Denver canyon remains closed because too many people are taking selfies with bears Daily Mail
A 17th-Century Woman Artist’s Butterfly Journey Hyperallergic
Fed to dominate week of central bank meetings Reuters
Kenneth Rogoff Slams One of the Most Popular Theories for What the Fed Should Do Next Bloomberg
Lesson for Fed: Higher Interest Rates Haven’t Been Sticking WSJ
In the seven years since the world’s central banks responded to the financial crisis by slashing interest rates, more than a dozen in advanced economies have subsequently tried to move rates back up. Not a single one—in the eurozone, Sweden, Israel, Canada, South Korea, Australia, Chile and beyond—has been able to sustain interest rates at the higher level it sought.
Rain Man in Trouble WSJ (“The Unraveling of Tom Hayes,” Part I). I can’t wait to find out which executives are indicted. Please, no spoilers!
Franklin Templeton sees record outflows FT
BIS Quarterly Review September 2015 – media briefing BIS and Stock sell-off reveals ‘major faultlines’ in economy, BIS says FT
Investors Lose in Today’s Markets, Says Former NYSE Head Grasso Bloomberg
Fears grow over US stock market bubble FT. Shiller weighs in.
Wild Trading Exposed Flaws in ETFs WSJ
Back to the Future…for lunch Jared Bernstein, On the Economy. “So before we conclude we’re all robot fodder, let’s see it in the productivity and investment data.”
Corbyn Victory
John McDonnell appointed shadow chancellor in Corbyn’s new frontbench Guardian
What are the implications of Corbyn’s win for the EU debate and referendum campaign? Open Europe
How underachieving Jeremy Corbyn surprised everyone The Telegraph. Minimal trolling!
Jeremy Corbyn’s Victory and the Demise of New Labour The New Yorker
How Jeremy Corbyn Can Win Jacobin
Battleground Tracker: Sanders Surges in IA, NH; Clinton up in SC CBS
Prospect of shutdown grows The Hill
One last push to stop Medicare premium increases Reuters
Migrant Crisis
Desperation as record numbers of migrants rush into Hungary Agence France Presse
Munich Officials: We’ve Reached ‘Limit’ For Migrants NPR
Germany imposes ‘temporary’ border checks Deutsche Welle
A Refugee Crisis Made in America The American Conservative
After Creating Migration Flood Merkel Throws Up Emergency Dikes Moon of Alabama
Building Norway: a critique of Slavoj Žižek Idiot Joy Showland
Catalonia business split over independence before vote AFP
Greek election stalemate beckons as campaign enters final week Ekathimerini
Syraqistan
Intelligence chief: Iraq and Syria may not survive as states AP
War On Syria; Not Quite According To Plan Part 1. The Islamist-American Love-Hate Quagmire; Facts And Myths Vineyard of the Saker
USAID and the Criminalization of Social Movements in Paraguay Truthout
China?
China economy: growth target in doubt as investment and factory output stutters Telegraph
‘The manufacturing boom in Guangdong is over’: Industrial robot makers the latest to get swallowed up by China’s economic slowdown South China Morning Post
Sluggish China Output and Investment Signal More Stimulus On Way Bloomberg
Foreign Investors and China’s Naval Buildup The Diplomat
Does Soccer Have a Brain-Trauma Problem? New York Magazine
Glyphosate to be labelled a carcinogen in California Chemistry World. Glyphosate being the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup.
French court confirms Monsanto liable in chemical poisoning case Reuters. “[N]eurological problems after inhaling the U.S. company’s Lasso weedkiller.”
Google Mulling Plan To Sell Self-Driving Cars, Offers Brief History Of Project Forbes
Why we should design our computer chips to self-destruct Christian Science Monitor
This 70-Year-Old Programmer Is Preserving an Ancient Coding Language on GitHub Motherboard. A life well-lived!
