni Arabs!
I love how they have the gall to keep printing stories about how terrible it is that rentier types like developers, landlords and lawyers have it in Japan as if the average person in the West looks at this as anything other than a utopia. Maybe lower house prices and higher wages due to lower labour supply will spur Japanese people to start families earlier, both reducing the generation time and leading to higher TLF for women. Maybe Japanese people could take more time off (Like something resembling the working hours of a human rather than say a printer) and have time to start relationships?
But this is clearly impossible as we all know the only direction of history is in the unsustainable path of the $current_year.
My mustn’t let the terrorists win and deviate a millimetre from the path which grossly and unsustainably enriches the current parasitic elite. #JeSuisBruxelles
Several years ago, there was an upsurge in the number of labor cases (e.g., wrongful termination or reduction in hours, wages etc.) brought in Japan. The Japanese responded with a specialized system of labor arbitration panels. If Japanese lawyers have too little work, perhaps that system succeeded. As a general rule, the only people who make money in courts are lawyers–it’s almost always better to settle things, especially commercial disputes, amicably between the parties.
Hey look at this
A student has apparently stumbled upon the NCVS PDF that says that “0*” black women were raped by white men in 2004.
lol. She can’t understand how “0*” black women could be raped by white men per year. I guess that the actual number was so low that they rounded it down to 0.
Most female rape victims in The U.S are raped by men they personally know like their boyfriend, uncle, or father for example.
How many Black women in The U.S have a White father? How many Black women in The U.S have a White boyfriend? How many Black women in The U.S have a White uncle?
So why is this?
1. You can't rape the willing.
2. Just about nobody risks prison for something that they can easily get without the risk.
3. There are better-looking alternatives, particularly from the point of view of nearly all White men.
4. White guys would usually have to go out of their way to find a Black to rape, the same is not true for Black guys.
5. White guys just don't rape much (Certainly not enough to satisfy female fantasies - not within a factor of a thousand.)
…with low crime and falling bankruptcies…
I can’t read the WSJ article, but it’s really strange that the sub-head recites low crime and falling bankruptcies as if they’re bad things.
Philadelphia has more lawyers than any other city in America. Oakland has more black males between the ages of 15 and 25 than any other city in America………and the point is. Oakland had first choice.
It is pretty hard to believe that zero, or anywhere near that number, of black women could be raped by white men in an entire year. One need not be an SJW to wonder how on earth that could possibly be accurate. Of course I have no doubt that the vast majority of victims of interracial rape are white.
The few so-called "White" male on Black female rapes in The U.S is mostly committed by Hispanic men.
If a Dominican man in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City rapes an African American woman, the FBI will statistically classify that as "White" on Black rape.Replies: @Steve Sailer
On the other hand and maybe OT, Japanese non-lawyers are still dropping dead from overwork:
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/death-overwork-rise-among-japans-vulnerable-workers-011205871
I work with the Japanese and do see they stay working very late. In my experience, no one will leave the office until their manager leaves.
More on point, Japanese are extremely non-litigious. And more and more of the M&A work there consists of Japanese firms buying non-Japanese assets, and foreign firms are used for those deals. The Japanese also use non-lawyer specialized professionals to do a great deal of the work done in the US by lawyers (scriveners and IP professionals).
Anyway, not sure what the Japanese government was thinking.
Sending them Englishmen?
In a society where people view themselves as part of a whole, they don’t attack each other.
In a society where people view their family as distinct from the mass of society and not part of it, there is a lot of litigation.
In completely unrelated news, Jews are a large percentage of lawyers in the U.S
In other completely unrelated news, the stereotype of the Irish-conman-lawyer was once common in the late 19th and early 20th c. America, only to disappear as the mass of Irish moved into the middle and upper classes.
Hmmmm…..
All this debate discussing “free trade” in the classical economics sense ignores the actual truth: the post war “free trade” agreements have *nothing* to do with free trade. They were designed to allow multi-national corporations to move production to wherever is cheapest while still exporting back to the West at a similar price.
(so instead of $150 production costs and $49 markup they got $49 production costs and $150 markup)
We don’t have free trade. We have people in one place whose wages are too low to buy what they make and people in another place buying that stuff with borrowed money.
It’s a scam that is [going to collapse / in the process of collapsing] because sooner or later the promise of more Western debt that will never be paid back will not motivate anyone to provide actual work and the whole structure starts to implode.
Technically the jobs did move to China but when they say US plants shut down because of Chinese competition it’s a lie – the corporations moved to China.
Except they can’t because if they try to do so the corporations move their plants from China to Vietnam (or wherever else is cheaper).
The people responsible for the current version of globalization are screwing everyone.
Maybe because it doesn't exist, just as "real" communism the left wing professors invented in their heads didn't exist or "real" capitalism where no cronies use their connections to get an unfair advantage doesn't exist.
I hope Japan manages to survive the ongoing war against the nations.
I suspect it will require them having a clear idea how exactly the West was brought to the brink of destruction and why.
Of course, the Yakuza provide certain services that otherwise might be handled by attorneys, like persuading a homeowner to sell a property that a developer has his eye on.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @White Guy In japan
…as does this fellow:
http://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Rapeman
Japanese dentists could advertise dental tourism in Russia’s Far East.
Russians have a reputation for not smiling much because they don’t value happiness as their main purpose in life, but I suspect their bad teeth have something to do with that as well.
“Fifteen years ago, the conventional economic wisdom was that free trade was almost unambiguously a good idea. Here’s the basic logic. There are two ways for the British to get hold of wine. We can grow and press our own grapes, or we can make something that the French want and trade with them. If we’re good at making, say, computer games and the French are good at making wine, then trading is the better way to get what we want.
The idea that we might, Trumpishly, “beat the French in trade” sounds appealing but is incoherent. And while a British Sanders might point to the loss of jobs in the UK wine industry, that would miss the gains in the software industry. There is little economic difference between a tariff on the import of French wine and a tariff on the export of British software…
The problem with the basic logic is that it only makes sense pre-industrial revolution where what can be produced per man-hour of work never changes for generations.
Economists are morons more in love with their theories than how the real world works. This is why they are clueless about Trump’s appeal. Trump lives in the real world.
The bigger problem is that only one product holds any value in these calculations. When you make wine, two things are produced: the wine and the knowledge, tacit and explicit, of how to make wine. In looking only at products and not knowledge, the economists have ignored the creation of productive capacity in humans, arguably the most important capital asset. Using tariffs to protect this asset is entirely rational.
Ah, a homogeneous society of intelligent, respectful citizens; proud of their heritage and their people. I'm envious of their ability to select "non traitors" as political leaders..Replies: @Hubbub
Surely, we in the West cannot let this stand. As a member of the Great Nations, Japan owes it to all mankind to open its doors to the diverse peoples of the world and to the many problems they will bring with them that can never be solved. Peace, serenity, Utopia? Never.
Chrysler Corporation used to own 30% of the stock of Mitsubishi and had to sell it off during the early 90s when the country was in recession and they came very close to bankruptcy (their bonds were junk rated).
I remember reading articles about the meetings between the Chrysler and Mitsubishi management and how the Japanese were amazed at how the US management wanted everything locked down tightly in contracts while the Japanese were more willing to agree on general principles and if there was a conflict negotiate to come to some mutual agreement.
One is a screw-you-any-chance-I-can mentality and the other is more of a give and take for mutual benefit mentality.
Trump update please. I need reliable information.
If Trump loses, don't despair (at least not a lot). He's mobilized forces that won't go away and can be channeled in constructive directions by future leaders. The Ross Douthat column in The New York Times on cuckservative Paul Ryan shows how great the cleavage is in the GOP. Ryan is getting a primary challenge, halleluiah!Replies: @Anonymous
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3521583/Uber-driver-repeated-Trump-s-Make-America-Great-slogan-shooting-dead-six-people-Kalamazoo.htmlReplies: @22pp22
Last year the WSJ reported that the Japanese government was forcing all 86 public universities to downsize their liberal arts programs and add more business and vocational programs.
This article mentions an increase in child custody cases. Afaik, Japan does not recognize dual custody and the police and government don’t want to get involved in disputes. Perhaps the custody cases are being filed by bewildered foreigners like the ones in this video.
I can't read the WSJ article, but it's really strange that the sub-head recites low crime and falling bankruptcies as if they're bad things.Replies: @Triumph104, @yaqub the mad scientist
If you put the title of a WSJ article in a search engine, you should be able to access it. I tried “wsj japan lawyers” and had no problems
She says only 11,600 White women were raped by blacks in 2004? I agree with her: that stat is a flat-out lie. The number is at least 30,000. The video is otherwise chockablock with non-sequiturs and room-temp IQ emotionalyzing.
Leave it to the Wall Street Journal to think that more lawyers, more crime, and more litigiousness makes a society better in some way.
Jeez, Steve, but was this post meat to the lions or what?
They need a new war. Let’s arm ’em and see how the Chinese like it.
See my comment regarding arming Japan.
Speaking of Asia, I sometimes can’t help but see some LPGA golf when I’m watching Golf Channel waiting for the men’s tournaments. The LPGA has enabled a relentless Asian invasion, particularly of fat Korean chicks. Who the hell wants to watch fat Korean chicks play golf??? Yet they seem to compose 50-60% of the LPGA tour now. An essay from Steve on this odious phenomenon would be welcome.
That was it, right?
---
I would dearly love for my nation to have the 'problems' Japan has, and I hope that the usual suspects never get the chance to do to Japan what they do to us.Replies: @Jim Christian, @Truth
Yeah, I got nothing.
Yeah, Sarah Jessica Parker looks much better with ‘teeth’ the size of a horse’s.
A letter writer responded to Harford’s column yesterday:
I have started reading When globalisation Fails by James MacDonald which is apposite and lucid.
The great 19th Century debate about free trade is worth reappraising. When Germany introduced rising tariffs and even cartels The Times in 1877 was outraged:
"The growth of the strong protectionist party in Germany has been one of the most unsatisfactory signs of the limited political training of that country."
The Dorn paper that Harford quoted opined that it might take two generations for the magic of free markets to work: um....how do they know? They've already admitted they miscalculated on the initial damage.
Personally I don't want my country stripped and humbled because a free trade ideology saves our elites from having to think too hard or be cunning, for a change.Replies: @MarkinLA, @anon
Can’t give you a full update. But if Trump can still win in Wisconsin after the last two weeks that he’s had, he’s in a strong position to clinch the nomination on the first ballot. The general election is still tough, although he’s the best shot that the Republicans have.
If Trump loses, don’t despair (at least not a lot). He’s mobilized forces that won’t go away and can be channeled in constructive directions by future leaders. The Ross Douthat column in The New York Times on cuckservative Paul Ryan shows how great the cleavage is in the GOP. Ryan is getting a primary challenge, halleluiah!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-would-be-least-popular-major-party-nominee-in-modern-times/2016/03/30/b4b077e0-f5e7-11e5-9804-537defcc3cf6_story.html
http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2016/03/31/gop-front-runner-trump-unpopular-even-among-white-men-the-partys-base
http://dailycaller.com/2016/04/02/poll-60-percent-of-americans-dont-want-donald-trumps-wall/Replies: @MarkinLA
OT:
The decline of Minnesota (and its Mall of America) continues:
http://www.startribune.com/several-teens-attack-bus-driver-at-southdale-inflict-potentially-life-altering-head-injuries/374407091/
Haha, and plenty of trained chemists. Such an elegant solution.
isn´t it more or less the same in every country in the world? always to few people trained in the MINT sector and some non-academic jobs like nursing and too many people with any other training?
“lol. She can’t understand how “0*” black women could be raped by white men per year. I guess that the actual number was so low that they rounded it down to 0.”
Most female rape victims in The U.S are raped by men they personally know like their boyfriend, uncle, or father for example.
How many Black women in The U.S have a White father? How many Black women in The U.S have a White boyfriend? How many Black women in The U.S have a White uncle?
Dear Japan, you are obviously doing a lot of things right. If you feel the feedback you are getting from the West is incoherent and backwards – you are correct. Disregard all advice from the NY Times crowd. We are stuck in it’s muck and trying to recover.
Sweden used to have similar problems. Lots of rape counselors, policemen, judges with nothing to do. These are booming professions now.
I’m terribly sorry to have missed Derb remonstrate the memory of that fanatic Patrick Pearse. Good news is I haven’t been missing my Girls. The cutesy airhead can’t fathom leaving her adopted Japan just because she lost her job and doesn’t belong there. Made me recall Jarod Taylor “criticized the Japanese for excessive preoccupation with their own uniqueness.” I see what he means. Their style of casual attire, if Lena Dunham can be trusted, would pass for costume anywhere else. And that is why it is their style. Then ya got them panty dispensers. Weird.
