Posts by DaveDaveDave

Re: Profit in Money Creation

"The bank uses the collateral (my promise) to create 10 units so I can aquire the 10 widgets, no problem."

That's the bit that's not true. In the real world, at least, that bank has to borrow the 10 units it just lent you, in order to balance its books.

Re: @rob

"Put another way: whom should we be rewarding and supporting more -- teachers or bankers?"

I think the fundamental problem here is that you don't understand what bankers actually do, so you can't see why they're getting more money than teachers. The 'moving zeros around' you refer to above isn't actually that at all: they're (among other things) using abstract concepts to transport physical, real objects* through time to where they're needed.

*Not via a time portal, obviously. Often not the same physical objects, but ones which are fungible.

It's probably easiest to understand on a very small scale. Imagine Ug the caveman has a pot of mastodon soup today, far more than he can eat, and Og, the occupant of the cave just down the ravine, has been busy chipping out some odd stone disc with a hole in the middle and has no food. Ug gives Og a bowl of soup, in exchange for a promise to get a bowl of soup back tomorrow. The next day, Og goes hunting and pays his debt.

From Ug's perspective, he's moved a bowl of soup through time from today to tomorrow, from a time of excess to a time of scarcity. Og's done the same thing, but the other way around. Oh, and by working together, they've used their time more efficiently and now have time to notice that Og's round rock is much easier to move if you roll it along the ground than if you carry it.

Banks are largely just doing that kind of thing, but on a much bigger, vastly more complex scale.

Re: Smoke and Mirrors

"Is this an urban myth or would something of this sort increase a nation's GDP?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

It's not quite one or the other. One of the widely acknowledged problems with GDP is as you say: cleaning up some disaster can technically add to GDP in the short term. In the longer term, though, the economy is going to suffer the effects of having put that effort into clean-up where otherwise the effort could have been invested in something new/useful, so GDP will be lower.

"According to a (Corbyn-supporting friend) bankers are making precisely those billions and spending it on themselves. They are also taking it directly from the pockets of the "deserving poor" for no motive other than all bankers are evil. On the other hand,same person wonders from time to time why he should work simply to lose so much in tax on a low salary (sub £15k) when others around him don't work at all yet get (London) housing provided and always seem to have more cash to spend at the end of the week. "

And that's where camp guards came from...

Re: @DaveDaveDave - Politicians really hate it

"You really do have a bee in your bonnet about "The Jooz", don't you..."

No, about the antisemites who tell such absurd stories as that the (Jew-controlled, natch) media is manipulating national governments into going to war. As I said, it's verging on antisemitic conspiracy territory, and I'll add that it's perhaps unintended by the OP - which I thought literally went without saying given the language I used.

Re: Politicians really hate it

"You have heard of William Randolph Hearst, have you?"

Of course. To stretch from that to claiming that a primary cause of wars is manipulation by the media is fatuous, and, perhaps coincidentally in this case, manipulation of world governments by the media is a well-known antisemitic trope.

Re: Politicians really hate it

"Even the most amateur student of history knows that one of the primary causes of war is state secrecy (another one is irresponsible journalists stoking conflict in the interests of circulation.)"

What an utterly ludicrous set of claims - the latter verging on an antisemitic conspiracy theory.

Re: Government’s role is to provide the opportunity for massive advances in technology [..]

"I'm not aware of him having stated that Jewish people are responsible for our economic and social woes (please feel free to link to a quote to the contrary if I'm mistaken)."

That's the underlying principle of Corbynomics. Corbyn dances around the edge of acceptability in terms of language - he doesn't come right out and say it's 'the jooz', but simply uses codewords and allusions. It's all straight out of the Protocols/The International Jew, apart from the one word missing.

Of course, you can excuse away each of Corbyn's actions individually, but looked at as a whole this is a man who has supported and funded Holocaust denial for decades, associated closely with leading neo-Nazis and other assorted antisemites, criticised Israel in a manner that even his supporters have to admit is unbalanced, stated his belief in conspiracy theories about 9/11 and the NWO, and who now expects us to believe that the thinly veiled antisemitic conspiracy theory he's currently wielding is truly just directed at 'bankers'. Given his track record as a flagrant liar*, it's ridiculous to suggest that there's any doubt left about what he's really about.

*Everything from the lies about 'bankers' stealing hundreds of billions in QE, to the ones about how he doesn't claim expenses (while in fact he's actually fiddling them), to the ones about how he isn't a multi-millionaire fraud.

"I don't trust politicians full stop and am happy to take the piss out of them (hell, they've been taking the piss out of us for years) but the nazi thing is a bit of a stretch."