Range of reactions to realism about the social world Understanding Society
Federalism Form and Function in the Detroit Bankruptcy Melissa Jacoby, SSRN
Poll finds almost a third of Americans would support a military coup Guardian. A YouGov.com poll which, despite its name, is a private entity in Palo Alto, CA. What I can’t see, and would like to know, is who commissioned the poll, and why.
Anyone planning a coup should read this first WaPo
Antidote du jour:
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7hGtzaBRR0
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson interview on ST: Voyager appearance.
Tony Abbott is no longer prime minister of Australia. Replaced minutes ago by Malcolm Turnbull, via a ballot for leadership within the Liberal party. Julie Bishop has also become the deputy pm, replacing Warren Truss.
Live updates.
Yes, been coming for a while.
MT appears to be less to the right, some hope for some real progressive change… Only time will tell.
He is a very intelligent man and has shown empathy, rare for most politicians.
Good riddance to Abbott and Hockey. Waste of rations both of them
MT has a few skeletons in his closet, the most recent being the sabotage of Labor’s FTTP NBN plan, which considering his widely touted technical knowledge is pretty unforgivable. I would, however, agree that he is orders of magnitude better than TA.
Yes, Australia’s record on internet speed is not good and Turnbull’s record on this is not the only skeleton. His motives to get into Parliament were never about money or entitlement. It was always his goal to get into the PM position where he could fulfill his destiny and lead the country, and particularly the economy his way.
Been waiting up for the speeches, but it now seems this will happen tomorrow morning.
btw, I got fibre all the way to the house. The tech said we were one of the last places to get it.
Helps when a sitting Federal Minister lives one hundred metres away.
Yep. My favourite is the Australian Rain Corporation fiasco, and their presentations in Russian to the CSIRO. Turnbull press conference on right now on ABC News 24.
Best part is Tony won’t get the PM pension, missed it by 4 days [had to served a min 2 years].
Skippy…. there is always the dole, because I can’t see anyone paying him as a key note speaker, and the book will undoubtedly come with crayons.
It’s a good day to be alive. I’m very happy to hear that he didn’t get that pension, he did nothing but lie and create misery at home and embarrass Australia when on the international stage. Quite simply he does not deserve it.
I think it’s time for me to sign off for the night, had a few beers while watching all this unfold and plan on having a few more to celebrate. Cheers all!
Enjoy!
He’ll hire an American lawyer
Not difficult to be better than Abbott, but for a lot of people he will be better than Shorten, the hollow man leading the ALP, who must have prayed this wouldn’t happen.
Turnbull has quite a resume:
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/sep/14/malcolm-turnbull-australia-prime-minister-journalist-banker-lawyer-spycatcher
Richard Seymour at Lenins Tomb said the other day that Corbyn was the first Socialist Labour leader since George Lansbury in the 30s. He is Turnbulls great-uncle.
We have no-one here that goes close to either Corbyn or Sanders as a real, crusading progressive. And any that do appear wont have the easy target Abbott provided.
Did he do one more shirtfronting on his way out, for old times’ sake?
In Abbott’s own words:
“Nope, nope, nope, nope.”
I think 4 nopes was his record. A veritable wordsmith.
Btw, after TA’s shirtfronting posturing, Sergey Lavrov remarked (whilst in Australia, in the lead up to the Brisbane G20 summit I think) that Putin is a black belt in judo, and would be not be worried if Abbott wanted to have a go. I’m not a betting man, but I know who I’d put my money on.
Perhaps he was a fan of the concept “less is more?” In that vein, Bishop’s trailblazing in the world of emoji interviews portends some continuity, doesn’t it? Or am I missing something from my perch in the States?
No, I think you’ve got it pretty well worked out. Not a total transformation of the Australian political landscape, but most will be very happy to see Abbott go. He was the worst.
Cheers!
Tweet from Umair Haque, author of ‘How to Dream: A Guide to An Extraordinary Life’
— Shorter pundits: we’ll give the Tories a free pass on crazy policies causing stagnation forever. Corbyn, on the other hand, must be stopped. —
“Google Mulling Plan To Sell Self-Driving Cars, Offers Brief History Of Project Forbes”
Well, cruise control counts…
*NOTE: Steven Shladover, California PATH Program Manager, spelled out the five levels of autonomous driving.