Something reminds me
That’s a good point. A lot of Japanese people clearly don’t get braces when they’re in secondary school. Maybe that’s a potential area of growth for dentists?
If Trump loses, don't despair (at least not a lot). He's mobilized forces that won't go away and can be channeled in constructive directions by future leaders. The Ross Douthat column in The New York Times on cuckservative Paul Ryan shows how great the cleavage is in the GOP. Ryan is getting a primary challenge, halleluiah!Replies: @Anonymous
Trump could lose the general in the biggest landslide in modern history:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-would-be-least-popular-major-party-nominee-in-modern-times/2016/03/30/b4b077e0-f5e7-11e5-9804-537defcc3cf6_story.html
http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2016/03/31/gop-front-runner-trump-unpopular-even-among-white-men-the-partys-base
http://dailycaller.com/2016/04/02/poll-60-percent-of-americans-dont-want-donald-trumps-wall/
Until relatively recently, straight teeth and every kid getting braces was associated with the US
We should encourage rapists to be more diverse and representative. We could call the sensitivity training for schoolboys: White Rapes Matter.
“It is pretty hard to believe that zero, or anywhere near that number, of black women could be raped by white men in an entire year. One need not be an SJW to wonder how on earth that could possibly be accurate. Of course I have no doubt that the vast majority of victims of interracial rape are white.”
The few so-called “White” male on Black female rapes in The U.S is mostly committed by Hispanic men.
If a Dominican man in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City rapes an African American woman, the FBI will statistically classify that as “White” on Black rape.
The few so-called "White" male on Black female rapes in The U.S is mostly committed by Hispanic men.
If a Dominican man in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City rapes an African American woman, the FBI will statistically classify that as "White" on Black rape.Replies: @Steve Sailer
It’s a sample size issue.
Can you name any 21st Century examples of White male on Black female rape, where the White rapist is neither Hispanic nor half Chinese like the police officer in Oklahoma City?
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/716518097591603200Replies: @Bill B.
Interesting letters.
I have started reading When globalisation Fails by James MacDonald which is apposite and lucid.
The great 19th Century debate about free trade is worth reappraising. When Germany introduced rising tariffs and even cartels The Times in 1877 was outraged:
“The growth of the strong protectionist party in Germany has been one of the most unsatisfactory signs of the limited political training of that country.”
The Dorn paper that Harford quoted opined that it might take two generations for the magic of free markets to work: um….how do they know? They’ve already admitted they miscalculated on the initial damage.
Personally I don’t want my country stripped and humbled because a free trade ideology saves our elites from having to think too hard or be cunning, for a change.
Don't you know? When a economist's predictions turn out to be dead wrong, the answer is that we haven't done enough of it yet. We won't know that free trade is working until it eventually does as defined by the economists and not the public. Any major social upheavals caused by adherence to the theory are just minor inconveniences on the way to the ultimate truth.
However it's much less so for an auto assembly plant (it still is a bit: stability, rule of law, corruption etc).
Hey genetic inferior. How’s tricks? You didn’t say anything stupid in this thread but I hope you do ’cause I just love calling you stupid. What’s it like being so thin skinned that every little thing bugs you?
LOL, hey it's still early, give my boy time.
If rape is all about power and not sex, why does the desirability of rape victims mimic the desirability of races in the online dating market? Not to say that there is not a significant power element at play as well.
Notice you never hear about White Infidel men in Europe raping Muslim women.
It's beyond duh to anyone rocking a triple-digit IQ that a man need not sport a raging tumescence to have power over another person. Rape is mostly about sex, and only tangentially about power, except that it's hard to achieve tumescence if your self-esteem is in the dumpster. I'd bet my life that ALL black rapists have absurdly, unjustifiably high self-esteem.Replies: @Jefferson
It might be more about power among K selected populations but as you can see in cases like the Congo, Boko Haram or Darfur among more r selected or tribal populations it's reproduction by force.
Hence rape victim proportions mirror dating.
“It’s a sample size issue.”
Can you name any 21st Century examples of White male on Black female rape, where the White rapist is neither Hispanic nor half Chinese like the police officer in Oklahoma City?
Since I don’t want to lose my posting privileges, I’ll mention what the the High and Mighty Lee Kuan Yew said comparing Koreans and Japanese. I heard it in an interview so my recollection may be faulty.
“Individually the Koreans are tougher. But comparing countries the Japanese will win. They are like Lego blocks. When they are fit together they are unstoppable”.
Or words to that effect. My google-fu is weak and I hope that auto-captioning technology will advance enough that I can find the interview in the future.
Charlie Rose, if I am not mistaken.
They regularly demonstrate this on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, when the Power Rangers all combine to form a giant robot. A uniquely Japanese concept.Replies: @justanotherguywitha1911, @Sailer has an interesting life
We don’t have free trade.
Maybe because it doesn’t exist, just as “real” communism the left wing professors invented in their heads didn’t exist or “real” capitalism where no cronies use their connections to get an unfair advantage doesn’t exist.
Don’t forget Fukushima and (in)permanent mercan military and cultural occupation.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-would-be-least-popular-major-party-nominee-in-modern-times/2016/03/30/b4b077e0-f5e7-11e5-9804-537defcc3cf6_story.html
http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2016/03/31/gop-front-runner-trump-unpopular-even-among-white-men-the-partys-base
http://dailycaller.com/2016/04/02/poll-60-percent-of-americans-dont-want-donald-trumps-wall/Replies: @MarkinLA
What is Hillary’s popularity with white men? What will it be when Trump debates her on immigration?
There is probably like 6 White guys in the whole country who like Hildabeast, lol.
Even among Left Wing White men, most of them like Bernie Sanders a lot more than Hildabeast.
I have started reading When globalisation Fails by James MacDonald which is apposite and lucid.
The great 19th Century debate about free trade is worth reappraising. When Germany introduced rising tariffs and even cartels The Times in 1877 was outraged:
"The growth of the strong protectionist party in Germany has been one of the most unsatisfactory signs of the limited political training of that country."
The Dorn paper that Harford quoted opined that it might take two generations for the magic of free markets to work: um....how do they know? They've already admitted they miscalculated on the initial damage.
Personally I don't want my country stripped and humbled because a free trade ideology saves our elites from having to think too hard or be cunning, for a change.Replies: @MarkinLA, @anon
The Dorn paper that Harford quoted opined that it might take two generations for the magic of free markets to work: um….how do they know?
Don’t you know? When a economist’s predictions turn out to be dead wrong, the answer is that we haven’t done enough of it yet. We won’t know that free trade is working until it eventually does as defined by the economists and not the public. Any major social upheavals caused by adherence to the theory are just minor inconveniences on the way to the ultimate truth.
Personally, I agree with you; never really understood her popularity despite the horse mouth anyway. But it seems to work somehow. That’s the hell of it, culturally, because until somewhat recently it wasn’t unusual to find Japanese idols popping up on TV with crooked teeth. If anything, it was considered cute.
“If rape is all about power and not sex, why does the desirability of rape victims mimic the desirability of races in the online dating market? Not to say that there is not a significant power element at play as well.”
Notice you never hear about White Infidel men in Europe raping Muslim women.
Any excuse to comment on my teeth.
Say it ain't so.
Rape can sometimes be about power in war, when it is used as a weapon to weaken, humiliate, and torture enemies. Otherwise, the idea that rape is about power is another one of those things that feminist theory with its typical floozy semantics has promoted as factual without applying any science to it. They seemingly didn’t even do the simple task of looking at the demographics of rapists and rape victims, which even without sophisticated analysis makes it clear that, by large, rape is about sex.
The idea that we might, Trumpishly, “beat the French in trade” sounds appealing but is incoherent. And while a British Sanders might point to the loss of jobs in the UK wine industry, that would miss the gains in the software industry. There is little economic difference between a tariff on the import of French wine and a tariff on the export of British software…
The problem with the basic logic is that it only makes sense pre-industrial revolution where what can be produced per man-hour of work never changes for generations.
Economists are morons more in love with their theories than how the real world works. This is why they are clueless about Trump's appeal. Trump lives in the real world.Replies: @Dave Pinsen, @TomSchmidt
The problem Harford elides is unbalanced trade / persistent trade deficits. If for every pound spent on French wine one is spent on British video games, that’s fine. But what if what if Britain has a trade deficit? Then those pounds go into gilts or stocks or London homes. So you get asset inflation that helps the wealthy but creates relatively few jobs.
Really, what if you have 10 British programmers making all the video games for France and 1 million Frenchmen making the same dollar amount of wine for Britain and to keep this wonderful balance going 500,000 British wine makers are on the dole? Asset inflation is the least of your worries yet you would still have it here since those 10 Brits are pretty wealthy.
When most everything was done by human hands and people could only produce so much in a year and it almost never varied then simplistic theories like free trade might make some sense. In those days there was no huge difference in the pay between different skill sets so something that took 20 hours to make was traded for something else that took 20 hours to make.
The whole free trade theory is based on ridiculous assumptions that have nothing to do with the real world we live in now. The idea that at some point in time there is a perfect balance of French wine and British computer game makers so the entire British wine industry should just step aside is unrealistic in today's world. Those British wine makers aren't going to be producing computer games nor are French computer programmers going to be squishing grapes.
For the Britain the best thing is to keep both the wine makers and computer makers employed. Who cares about the French wine makers?
Once you have the industrial revolution and can start producing many times more per human hour of work you start to see the problem we have now of overproduction of everything and less and less need for a large workforce. Free trade policies and the ability to move production to low wage producers only make the problem worse.
Free trade is some silly numbers game about trade surpluses and deficits that completely ignores all the rest of the issues in the economy and society at large.Replies: @Anonymous, @Romanian, @utu
Not really OT. And if you can, carry a pistol.
I can't read the WSJ article, but it's really strange that the sub-head recites low crime and falling bankruptcies as if they're bad things.Replies: @Triumph104, @yaqub the mad scientist
Kind of like how Business Insider writes ominous think pieces about the dangers of homogeneous, stable societies and glowing tales of vibrancy like the narcotraffica Santa Muerte cult as if its some kind of coming spiritual renewal.
If for every pound spent on French wine one is spent on British video games, that’s fine.
Really, what if you have 10 British programmers making all the video games for France and 1 million Frenchmen making the same dollar amount of wine for Britain and to keep this wonderful balance going 500,000 British wine makers are on the dole? Asset inflation is the least of your worries yet you would still have it here since those 10 Brits are pretty wealthy.
When most everything was done by human hands and people could only produce so much in a year and it almost never varied then simplistic theories like free trade might make some sense. In those days there was no huge difference in the pay between different skill sets so something that took 20 hours to make was traded for something else that took 20 hours to make.
The whole free trade theory is based on ridiculous assumptions that have nothing to do with the real world we live in now. The idea that at some point in time there is a perfect balance of French wine and British computer game makers so the entire British wine industry should just step aside is unrealistic in today’s world. Those British wine makers aren’t going to be producing computer games nor are French computer programmers going to be squishing grapes.
For the Britain the best thing is to keep both the wine makers and computer makers employed. Who cares about the French wine makers?
Once you have the industrial revolution and can start producing many times more per human hour of work you start to see the problem we have now of overproduction of everything and less and less need for a large workforce. Free trade policies and the ability to move production to low wage producers only make the problem worse.
Free trade is some silly numbers game about trade surpluses and deficits that completely ignores all the rest of the issues in the economy and society at large.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwmOkaKh3-s
The trivial issues you have in countries that lack diversity.
OT oh my god, is this 60 Minutes segment on kindler gentler German prisons new or a rerun?
Yes, how do you explain the lack of violence…with a 100% white inmate population…
“Uber driver repeated Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan before ‘shooting dead six people in Kalamazoo’”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3521583/Uber-driver-repeated-Trump-s-Make-America-Great-slogan-shooting-dead-six-people-Kalamazoo.html
You are a deranged, pathetic little man. You should come to grips with it, instead of projecting your faults on to others. Or not. Nobody gives a damn what you do or think.
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/04/03/henry-harpending-2/
The idea that we might, Trumpishly, “beat the French in trade” sounds appealing but is incoherent. And while a British Sanders might point to the loss of jobs in the UK wine industry, that would miss the gains in the software industry. There is little economic difference between a tariff on the import of French wine and a tariff on the export of British software…
The problem with the basic logic is that it only makes sense pre-industrial revolution where what can be produced per man-hour of work never changes for generations.
