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Post by Pharcellus on Nov 5, 2010 8:25:56 GMT
These are all good ideas, really.
There is just one MAJOR FUCKING PROBLEM, however; *WE* are reasonable people who can (for the most part) see through the HUGE masses of bullshit that's been thrown around for the last two years. However, these new Teabaggers/Republicans have a massive reality distortion field in operation that allows them to do and say the craziest shit EVER, and people (in general) eat it up like candy.
So, yeah, the Dems could do all kinds of rational things, just like the rational things that they have been doing (but different; larger/smaller, etc), and it WON'T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE, because, in a couple years, the Teabaggers/Repubs will turn on the reality distortion field again, funded by billionaires, corporations, and foreign concerns, and people will flock to the polls to "throw the bums out" again.
Appealing to reason doesn't work. Appealing to fear does. Telling the truth doesn't work. Telling lies (not just any lies, but WHOPPERS) does.
Sound familiar? That's the anarchic "free market" paradigm playbook. Lie, cheat, FUD, steal. The ends justify the means. Winning at any cost. Shouldn't come as a surprise coming from the Republican side, considering ultimately who is writing their paychecks.
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Post by sheral on Nov 5, 2010 15:11:58 GMT
When I read/hear what some of the teabaggers believe I want to go and build a fallout shelter way out where no one can find me. I mean, you work with people, talk to them about other things and they seem perfectly normal. Then they start spouting all their 'it's Marxism' crap and your jaw hits the floor and you realise they're either not as intelligent as you first thought, or they're just fucking insane.
My old boss lost his job in the election. He was the county assessor for Garfield County, CO. Lovely man. However, he lost to a republican and his political views are mostly democrat. The sad thing is, he was doing a good job as assessor. He was making the gas and oil companies pay their dues (something they'd been avoiding prior). It's not like the assessor can raise or lower taxes. They have to (by state law) go by the market of the previous two years to any reappraisal year. When the state audits them, if their figures don't match up to the market then they are subject to a state appraisal, paid for by the taxpayer. They HAVE to get it right.
So this republican got voted in for three reasons: he promised to build a better relationship with gas and oil; he was not the incumbent; he was a republican. People were possibly getting revenge for their house values going up (which was inevitable because the two years prior to the last reappraisal the market was crazy high). I just feel sad for my old boss, not because he lost his job, but because he lost it for doing it right.
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Post by kirinir on Nov 6, 2010 3:58:15 GMT
Too many jobs in the US are politically appointed instead of being actual jobs.
Sheriff? Wtf?!?? Choose the best man/person for the job and hire them from the council. Don't let some douche with a million bucks campaign only to run the local office into the ground while he's lining his pockets or busy greasing palms of friends and lining them up with bonues.
Tax assessor, another WTF? Umm yeah I'll vote for the guy who says he'll let me pay less. Another one that should be appointed.
Throw in like 10 other jobs (judges, prosecutors, attourney generals, etc) which should all be appointed/selected by the local council/state/etc instead of being a fucking popularity contest. These people actually do jobs (or are supposed to) instead of being voted "most likable" in school...
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Post by Darkwater on Nov 6, 2010 5:21:18 GMT
Yeah never understood that bout the US. I assume its a hold over from days gone by. Don't trust the government and all that I guess.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 6, 2010 11:40:25 GMT
@kirnir: Well, there are two sides to every coin. If they are appointed what you tend to get is cronyism and you have one person who may not actually be doing his or her job or might be very corrupt or something and you can't get rid of them because they are appointed. Thats actually why most of these positions are now elected, because at some point in the past in regions or towns someone abused the position. At least if they are elected you can (theoretically) vote out the person.
And you gotta remember that until the last 10 years it wasn't necessarily a popularity contest involving millions of dollars. Sure, they posted signs and stuff, but rarely did you ever see a sheriff running TV ads or spending $500,000 or $1 million on a campaign.
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Post by sheral on Nov 6, 2010 14:18:59 GMT
Without wishing to drag yet another thread way off topic, in answer to your point, Amon, I think as far as the Assessor goes it's a no-brainer. It should be an appointed job and the person appointed should be someone who has worked their way through the office from appraiser so they know what they're doing. The only way you could possibly give paybacks would be in under-appraising properties in order to lower the value of the property and thereby the amount of tax they have to pay. The tax rate is set by the state. The state also audits all counties and any who have properties that come in under, or over the market are re-appraised. Heck, when my old boss was elected, he had to go to state-run classes to learn how the system worked. The deputy assessor pretty much had to run the show for the first year. Luckily her job is appointed and she knows more about assessment than most people have forgotten. She won't run for assessor, because she doesn't want to lose her job on a political whim. Now, some real estate guy will come in and have to go to all the same classes, thereby wasting more taxpayers money. It's silly.