Level 1: e.g., adaptive cruise control
Level 2: e.g., combine adaptive cruise control with automatic lane keeping
Level 3: driver can temporarily stop paying attention to the driving and, for example, text or read
Level 4: driver can disengage for a more extensive period of time, maybe even go to sleep, but still restricted in their operating domains, only operate on limited access freeway
Level 5: can replace drivers completely. Can drive anywhere people can drive under the full range of conditions. “Many, many decades in the future,” according to Shladover.
————————————
They neglected to mention Level 4.5 : Driver can listen to NPR on the car radio. hahaha.
I think there is more money (more socially useful) in developing self-folding origami cars, in light of the world’s first $1 million parking spot that will come pretty soon.
BTW, that should be enough for the Fed to raise rates.
If you’re a Precious Silicon Valley Smart Person, sometimes they pay you to work on BS.
Personal parking spots are not a component of the PCE or CPI. This is not inflation.
What I like about a parking space is that it is its emptiness that is being sold.
No improvement on it.
It’s like the Zen thing about the emptiness of a cup that holds water.
For that insight alone, I suppose it’s worth $1 million to someone.
And I like the self-folding feature, because, let’s be frank here, origami is not easy.
Yes, that has a certain sense of value to it. Perhaps they should sell donut holes to entry level New Yawkers. You can save up and hopefully someday have enough donut holes to trade for a parking spot?
Thank God that’s over. I couldnt have taken much more of Abbott’s pious cadences and knowing winks, the rancid mix of spiv and saint. He laid it on with a trowel, as if we were all 5 years old.
He seemed, before he took power, as if he might actually be a clever fella, playing the loyal but limited dork to perfection under Howard then in opposition. Turns out he really was a dill all along.
If you can measure a man by his friends then his roll call of supporters will depress any future biographers. Hockey, Andrews, Bernardi, Cormann, Morrison, Pyne, Dutton… What a captain. What a crew.
Do not forget that Harper is Abbot’s friend also–like two peas in a pod and October 19 will tell the tale.
Present polls essentially show a 3-way tie. If the Liberals and NDP could form a coalition…
This kind of election is the fundamental justification for Instant Runoff aka Ranked Choice Voting.
“The manufacturing boom in Guangdong is over’: Industrial robot makers the latest to get swallowed up by China’s economic slowdown”
hahaha. China lays off robots. Robots engage in wage price war – put parents out of biz. Layoff a robot – but amortized capital cost stays. Chinese companies pay robot unemployment to the bank.
Whodathunk there could be problems with it.
Thank you. That is both the funniest comment I’ve read for a while, and has the most underlying irony.
There are now believed to be 700 to 800, mostly concentrated in Guangdong due to its comprehensive supply chains, and two-thirds are in the red, He said.
The government is partly to blame for exaggerating, or misreading, demand, He added.
But many companies rely on government subsidies and would collapse if these were withdrawn, according to the salesman.
Cities in the province have promised to deliver annual subsidies of between 200 million and 500 million yuan to makers of robots and to the manufacturers who install them on assembly lines.
Yet more is needed, local operators say.
A lot of companies here would collapse without government subsidies. Boeing, General Dynamics, Goldman Sachs, GM, the list is practically endless. They say the same thing. More is needed!
Socialism for them, capitalism for those providing the subsidy.
The interesting thing is that they want to subsidize robot factories at all – it seems counter intuitive – with a billion people, half of them in poverty, why would China want to throw even more of them out of work by replacing them with robots?
Last nite on the BBC stg. about China fixing up the state-owned enterprises. Supposedly to make them more efficient because the government needs tax yuan. Probably the opposite of neoliberal efficiency bec the proceeds go to the gov, otherwise the same. Maybe even buying out foreign investors? There was a teaser PR piece a month ago about how robots have improved Chinese productivity and they don’t make mistakes like humans do. So the intersection of productivity and communism is a robot.