Economists are morons more in love with their theories than how the real world works. This is why they are clueless about Trump's appeal. Trump lives in the real world.Replies: @Dave Pinsen, @TomSchmidt
The problem with the basic logic is that it only makes sense pre-industrial revolution where what can be produced per man-hour of work never changes for generations.
The bigger problem is that only one product holds any value in these calculations. When you make wine, two things are produced: the wine and the knowledge, tacit and explicit, of how to make wine. In looking only at products and not knowledge, the economists have ignored the creation of productive capacity in humans, arguably the most important capital asset. Using tariffs to protect this asset is entirely rational.
OT throwback
That from a Frenchman a generation before the famine. Ireland is not an exceptional country? I guess Mill would be among the ones today harping about the greatest nation in the history of the world since obviously America is exceptionalism. This too shall pass but I bet Ulysses lives forever.
Why does that matter, really? Because there is more truth in that book than in Darwin. And that’s not even the book’s reward. Realism reclaimed by the Muse, quotidian mysticism the bitter bellies decry superstition. Thoughts pop and epiphanies flower. Too it puts the spirit alive in you.
What makes The Rising really revealing of Ireland is that the by-nature-greats had first hand opinions of the men who became great by leading the thing. O’Casey thought Pearse was a poser and Yeats thought he deserved his own joke. Then the bloody English executed him and his little brother too, plus a crippled, putting too fine a point on it, and the British Empire would never be the same. The moral lesson belongs to them. The fools the fools the fools! They have left us our Fenian dead!
And let’s be clear here, the British Empire was beat by Twelve Apostles, not some pervasive insurgency or mass upheaval. They saved that for themselves, between each other, after.
Ireland will be just fine midst this slow motion minority revolution rampaging across Europe. Because they can outspeak the rest of the world and this is the oral age of omnipresent media. And that funny book about a Jew in Ireland will be why they will only need to wink.
Something reminds meReplies: @Dave Pinsen
Thanks for the reminder about Girls. I had missed the Japan episode, so I just watched it on demand. I can see why she wanted to stay. That episode makes Japan look great.
They need a bevy of American female or gay HR reps. That would bring some strife and litigation to that moribund society.
Japan needs a Gloria Steinem.
That’s the spirit. I knew you couldn’t resist. No shame in being inferior. Just don’t get uppity and get thoughts of rising beyond your inferior standing in life.
Interesting how reactions differ. I thought that it made Japan look like a nation of adult-sized children.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzC4hFK5P3g&feature=player_embeddedReplies: @Santoculto, @FactsAreImportant
There is a Japanese actress named Reiko Takami who is 65 years old and has the high pitch voice of a young woman. She doesn't have the stereotypical deeper voice associated with senior citizen women.
“Here’s the basic logic. There are two ways for the British to get hold of wine. We can grow and press our own grapes, or we can make something that the French want and trade with them. If we’re good at making, say, computer games and the French are good at making wine, then trading is the better way to get what we want.”
and
“The problem with the basic logic is that it only makes sense pre-industrial revolution where what can be produced per man-hour of work never changes for generations.”
and
“The great 19th Century debate about free trade is worth reappraising.
and
“When most everything was done by human hands and people could only produce so much in a year and it almost never varied then simplistic theories like free trade might make some sense.”
and
“The whole free trade theory is based on ridiculous assumptions that have nothing to do with the real world we live in now.”
and
“When you make wine, two things are produced: the wine and the knowledge, tacit and explicit, of how to make wine. In looking only at products and not knowledge, the economists have ignored the creation of productive capacity in humans, arguably the most important capital asset. Using tariffs to protect this asset is entirely rational.”
I read a book by some rogue economists a decade or two ago. Their basic point. In the modern world today it is very often absolute advantage (like knowing how to make wine or CPU chips) that matters, not relative advantage (like wine growing better in France than in England, due to the climate; while sheep for wool were cheaper to raise in England).
(I’m not so sure that a lot of “absolute advantage” knowledge about breeding and raising sheep didn’t go into that English wool situation.)
The Free Trade fanatics want to preach that the world today is still all about things like wine and wool, when it’s just not. We might not be living in “the knowledge economy”, but we are living in an economy where absolute advantage, based on accumulated knowledge or skill (“good old American known-how”), is awfully important. It’s also relatively portable. A company today that knows how to make foobars can pretty much make them wherever it can find the other (non-foobar) factors cheapest. 747s and container ships destroy a lot of old assumptions.
Our economists, with their physics envy of F=ma, have not been systems thinkers and have made an economic desert of the United States.
Didn’t Queen sing “Fat Bottomed Girls, you make the Golfing world go round?”
That was it, right?
The only inferiority on display in your post is yours, nitwit.
It's not your fault. You have certain ingrain genetic inferiorities that come from within. And nothing that you can reasonably do will have an effect on it. I am reminded of those old flash games I used to play on a browser. You click a button and something stupid comes out. Amusing but still stupid.
I'm going to have fun with you, you dirty creature. Isn't that fun? Doesn't that make you laugh? No wait. That's what people do at you. Laugh at what you are.Replies: @Mr. Anon
"Individually the Koreans are tougher. But comparing countries the Japanese will win. They are like Lego blocks. When they are fit together they are unstoppable".
Or words to that effect. My google-fu is weak and I hope that auto-captioning technology will advance enough that I can find the interview in the future.
Charlie Rose, if I am not mistaken.Replies: @Harry Baldwin, @Truth
“The Japanese will win. They are like Lego blocks. When they are fit together they are unstoppable”.
They regularly demonstrate this on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, when the Power Rangers all combine to form a giant robot. A uniquely Japanese concept.
Which reminds me, Steve when are you going to post your Pacific Rim review?
A new one is coming out, where the Kaju take the form of mechanized lesbian Korean golfers that can only be stopped by Super Jaeger!!
Anyway - the first generation of Power Rangers hit when I was in college. I was taken aback by the fact the Rangers were all supposed to be in high school, but, a la 90210, looked to be (and probably were) in their 20's, with at least one Ranger, Billy, exhibiting male pattern baldness.
Of course, Amy Jo Johnson as the Pink Ranger, how could ya complain? I was always surprised her career never really took, despite a decent turn on Felicity. The Yellow Ranger (who was an Asian - hey, it was the 90's a far less hysterical time) actually died quite young in an auto accident.
Not much immigration work.
Wikipedia on legal education including Japan.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_education
Of course, the Yakuza provide certain services that otherwise might be handled by attorneys, like persuading a homeowner to sell a property that a developer has his eye on.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @White Guy In japan
Japanese TV prefers to focus on more important things-slapstick humor and cutie-pie figure skaters.
It’s also about stupidity. Rapists, at least the perps of violent stranger rapes, not those more ambiguous situations, represent the far left of the Bell Curve. They have the lowest IQs of any violent criminals.
and
"The problem with the basic logic is that it only makes sense pre-industrial revolution where what can be produced per man-hour of work never changes for generations."
and
"The great 19th Century debate about free trade is worth reappraising.
and
"When most everything was done by human hands and people could only produce so much in a year and it almost never varied then simplistic theories like free trade might make some sense."
and
"The whole free trade theory is based on ridiculous assumptions that have nothing to do with the real world we live in now."
and
"When you make wine, two things are produced: the wine and the knowledge, tacit and explicit, of how to make wine. In looking only at products and not knowledge, the economists have ignored the creation of productive capacity in humans, arguably the most important capital asset. Using tariffs to protect this asset is entirely rational."
I read a book by some rogue economists a decade or two ago. Their basic point. In the modern world today it is very often absolute advantage (like knowing how to make wine or CPU chips) that matters, not relative advantage (like wine growing better in France than in England, due to the climate; while sheep for wool were cheaper to raise in England).
(I'm not so sure that a lot of "absolute advantage" knowledge about breeding and raising sheep didn't go into that English wool situation.)
The Free Trade fanatics want to preach that the world today is still all about things like wine and wool, when it's just not. We might not be living in "the knowledge economy", but we are living in an economy where absolute advantage, based on accumulated knowledge or skill ("good old American known-how"), is awfully important. It's also relatively portable. A company today that knows how to make foobars can pretty much make them wherever it can find the other (non-foobar) factors cheapest. 747s and container ships destroy a lot of old assumptions.Replies: @TomSchmidt, @Anonymous
Yes, the adaptive economy is more important. For reference, you might read Jane Jacobs’ The Nature of Economies. She makes the point that a web of life, as in a rain forest, is much richer than a desert. Both get the same input of sunlight, but in one a complex web uses and reuses the chemical energy of sunlight, while in the other the light overheats during the day and escapes at night.
Our economists, with their physics envy of F=ma, have not been systems thinkers and have made an economic desert of the United States.
Really, what if you have 10 British programmers making all the video games for France and 1 million Frenchmen making the same dollar amount of wine for Britain and to keep this wonderful balance going 500,000 British wine makers are on the dole? Asset inflation is the least of your worries yet you would still have it here since those 10 Brits are pretty wealthy.
When most everything was done by human hands and people could only produce so much in a year and it almost never varied then simplistic theories like free trade might make some sense. In those days there was no huge difference in the pay between different skill sets so something that took 20 hours to make was traded for something else that took 20 hours to make.
The whole free trade theory is based on ridiculous assumptions that have nothing to do with the real world we live in now. The idea that at some point in time there is a perfect balance of French wine and British computer game makers so the entire British wine industry should just step aside is unrealistic in today's world. Those British wine makers aren't going to be producing computer games nor are French computer programmers going to be squishing grapes.
For the Britain the best thing is to keep both the wine makers and computer makers employed. Who cares about the French wine makers?
Once you have the industrial revolution and can start producing many times more per human hour of work you start to see the problem we have now of overproduction of everything and less and less need for a large workforce. Free trade policies and the ability to move production to low wage producers only make the problem worse.
Free trade is some silly numbers game about trade surpluses and deficits that completely ignores all the rest of the issues in the economy and society at large.Replies: @Anonymous, @Romanian, @utu
The Ricardian theory is based on comparative advantage, which is about relative opportunity cost. France could be better at producing both computer games and wine than Britain, but Britain could have a lower relative opportunity cost in terms of wine when producing computer games than France does. That is, for the degree of effort Britain expends on producing computer games, it foregoes producing fewer bottles of wine than France does. As a result, when Britain produces computer games, and France produces wine, total computer game and wine production is higher.
Comparative advantage works like this: What if you are the best at producing everything? Meaning, you make the best wine and the best computer games. Does it make sense to trade?
The answer is yes, depending on which activity has a higher value. If computer games are more profitable then wine, then it makes sense to spend time making video games and simply import wine, even if the wine is not as good as what can be made at home.Replies: @Truth, @Truth, @TomSchmidt, @Anonymous
and
"The problem with the basic logic is that it only makes sense pre-industrial revolution where what can be produced per man-hour of work never changes for generations."
and
"The great 19th Century debate about free trade is worth reappraising.
and
"When most everything was done by human hands and people could only produce so much in a year and it almost never varied then simplistic theories like free trade might make some sense."
and
"The whole free trade theory is based on ridiculous assumptions that have nothing to do with the real world we live in now."
and
"When you make wine, two things are produced: the wine and the knowledge, tacit and explicit, of how to make wine. In looking only at products and not knowledge, the economists have ignored the creation of productive capacity in humans, arguably the most important capital asset. Using tariffs to protect this asset is entirely rational."
I read a book by some rogue economists a decade or two ago. Their basic point. In the modern world today it is very often absolute advantage (like knowing how to make wine or CPU chips) that matters, not relative advantage (like wine growing better in France than in England, due to the climate; while sheep for wool were cheaper to raise in England).
(I'm not so sure that a lot of "absolute advantage" knowledge about breeding and raising sheep didn't go into that English wool situation.)
The Free Trade fanatics want to preach that the world today is still all about things like wine and wool, when it's just not. We might not be living in "the knowledge economy", but we are living in an economy where absolute advantage, based on accumulated knowledge or skill ("good old American known-how"), is awfully important. It's also relatively portable. A company today that knows how to make foobars can pretty much make them wherever it can find the other (non-foobar) factors cheapest. 747s and container ships destroy a lot of old assumptions.Replies: @TomSchmidt, @Anonymous
You’re thinking of absolute and comparative advantage, but you’re confused about them. Absolute advantage is the ability to produce something more efficiently. Comparative advantage is the ability to produce at a lower opportunity cost.
Speaking of Japanese teeth, there is a fad among young Japanese women for getting crooked double caps cemented on their upper bicuspids. They think having flawed-looking teeth is cute and endearing. They have these caps removed when they graduate from school and join the workforce.
