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Messages - GreatJustice

Pages: 1 ... 14 15 [16] 17 18 ... 89
226
General Discussion / Re: Sheb's European Politics Megathread
« on: July 23, 2014, 03:21:20 pm »
Quote from: Darvi on July 23, 2014, 03:13:30 pm
Quote from: Graknorke on July 23, 2014, 02:13:41 pm
But a comma wouldn't even make sense. Maybe the using brackets in sentences like I always though should be a thing would help.
"Dutch military plane, carrying bodies from Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash, lands in Eindhoven."

That works, but personally I'd just replace the word "crash" with something else and carry on

"Dutch military plane carrying bodies from Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 incident lands in Eindhoven."

227
General Discussion / Re: John Galt's Freedom Appreciation Megathread
« on: July 17, 2014, 10:52:03 am »
Quote from: mainiac on July 16, 2014, 09:51:38 pm
Quote from: GreatJustice on July 16, 2014, 09:21:22 pm

I don't recall ever saying that I expected the Fed's bonds to increase at the same rate as comparatively high risk stocks. I said that the Fed's policies meant that a 2% rate of return is basically meaningless and not a profit, but also that the Fed's purpose isn't to make a profit regardless so why do you keep harping on it
Because you called the assets worthless.
[Citation Needed]


Quote from: mainiac on July 16, 2014, 09:51:38 pm
I don't really give a shit about your harebrained handwaving on the other stuff but I want to set the record straight on the fact that no, the Fed doesn't give money away.

I bought my cousin's dollar store hat off him for $500,000, but see that isn't giving him money that's making an honest market purchase and I'll have you know that hat is actually worth something too

228
General Discussion / Re: John Galt's Freedom Appreciation Megathread
« on: July 16, 2014, 09:21:22 pm »
Quote from: mainiac on July 16, 2014, 08:26:26 pm
Quote from: GreatJustice on July 16, 2014, 12:58:19 pm
Quote from: mainiac on July 15, 2014, 07:12:27 pm
Quote from: GreatJustice on July 15, 2014, 02:58:12 pm

Thanks for the ground breaking revelation that stocks and unleveraged bond portfolios should have the same nominal rate of return without accounting for risk premiums.

Economics is a science, believe it or not and conflating those rates in this particular situation is about misleading as swapping Fahrenheit and Celsius values without conversion.  And then just waving your hands about unspecified cash transfers is just more of the same on the top.  But what are prices when you remove the prices from their evaluation.  Quite the koan.

The point is that the Federal Reserve isn't making any real profit on those bonds since they're barely keeping up with inflation, and even a first year econ major would know that the Fed isn't buying bonds to make a profit regardless, so you're shifting the topic.

Anyhow, from what I can decipher from your argument (inasmuch as you're making one at all), you seem to think the Fed's bond purchases and current policies don't constitute giving money to the rich because all they do is buy assets at market value, so it isn't really giving them money, just making an honest purchase. Except this argument is circular, because the "market value" of bonds these days is primarily held up by Federal Reserve asset purchases, so the "market value" is realistically whatever the Fed sets it at. Similarly, a hypothetical Fed with no restrictions on purchases could buy donuts at $5 apiece in sufficient volume to drive the price of donuts to that level, and at that point it would be the "market value", but it would be "market value" in a weird, post-Keynesian sense.

I you dont want me "changing the subject" by correcting your factual inaccuracies, stop repeating them.

That's a fun argument that market prices are meaningless if affected by participants.  I didn't know you dabbled in philosophy.  I just wade in the shallow end of political philosophy myself.

I don't recall ever saying that I expected the Fed's bonds to increase at the same rate as comparatively high risk stocks. I said that the Fed's policies meant that a 2% rate of return is basically meaningless and not a profit, but also that the Fed's purpose isn't to make a profit regardless so why do you keep harping on it

Also, market prices are meaningless when the government, or a subsidiary of the government, is capable of using fiat to completely override every other participant.

In Weimar Germany, the government instituted price controls on goods to attempt to combat inflation. Were these arbitrarily low prices at all meaningful?

In the US after the 1930s, it was illegal for individuals to own gold, and the US government very tightly controlled the flow of gold. Were the prices of gold at the time even remotely meaningful?