In a related article is this:
While much criticism of the Chinese economy focuses on the protected monopoly status of major state-owned enterprises, seen as suppressing competition and discouraging efficiency gains, the challenge for China’s legions of medium-sized private companies is not too little competition, but too much.
“China has a bad disease,” said Richard Gong, chief executive of the Wecan Group, speaking from his factory on the outskirts of Shanghai, where lines of robots in various states of repair stare blankly at rows of corn in the adjacent vegetable garden.
“Competition within industries is too intense, it’s irrational.”
Wecan started manufacturing automated production lines and recently launched a lucrative sideline in refurbished foreign robot arms, which Gong resells to Chinese carmakers.
Outside of China the robotics sector is dominated by about four major brands, but Gong estimates he faces more than 1,000 competitors in China, many of them start-ups sponsored by local governments as part of a nationwide push to automate Chinese factories.
Good thing robots don’t eat corn.
Yeh, but are robots fanatics of baseball? Fields of dreams, fields of dreams. Fields of dreams/
I would re-settle unemployed robots* in South China Sea islands/atolls.
*Only Han Chinese looking robots, not Filipino or Vietnamese looking robots.
Come on now MTLTPB, Robots are (potential) people too! Give them a break. Let us send the laid off robots to Tibet. There they could study the 2 to the 3rd power Fold Path. Since robots have a well deserved reputation for diligence and focus of action, they will eventually become AIEBs. (Artificial Intelligence Enlightened Beings.) Imagine the world with a few dozen Mecho Dharmas wandering around!
Gives new meaning to turning over a new reef
It is post Peak Labor period for China.
“Lesson for Fed: Higher Interest Rates Haven’t Been Sticking”
Hang on to your credit cards. The Fed may screw up and hit us with that quarter point. Jon Hilsenrath says so.
Meeting tomorrow about the Tor node run by the Lebanon Public Library. Planning on attending. Should be interesting.
“War On Syria; Not Quite According To Plan Part 1. The Islamist-American Love-Hate Quagmire; Facts And Myths”
A lot of myths in that article…
“As a result, America backed down about its decision to invade Syria and settled for the face-saving dealing of Syria’s surrender of it stockpile of chemical weapons.”
Invade Syria?
Using the military to put a puppet government Damascus is invasion even if we call it a “smart war.”
Hasn’t worked out so well in Iraq or Libya. Nor will it work in Syria. If the Assad regime is overthrown in Damascus it won’t end with any western friendly government. It’ll be the Islamic State or al-Nusra. All those middle class intellectuals and western educated liberals are either in exile or cowering under the protection of Assad. The Syrian Revolution turned ugly real quick.
I should probably point out that in Iraq the Islamic State is mostly fueled by revanchist sentiments held by the Iraqi Sunni in the wake of the Iraqi Civil War. While in places like Syria and Libya they are being led by a revolutionary class. In Libya it’s the former Gaddafi loyalists and foreigners who comprise this class while in Syria it’s a combination of local Sunni and foreign jihadis.
Whatever “myths” there are in that article, this is not one of them:
“One of the problems of American foreign policy makers however is that they never learn from previous mistakes. And whilst they try to give the impression that they are the masters of information-intelligence, evidence shows that they have little literal intelligence, ie human-intelligence.”
One former foreign policy maker, who now seeks the presidency, doesn’t seem to have learned very much from her mistakes:
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/32346-hillary-clinton-goes-to-militaristic-hawkish-think-tank-gives-militaristic-hawkish-speech
But, If you take the cynical view (as I do) and assume that the US starts wars to keep the MIC flush with cash, then they have indeed “learned from” previous successes (Iraq war, Afgan war, et al). The emergence of ISIS after destabilizing Iraq, was just a serendipitous result.
Yes, I assume all that, plus the objective of keeping Israel’s muslim neighbors (of which Syria is one) divided and destabilized.
