patrick.net

In my view, the problem now is that they are getting bad or at the very least subpar deals for the tax-paying public. This is a real problem.

We are getting exactly what we deserved for putting those creeps in public office.

All citizens get the government they deserve.

I still think IQ is just another measure developed by underachievers to make themselves feel good.

Fairness to me is that people get to be the best that they can given their natural abilities.

Ever wonder why 'fairness' and 'fairy' share so many consecutive alphabets?

All citizens get the government they deserve.

Are you blaming voters or democracy in general? Or both?

ONE measure of unfairness in a society is wealth disparity.

If there is a sustained bubble in wealth disparity based on historical trends , we know that the society is no longer fair.

In a fair society, wealth bubbles should not exist too long as equal oppurtunity and competition should diffuse it very soon.

Maybe we should have an index (based on historic data) on wealth disparity just like case-schiller housing index, to measure fairness :-)

"Maybe we should have an index (based on historic data) on wealth disparity just like case-schiller housing index, to measure fairness"

That's not a bad idea at all. At least then I would have a reasonable hedge against getting fucked out of my job, house, and savings.

And right now, I'd be long on unfairness for sure.

If there is a sustained bubble in wealth disparity based on historical trends , we know that the society is no longer fair.

All bubbles are unsustainable.

Throughout history, except during a few shocks like communism, wealth disparity tends to widen by itself. This is due to the human hierarchy.

In a fair society, wealth bubbles should not exist too long as equal oppurtunity and competition should diffuse it very soon.

Quite the contrary. Asset bubbles allow certain ordinary people to obtain otherwise unobtainable wealth. So if one wants "fairness" one better pray for more bubbles.

Peter P says :
When Asset bubbles allow certain ordinary people to obtain otherwise unobtainable wealth.So if one wants “fairness” one better pray for more bubbles.

I don't believe its fair when ordinary people can obtain otherwise unobtainable wealth.
I don't think it results in reducing wealth disparity in anyway.
When ordinary people can make money easily due to asset bubbles , think of the powerful and well connected.

When ordinary people can make money easily due to asset bubbles , think of the powerful and well connected.

True enough. This brings us to the question... why would the powerful and well-connected allow a 'fair' world?

Asset bubbles create Zero Sum games where the winners are mostly lazy, undeserving, reckless, corrupt, powerful or well connected.

No wonder, the corrupt and powerful love asset bubbles.

So? What does that mean for us?

Contrary to popular belief, there is no greater force out there to right wrongs. We just have to live with the human tragedy.

Peter P says :

True enough. This brings us to the question… why would the powerful and well-connected allow a ‘fair’ world?

Thats why i mentioned in my previous post that a Perfectly fair society is a myth. There is a constant struggle between corrupt, powerful and well-connected and the rest.

Its now time for the rest to kick some ass. Its way past the pain threshold.

Its now time for the rest to kick some ass. Its way past the pain threshold.

Yep. Let's make the world more unfair for other people. :)

Contrary to popular belief, there is no greater force out there to right wrongs. We just have to live with the human tragedy

No , there is actually a greater force, the evolutionary force.
We have evolved to deal with these kind of problem in jungle by always having some people who have the fairness genes in them.It keeps the species surviving.
We could never have gotten out of the jungle to where we are today, without the good genes countering the evil genes. The bad and good are part of the evolution which keeps the species going.

At the risk of sounding a bit philosophical, i would say that it all boils down to the struggle between evil and good.

I know many folks who have fairness genes in them. They get disturbed by unfairness irrespective of whether it hurts them or not.
I find those guys disproportionately in forums like partick.net :-)

At the risk of sounding a bit philosophical, i would say that it all boils down to the struggle between evil and good.

The struggle is between opposing forces, not necessarily evil and good.

If humanity preoccupied itself with good and evil early on, we would still be living in caves.

OPEC trying to organize Emergency Meeting to cut production.

Can somebody tell them the world doesn't care what they do, OPEC only matters when oil prices are going up.

Can somebody tell them the world doesn’t care what they do, OPEC only matters when oil prices are going up.

But they care what the world does. The last thing they want is demand destruction because of high price.

OPEC trying to organize Emergency Meeting to "cut" production.

Why would they want to raise prices now ?

Do they really want to increase the already existing movement to go to alternative energy ?
My guess is that they have accepted the fact that the alternative energy train has already left and they cannot stop it.
In the meanwhile, milk everybody as much as they can.

They do want excessive inventory either. They are walking a fine line.

In the end, all cartels fail.

All OPEC wants is highest possible value for their oil.

I don't believe they care about alternative energy.

This world has shown very little progress towards alternative energy.

In another 4-5 years we will again be talking about peak oil.

In another 4-5 years we will again be talking about peak oil.

Hopefully. Or else we are in really deep shit.

Just an oily note here. In the mid-80s my wife was in the geology department of a midwestern university and had a prof who had been deeply in the Oil & Gas industry. He maintained that it was the strategic policy of the US to use up other countries' reserves of oil before using our own, and so we would be "the last man standing."

OTOH, the Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of rocks. The Petroleum Age will end, OPEC knows it, and has to play for time, 'cause they damn sure haven't been investing in economic alternatives for their countries.

TOB:

Exactly.

He maintained that it was the strategic policy of the US to use up other countries’ reserves of oil before using our own, and so we would be “the last man standing.”

Yup. Once cheap foreign oil becomes expensive foreign oil, expensive domestic oil becomes cheap.

This is already happening, btw.

Quote from the link above :

"What's going on in America is a result of the violation of the rights of people in Palestine, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Muslims around the world."