If only it were. I don't like the political class generally, but Corbyn's so vile that he makes Cameron and Blair look like an attractive option. It's not a stretch at all to point out that being in favour of a Fascist, socialist state built on antisemitic lies has a name, and that name is undoubtedly Nazism.

"Democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all the others"'

"'I really wish people would stop using this quotation. Most of human society has been governed under a non-democratic process and surprisingly it worked. "

FSVO worked. Is crushing poverty, slavery, rigidly stratified society, and so-on a good thing?

Re: Corbyn's broader and more useful aims?

"As long as building regulations control isn't repealed as well, and there is some sort of overview so that you don't get a ten-mile long road with houses filling both sides meaning it's impossible to develop the next bit of land out as there's nowhere to join on an access road."

If there's enough to be worth developing, it's worth buying and demolishing a house to put in an access road.

Similarly, while you can't say 'oh, I'll just buy a different brand of house next time', you can be aware of the experiences of others, what kind of certification and insurance the housebuilder offers, and so-on.

Re: Would Tim have rescued Rolls Royce in the seventies?

"That's the sort of thing that nationalisation and or recapitalisation can solve. Making shite cars, a la BL, isn't."

When it comes to BL, it's a notable example of government interference being the root of the problems. If they'd just kept their hands off, BL would have stood a fighting chance.

Re: Government’s role is to provide the opportunity for massive advances in technology [..]

You can have an opinion on service quality of trains, utilities, etc, but the outcomes the NHS generates are matters of fact, not opinion, and you're not remembering accurately. Not that it's been privatised or cut anyway, but outcomes have massively improved even since the eighties - although of course the same is true for non-NHS medical care too.

"If nothing else, Corbyns lot (and I don;t as yet know what to make of 'em) will present us with something different to consider"

But it's not a new 'something different', just something so vile that we rejected it about 75 years ago, then fought a world war against it. I really don't see any merit in rediscussing 'the Jewish Question'. Corbynism is very simple, really: there is a magic money tree, and currently 'the Jooz' steal its fruit; if we, ahem, finally solve that problem, we can share the money around and everything will be rainbows and moonbeams and kittens.

Re: I still can't work it out...

"All it's saying is..."

Yes, but you're ignoring the implications. Corbyn didn't say the state should be creating conditions in which other actors can thrive, but that it should be taking a stake, an active role, in controlling those actors' choices. That's fascism in a nutshell.

Re: The Knowledge

Satnav alone doesn't know enough to beat anyone who drives regularly in an area - that's a given. The correct comparison is between the black-cabbies and others who drive regularly in central London. To quote Bill Bryson:

I took a cab to Hazlitt's Hotel on Frith Street. I like Hazlitt's because it's intentionally obscure ­ it doesn't even have a sign out front ­ which puts you in a rare position of strength with your cab driver. Let me say right now that London cab drivers are, without question, the finest in the world. They're trustworthy, safe, generally friendly, always polite. They keep their vehicles spotless inside and out, and they will put themselves to the most extraordinary inconvenience to drop you at the front entrance of your destination. There are really only two odd things about them. One is that they cannot drive more than 200 feet in a straight line. I've never understood this, but no matter where you are or what the driving conditions, every 200 feet a little bell goes off in their heads and they abruptly lunge down a side­street. And when you get to your hotel or railway station or wherever it is you are going, they like to drive you all the way around it at least once so that you can see it from all angles before alighting.

The other distinctive thing about them, and the reason I like to go to Hazlitt's, is that they cannot bear to admit that they don't know the location of something they feel they ought to know, like a hotel. They would sooner entrust their teenaged daughters to Alan Clark for a weekend than concede even fractional ignorance of The Knowledge, which I think is rather sweet. So what they do instead is probe. They drive for a bit, then glance at you in the mirror and in an over­casual voice say, 'Hazlitt's ­ that's the one on Curzon Street, innit, guv? Opposite the Blue Lion?' But the instant they see a knowing smile of demurral forming on your lips, they hastily say, 'No, hang on a minute, I'm thinking of the Hazelbury. Yeah, the Hazelbury. You want Hazlitt's, right?' He'll drive on a bit in a fairly random direction. 'That's this side of Shepherd's Bush, innit?' he'll suggest speculatively.

When you tell him that it's on Frith Street, he says, 'Yeah, that's the one. Course it is. I know it ­ modern place, lots of glass.'

'Actually, it's an eighteenth­century brick building.'