It’s workin’ great — West Bank settlement construction onna roll:
http://www.haaretz.com/news/israel/.premium-1.668448
Yup, West Bank settlements is why I have zero sympathy for Israel. Poke a stick in a hornet’s nest and guess what happens next.
The egoistic colonists dredge up a 3000-year-old woe-is-me narrative dripping with dubious entitlement and false witness against their neighbors, and declare planned extinction for hornets? That’s how it usually goes.
@ L.M.: If indeed it was “serendipitous,” ie, accidental. It’s suspiciously convenient for the interventionists, and literally began in a US prison in Iraq. It might be blowback, that is a monster that escaped control; but it might also be intentional.
According to the Washingtonsblog.com, in Julian Assange’s new book he states that there are 1,400 US military installations around the world: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/09/us-now-has-over-1400-foreign-military-bases-spread-over-120-countries-assange.html.
Since the USA is the main cause of the migrant crisis, why not open these installations to the desperate families fleeing our bombing campaigns? They could then be processed in an orderly fashion for resettlement around the globe. There must be hundreds of facilities in and around the EU and Middle East. Just a thought.
At one point, there were 800 military installations ranging from bases to outposts in Iraq alone. 1,400 may in fact be too low of a number.
re: A Refugee Crisis Made In America
Destroying nation-states and creating failed ones is what the bipartisan U.S. foreign policy has done around the globe, but mostly in the M.E. American Exceptionalism is bad news for humans and other living things.
—“Significantly, the countries that have generated most of the refugees are all places where the United States has invaded, overthrown governments, supported insurgencies, or intervened in a civil war”.—
One can create refugees non-violently, that is, by, for example, financial means.
Something as simple of printing money here, and rush it in and out of a vulnerable country, can do the job of creating refugees.
We have to be careful to say we want to print money here to stimulate our economy…almost surgically careful, to sterilize the operation, by, for example, specifying the new money is to be exclusively for non-financial use, and only for domestic labor and materials.
That is, removing its global reserve currency status temporarily.
Now that is an interesting notion…
What’s interesting / arresting about Giraldi’s article in the American Conservative is that it would have fit just as well in the headlines at Jacobin. So we are in a moral crisis due to abdication of responsibilities by neo-cons and neo-libs–who I’d define as the Republicans sowing resentments and the Democrats reforming their party into looting and irrelevancy–and much of the liberal chattering class, which mainly wants to be quoted. Which is likely why Lambert posted the article.
Comments as well. Sounds just like here. Rigth and left finally seeing some reality. Libertarians have been anti-war for a long time but their absolute worship of the free market and the invisible hand is very disturbing.
The liberal chattering class mostly doesn’t want to chatter about foreign policy because they equate any principled stand on such matters as sounding “wimpy” and “not serious.” Serious people understand that if you want to enforce your will, you are going to have to kill a whole load of people, even people who mean you no harm. America’s chattering liberals don’t like to dwell on it but they are sold on the idea of using force to enforce our ideas about economic, social, and political norms on the benighted peoples of the world is a good idea. So if you point out the vast number of deaths over in Afghanistan since we barged into the place 14 years ago, they will tell you about how awful it was for women under the Taliban and how we’ve got to “stop that.” When you point out that most Afghan women are in exactly the same place they were socially today as they were then, or ask how many Afghan women and children they want to kill and maim in order to “liberate” them, they yell at you for “not caring” or try to change the subject or explain that that is why we have to “stay the course.” The one thing you can’t do with these people is convince them that their initial premise, that it’s America’s job to use force to change other societies to our liking, is a lousy idea. That is why chattering neocons and chattering liberals all wind up saying the same things in the end, just using different rhetoric.
I think we see something similar this election cycle – a candidate looks good on the domestic front, and people are excited, while some ask about his foreign policy positions and how they relate to the Military Industrial Complex.
Why don’t more people find those sort of people too disgusting to acknowledge in polite settings?