In the Soviet Union, there were, in fact, prices of goods and services, albeit all provided by and set by the state. Were "prices" in the Soviet Union meaningful?

etc etc etc

229
General Discussion / Re: John Galt's Freedom Appreciation Megathread
« on: July 16, 2014, 12:58:19 pm »
Quote from: mainiac on July 15, 2014, 07:12:27 pm
Quote from: GreatJustice on July 15, 2014, 02:58:12 pm

Thanks for the ground breaking revelation that stocks and unleveraged bond portfolios should have the same nominal rate of return without accounting for risk premiums.

Economics is a science, believe it or not and conflating those rates in this particular situation is about misleading as swapping Fahrenheit and Celsius values without conversion.  And then just waving your hands about unspecified cash transfers is just more of the same on the top.

The point is that the Federal Reserve isn't making any real profit on those bonds since they're barely keeping up with inflation, and even a first year econ major would know that the Fed isn't buying bonds to make a profit regardless, so you're shifting the topic.

Anyhow, from what I can decipher from your argument (inasmuch as you're making one at all), you seem to think the Fed's bond purchases and current policies don't constitute giving money to the rich because all they do is buy assets at market value, so it isn't really giving them money, just making an honest purchase. Except this argument is circular, because the "market value" of bonds these days is primarily held up by Federal Reserve asset purchases, so the "market value" is realistically whatever the Fed sets it at. Similarly, a hypothetical Fed with no restrictions on purchases could buy donuts at $5 apiece in sufficient volume to drive the price of donuts to that level, and at that point it would be the "market value", but it would be "market value" in a weird, post-Keynesian sense.

230
General Discussion / Re: John Galt's Freedom Appreciation Megathread
« on: July 15, 2014, 02:58:12 pm »
Quote from: mainiac on July 15, 2014, 11:50:04 am
Quote from: GreatJustice on July 15, 2014, 09:48:32 am
Making several billion dollars in profits is pretty insignificant when not only is your profit basically being generated by your own gigantic purchases

"Several billions" is a poor description of 88 billion.

A ~2% annual return on investment for safe assets is if anything a little above what you would expect for a zero leverage portfolio of that composition.

"Several billions" isn't too bad when, to my recollection, the Fed purchases 65 billion dollars worth of such assets monthly. Also, a 2% RoI isn't very good when you factor in the fact that stocks are generally shooting through the roof thanks for aforementioned low interest rates, which basically means that 2% RoI is "breaking even" after accounting for inflation at best.
Quote from: mainiac on July 15, 2014, 11:50:04 am
Quote from: GreatJustice on July 15, 2014, 09:48:32 am
Meanwhile, besides direct asset purchases on Wall Street, the Fed also buys Treasuries, except it doesn't buy them directly; the Fed purchases are middle-manned by Wall Street firms, which basically constitutes about a trillion dollars literally going straight to Wall Street.

Yes that money literally goes to the group of entities that laypeople generally conflate with Wall Street.  It literally goes to them because of assets purchased at market value.

Just last week literally hundreds of dollars went from my boss to me.  Aren't I lucky.

Assets purchased for the purpose of stimulating the stocks and bonds, which, again, overwhelmingly benefits the rich, ignoring the direct transfers of cash to Wall Street firms (which, again, make money from middle-manning the purchases). This is a similar end (with a different means) to the one sought by supply-siders, only with direct asset purchases instead of indirect tax cuts. I'm not sure why the latter is somehow unacceptable but whatever.

231
General Discussion / Re: John Galt's Freedom Appreciation Megathread
« on: July 15, 2014, 09:48:32 am »
Quote from: mainiac on July 14, 2014, 10:03:10 pm
Quote from: GreatJustice on July 14, 2014, 09:17:39 pm
I dunno, both parties seem to support the idea of the rich accumulating money being equivalent to the economy improving, they just have different methods of achieving that goal. The Republicans support tax breaks etc while the Democrats support literally giving them several trillion dollars indirectly via Federal Reserve purchases.

"Literally giving" in this case meaning "purchasing financial assets from them at market value".  The purchased assets are hardly worthless: conservative source, liberal source

Making several billion dollars in profits is pretty insignificant when not only is your profit basically being generated by your own gigantic purchases, but your expenditures are in the multi-trillion dollar range. Anyhow, besides that, a monetarist conservative would argue that cutting taxes can lead to increased revenues going by the Laffer Curve, but that's largely beside the point.