'Course it is. I know it.' And he immediately executes a dramatic U­turn, causing a passing cyclist to steer into a lamppost (but that's all right because he has on cycle clips and one of those geeky\slipstream helmets that all but invite you to knock him over). 'Yeah, you had me thinking of the Hazelbury,' the driver adds, chuckling as if to say it's a lucky thing he sorted that one out for you, and then lunges down a little side­street off the Strand called Running Sore Lane or Sphincter Passage, which, like so much else in London, you had never noticed was there before.

And things have only got worse since then. The reality is that these days there are any number of delivery drivers, couriers, tradesmen, and just ordinary people who know central London better than most cabbies.

Re: Insurance

""valid insurance" and "Private Hire insurance" are not the same thing."

Yes, of course they are, if you're operating a cab. Don't be silly.

"private hire insurance is on the order of 7 to 12 times more expensive than standard everyday driver insurance."

And yet, regular minicabs exist in plentitude here. Your ridiculous strawman is particularly obvious.

Re: Insurance

"Knowing the cost of insurance for private hire, I doubt the majority of Uber drivers are insured correctly, they'd have to carry plenty of fares just to cover the insurance."

Easy to spot an astroturfer. Uber checks drivers have valid insurance. And amazingly enough, not that many fares need to be carried - that's how every other cab manages to pay it despite getting less business than Uber cabs.

Re: SatNav Vs The Knowledge

Loads of people - delivery drivers, street sweepers, long-time office workers - know their way around central London just as well as the black-cab drivers.

Really, whatever it may have been in the past, these days The Knowledge doesn't really exist as anything other than a variable-height barrier to entry; the only important question is 'who do you know?'. If the cabbies want to let you into their club - usually because you're a relation or friend of a current/former cabbie - then you'll get questions like 'what road is Camden Road station on?' If you have the temerity to show up as an outsider who's merely learnt every street and site in central London, you'll be asked things like 'which street in London has a tree next to a letterbox outside number 71?'

The cab cartel likes to quote stuff about the number of failures - something like 75% of 'tests' are 'failed', but what they don't like to be mentioned is that the people who ever pass almost all pass first time, whereas those who don't pass first time can come back for multiple goes over several years and still fail every time.

Re: Extra, extra, thick Zog

"What's the one sentence summary of this article?"

Improved communications encourage growth through allowing actors in an economy to make better informed (and so more efficient) decisions.

As for how, that's less clear than the empirical observations that this does happen.

"And by isolating from calculating other benefits/income support/credits there would be less "I can't afford to [vital activity] and heat my home, cook meals""

But that's people showing their preference for using what money they have a different way. You're implying those people are incapable of deciding for themselves how it'll best benefit them. In fact, though, it's clearly (empirically) established that people prefer agency. They value the ability to allocate resources as they see fit more than a slightly greater total allocation of resources.

Re: The child sized elephant in the room

"A lot of people think we've already exceeded [the carrying capacity of the planet]. This may or may not be true - the error bars are large - but we cannot be that far off."

I really don't think we're even vaguely close to it, or even to a point where we'd be undesirably crowded. We're still a very long way off from any crisis point, and will almost certainly never reach it. The more moderate predictions are that the global population will peak at around 8-10 billion, some time in the next century or thereabouts.

As far as living conditions go, it's noteworthy that the US has a population density about a quarter or third of the EU's - and the EU is hardly a densely built up urban area, it's a perfectly pleasant place to live with a variety of land uses including extensive nature reserves etc. Essentially that means you could triple or quadruple the US population - an extra billion or more people - without noticeably impacting on anyone's quality of life.

Or there's the UK's population density - double the above figure again, and while we're not hermits here, we're not massively overcrowded.

Japan's definitely crowded, but it has at least ten times the population density of the US without being a total shithole.

And of course there's New York, which has about 25k people per square km. If they all lived in cities that densely populated, a billion people would take up just 40 sq km, which is nothing.

So, pretty clearly land area isn't a problem. What else will be? There's plenty of un- or under-used agricultural land, let alone things we could do with sea farming - and actual peak capacity would include Soylent Green... - so food's not a limitation. Power could be, except we're moving off fossil fuels anyway. And as our esteemed host has written a book about it, we can't argue that metals etc are in short supply.

Re: I'll be damned...

"" Venezuela is a shithole", yes, but is that just because of their economic policy or also because of the massive levels of corruption which are endemic in that part of the world?"

It's the economic policies, overwhelmingly. It ought to be doing better than its neighbours like Trinidad and Guyana, but it's doing far worse.

Re: I'm still thinking

"We still have the need for skilled educated people who can be trained up, but for a lot of folks... unemployment looms"

Why? Are you seriously suggesting that there's nothing which could be done by unskilled labour to satisfy some currently unsatisfied human desire?