Either they really believe it OR of course they recognize their economic privilege flows from such. But if my privilege as a middle class nobody always in danger of falling out of said middle class, and hardly one of the infinitely privileged chattering classes, flows from not just the exploitation but the outright slaughter (well we are talking about wars right?) of the rest of the world then … it is wrong. It is wrong and I have not given up all my possessions and gone into the dessert but nonetheless. End the wars.
The Syrian situation seems more complex than that (though the U.S. is hardly doing peacemaking there). Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. I will give you.
Syria is less complex than Libya. The source of the conflict in Syria was the defections of organized Sunni regime forces who expected to receive Western air power, who were supplemented by for errors Baathists formerly on our payroll during the Surge and the more troublesome Islamic fundamentalists well bussed in with plenty of new weapons, and a similar promise to be recognized as the new rulers of Syria similar to the elite of Benghazi expecting to rule Libya. Western leaders thought knocking over another government would make them look tough. Unlike Libya, smarter military brass knew Syrian air defense represented a threat to our ships and planes and wanted no part, hence the leaking of stories about what a dunce Kerry was. There won’t be any parades for generals who oversee the decline of U.S. air supremacy.
Unlike Libya where France and Italy had refugee concerns from a potential assault on Benghazi, the Western politicos tried to act in Syria to add another notch to its gun. Much like Iraq, attacking Syria was motivated by the perception we could.
Giraldi says his “road to Damascus” moment came in 2008. Maybe he was too young to remember the millions of Vietnamese dead, displaced or fled overseas as a result of the US destroying Vietnam in order to save it.
Interesting thought experiment that I would like to see fleshed out by some expert in the middle east;
What would the Middle East look like today if the West and Israel never went into Iraq or any of the hand full of other “bombing back to the stone age” exercises performed?
Less radicalization.
Millions not killed.
And most importantly tens of millions more barrels of oil a day consumed. Oops! thats goes on the negative side of the ledger I guess.
Or less oil. Those tanks and hummers don’t run on patriotic sentiment. Even when not in use, the Sandy environment meant many vehicles had to be run just for maintenance unnecessary in their home bases.
If we play ifs and only Iraq because it’s a huge deal:
-Gaddafi would lose his seat of power due to his age. His sons would lose control due to tribal infighting over position and not embracing a position as heirs to the throne. (Father and son dynasties are quite rare). France and Italy would have a refugee crisis. Less weapons a ND motivated fighters would have entered Libya and inevitably a non-Gaddafi family member would have been elected with the backing of the regular forces. There would be more pitched battles a day less night time terror than the post Gaddafi Libya has seen. Libya would not have blown it’s money on hotels, spas, and malls. However without radicalization a day fervor of revolution diplomacy wins.
-Iraq. Hussein would have reached a point where there would be jockeying. His sons would be ousted and I think a federal structure with Shiite generals could have been a reality, and Iraq could have emerged as our top friend in the region again much like Hussein wanted to be I the first place,
-Syria would have not been forced to deal with the millions of Iraqi settlers leaving their economy in a stronger position and Assad wouldn’t have rushed to embrace neoliberal economic reforms which hastened dissatisfaction with the regime.
-Turkey would still be kept at arms length by the EU, but stronger regimes in Iraq and Syria would have blunted their ambitions for a larger sphere of influence.
-Egypt still would have had issues having been bit by high food prices, but without an overstretched U.S., I think the promises of the old regime turn into enough action to soothe crowds who embrace the promise and possibly a promise for a seemingly more open elections.
-Lebanon still has issues because of food prices, the economy, and a power sharing deal which doesn’t allow a government to react to a crisis. Watch out for peacekeepers. “We can’t turn a blind eye rhetoric” is all the rage with no worries about boots on the ground.
-Israel is still an apartheid mess, but it’s government and economy are even more precarious as the U.S. doesn’t rely on Israel for logistical or propaganda support in Iraq.
-Sanctions come and go in Iran, but Moscow and Beijing are less likely to be concerned having not seen Iraq and Libya. There is likely a few 1998 style bombing campaigns with cruise missiles. High fives all around. Iran doesn’t react because the U.S. military isn’t a shell and still a conquering hero from 1991.