Mildly crooked teeth make a woman look vulnerable by shaping the lips into a perpetually quizzical and slightly perplexed expression and also cause the jaw to rest asymmetrically instead of humorlessly ramrod-straight, which has a similar effect of perpetual vulnerability and puzzlement -- and vulnerability is very attractive to men (duh). Unless a woman is born with perfectly straight teeth, she should not get braces as long as her bite is normal and functional.
“You’re thinking of absolute and comparative advantage, but you’re confused about them. Absolute advantage is the ability to produce something more efficiently. Comparative advantage is the ability to produce at a lower opportunity cost.”
You’re right (I’m somewhat confused about anything to do with economics) but I still don’t get it.
If I am the only one who knows how to produce arsinide chips, I’m not not just more efficient, I’m the only one in the game. No one else can really compete with me. It’s going to take them maybe a decade to reverse engineer, catch up, or wait for my patents to expire. I’ve got huge market barriers anyone else has to overcome. (I own the market because I’m the only one who knows how to make arsinide chips.) I’ve got first-mover advantage. It’s a winner-take-all market in a field where there’s only room for the top two, if that. (I hear this sort of talk all the time in silicon valley.)
I’ve got an absolute advantage over any would be competitor. (I suppose this might not be the meaning of the economic term-of-art.)
Speaking of adult-sized children, I can’t get enough of this:
hihihihihi
a lot of iluminatti symbolism in this shit-candy-shit.
I need to lie down for a while.
"Individually the Koreans are tougher. But comparing countries the Japanese will win. They are like Lego blocks. When they are fit together they are unstoppable".
Or words to that effect. My google-fu is weak and I hope that auto-captioning technology will advance enough that I can find the interview in the future.
Charlie Rose, if I am not mistaken.Replies: @Harry Baldwin, @Truth
Napoleon said the same thing about white guys and “Saracens.”
“Hey genetic inferior. How’s tricks? You didn’t say anything stupid in this thread”
LOL, hey it’s still early, give my boy time.
You're right (I'm somewhat confused about anything to do with economics) but I still don't get it.
If I am the only one who knows how to produce arsinide chips, I'm not not just more efficient, I'm the only one in the game. No one else can really compete with me. It's going to take them maybe a decade to reverse engineer, catch up, or wait for my patents to expire. I've got huge market barriers anyone else has to overcome. (I own the market because I'm the only one who knows how to make arsinide chips.) I've got first-mover advantage. It's a winner-take-all market in a field where there's only room for the top two, if that. (I hear this sort of talk all the time in silicon valley.)
I've got an absolute advantage over any would be competitor. (I suppose this might not be the meaning of the economic term-of-art.)Replies: @Anonymous
Yes, that’s absolute advantage.
“…France could be better at producing both computer games and wine than Britain”
“…As a result, when Britain produces computer games, and France produces wine, total computer game and wine production is higher.”
Until it turns out that the AI-based game engines that computer games are based on are superior platforms for optimizing wine production and wine marketing, compared to what the French have been doing, and the British are thus able to produce more than the total world-wide market demand for both computer games and wine.
Russians have a reputation for not smiling much because they don't value happiness as their main purpose in life, but I suspect their bad teeth have something to do with that as well.Replies: @5371, @Jefferson
Russian dentists are good and cheap. Those Japanese dentists would starve as well as freeze.
"...As a result, when Britain produces computer games, and France produces wine, total computer game and wine production is higher."
Until it turns out that the AI-based game engines that computer games are based on are superior platforms for optimizing wine production and wine marketing, compared to what the French have been doing, and the British are thus able to produce more than the total world-wide market demand for both computer games and wine.Replies: @Anonymous
In that case, Britain would have an absolute advantage, and France would have a comparative advantage in producing wine or games.
Not correct.
Comparative advantage works like this: What if you are the best at producing everything? Meaning, you make the best wine and the best computer games. Does it make sense to trade?
The answer is yes, depending on which activity has a higher value. If computer games are more profitable then wine, then it makes sense to spend time making video games and simply import wine, even if the wine is not as good as what can be made at home.
Fair enough. But then you change terms:
"If computer games are more profitable then wine"
What if the knowledge to make computer games has more value, but the profit in making wine is higher? Do you allow such a construct in your world, or is everything price? To use another term, is the map the territory?
If you want a good debunking of comparative advantage, see Steve Keen's Debunking Economics, in which much of the "you make guns, I'll make butter, and we will trade" nonsense is dispensed (in the real world, if you have no guns, why shouldn't I just kill you and TAKE the butter?) with.Replies: @Charles Erwin Wilson
Who wants to see anybody play golf? And why?
—
I would dearly love for my nation to have the ‘problems’ Japan has, and I hope that the usual suspects never get the chance to do to Japan what they do to us.
You do NOT want Japan's problems. The Northern half of the country is polluted with Strontium, Cesium, Plutonium. Their mountains, water and air are radioactive from the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (Brought to you by General Electric). The storage of highly contaminated water is fragile, the elevated steel cooling pens full of millions of pounds of radioactive rods and of course, the entire melted-down cores of three reactors are lying there waiting for the next mild earthquake to collapse the entire mess into the Pacific at which point it DOES become "our" problem. The debris field from the tsunami landing on Alaska is radioactive. The air, the fish, the crabs coming from the Pacific are unsafe, they keep raising the "acceptable" levels of toxicity.
And there are the people that are being forced back to these regions around Fukushima. Nosebleeds, pockmarks and cancers from the radiation. A human disaster in progress, Japan is a doomed society and very soon, immediately really, plans need to be made to evacuate them off that island someday. The media is very, very good at keeping this off the radar, but this is of a scale never dealt with before and in fact, it is not. Ice walls aren't going to contain this stuff and in any case, much has already run off into the Pacific. Just sayin', since Japan came up. Their problem ain't too many lawyers. Their problem is too many Rads.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/japan-ice-wall_us_56febfa4e4b0a06d5805afffReplies: @spandrell, @Truth, @Mr. Anon
Make it the richest, most powerful country in the world?Replies: @Hippopotamusdrome, @Monopthalmus
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3521583/Uber-driver-repeated-Trump-s-Make-America-Great-slogan-shooting-dead-six-people-Kalamazoo.htmlReplies: @22pp22
That article about sums up the quality of the commentary we are getting outside the USA.
Comparative advantage works like this: What if you are the best at producing everything? Meaning, you make the best wine and the best computer games. Does it make sense to trade?
The answer is yes, depending on which activity has a higher value. If computer games are more profitable then wine, then it makes sense to spend time making video games and simply import wine, even if the wine is not as good as what can be made at home.Replies: @Truth, @Truth, @TomSchmidt, @Anonymous
…Unless one has a labor surplus, at which point it makes sense not to import anything.
Comparative advantage works like this: What if you are the best at producing everything? Meaning, you make the best wine and the best computer games. Does it make sense to trade?
The answer is yes, depending on which activity has a higher value. If computer games are more profitable then wine, then it makes sense to spend time making video games and simply import wine, even if the wine is not as good as what can be made at home.Replies: @Truth, @Truth, @TomSchmidt, @Anonymous
…Unless one has a labor surplus, at which point it makes sense not to import anything.
What if a society is so far superior that it can produce everything it needs without relying on trade at all?
And what about trade imbalances? Country A is far superior at producing both video games and wines – its ‘trade partners’ can consume only so much video games and produce a limited amount of poor quality wine. With it high industry, country A can very well produce both video games and wines to satisfy overall demand. Maybe it imports a small amount of wines, but by and large they are for its lower socio-economic classes and it retains both capacity and knowledge in both fields for itself.
Hmmm… I guess that’s what trade is for – making inferior goods affordable to lower classes.
I would also note that we haven’t even gotten to trade imbalances yet.
If the countries produce different quality wine that aren't substitutes, then they'd be producing different goods, not trading the same good.
Really, what if you have 10 British programmers making all the video games for France and 1 million Frenchmen making the same dollar amount of wine for Britain and to keep this wonderful balance going 500,000 British wine makers are on the dole? Asset inflation is the least of your worries yet you would still have it here since those 10 Brits are pretty wealthy.
When most everything was done by human hands and people could only produce so much in a year and it almost never varied then simplistic theories like free trade might make some sense. In those days there was no huge difference in the pay between different skill sets so something that took 20 hours to make was traded for something else that took 20 hours to make.
The whole free trade theory is based on ridiculous assumptions that have nothing to do with the real world we live in now. The idea that at some point in time there is a perfect balance of French wine and British computer game makers so the entire British wine industry should just step aside is unrealistic in today's world. Those British wine makers aren't going to be producing computer games nor are French computer programmers going to be squishing grapes.
For the Britain the best thing is to keep both the wine makers and computer makers employed. Who cares about the French wine makers?
Once you have the industrial revolution and can start producing many times more per human hour of work you start to see the problem we have now of overproduction of everything and less and less need for a large workforce. Free trade policies and the ability to move production to low wage producers only make the problem worse.
Free trade is some silly numbers game about trade surpluses and deficits that completely ignores all the rest of the issues in the economy and society at large.Replies: @Anonymous, @Romanian, @utu
James Goldsmith made many of the same points in the 1990s on GATT discussions.
And what about trade imbalances? Country A is far superior at producing both video games and wines - its 'trade partners' can consume only so much video games and produce a limited amount of poor quality wine. With it high industry, country A can very well produce both video games and wines to satisfy overall demand. Maybe it imports a small amount of wines, but by and large they are for its lower socio-economic classes and it retains both capacity and knowledge in both fields for itself.
Hmmm... I guess that's what trade is for - making inferior goods affordable to lower classes.
I would also note that we haven't even gotten to trade imbalances yet.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Anonymous
Portugal in 1813 is better at making corks for wine bottles, England is better at making steam engines.
Which language does the world speak in 2016: Portuguese or English?
The Portuguese royal family was saved by the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars. It is expected that this help might have come with some impositions. I do not believe that the Portuguese elites of the early nineteenth century, still very nostalgic in relation to its old and shabby colonial power has accepted this humiliating imposition with a smile on his face.
The big stick of his majesty also echoes throughout latin america, forcing all nations of the continent not to initiate any project of industrialization in the nineteenth century.
Not so iq-hbd explanation about worldwide inequality is not*Replies: @Hippopotamusdrome
Which language does the world speak in 2016: Portuguese or English?
__________________
In 19c. Germany used tariffs to help develop their own steam engine industry and so on. Portugal did not do it because it was controlled by England and followed the free trade dogma thats served England, so all they got are the cork oaks. But Germany managed to catch up with the UK.
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I would dearly love for my nation to have the 'problems' Japan has, and I hope that the usual suspects never get the chance to do to Japan what they do to us.Replies: @Jim Christian, @Truth
Golf is a great sport. Not women’s golf, but the fellas of the PGA Tour. Here nor there.
You do NOT want Japan’s problems. The Northern half of the country is polluted with Strontium, Cesium, Plutonium. Their mountains, water and air are radioactive from the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (Brought to you by General Electric). The storage of highly contaminated water is fragile, the elevated steel cooling pens full of millions of pounds of radioactive rods and of course, the entire melted-down cores of three reactors are lying there waiting for the next mild earthquake to collapse the entire mess into the Pacific at which point it DOES become “our” problem. The debris field from the tsunami landing on Alaska is radioactive. The air, the fish, the crabs coming from the Pacific are unsafe, they keep raising the “acceptable” levels of toxicity.
And there are the people that are being forced back to these regions around Fukushima. Nosebleeds, pockmarks and cancers from the radiation. A human disaster in progress, Japan is a doomed society and very soon, immediately really, plans need to be made to evacuate them off that island someday. The media is very, very good at keeping this off the radar, but this is of a scale never dealt with before and in fact, it is not. Ice walls aren’t going to contain this stuff and in any case, much has already run off into the Pacific. Just sayin’, since Japan came up. Their problem ain’t too many lawyers. Their problem is too many Rads.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/japan-ice-wall_us_56febfa4e4b0a06d5805afff
Japan has been seeing a lot of leftist agitation in the recent years, with student movements (100 all of them) saying prime minister Abe is Hitler, that Japan is contaminated with nukes, and that Japan should accept refugees because International Community.
Having lots of idle lawyers may have something to do with that.
Complete BS. Japan is much luckier in its nuclear disaster than the Ukraine was. And it's not as if Ukraine has disappeared off the map.