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Kulamata
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Post by Kulamata on Nov 9, 2010 0:24:21 GMT
A new Glittery Pretty has caught my eye and brief attention span. Pragmatic liberal article? Certainly not of the Clintonian persuasion. www.thenation.com/article/155848/end-free-trade-globalizationLooking at the track record of some of the countries that erected high tariff walls during their developmental periods (US, England, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, China) has prevented me from believing that free trade is good for everyone all the time. The current US practice of giving tax advantages to offshoring jobs strikes me as simply perverse.
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Post by sheral on Nov 9, 2010 21:00:02 GMT
Interesting article, thanks for sharing. And I agree, although didn't an attempt to take that tax relief away get squashed recently? Or was it an attempt to give tax relief to people who didn't go offshore? I forget....I've slept since then.
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Post by Pharcellus on Nov 9, 2010 21:09:24 GMT
I've been starting a new thought experiment as a result of reading that article. I am curious what the system basis is for our economic system. As a systems designer/analyst, I've been thinking about how one would build an economic system from the ground up, starting with just two people and going from there.
I'm mainly curious about the continued stability of the "profit motive" in economics, where it seems to be that it creates value from nothing, which lowers the value of everything else.
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Kulamata
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Post by Kulamata on Nov 10, 2010 3:15:27 GMT
Yes, Sheral, IIRC, it was squashed; tax hike and all that, although everything in reach was getting squashed, so it may just have been caught in the general carnage...
Interestingly enough Phar, it's been tried. My first exposure to the Chicago School of Economics was reading the "axioms" that were supposedly the unquestionable foundation of economics. Some that I vaguely remember ran along the lines of: People and institutions would always act to maximize profit; people and institutions would always act rationally; and perhaps by then also the stuff about information being so broadly available that no one had an advantage, leading to the random walk theory, and the idea that everything was rationally priced by the market. (I immediately rejected this as lacking any resemblance to people that I had seen.) This load of bollocks was sufficiently stringent that it lent itself very well to mathematical modeling, and from that, a major beachhead in academia. Several Nobels recently have been awarded for work disproving some of these tenets. For example, business people do NOT take enough risk to maximize profit; if they did, on the first "failure" they'd be fired, or at least nudged off the fast track, so instead they always act to maximize non-failure over maximum return. (Enron and some more recent examples notwithstanding.) Watching a stock market crash should persuade any open-minded observer that rational pricing can take a bit of a holiday... Krugman wrote a column not too long ago, in which he said that the CSE modeling too often gave the wrong result, or gave trivially obvious answers, and that for the foreseeable future, economics was going to be a little messier rather than tidier. Since Krugman is a master modeller, I was delighted that my gut reaction was confirmed.
(Preens self.)
CSE has become almost a cult in some circles, despite it's recent difficulties. It tends to glorify the omniscient market, and is notably anti-Keynsian.
CSE is also known as fresh-water economics, as opposed to the saltwater (macro-)economics, of MIT, Princeton, and Berkeley. There are dark whispers of midnight sacrifices to the memory of Hayek and the warrior Friedman.
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Post by Darkwater on Nov 10, 2010 9:21:25 GMT
Nice article, pretty much what i've thought/suggested upto now. I'm just not holding my breath that it'll happen anytime soon. The wall street shenanigans are proof of that I think. They should have been brought to task when they fucked the whole system up. Instead, they called up thier washington cronies and got some sweet deals for themselves in the process. Now they're making as big a profit as ever, without any real new regulation to rein them in.
So the time isn't now. It'll be interesting to see how far down in the ditch the US falls before someone has the balls/influence to make the tough and unpopular decisions to pull it out of it.
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Post by FrithRae on Nov 10, 2010 18:39:52 GMT
Noone will make any tough and unpopular decisions, because if they do that, they'll lose office and their party will lose power...
Oh..wait...:/
Seriously, unpopular decisions, even if for the better inthe long run, just get people voted out of their jobs. Therefore, until the US intellect grows by about 20 points a person, it ain't nver gonna happen. We'll crush ourselves into oblivion first, and then the tough decisions will become the popular one because there will be no alternative and noone will be able to pay the wool to stay on their eyes..
That's my call...I'm off to finish the underground backyard bunker...
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Post by Darkwater on Nov 10, 2010 22:33:14 GMT
Yeah economics is as much science as say psychology or forensics. Anything that involves humans and the idea that they are rational beings is just fundamentally flawed. You can analyze trends and work up models for stuff but they don't predict anything with certainty. They're more art than science really.
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Kulamata
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Post by Kulamata on Nov 23, 2010 22:27:07 GMT
I thought there were some interesting insights here, especially the comments about the US bias towards innovative products vs. the Chinese bias towards getting to market sooner with good-enough stuff. Also the mismatch of funding vs. need in the US. It seems to me that the US has fewer analysts (and there never were many) who take a really broad, systems view nowadays. Seems to be more piece-meal analysis instead, but maybe that's just my age showing. tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/11/22/richard_kauffmans_speech/#more
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Post by Darkwater on Nov 24, 2010 0:07:34 GMT
Just a random thought as to a possible explanation, but maybe its the same as with Doctors. General practitioners (at least here) are getting rarer to find, because most new doctors want to go into a specialty... generally because they pay more money.
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