The reasons for our financial mess is growing by the day . LOL :-)

Actualy i think the real reason for our financial mess is patrick.net which promoted the housing bubble conspiracy :-)

I am all for printing money to exhaust the foreign oil reserve, no skin off my back. The thing is, I believe that they are waking up to this plot.

It is H4 day again. And I am semi-delighted to find out our beloved Fed has grown its asset to almost $1.8T, compared to 2 months ago, that's almost $800B increase on the balance sheet. The only concern I have is it is not growing as fast as it should. Growth is always a highly desirable element in this country.

That's why I never understand the $700B debacle. What is the problem, do you see Fed growing its balance sheet with any restraint? That's already $800B growth within last 2 months, right there. Need any congress and senate approval?

I'd like to know why they make such a big fuss out of the $700B, which will be paled by the growth of Fed's balance sheet in the next few months. Fed is going to have a $2T, $3T balance sheet full of sh*t, I really do not see why they need to make a fuss out of a mere $700B.

I really believe this is for show to our creditors as if this amount of money is coming from anyone other than the thin air.

I also believe that there are many easter eggs in that 400-page bill (we already know some, 0 banking reserve for one), maybe that is the reason why they are making such a big fuss out of the drama, just to slip in the easter eggs since nobody has any time to read a 400-page addition within 3 days.

It is called Capitalism Without Failure, aka socia!ism for the rich.

It is good to see the truth in living color, rather than believe some fairy tale taught to grade school children.

Don't worry about that balance sheet expansion; it's being financed (to the tune of $90B more this past week) by the Treasury. When all boats are falling, dollars don't look that bad.

MST

I am just being sarcastic. It is deleveraging, I don't believe in the strength of usd for even a brief moment, I am glad that someone up there is giving me more time to turn on USD wage into something useful.

Metal prices have too much speculative component in them right now. I think warren buffet's commentary on metals in general is quite apt.

I think gold prices will see a TEMPORARY drop given that people are slowly moving from depression fear to recession fear.They are buying in to fed's magical powers.

*not an investment advice*

What I don't get is why do people buy metals on ebay? You are going to spend a grand, and you trust the other party is going to ship you something real, or something at all?

I don't understand the ebay fad, and I personally have only sold things on ebay, never bought anything, cannot trust an outfit that only exists virtually. The rating system can be professionally gamed, and I know companies that do that, by creating lots of false identities and conducting bogus transactions to boost rating of a new seller.

TOB,

I saw this about 6 months ago. I like the simple big picture view of this E8 theory. When you dig deeper into this you see how complex it is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oycE0r_azP8

Here is another video of a rotation of this complex mathematical idea.

Just remember that many particles were predicted with math long before any empirical evidence of the particle was found.

OO says

I personally have only sold things on ebay, never bought anything
For you to sell things on ebay, somebody needs to engage in the same fad you are questioning

When stakes are not that high, I think you need to sometimes just trust in general goodwill that exists in our society . If the whole world is so paranoid , we will have trust crisis just like liquidity crisis. The world will stop functioning :-)
I am more than willing to take a small risk for low priced items based on the reviews.

http://homepages.wmich.edu/~drichter/gossetzome.htm

Wow! I wonder how long this took to build.

snmr,

I would rather go to Target or a retail store to get the small things. Maybe I don't have that many niche habits looking for extremely exotic objects in small value.

Based on what I know of these professional rating agencies, I think the trust most have on eBay is abused, to a certain extent. I trust Amazon, because if something goes wrong, I send back the item for refund. For more niche products, I prefer craigslist so that I can meet the seller in person.

The credit bubble got so big precisely because we "trusted" each other, and the system too much that some clever abusers come along to take advantage of us all. I don't mind if I cannot sell an item on ebay, because it is not a medium that I rely on to get things done.

There's much more goodwill if you can attach a face to a person.

That E8 group is over 100 years old. The math is so complex, you would work your entire life to solve it on paper. It is so complex that they had to solve 1/2 of it at a time on the computer and then combine the results.

Scientist can only be as good as their tools and instruments. Imagine a modern doctor trying to explain the concept of a virus to another doctor just a 100 years ago.

TOB :

Why do you keep dragging india in to discussions.
This blog gets hijacked by eventual race/H1b ..etc discussions when you keep doing this.
how old are you anyways ?

>> how old are you anyways ?

The Original Bankster must be over 40 and could be black ....

America could regain its footing if we were willing to accept the pain now and start building a real economy. This financial alchemy is wastes resources. The bailouts just make this more and more impossible.

If we can make energy cheap and drive technology, we can take the status of World Super Power back. Now we need figure out how to get kids to study engineering and science. Like most things, money is the method I would choose to motivate behaviors.

I will never see how cheap human labor could ever be cost competitive with robots on a production line. I see it ever day I work. I do not make electricity. The machinery that I watch after makes the electricity. I just work at an energy factory. The productivity of 12 well educated and trained people make enough electricity to power about 800,000 homes.

Now imagine modern factories where autonomous machinery manufactures every thing. The only people required would be highly trained people to operate/repair the equipment. The service economy that we stuck in our crack pipe could be possible if we had some industrialization. Sad fact: We can’t make large steel components for power plants. We are at the mercy of Spain, France or Japan!

With technology, we could collect massive amounts of resources for production, cheaply move the goods, and make 1 human more productive than 10,000 humans in a third world shit hole. Just imagine what cheap access to space and the ability to mine asteroids with robots could do for us.

On another note: That E8 group has the golden ratio that I talked about in the last thread. I think it is so cool that you can take small parts of math and piece them together to make complex models.

*where=were