You do NOT want Japan's problems. The Northern half of the country is polluted with Strontium, Cesium, Plutonium. Their mountains, water and air are radioactive from the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (Brought to you by General Electric). The storage of highly contaminated water is fragile, the elevated steel cooling pens full of millions of pounds of radioactive rods and of course, the entire melted-down cores of three reactors are lying there waiting for the next mild earthquake to collapse the entire mess into the Pacific at which point it DOES become "our" problem. The debris field from the tsunami landing on Alaska is radioactive. The air, the fish, the crabs coming from the Pacific are unsafe, they keep raising the "acceptable" levels of toxicity.
And there are the people that are being forced back to these regions around Fukushima. Nosebleeds, pockmarks and cancers from the radiation. A human disaster in progress, Japan is a doomed society and very soon, immediately really, plans need to be made to evacuate them off that island someday. The media is very, very good at keeping this off the radar, but this is of a scale never dealt with before and in fact, it is not. Ice walls aren't going to contain this stuff and in any case, much has already run off into the Pacific. Just sayin', since Japan came up. Their problem ain't too many lawyers. Their problem is too many Rads.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/japan-ice-wall_us_56febfa4e4b0a06d5805afffReplies: @spandrell, @Truth, @Mr. Anon
Bullshit, all of it.
Japan has been seeing a lot of leftist agitation in the recent years, with student movements (100 all of them) saying prime minister Abe is Hitler, that Japan is contaminated with nukes, and that Japan should accept refugees because International Community.
Having lots of idle lawyers may have something to do with that.
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I would dearly love for my nation to have the 'problems' Japan has, and I hope that the usual suspects never get the chance to do to Japan what they do to us.Replies: @Jim Christian, @Truth
“I would dearly love for my nation to have the ‘problems’ Japan has, and I hope that the usual suspects never get the chance to do to Japan what they do to us.”
Make it the richest, most powerful country in the world?
Thanks for the sentiment, but I don't think we make the top of the list, by any standard.
Neigh.
Say it ain’t so.
Lesbian chicks just love, love, love fat Korean chicks?
Yeah, I got nothing.
Force Japan to take in 500k syrian refugees a year or their trade gets cut off and Toyota can’t even sell so much as a single side mirror.
Steve I am sure you and your platoon would love to have plenty of Japanese problems in a Burmese POW camp in 1943
Thing is, Alph no one is watching the ladies’ tour. They play on 2/3 the track of men, they play to no galleries, ad spots are junk and no mainstream media carries them. Since they possess half the game of the men, no one is interested. Even women don’t watch. Add in the influx of Korean and Japanese ladies (many Asians in general born here and on the golf Tours are babies delivered in the United States by parents who flew in specifically so their daughters and sons would be American-born, there is an enormous industry catering to them) and you have a tour that might as well be Asian-based. So no Americans even care to watch, much like the NBA lost millions of fans owing to the league having been reduced to the realm of the African American Ballet. No one cares.
Meanwhile, on the PGA Tour, the men are having a heyday. There is lots of dough, ads and endorsements flowing in from the financial and automotive and insurance greats, club manufacturers doling out millions to the sponsored and of course crowds on the courses all four days of a PGA Tour event number in the tens of thousands. And of course, there are the purses in the 7-10 million dollar range every week, first place money well North of 1 million. Billions and billions served to the millionaires of the PGA Tour. It is GREAT to be a pro golfer on the PGA Tour these days.
Hell, the women’s tour doesn’t generate a purse totaling a million, I don’t believe, but I can’t be bothered to look it up. Women’s Golf is like Jap/Korean Girl’s Hockey to me. Doesn’t matter. And that is why the Sailor-Man will never bother to write a screed on Ladies’ golf. Unless of course in conjunction with the aforementioned situation with the NBA. It isn’t “my” sport anymore. The NFL is getting there, too. As sports “Black out”, so to speak, they lose White males. These are facts..
They regularly demonstrate this on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, when the Power Rangers all combine to form a giant robot. A uniquely Japanese concept.Replies: @justanotherguywitha1911, @Sailer has an interesting life
As a callow young fella still cuckoo for coca-puffs, I remember watching Voltron and being amazed when all the robots formed another giant robot! The local toy store (remember those?) had a fantastic die cast version of all five robotic lions that would fit together to form Voltron. I think if I had saved up my allowance until I was 35 I could have afforded it.
Which reminds me, Steve when are you going to post your Pacific Rim review?
A new one is coming out, where the Kaju take the form of mechanized lesbian Korean golfers that can only be stopped by Super Jaeger!!
Anyway – the first generation of Power Rangers hit when I was in college. I was taken aback by the fact the Rangers were all supposed to be in high school, but, a la 90210, looked to be (and probably were) in their 20’s, with at least one Ranger, Billy, exhibiting male pattern baldness.
Of course, Amy Jo Johnson as the Pink Ranger, how could ya complain? I was always surprised her career never really took, despite a decent turn on Felicity. The Yellow Ranger (who was an Asian – hey, it was the 90’s a far less hysterical time) actually died quite young in an auto accident.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzC4hFK5P3g&feature=player_embeddedReplies: @Santoculto, @FactsAreImportant
Conservatives on avrg are not musically eclectic,
hihihihihi
a lot of iluminatti symbolism in this shit-candy-shit.
”Royal” families of both countries, seems, entered into an agreement in which Portugal would not try to develop industrially at that time, that is, to be dependent on the manufactured products from UK. Something similar happened in Paraguay, which resulted in a war that destroyed the country completely.
The Portuguese royal family was saved by the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars. It is expected that this help might have come with some impositions. I do not believe that the Portuguese elites of the early nineteenth century, still very nostalgic in relation to its old and shabby colonial power has accepted this humiliating imposition with a smile on his face.
The big stick of his majesty also echoes throughout latin america, forcing all nations of the continent not to initiate any project of industrialization in the nineteenth century.
Not so iq-hbd explanation about worldwide inequality is not*
I’m proud of you, Sailerites! 114 comments and nobody has blamed Japan’s lack of litigation on it’s lack of Semites.
Jews: 10 Jews, 11 opinions
Japanese: 120 million, no opinion
Don't get me wrong, I love the Shire folk.Replies: @anon
Comparative advantage works like this: What if you are the best at producing everything? Meaning, you make the best wine and the best computer games. Does it make sense to trade?
The answer is yes, depending on which activity has a higher value. If computer games are more profitable then wine, then it makes sense to spend time making video games and simply import wine, even if the wine is not as good as what can be made at home.Replies: @Truth, @Truth, @TomSchmidt, @Anonymous
You write: “The answer is yes, depending on which activity has a higher value.”
Fair enough. But then you change terms:
“If computer games are more profitable then wine”
What if the knowledge to make computer games has more value, but the profit in making wine is higher? Do you allow such a construct in your world, or is everything price? To use another term, is the map the territory?
If you want a good debunking of comparative advantage, see Steve Keen’s Debunking Economics, in which much of the “you make guns, I’ll make butter, and we will trade” nonsense is dispensed (in the real world, if you have no guns, why shouldn’t I just kill you and TAKE the butter?) with.
Your argument might work, but only if you improve it.Replies: @The Wobbly Guy, @Anonymous
Ok, ok, I bothered to look it up. Some ladies tourney prizes total a $1.3 million purse, but the Lady-US Open is 4.5 Million this year, run by a VERY PC USGA. Most purses for the ladies are less than 20% of the men sometimes 15%. With 1st place money $220,000 on the ladies’ tour vs. $1.7-2.0 million for the men, the call for “equality” can’t be far behind.
See? You can’t even help yourself from responding.
It’s not your fault. You have certain ingrain genetic inferiorities that come from within. And nothing that you can reasonably do will have an effect on it. I am reminded of those old flash games I used to play on a browser. You click a button and something stupid comes out. Amusing but still stupid.
I’m going to have fun with you, you dirty creature. Isn’t that fun? Doesn’t that make you laugh? No wait. That’s what people do at you. Laugh at what you are.
They regularly demonstrate this on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, when the Power Rangers all combine to form a giant robot. A uniquely Japanese concept.Replies: @justanotherguywitha1911, @Sailer has an interesting life
Lol. 🙂 That brings back memories. I wanted Pink Ranger as my girlfriend. A love that could never be. ;__;
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/death-overwork-rise-among-japans-vulnerable-workers-011205871
I work with the Japanese and do see they stay working very late. In my experience, no one will leave the office until their manager leaves.
More on point, Japanese are extremely non-litigious. And more and more of the M&A work there consists of Japanese firms buying non-Japanese assets, and foreign firms are used for those deals. The Japanese also use non-lawyer specialized professionals to do a great deal of the work done in the US by lawyers (scriveners and IP professionals).
Anyway, not sure what the Japanese government was thinking.Replies: @Buffalo Joe
CWhat, The workers stay late because they don’t want to be the first one to leave, as in the “first one to stop clapping.”
Comparative advantage works like this: What if you are the best at producing everything? Meaning, you make the best wine and the best computer games. Does it make sense to trade?
The answer is yes, depending on which activity has a higher value. If computer games are more profitable then wine, then it makes sense to spend time making video games and simply import wine, even if the wine is not as good as what can be made at home.Replies: @Truth, @Truth, @TomSchmidt, @Anonymous
That’s not what comparative advantage is. Comparative advantage is defined by opportunity cost, not profitability.
Portugal has about 10 million people, about the population of New York City, and Portuguese is the 5th most widely spoken language in the world.
And what about trade imbalances? Country A is far superior at producing both video games and wines - its 'trade partners' can consume only so much video games and produce a limited amount of poor quality wine. With it high industry, country A can very well produce both video games and wines to satisfy overall demand. Maybe it imports a small amount of wines, but by and large they are for its lower socio-economic classes and it retains both capacity and knowledge in both fields for itself.
Hmmm... I guess that's what trade is for - making inferior goods affordable to lower classes.
I would also note that we haven't even gotten to trade imbalances yet.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Anonymous
That’s absolute advantage.
If the countries produce different quality wine that aren’t substitutes, then they’d be producing different goods, not trading the same good.
I suspect it will require them having a clear idea how exactly the West was brought to the brink of destruction and why.Replies: @Ed
I suspect Japan will be fine. Their women aren’t nearly as self destructive & self-absorbed as western women. Most have a nationalist baseline & aren’t too concerned with helping the world. While many more Japanese women are souring on marriage the reason is because they know what they lose when they get married. That’s preferable to Western women that seek to undermine it & men completely.
It is still the case that only men can decide which women get married.Replies: @AnotherDad
The Portuguese royal family was saved by the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars. It is expected that this help might have come with some impositions. I do not believe that the Portuguese elites of the early nineteenth century, still very nostalgic in relation to its old and shabby colonial power has accepted this humiliating imposition with a smile on his face.
The big stick of his majesty also echoes throughout latin america, forcing all nations of the continent not to initiate any project of industrialization in the nineteenth century.
Not so iq-hbd explanation about worldwide inequality is not*Replies: @Hippopotamusdrome
Uhh … the Napoleonic wars were 200 years ago. And they all declared independence from the colonial monarchs and are all now nominal republics. Remember Simón Bolívar, 1783-1830? Also, the former colonial kingdoms are also now republics.
England forced the Latin American nations to accept its monopoly in international translations. There have been attempts of industrialization in the nineteenth century, all of them were barred by the british government and the worst of all was Paraguay.
England '' needed '' to consumers of their products. This was one of the reasons to stop trafficking in enslaved Africans.
Just as the US applied its big stick policy in Latin America and continues to do so. In the nineteenth century was the greatest power of the time, England, who abused the young Latin American nations.
Of course this is not the only reason for the underdevelopment of this region and we know well, but appears as an additional factor, similar to the case of Mongolia, which between two red giants, can do little by itself for years.
Make it the richest, most powerful country in the world?Replies: @Hippopotamusdrome, @Monopthalmus
But it’s not “the usual suspects” that are responsible for that. And we were number one decades ago when we had much fewer lawyers then we have now.
Teeth were what you had in Tattoo (1981).
You do NOT want Japan's problems. The Northern half of the country is polluted with Strontium, Cesium, Plutonium. Their mountains, water and air are radioactive from the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (Brought to you by General Electric). The storage of highly contaminated water is fragile, the elevated steel cooling pens full of millions of pounds of radioactive rods and of course, the entire melted-down cores of three reactors are lying there waiting for the next mild earthquake to collapse the entire mess into the Pacific at which point it DOES become "our" problem. The debris field from the tsunami landing on Alaska is radioactive. The air, the fish, the crabs coming from the Pacific are unsafe, they keep raising the "acceptable" levels of toxicity.