Meanwhile, besides direct asset purchases on Wall Street, the Fed also buys Treasuries, except it doesn't buy them directly; the Fed purchases are middle-manned by Wall Street firms, which basically constitutes about a trillion dollars literally going straight to Wall Street. Further, interest rates are held artificially low, which hugely stimulates the stock market, of which 90% is owned by the richest 10%. So people flip out about how the Republicans only care about the rich when they get tax cuts amounting to tens of billions of dollars each year, but have no comment when they receive trillions directly and indirectly.

232
General Discussion / Re: John Galt's Freedom Appreciation Megathread
« on: July 14, 2014, 09:17:39 pm »
Quote from: greatorder on July 14, 2014, 06:31:24 pm
Republicans seem to be based on the idea that the more money the rich accumulate and don't spend, the better the economy is.

And that anything opposing this view is EVIL COMMIE PROPAGANDA!

I dunno, both parties seem to support the idea of the rich accumulating money being equivalent to the economy improving, they just have different methods of achieving that goal. The Republicans support tax breaks etc while the Democrats support literally giving them several trillion dollars indirectly via Federal Reserve purchases.

233
General Discussion / Re: John Galt's Freedom Appreciation Megathread
« on: July 10, 2014, 01:44:41 am »
So a politician is supposed to represent their constituents. Okay. But if they're absolutely supposed to represent their constituents, then you don't need elections, political parties, political platforms, or any of the other panoplies of modern democracy. Just pick a reasonably open minded lawyer from a given population, send him to Congress, and then periodically hold polls on specific issues as they come up. The "representative" would then have to get his "constituents" what they voted for however possible. That's really the only system in which politicians wouldn't be lying to either the supporters which campaigned for them or the moderates that swung the vote in their favour (where applicable).

Also, this only applies to systems in which the candidate actually represents the area in a meaningful sense. In Ontario, we recently had provincial elections that were contested between three parties, the Liberals (mildly left of centre), the Conservatives (right wing), and the NDP (usually far left, but a bit more populist recently). In Parliament, representatives basically have to vote for the party line, so they don't get the freedom American legislators get when it comes to "representing their constituents", so instead the parties basically support measures that help the areas that got them into parliament. In the case of the last election, the Liberals had a seat in Windsor held by a Cabinet Minister that they really wanted to keep, so they did a fair bit of campaigning talking about all the local improvements we could get from infrastructure spending, increased investment by the provincial government in the area's healthcare system, and so on. Well, the Liberals ended up losing the seat to the NDP, who dominated the north and southwest, while similarly not doing so well in most of the province. Yet they won overwhelmingly in Toronto, which basically gave them the election and a majority government, despite having lost basically everywhere else bar a few cities. Further, because of the Toronto seats, they won a majority government with about 37% of the vote, showing just how hard they were pummelled elsewhere. So obviously the talk of the area is that the Liberals aren't going to be sending much funding for hospitals or supporting policies that would benefit the southwest, and will instead be representing their "constituents" in Toronto. Does this at all seem like a good way for a democracy to function?

234
General Discussion / Re: John Galt's Freedom Appreciation Megathread
« on: July 09, 2014, 01:28:31 pm »
Quote from: GavJ on July 09, 2014, 01:18:29 pm
Quote
politicians who would rather no get re-elected, and instead let someone else represent the constituency, than endorse the types of bills their former constituents want?
Those politicians if they feel that way should then step down and allow an emergency election (or whatever method the state has in place for replacements) so that they don't tie up however many years of time with the people not being represented.

Just sitting around anyway, collecting your paycheck, taking up a slot, and not representing people because you changed your mind is ridiculous and corrupt. Especially since the next guy in office can't go back in time and vote on the bills coming up on the docket right now that you are ignoring...

There can be situations where not representing your constituents for a time could be considered to be the right thing anyway. For example, I doubt you would decry someone that supported civil rights legislation in the 1950s in an area where it was unpopular, yet that would qualify as "not representing the people".