People said much the same things about the automation of farming that you're saying here, when that removed 90% or so of the then-existing jobs over a generation or two. But in fact people find other things to do with their time, other needs to satisfy.

Re: Insurance

"Hire companies currently clean cars between customers, but their customers are hiring by the day. How will that work when they hire by the minute?"

It works just fine for DriveNow. When you get into the car, it asks about condition/cleanliness. If the previous user has left it dirty, you tell them, the car gets cleaned, and the slob who left it that way gets fined.

Re: So this is what the party of No Platform has become...

"I'm still waiting to hear evidence for it."

And you'll be waiting a long time if you keep refusing to hear it. Do you honestly believe that the BoD and JC are saying things they don't believe in order to influence the Labour leadership contest? Why? How would that benefit them? You're dangerously close to antisemitic conspiracy theory territory already, if you argue that they feel Corbyn's economic policies would disproportionately affect Jewish people, and the alternative is that they are genuinely worried by Corbyn's antisemitism.

The fact is that Corbyn has repeatedly endorsed naked antisemitism, for decade after decade. This isn't hidden, it's public knowledge that has been printed in multiple national newspapers. For you to continue to deny its existence says a lot about the mindset of the Corbynites.

Re: Thank god!

I don't think it is in any sense unjustified. Corbyn's a raving antisemite, a thoroughly dishonest fake leftie only in it for the money. The hypocrisy is so immense that they can smell it in New Zealand.

Re: Thank god!

"All power to Corbyn. If he achieves nothing else, he's at least shown that there is some decency left in the world."

Poe's law applies. I honestly can't tell if you're joking, given that his supporters don't appear to have noticed that he's a flagrant liar, a multi-millionaire who fiddled his expenses and lied about it, etc etc. He's the vilest man in Westminster - and would be even if Cyril Smith was still there, and naked.

Re: Interesting times

Some things shouldn't be debated anymore because we've put them to bed long ago - like Corbyn's insane conspiracy theories about 'the joos' running the world. Much as he might like to, we really don't need to reopen the debate on the 'Jewish problem'.

Re: Fiat currency?

As far as Jaguar's name change from SS goes, don't forget that car production stopped during the war. They were never called SS Motors after 1939, basically.

Deflation

Deflation seems to be widely misunderstood. Things getting cheaper is not deflation. The same number of currency units buying more of something at the same (real terms) price is. In other words, deflation is about a change in the value of money, not in the cost of goods.

Measures of inflation like CPI/RPI are a proxy, not inflation itself. As such, one needs to look at them and note that e.g. electronics have been getting much cheaper, and try to have a basket of goods which consists of things like e.g. bread which are at a much later stage of development when it comes to things like production methods.

Re: The issue with deflation

"pretty much everything will be cheaper in six months, almost everything is desired but not needed, and yet purchases aren't deferred indefinitely?"

If I buy a tool for my work which costs £1k, and earn £10k with it this year, the fact that next year I could buy it for £500 isn't relevant. If it's next week, it is. The trade-off between time waited and money saved is a pretty obvious one.

Now, simply substitute 'utility' for the money earned working with the tool. That could be enjoyment, it could be employment, it could be whatever a person wants it to be. They're capable of weighing up one against the other, having regard to their purchasing power over time.

Re: Keep Tim

"Considering their wealth you would assume that the Rothschilds would be mentioned in the media "

What you're missing here is that this stuff's all a lie. The Rothschilds are not extraordinarily rich, simple as that. Between them the family is worth maybe single digit billions. Yes, that's certainly absolutely loaded by our standards, but it's not even close to the richest people on the planet.

It's true that at one point the Rothschilds were a particularly prominent banking family in the Anglo-Saxon culture. That was at about the beginning of the 20th century. A whole load of antisemitic propaganda was created around that time - by people like Hitler's inspiration, Henry Ford - about the Rothschilds, and as it's aged, it's become more and more obviously crackpot.

Re: I gave up on Wikipedia a while ago...

Forget Israel. I can't imagine any of the pages relating to anywhere in that region contain any reliable information at all thanks to people dedicated to pushing their particular view. Not even the one about hummus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars/Ethnic_feuds#Hummus_and_friends

Re: Are most Wiki editors employed to spin a vision?

"The trick seems to be to get dodgy info published elsewhere thus ensuring half truths become become Wiki facts!"

If you do it right, you use Wiki as the source for a blog post on somewhere Wikipedia considers reliable (like Gawker...), and then use that in turn as the reference for the Wiki article.