And there are the people that are being forced back to these regions around Fukushima. Nosebleeds, pockmarks and cancers from the radiation. A human disaster in progress, Japan is a doomed society and very soon, immediately really, plans need to be made to evacuate them off that island someday. The media is very, very good at keeping this off the radar, but this is of a scale never dealt with before and in fact, it is not. Ice walls aren't going to contain this stuff and in any case, much has already run off into the Pacific. Just sayin', since Japan came up. Their problem ain't too many lawyers. Their problem is too many Rads.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/japan-ice-wall_us_56febfa4e4b0a06d5805afffReplies: @spandrell, @Truth, @Mr. Anon
I’ve read similar accounts. I read one that said that the nuclear meltdown was the world’s biggest disaster of the past century, and media is keeping it quiet.
And the Confederacy is good at growing cotton, and England is good at manufacturing cannons, trading will give them an advantage over the North with their protective tarriffs designed to foster industry.
I was thinking of illegal immigrants. But amazingly enough the Japanese and Koreans drug of choice is meth and in that part of the world most is made in North Korea. They like uppers while the downer marijuana is the most popular drug in Canada and USA. I am sure drug use in those two nations is lots lower than in America. At least I hope so.
I urge people who do not have much real-life experience of immersion in Japanese society to use caution when offering opinions about Japan’s current situation or its future prospects. Your comment sounds almost on point (except perhaps the final sentence) when “Japan” is switched with “the West” and “men” is switched with “women.”
I hear so many Western men complaining about how their wives completely stop having sex with them after marriage. In Japan, generally the converse applies: if anyone complains, it is usually the women complaining that the men completely stop having sex with them after marriage (or after pregnancy and childbirth). I sincerely think this might be an interesting topic for psychological research.
“If rape is all about power and not sex, why does the desirability of rape victims mimic the desirability of races in the online dating market?”
It’s beyond duh to anyone rocking a triple-digit IQ that a man need not sport a raging tumescence to have power over another person. Rape is mostly about sex, and only tangentially about power, except that it’s hard to achieve tumescence if your self-esteem is in the dumpster. I’d bet my life that ALL black rapists have absurdly, unjustifiably high self-esteem.
Make it the richest, most powerful country in the world?Replies: @Hippopotamusdrome, @Monopthalmus
Make it the richest, most powerful country in the world?
Thanks for the sentiment, but I don’t think we make the top of the list, by any standard.
“Speaking of Japanese teeth, there is a fad among young Japanese women for getting crooked double caps cemented on their upper bicuspids. They think having flawed-looking teeth is cute and endearing.”
Mildly crooked teeth make a woman look vulnerable by shaping the lips into a perpetually quizzical and slightly perplexed expression and also cause the jaw to rest asymmetrically instead of humorlessly ramrod-straight, which has a similar effect of perpetual vulnerability and puzzlement — and vulnerability is very attractive to men (duh). Unless a woman is born with perfectly straight teeth, she should not get braces as long as her bite is normal and functional.
Alph, don’t want to date one but I wish I could play golf like one of those fat bottom Korean girls. Not every woman golfer looks like Jan Stephenson .
http://www.fitstylelife.com/2015/09/the-9-most-stunning-female-golfers/Replies: @Buffalo Joe
It’s actually the first in the Southern Hemisphere, unless you count Indonesia’s lingua franca, and a slight majority in South America.
Sid, My youngest children, both girls, are now 28 and 25 . Everyone of their friends have beautifully teeth, it is that noticeable. There is a highly recommended Orthodontist directly across the street from our High School and his parking lot is always full to overflowing. I think the money I invested in my children’s teeth is some of the best money I have ever spent. You can’t find a photo of me with a tooth displaying smile, I hate my teeth that much.
Anonym, My favorite comment on rape….rape is a crime, just like robbing a liquor store… and then fucking it.
--Adam CorollaReplies: @syonredux
Oops, forgot.
Jews: 10 Jews, 11 opinions
Japanese: 120 million, no opinion
Don’t get me wrong, I love the Shire folk.
Russians have a reputation for not smiling much because they don't value happiness as their main purpose in life, but I suspect their bad teeth have something to do with that as well.Replies: @5371, @Jefferson
“Russians have a reputation for not smiling much because they don’t value happiness as their main purpose in life,”
Its hard to be happy with life when you are a Russian male alcoholic and your Russian wife is a materialistic gold digger who does not really love you for you.
>>> While many more Japanese women are souring on marriage
It is still the case that only men can decide which women get married.
“Interesting how reactions differ. I thought that it made Japan look like a nation of adult-sized children.”
There is a Japanese actress named Reiko Takami who is 65 years old and has the high pitch voice of a young woman. She doesn’t have the stereotypical deeper voice associated with senior citizen women.
Off-topic,
Sean Young’s thoughts on Hillary Clinton:
http://gawker.com/talking-with-sean-young-crazy-in-hollywood-supporti-1768875389
Naw, that only solves the dentists’ problem, not the lawyers’. To increase the crime rate and thus solve both, they need a twofer: the offspring of black fathers and chav mums.
Brazil, for example, did not become independent fighting, but contracting a debt. Later this debt was to the British crown.
England forced the Latin American nations to accept its monopoly in international translations. There have been attempts of industrialization in the nineteenth century, all of them were barred by the british government and the worst of all was Paraguay.
England ” needed ” to consumers of their products. This was one of the reasons to stop trafficking in enslaved Africans.
Just as the US applied its big stick policy in Latin America and continues to do so. In the nineteenth century was the greatest power of the time, England, who abused the young Latin American nations.
Of course this is not the only reason for the underdevelopment of this region and we know well, but appears as an additional factor, similar to the case of Mongolia, which between two red giants, can do little by itself for years.
Sean Young's thoughts on Hillary Clinton:http://gawker.com/talking-with-sean-young-crazy-in-hollywood-supporti-1768875389Replies: @Jefferson
There is an actress named Paget Brewster, who looks like a younger version of Sean Young.
“What is Hillary’s popularity with white men? What will it be when Trump debates her on immigration?”
There is probably like 6 White guys in the whole country who like Hildabeast, lol.
Even among Left Wing White men, most of them like Bernie Sanders a lot more than Hildabeast.
I worked at a NYC ad agency and it was just like that. The lady creative director didn’t have children and had nothing to go home to. She looked askance at those of us with families who went home at 6 PM, after having done a full day’s work. Her favorites hung around and kept her company. It didn’t matter that they weren’t getting anything worthwhile accomplished. They were showing loyalty to her and meeting her needs.
“Rape is not a sexual crime. It is not sexual. Rape is a violent crime. It’s a violent crime, where you come at the end. It’s no different then if you robbed a liquor store … and then came.”
–Adam Corolla
--Adam CorollaReplies: @syonredux
Stupid comment. Of course rape is sexual. It’s about a man using violence to get sex.
Yeah, I never understood that line about "rape is not about sex". What the Hell else would it be about? Oil futures? If robbery is about money, then rape is pretty clearly about sex.Replies: @JSM
No, there isn’t.
It's beyond duh to anyone rocking a triple-digit IQ that a man need not sport a raging tumescence to have power over another person. Rape is mostly about sex, and only tangentially about power, except that it's hard to achieve tumescence if your self-esteem is in the dumpster. I'd bet my life that ALL black rapists have absurdly, unjustifiably high self-esteem.Replies: @Jefferson
“I’d bet my life that ALL black rapists have absurdly, unjustifiably high self-esteem.”
So you are saying that on a scale of 1 through 10, all Black rapists would rate themselves a perfect 10 in the looks department?
A Dindu Nuffin can not be that good looking, if he can only get laid using violence and intimidation.
Denzel Washington does not need to be holding a knife to a woman’s throat to get some vagina.
You’re showing your age there, Joe! The “new” LPGA lookers:
http://www.fitstylelife.com/2015/09/the-9-most-stunning-female-golfers/
They were meeting her sexual needs in the office?
http://www.fitstylelife.com/2015/09/the-9-most-stunning-female-golfers/Replies: @Buffalo Joe
Brutusale, Thank you for the link. I had a Jan Stephenson calendar probably 25 years ago, and she was hot. The girls you linked to are young enough to be my grand daughters.
Or as Dan Jenkins called them in his LPGA novel, The Franchise Babe, the "new crop of Lolitas".
Brutus, I was looking for images of Jan Stephenson and I found an article from two days ago in the Daily Mail that says she dated Donald Trump and he asked her to marry him. She choose to pursue her golf career instead . Find the photo of her in the pink blouse, sans a bra. She was the real deal.
“Stupid comment. Of course rape is sexual. It’s about a man using violence to get sex.”
Yeah, I never understood that line about “rape is not about sex”. What the Hell else would it be about? Oil futures? If robbery is about money, then rape is pretty clearly about sex.
You do NOT want Japan's problems. The Northern half of the country is polluted with Strontium, Cesium, Plutonium. Their mountains, water and air are radioactive from the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (Brought to you by General Electric). The storage of highly contaminated water is fragile, the elevated steel cooling pens full of millions of pounds of radioactive rods and of course, the entire melted-down cores of three reactors are lying there waiting for the next mild earthquake to collapse the entire mess into the Pacific at which point it DOES become "our" problem. The debris field from the tsunami landing on Alaska is radioactive. The air, the fish, the crabs coming from the Pacific are unsafe, they keep raising the "acceptable" levels of toxicity.
And there are the people that are being forced back to these regions around Fukushima. Nosebleeds, pockmarks and cancers from the radiation. A human disaster in progress, Japan is a doomed society and very soon, immediately really, plans need to be made to evacuate them off that island someday. The media is very, very good at keeping this off the radar, but this is of a scale never dealt with before and in fact, it is not. Ice walls aren't going to contain this stuff and in any case, much has already run off into the Pacific. Just sayin', since Japan came up. Their problem ain't too many lawyers. Their problem is too many Rads.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/japan-ice-wall_us_56febfa4e4b0a06d5805afffReplies: @spandrell, @Truth, @Mr. Anon
“A human disaster in progress, Japan is a doomed society and very soon, immediately really, plans need to be made to evacuate them off that island someday. The media is very, very good at keeping this off the radar, but this is of a scale never dealt with before and in fact, it is not.”
Complete BS. Japan is much luckier in its nuclear disaster than the Ukraine was. And it’s not as if Ukraine has disappeared off the map.
Kirsten Dunst is turning Japaneese!
No lawyers were raped during the filming of this video!
Added bonus: 100 percent Fat Korean Lesbian Golfers and bat shit crazy old lady (but only 10 years older than Padgett Brewster who never made unsub happen)Sean Young free!
Yeah, I never understood that line about "rape is not about sex". What the Hell else would it be about? Oil futures? If robbery is about money, then rape is pretty clearly about sex.Replies: @JSM
Right. Rape is sex robbery.
Fair enough. But then you change terms:
"If computer games are more profitable then wine"
What if the knowledge to make computer games has more value, but the profit in making wine is higher? Do you allow such a construct in your world, or is everything price? To use another term, is the map the territory?
If you want a good debunking of comparative advantage, see Steve Keen's Debunking Economics, in which much of the "you make guns, I'll make butter, and we will trade" nonsense is dispensed (in the real world, if you have no guns, why shouldn't I just kill you and TAKE the butter?) with.Replies: @Charles Erwin Wilson
Because my butter production goes to zero once you have killed me. If “Steve Keen’s Debunking Economics” takes the same tack it fails.
Your argument might work, but only if you improve it.
"in the real world, if you have no guns, why shouldn’t I just ENSLAVE you and force you to MAKE butter for me?
Just checking.Replies: @Twinkie, @Charles Erwin Wilson
What are the assumptions that underlie this objection? As Ayn Rand would say, check your premises.
People make short-sighted arrangements all the time. Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, in part, to secure access to oil that Stalin would have gladly sold him. Victor Suvarov notwithstanding, not a wise decision. Or, to use a different expression, "we should have picked our own cotton."
Note, also, that your butter CONSUMPTION also goes to 0 once I have killed you, but your cow's milk production remains about the same.
Keen makes the point that some very fundamental ideas in macro are flawed, irreparably. For example, the idea that you can sum individual demand curves to get an aggregate demand curve. Actually disproved, and not by him. Worth a read.Replies: @Charles Erwin Wilson
Japanese men complain too, all the time. But yes, some men are more into hookers or porn than into their wives.
Your argument might work, but only if you improve it.Replies: @The Wobbly Guy, @Anonymous
Uhm, so is the improvement like this:
“in the real world, if you have no guns, why shouldn’t I just ENSLAVE you and force you to MAKE butter for me?