235
General Discussion / Re: John Galt's Freedom Appreciation Megathread
« on: July 09, 2014, 11:27:04 am »
I don't really care much for democracy in the first place, but I've gotta say you guys aren't giving the American system much credit. Yeah, it's really corrupt, inefficient and unrepresentative, but at least the last two parts were basically designed into the system by the Framers. You had Federalists who wanted a fairly modest (by today's standards) government in charge with a very significant number of Anti-Federalists that basically wanted the government to be incapable of much of anything. Most of both wanted to make a system that prevented the government from being able to oppress anyone the way they believed the British did them, and they realized that bad things could come from the majority simply straight up having the power to pass laws screwing over a minority. So they designed a very inefficient system in which passing a law takes quite a lot of effort, with the idea being that only relatively straightforward legislation with broad support from all of society would pass - keep in mind, originally the Senate was appointed (as it still is in other countries eg Canada), so the separation of powers was even more acute back then. Now obviously they didn't succeed in preventing legislation they otherwise would have strongly disagreed with from making it through, but they did succeed in making a very inefficient, messy system in which government programs tend to be far less efficient than their counterparts elsewhere due to various compromises that need to be included to get them created at all.

Anyhow, so far as corruption goes, massive campaign donations and gerrymandering certainly don't help, but it's not as though removing them would somehow make politicians any more honest to their constituents or less corrupt. There is plenty of corruption and support for gigantic banking firms at the expense of the people across Europe, and politicians there actually have the campaign donation restrictions and relatively representative elections. Corruption of politicians can come from a lot more than straight up campaign donations.

Anyway, even assuming politicians were honest, unless they're all unusually knowledgeable they'll be reliant on "experts" when it comes to specific issues like the economy, and those "experts" will probably be from a government agency. What tends to happen, and this is VERY evident in agencies relating to the economy like the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, the FEC, and so on, in such agencies is that people from the private sector enter them for relatively safe, cushy jobs and people from the agency leave for the private sector to make the big bucks. Naturally, both are looking out for each other, so the banks will tend to not do anything that particularly agonizes the government (barring some financial regulation skirting on occasion, which isn't a big enough deal for most to care), and the agency will regulate where possible in ways that favour their friends back in the private sector. Sometimes these regulators don't have absolute control for making things pleasant for their friends though, and they have to get the politicians to bend to their will, yet this isn't hard if the politician isn't an expert in their field (and 99 times out of 100 he won't be), since they can simply flash their "Expert" credentials and convince non-ideological, relatively honest politicians to basically give money straight to their friends. Now of course they don't usually need to do this because the banks are rich and influential enough to basically buy politicians wholesale, but that's what would happen assuming that wasn't possible. Now you could say they could get an unbiased representative of the field, but in some fields that's basically impossible. Just look at economics; if you put a hundred economists in the same room, they'd manage to come up with a hundred completely different ideas for how to improve the economy. The fundamental ideas of economics can radically change in a very short period of time; the basic ideas of 200 years ago would be radically different from those 100 years ago, 50 years ago, or those held today. Yet they don't necessarily move "forward" in the sense that they become any more reliable, since the more mainstream ideas in macro would be closer to the views of the classicists of 200 years ago than those of the more laissez faire economists 100 years ago. If I want to push any agenda, I could find a fair number of economists that would just so happen to support my views. So it isn't really an easy to find an unbiased person in such fields to rely on.

236
General Discussion / Re: John Galt's Freedom Appreciation Megathread
« on: July 08, 2014, 06:55:19 pm »
Quote from: palsch on July 08, 2014, 11:48:04 am
Quote from: GreatJustice on July 08, 2014, 08:33:05 am
Nope. NSA shouldn't exist for that matter.
No individuals ever? For any reason? In any context?

Is there a warrant, and attained from actual legal process (as opposed to telling a secret judge "He's a terrorist!" and getting it rubber stamped)? Would the person have been considered worth following pre-2001 without all the nonsense of the PATRIOT Act? If those are passed, possibly there would be reason to follow them, though it wouldn't be in the hands of the NSA.

Quote from: palsch on July 08, 2014, 11:48:04 am
I'm going to assume you are only talking about the collection, foreign intelligence and counterintelligence side of the NSA and don't mean to say that the US government should not be allowed to have an agency "charged with protection of U.S. government communications and information systems against penetration and network warfare."