Just checking.
In particular:Which, of course, is then followed by:In other words, it ends up badly for all involved, even including the people who were not involved in anyway at all. Ask the ancestors of my fellow Southerners for a closer example.Replies: @5371
Do keep in mind that slavery as a model organization, at least of the present world, fails. Why are you an advocate for an obvious failure?
Next question please.Replies: @The Wobbly Guy, @anon
“In that case, Britain would have an absolute advantage, and France would have a comparative advantage in producing wine or games.”
Call me an idiot (okay, I’m an idiot), but I still don’t really get it overall. After doing a little homework and googling I think I get the concept, though. If we’re globally optimizing, and we always count France no matter what, we’re better off if France does something, even if they do it more expensively than any equivalent British product. This frees up Britain to do something in the time it would have taken Britain to do whatever it is that the French did, presumably something worthwhile or of value, since if the French have already done whatever they did, and between all of us we’ve already done all the world needed, there’s no point making more of “it”. I can see how this could apply to a wine versus wool decision.
But is this comparative advantage relevant (or advantageous) in the computer games scenario? Whether I make 100 computer games or 5 billion is pretty much a knob on a production process. If the computer game is entirely software (say, running on a PC and downloaded), the “opportunity cost” difference between 100 and 5 billion might be about zero. I’ve already pounded the d*&^n think out and burned out the team (making these things seems to be a lot like making a movie). I lay most of them off (like a movie releases its actors) and release my game. Like a movie, I’d love for my game to be a hit and make lots of money. Like movies, it’s possible for me to collide with some other game and suffer, but it’s also possible for both of us to do well, even better together. Marvel and DC Comics sometimes feed off each other. And sometimes it seems totally unconnected.
So if France make 200 hokey computer games (here’s looking at you, Groupe Bull), it doesn’t really matter in the comparative advantage calculus. Nobody says, “we don’t need to download 200 more games, because Group Bull already did that”.
And it’s not like if I’m making computer games I can’t also be making cash registers. The more I know about computer games, maybe the more I can make cool looking cash register interfaces that companies want to buy (oh, and I explain fewer errors will be made on them). And computer games are sexy, so making them helps my hire young talent for my cash register biz.
So if Britain can make both computer games and wine as good and cheaper as those of France, I don’t see how comparative advantage helps France with computer games. (Wine, sure, that’s where all this talk about comparative advantage originally comes from, right? The world can only drink so much wine per year. I wonder about the wine market though, I notice these days that any really successful game company CEO, like other silicon valley CEOs, seems to have their own Napa Valley winery. I guess it’s cheaper than private space programs. Where does that fit?)
I also wonder about the supposition that there’s always “something else” available that it’s obviously better to do that what “we are doing now”. A lot of high-tech companies spend a lot of time staring at the wall trying to see this, and it’s not obvious.
"in the real world, if you have no guns, why shouldn’t I just ENSLAVE you and force you to MAKE butter for me?
Just checking.Replies: @Twinkie, @Charles Erwin Wilson
Slaves have a habit of revolting, as the Spartans and the Romans discovered. And sometimes the revolts can be quite gruesome. See the Jacquerie revolt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquerie
In particular:
Which, of course, is then followed by:
In other words, it ends up badly for all involved, even including the people who were not involved in anyway at all. Ask the ancestors of my fellow Southerners for a closer example.
No slaves involved.Replies: @Twinkie
In particular:Which, of course, is then followed by:In other words, it ends up badly for all involved, even including the people who were not involved in anyway at all. Ask the ancestors of my fellow Southerners for a closer example.Replies: @5371
[See the Jacquerie revolt]
No slaves involved.
See:The point remains that keeping slaves is always a dicey proposition. One may keep them docile when the going is good, but one defeat overseas or some internal dissension among the elites, and then all heck can break loose, during which one's womenfolk and children may meet gruesome fates. Free labor isn't so free.Replies: @The Wobbly Guy, @5371
Yeah, Jan was hot, and at that time, pretty much the only one who was. Now lots of straight girls play golf.
Or as Dan Jenkins called them in his LPGA novel, The Franchise Babe, the “new crop of Lolitas”.
Wabi-sabi perhaps?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzC4hFK5P3g&feature=player_embeddedReplies: @Santoculto, @FactsAreImportant
Close the comment section, all further words are pointless. Shakespeare himself could write nothing that would interest someone who has seen this video.
I need to lie down for a while.
No slaves involved.Replies: @Twinkie
You quibble unnecessarily. One perfectly good definition of a slave is someone who is forced to work without compensation.
See:
The point remains that keeping slaves is always a dicey proposition. One may keep them docile when the going is good, but one defeat overseas or some internal dissension among the elites, and then all heck can break loose, during which one’s womenfolk and children may meet gruesome fates. Free labor isn’t so free.
Your argument might work, but only if you improve it.Replies: @The Wobbly Guy, @Anonymous
Because my butter production goes to zero once you have killed me.
What are the assumptions that underlie this objection? As Ayn Rand would say, check your premises.
People make short-sighted arrangements all the time. Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, in part, to secure access to oil that Stalin would have gladly sold him. Victor Suvarov notwithstanding, not a wise decision. Or, to use a different expression, “we should have picked our own cotton.”
Note, also, that your butter CONSUMPTION also goes to 0 once I have killed you, but your cow’s milk production remains about the same.
Keen makes the point that some very fundamental ideas in macro are flawed, irreparably. For example, the idea that you can sum individual demand curves to get an aggregate demand curve. Actually disproved, and not by him. Worth a read.
Possibly you have never read the fable of the golden goose that laid the golden eggs? There is much wisdom in childrens' fables. In fact, I claim that there is more wisdom in childrens' fables than in all of academia.
But once again, I must insist that your argument can only succeed if you improve it. And I am rooting for you, because your argument has application to the present.Replies: @Twinkie, @TomSchmidt
You are right. I see quite a bit of that. I once was working late next to a Japanese colleague and I asked him why he was staying so late. He seemed to be doing nothing at all. He told me his manager was still at work and he could not leave. And I did see the manager, staying late, playing dominos in the dining hall.
Really, what if you have 10 British programmers making all the video games for France and 1 million Frenchmen making the same dollar amount of wine for Britain and to keep this wonderful balance going 500,000 British wine makers are on the dole? Asset inflation is the least of your worries yet you would still have it here since those 10 Brits are pretty wealthy.
When most everything was done by human hands and people could only produce so much in a year and it almost never varied then simplistic theories like free trade might make some sense. In those days there was no huge difference in the pay between different skill sets so something that took 20 hours to make was traded for something else that took 20 hours to make.
The whole free trade theory is based on ridiculous assumptions that have nothing to do with the real world we live in now. The idea that at some point in time there is a perfect balance of French wine and British computer game makers so the entire British wine industry should just step aside is unrealistic in today's world. Those British wine makers aren't going to be producing computer games nor are French computer programmers going to be squishing grapes.
For the Britain the best thing is to keep both the wine makers and computer makers employed. Who cares about the French wine makers?
Once you have the industrial revolution and can start producing many times more per human hour of work you start to see the problem we have now of overproduction of everything and less and less need for a large workforce. Free trade policies and the ability to move production to low wage producers only make the problem worse.
Free trade is some silly numbers game about trade surpluses and deficits that completely ignores all the rest of the issues in the economy and society at large.Replies: @Anonymous, @Romanian, @utu
#73 – Very good comment. We need more narratives debunking “free trade” ideology.
Portugal in 1813 is better at making corks for wine bottles, England is better at making steam engines.
Which language does the world speak in 2016: Portuguese or English?
__________________
In 19c. Germany used tariffs to help develop their own steam engine industry and so on. Portugal did not do it because it was controlled by England and followed the free trade dogma thats served England, so all they got are the cork oaks. But Germany managed to catch up with the UK.
They did not round, the numbers are from a mailed survey asking about what crimes the person has been a victim of in the past year. I’m not sure of the total number of respondents, but it is several thousand. (I was one this year, so it’s likely a pretty high number. They’re also pretty serious about getting responses, nagging me three times.) Absolutely ZERO of the Blacks responding said they were raped by a white man. This is true not only for 2004, but also for 2008, and I have read in a comment here that this is true for all but one of the last 11 years, so it isn’t a fluke.
So why is this?
1. You can’t rape the willing.
2. Just about nobody risks prison for something that they can easily get without the risk.
3. There are better-looking alternatives, particularly from the point of view of nearly all White men.
4. White guys would usually have to go out of their way to find a Black to rape, the same is not true for Black guys.
5. White guys just don’t rape much (Certainly not enough to satisfy female fantasies – not within a factor of a thousand.)
It is still the case that only men can decide which women get married.Replies: @AnotherDad
Not after Hillary’s elected.
See:The point remains that keeping slaves is always a dicey proposition. One may keep them docile when the going is good, but one defeat overseas or some internal dissension among the elites, and then all heck can break loose, during which one's womenfolk and children may meet gruesome fates. Free labor isn't so free.Replies: @The Wobbly Guy, @5371
Has the arithmetic changed? Maybe change the terminology, but not the actual terms?
“You work as you are told! If not, I’ll ship you to ________!!”
Sounds a lot like H1Bs, in fact.
I think slaveowners (e.g. the 1%) in the future are going to be a lot more circumspect, but even more powerful. They may not own slaves as we define it, but the practical reality remains the same anyway, backed up by weapons and well-paid ‘security personnel’.
I would note that past slave revolts usually relied on mass and numbers to overpower their oppressors. Technology gradually reduced this advantage such that by the time of the American Civil War, I don’t think the slaves had the power to free themselves without the intervention of the North.
Slaves don't have to free themselves to cause trouble. The Jacquerie revolt of my example earlier was put down quite ruthlessly in the end, but how did that vengeance help that knight who was roasted alive and whose wife was violated by a mob, and whose children perished violently (likely tortured to death)?Replies: @The Wobbly Guy
What are the assumptions that underlie this objection? As Ayn Rand would say, check your premises.
People make short-sighted arrangements all the time. Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, in part, to secure access to oil that Stalin would have gladly sold him. Victor Suvarov notwithstanding, not a wise decision. Or, to use a different expression, "we should have picked our own cotton."
Note, also, that your butter CONSUMPTION also goes to 0 once I have killed you, but your cow's milk production remains about the same.
Keen makes the point that some very fundamental ideas in macro are flawed, irreparably. For example, the idea that you can sum individual demand curves to get an aggregate demand curve. Actually disproved, and not by him. Worth a read.Replies: @Charles Erwin Wilson
Well, speaking from beyond the grave, I might mention that once you have killed me, my
but only if you are willing to milk her.
Possibly you have never read the fable of the golden goose that laid the golden eggs? There is much wisdom in childrens’ fables. In fact, I claim that there is more wisdom in childrens’ fables than in all of academia.
But once again, I must insist that your argument can only succeed if you improve it. And I am rooting for you, because your argument has application to the present.
There is much wisdom of a "System 1" sort in fairy tales. We live in the age of the aspergery System 2 people, who took over academics and derided the sort of folk wisdom contained in fairy tales, taboos, and ancient moral codes. Since they understand nothing but numbers, one can always use numbers against them: the future belongs to those who show up for it. It belongs to Traditionalist Catholics over practically-protestant ones, Orthodox Jews over Reform, and Amish over Lutherans. So, wisdom there is, but we live in an age that values raw intellectual power.
You well know that a society that makes only butter will be overrun by one that makes guns; such is the nature of the naked ape. For the economist posing his simplistic comparative advantage tale, however, the possibility that people might not be completely rational, might make greedy short-term decisions that have negative long-term consequences, might prefer to steal instead of trade, does not enter the calculus, since the economist sees not people but people as viewed through the glasses of theory. A great book on the difference is Misbehaving, by Thaler. Thaler, in criticizing a "rational expectations" advocate said: "The problem with your theory is that for it to be true most people would need to be as smart as you, but I think it's more likely they're as dumb as me. He agreed."
Go a day or two without milking that cow, of course, and it will stop producing milk. Gun-toting Ricardo disrupters take note.
The arguments aren't mine, of course, but originate with Jane Jacobs and E. F. Schuhmacher. Thanks for the stimulus to thinking.
"in the real world, if you have no guns, why shouldn’t I just ENSLAVE you and force you to MAKE butter for me?
Just checking.Replies: @Twinkie, @Charles Erwin Wilson
Slavery is a non-starter, at least outside of the Muslim world. And I would be a very bad slave. But of course you can kill your very bad slaves. Then again, the dead do no work.
Do keep in mind that slavery as a model organization, at least of the present world, fails. Why are you an advocate for an obvious failure?