Anything the NSA does that is basically concerned with the literal security of the US government is more or less legitimate (inasmuch as anything the US Federal Government does is legitimate, at any rate) would be okay, but then such things are so few that they could be handled by other agencies, with the DoD coming to mind in particular.

Sorry on the late reply btw

237
General Discussion / Re: John Galt's Freedom Appreciation Megathread
« on: July 08, 2014, 08:33:05 am »

Quote
1) Should the NSA (or a similar body) be legally allowed to conduct secret surveillance against individuals? If so what conditions are the minimum requirement for doing so?

Nope. NSA shouldn't exist for that matter.

238
General Discussion / Re: Canadian Politics Mega-Thread!
« on: July 05, 2014, 04:10:44 pm »
Quote from: Levi on July 05, 2014, 02:52:17 pm
Quote from: Neonivek on July 05, 2014, 02:31:42 pm
Quote from: Levi on July 05, 2014, 02:30:48 pm
Shouldn't that have counted as a confession though?  How come the RCMP haven't stepped in?

Do they normally deal with local crimes that can easily be dealt with by the local police?

This is the equivalent of asking the FBI to get involved.

Not sure.  I thought RCMP acts as the police in most cities?  I know where I live we have our own police force, but I wasn't sure that was the same everywhere in Canada.

Most cities have a provincial police force eg. in Ontario we have the OPP. A few cities pay for their own police forces, but they're pretty rare from what I can tell. The RCMP basically cover the jobs the FBI would get otherwise plus a few extra functions.

239
Other Games / Re: Crusader Kings 2 is released.
« on: July 05, 2014, 10:29:06 am »
Quote from: kaian-a-coel on July 05, 2014, 07:12:28 am
Elective is best law.
If you "straight-up lose" by losing the election, you fucked up somewhere. Sure, you may lose your kingdom/empire title, but you don't GAME OVER. You still have at least a duchy. From there you can try and get you re-elected, or just plain faction your way back on the throne.
I never had problems with elective, you just need to raise your heirs good, and maintain good relations with your top vassals.
It's good to note that in elective empires, dukes under vassal kings don't get to vote, and kings get more votes than dukes. So I only have to get half a dozen people to like me.

Tanistry is even better though, since it's basically "Elective, but you can't lose". Unfortunately, I think it only works for the Irish, and it might be completely broken.

240
General Discussion / Re: Canadian Politics Mega-Thread!
« on: July 05, 2014, 01:07:19 am »
Yeah, Canadian telecom kind of sucks. Basically, whatever area you live in has one regional monopoly for cable and one regional monopoly for DSL. These regional monopolies in turn are required to open their lines to competitors, but they don't maintain/improve the infrastructure very much and since the competition is running on their infrastructure, if you subscribe to a smaller company and you get problems coming from the monopoly (problems with the line, problems with the cable box, etc), the monopoly will laugh at you and maybe send a maintenance man to investigate sometime in the next month all the while claiming that you must be responsible for the problem somehow.

Anyhow, it occasionally works out, but it varies from one area to the next. When I lived in BC, the two monopolies were Telus and Shaw, which were very competitive, regularly offered special deals, provided excellent customer service and generally did a good job of things. Meanwhile, in southwestern Ontario, your two options are Cogeco, which is generally apathetic when it comes to customer service and offers mediocre speeds at high prices, or Bell, which makes its money from scamming elderly farmers that don't understand what the internet is (eg. $10-20/month for 10 GB/month at slightly better than dial up speeds) and selling out torrent users to King Harper and his pals in the entertainment industry. The absolute fastest internet I could get, and this is with one of those unreliable minor "competitors" running through Cogeco's infrastructure, is 20MB/s. I've a friend across the river in Michigan who can get about the same speed with a mid-upper tier package from an actual provider for a fraction of the price, and people in the States complain about their internet being slow.

Oh, uh, voting? Well, at least federally, I have the fortune of living in a riding where my vote could conceivably count, since all three major parties have won the seat recently. Less fortunately, I detest the major parties about equally and no worthwhile minor parties (eg. the Marxist-Leninists) have seen fit to run a candidate here. Also, the elections generally aren't that close even though there is a lot of swing because it comes down less to moderate voters being convinced to switch parties and more whether the crazed religious extremists, grumpy, now largely unemployed autoworkers, or rich immigrants decide to show up on any given year.

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