Next question please.
And why kill when you can simply torture and make an example out of the recalcitrant ones, scaring the rest into obedience? I have never found the non-moral arguments against slavery (it doesn't work,; it's not more profitable etc) to be very effective.
Even today, human slavery is flourishing beneath the radar. They are not more prevalent only because much of civilised society has decided that it is abhorrent.
Should attitudes change, it may come back anytime, perhaps when we least expect it, or in forms so subtle we don't realise it.
Exactly!
Not quite. H1B holders can elect to go back home. Slaves and serfs are bound to the land and the lord. They couldn’t vote with their feet.
Even in the past, slave revolts generally failed… in the end. But they still did a lot of damage. Technology or no, would you leave your wife and children among 100 sullen, beaten down, and angry slaves to attend to some business elsewhere?
Slaves don’t have to free themselves to cause trouble. The Jacquerie revolt of my example earlier was put down quite ruthlessly in the end, but how did that vengeance help that knight who was roasted alive and whose wife was violated by a mob, and whose children perished violently (likely tortured to death)?
But then again, I might have a team of heavily armed professionals guarding them and keeping watch on the slaves, and probably not in the same vicinity. Somewhat similar to gated communities, with indentured servants (one step higher than slaves) working the estate grounds, with more dangerous jobs (mining etc) left to slaves.
In the past the slave guards were rather less well armed. In the future, with technologies like trigger fingerprint locks, I don't see slaves having much of a chance against automatic weapons.Replies: @Twinkie
Possibly you have never read the fable of the golden goose that laid the golden eggs? There is much wisdom in childrens' fables. In fact, I claim that there is more wisdom in childrens' fables than in all of academia.
But once again, I must insist that your argument can only succeed if you improve it. And I am rooting for you, because your argument has application to the present.Replies: @Twinkie, @TomSchmidt
Hence Tiberius Caesar’s response to a governor who recommended an increase in taxes: “A good shepherd shears his flock; he does not flay it.”
However, tt does seem like they like flaying by means other than taxes. How else would you describe the treatment of the citizens of the US by the USG?
Harpending, recently dead, in The 10,000 Year Explosion made the point that lactose tolerance allowed Indo Europeans to obtain protein from grass by milking cows, becoming "mampires," instead of killing and eating them. This allowed the Indo Europeans to "grow" more people per unit land, and so outcompete people without the gene.Replies: @Twinkie
Do keep in mind that slavery as a model organization, at least of the present world, fails. Why are you an advocate for an obvious failure?
Next question please.Replies: @The Wobbly Guy, @anon
Not an advocate, but wondering out loud.
And why kill when you can simply torture and make an example out of the recalcitrant ones, scaring the rest into obedience? I have never found the non-moral arguments against slavery (it doesn’t work,; it’s not more profitable etc) to be very effective.
Even today, human slavery is flourishing beneath the radar. They are not more prevalent only because much of civilised society has decided that it is abhorrent.
Should attitudes change, it may come back anytime, perhaps when we least expect it, or in forms so subtle we don’t realise it.
Slaves don't have to free themselves to cause trouble. The Jacquerie revolt of my example earlier was put down quite ruthlessly in the end, but how did that vengeance help that knight who was roasted alive and whose wife was violated by a mob, and whose children perished violently (likely tortured to death)?Replies: @The Wobbly Guy
I wouldn’t.
But then again, I might have a team of heavily armed professionals guarding them and keeping watch on the slaves, and probably not in the same vicinity. Somewhat similar to gated communities, with indentured servants (one step higher than slaves) working the estate grounds, with more dangerous jobs (mining etc) left to slaves.
In the past the slave guards were rather less well armed. In the future, with technologies like trigger fingerprint locks, I don’t see slaves having much of a chance against automatic weapons.
Agreed.
However, tt does seem like they like flaying by means other than taxes. How else would you describe the treatment of the citizens of the US by the USG?
But then again, I might have a team of heavily armed professionals guarding them and keeping watch on the slaves, and probably not in the same vicinity. Somewhat similar to gated communities, with indentured servants (one step higher than slaves) working the estate grounds, with more dangerous jobs (mining etc) left to slaves.
In the past the slave guards were rather less well armed. In the future, with technologies like trigger fingerprint locks, I don't see slaves having much of a chance against automatic weapons.Replies: @Twinkie
A Praetorian Guard? That doesn’t work out well either.
See:The point remains that keeping slaves is always a dicey proposition. One may keep them docile when the going is good, but one defeat overseas or some internal dissension among the elites, and then all heck can break loose, during which one's womenfolk and children may meet gruesome fates. Free labor isn't so free.Replies: @The Wobbly Guy, @5371
No, it’s not a good definition at all. Lots of people do some work without being paid, without anyone describing them as slaves.
Possibly you have never read the fable of the golden goose that laid the golden eggs? There is much wisdom in childrens' fables. In fact, I claim that there is more wisdom in childrens' fables than in all of academia.
But once again, I must insist that your argument can only succeed if you improve it. And I am rooting for you, because your argument has application to the present.Replies: @Twinkie, @TomSchmidt
Possibly you have never read the fable of the golden goose that laid the golden eggs? There is much wisdom in childrens’ fables. In fact, I claim that there is more wisdom in childrens’ fables than in all of academia.
There is much wisdom of a “System 1” sort in fairy tales. We live in the age of the aspergery System 2 people, who took over academics and derided the sort of folk wisdom contained in fairy tales, taboos, and ancient moral codes. Since they understand nothing but numbers, one can always use numbers against them: the future belongs to those who show up for it. It belongs to Traditionalist Catholics over practically-protestant ones, Orthodox Jews over Reform, and Amish over Lutherans. So, wisdom there is, but we live in an age that values raw intellectual power.
You well know that a society that makes only butter will be overrun by one that makes guns; such is the nature of the naked ape. For the economist posing his simplistic comparative advantage tale, however, the possibility that people might not be completely rational, might make greedy short-term decisions that have negative long-term consequences, might prefer to steal instead of trade, does not enter the calculus, since the economist sees not people but people as viewed through the glasses of theory. A great book on the difference is Misbehaving, by Thaler. Thaler, in criticizing a “rational expectations” advocate said: “The problem with your theory is that for it to be true most people would need to be as smart as you, but I think it’s more likely they’re as dumb as me. He agreed.”
Go a day or two without milking that cow, of course, and it will stop producing milk. Gun-toting Ricardo disrupters take note.
The arguments aren’t mine, of course, but originate with Jane Jacobs and E. F. Schuhmacher. Thanks for the stimulus to thinking.
Hence Tiberius Caesar’s response to a governor who recommended an increase in taxes: “A good shepherd shears his flock; he does not flay it.”
Harpending, recently dead, in The 10,000 Year Explosion made the point that lactose tolerance allowed Indo Europeans to obtain protein from grass by milking cows, becoming “mampires,” instead of killing and eating them. This allowed the Indo Europeans to “grow” more people per unit land, and so outcompete people without the gene.
Don’t be obtuse. People who CHOOSE to work without getting paid are called volunteers. It’s being FORCED to work without compensation that is slavery. It’s also the inability to leave… all of which applies to the French peasants.
Volunteers or slaves?
Harpending, recently dead, in The 10,000 Year Explosion made the point that lactose tolerance allowed Indo Europeans to obtain protein from grass by milking cows, becoming "mampires," instead of killing and eating them. This allowed the Indo Europeans to "grow" more people per unit land, and so outcompete people without the gene.Replies: @Twinkie
I have an enormous amount of respect for his work, but I think that thesis has not been borne out by recent research.
It's not your fault. You have certain ingrain genetic inferiorities that come from within. And nothing that you can reasonably do will have an effect on it. I am reminded of those old flash games I used to play on a browser. You click a button and something stupid comes out. Amusing but still stupid.
I'm going to have fun with you, you dirty creature. Isn't that fun? Doesn't that make you laugh? No wait. That's what people do at you. Laugh at what you are.Replies: @Mr. Anon
Apparently YOU don’t have an interesting life, as you have nothing better to do than display your psychoses.
I have started reading When globalisation Fails by James MacDonald which is apposite and lucid.
The great 19th Century debate about free trade is worth reappraising. When Germany introduced rising tariffs and even cartels The Times in 1877 was outraged:
"The growth of the strong protectionist party in Germany has been one of the most unsatisfactory signs of the limited political training of that country."
The Dorn paper that Harford quoted opined that it might take two generations for the magic of free markets to work: um....how do they know? They've already admitted they miscalculated on the initial damage.
Personally I don't want my country stripped and humbled because a free trade ideology saves our elites from having to think too hard or be cunning, for a change.Replies: @MarkinLA, @anon
One aspect of that is Ricardo’s examples usually relate to goods that have some kind of intrinsic regional production advantage usually related to climate and in those cases the comparative advantage argument makes a lot of sense and also at the time the total percentage of trade in goods like that: sugar, spices, rubber, cotton etc was huge.
However it’s much less so for an auto assembly plant (it still is a bit: stability, rule of law, corruption etc).
r/K
It might be more about power among K selected populations but as you can see in cases like the Congo, Boko Haram or Darfur among more r selected or tribal populations it’s reproduction by force.
Hence rape victim proportions mirror dating.
You missed it.
About half the posts said that but in coded language.
Like I said. If Japan is to survive the current war against the nations they need to have a clear analysis of how the West was poisoned and not let themselves get sidetracked into bogus dead ends.
Jews: 10 Jews, 11 opinions
Japanese: 120 million, no opinion
Don't get me wrong, I love the Shire folk.Replies: @anon
Except among Jewish media pundits.
Call me an idiot (okay, I'm an idiot), but I still don't really get it overall. After doing a little homework and googling I think I get the concept, though. If we're globally optimizing, and we always count France no matter what, we're better off if France does something, even if they do it more expensively than any equivalent British product. This frees up Britain to do something in the time it would have taken Britain to do whatever it is that the French did, presumably something worthwhile or of value, since if the French have already done whatever they did, and between all of us we've already done all the world needed, there's no point making more of "it". I can see how this could apply to a wine versus wool decision.
But is this comparative advantage relevant (or advantageous) in the computer games scenario? Whether I make 100 computer games or 5 billion is pretty much a knob on a production process. If the computer game is entirely software (say, running on a PC and downloaded), the "opportunity cost" difference between 100 and 5 billion might be about zero. I've already pounded the d*&^n think out and burned out the team (making these things seems to be a lot like making a movie). I lay most of them off (like a movie releases its actors) and release my game. Like a movie, I'd love for my game to be a hit and make lots of money. Like movies, it's possible for me to collide with some other game and suffer, but it's also possible for both of us to do well, even better together. Marvel and DC Comics sometimes feed off each other. And sometimes it seems totally unconnected.
So if France make 200 hokey computer games (here's looking at you, Groupe Bull), it doesn't really matter in the comparative advantage calculus. Nobody says, "we don't need to download 200 more games, because Group Bull already did that".
And it's not like if I'm making computer games I can't also be making cash registers. The more I know about computer games, maybe the more I can make cool looking cash register interfaces that companies want to buy (oh, and I explain fewer errors will be made on them). And computer games are sexy, so making them helps my hire young talent for my cash register biz.
So if Britain can make both computer games and wine as good and cheaper as those of France, I don't see how comparative advantage helps France with computer games. (Wine, sure, that's where all this talk about comparative advantage originally comes from, right? The world can only drink so much wine per year. I wonder about the wine market though, I notice these days that any really successful game company CEO, like other silicon valley CEOs, seems to have their own Napa Valley winery. I guess it's cheaper than private space programs. Where does that fit?)
I also wonder about the supposition that there's always "something else" available that it's obviously better to do that what "we are doing now". A lot of high-tech companies spend a lot of time staring at the wall trying to see this, and it's not obvious.Replies: @anon
You’re right and classical economics is wrong (now not then) cos they’re stuck in a different era where regional comparative advantage was more significant as a proportion.
Do keep in mind that slavery as a model organization, at least of the present world, fails. Why are you an advocate for an obvious failure?
Next question please.Replies: @The Wobbly Guy, @anon
Slavery fails for the same reason subsistence wages fail – wages for one = revenue for another – but we’re heading that way because the people driving it are too greedy to see the obvious.
I think it happened but on the Atlantic coast not the steppe.
Then there are the jobs that are only for those with the financial wherewithal to do the unpaid internship. Which is why there’s nothing but the idiot spawn of the upper-middle class in journalism and somewhat brighter upper-middle class law school grads in the upper echelons of sports management.
Volunteers or slaves?