-the Arabian peninsula is fairly similar with more boots on the ground. Yemen has the potential to be a real quagmire and is likely the topic of presidential debates in the U.S.
-Saudi Arabia prefers a more noble and diplomatic foreign policy realizing the U.S. would that destroy it’s enemies outright. My guess is they invest in automation and drive out foreign workers with stable regimes in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt. They don’t want anyone to get ideas. I don’t think they reach a revolution point with their population spending more money domestically instead of international plots.
-the Kurds are quit or at most revert to their 70’s ways without a semi-independent Kurdistan in Northern Iraq to work around.
-Putin stays retired when his second term is up. Without rampant U.S. aggression the drive to return and public support for his return isn’t there. Instead he hops around the world trying to be what Tony Blair pretends Blair is.
-U.S. arm merchants maintains high levels of dominance without questions being raised about efficiency and counter weapons being developed. Since the dominance isn’t necessary, NATO isn’t expanded. They buy our weapons anyway.
-the SCO and BRIICS are less united since the U.S. is not the great Satan. Without countries looking to China for leadership and economic integration, there is no TPP.
-Since the U.S. isn’t as hideous, Iran makes more democratic reforms. Thomas Paine isn’t writing about them, but they are doing better.
Ifs are fun.
Pat Lang of Sic Semper Tyrannis, based on a personal experience which he relates, asserts that if you’re ever taken hostage you’d better hope to high heaven that the Egyptian Army isn’t involved in your “rescue.”
re: Prospect of shutdown grows
Oh Joy, is it that time of year already… the time when Obama ‘caves-in’ and cedes control of yet another large piece of the Govt to Wall St. Because, in 3.2.1… “They made me do it or they’d shut it down”.
Seems like only yesterday that Obama knifed us in the back with the Cromnibus spending bill (last year’s shutdown betrayal).
http://www.cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/robert-samuelson-on-productivity-and-living-standards?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+beat_the_press+%28Beat+the+Press%29
There are a few points worth making here. First, while Samuelson is right that redistribution is a one-time story over a long period of time it can be a big story. If the typical worker’s compensation had kept pace with productivity growth, their pay would be more than 40 percent higher today. For the median worker with an hourly wage around $18 and and hourly compensation around $22 an hour, this would translate into more than $16,000 a year in addition compensation for a full-time full-year worker. This would be real money for most people.
Furthermore, if compensation were to keep pace with even a slow rate of productivity growth going forward, it would mean that workers would see rising living standards on an ongoing basis. In this respect, much of the political elite in the United States has argued that even modest increases in the payroll tax (e.g. 0.1 percentage point annually) would be devastating and not worth considering. If the idea of raising the payroll tax by 0.1 percentage point annually is a huge deal, the prospect of getting ten times as much by addressing inequality must an incredibly huge deal. So by the logic of our elite, we should think that addressing inequality has enormous implications for living standards, even if we can’t do anything to boost productivity growth.
========================================================
Growth is a chimera – there has been growth, only most people get no benefit. There really is no evidence, indeed all the evidence goes the other way, that the problem is distribution. If one won’t even consider such a possibility – well, the wealthy have succeeded than. As the wealthy sit at the banquet table scarfing down more, and more, and more, the argument is if only the turducken was a Roti sans pareil*, there might be some leftovers for the hungry….
*The Almanach des gourmands, published in 1807, has a recipe, or at least a description, of a Roti sans pareil, an insane combination of seventeen birds, all stuffed one inside the other.
Perhaps that was an early inspiration for the Turducken?
Like you say, the problem is distribution (of wealth in the private sector and of domestic vs. military spending in the public sector).
GDP growth – secondary
Total government spending growth – secondary.
It’s only a one time thing if you assume none of it is invested in things which will produce greater returns over time, e.g. education.
Lest you doubt the authenticity of the poll that says that 1/3 of Americans would support a military coup–just look at how much support in the primaries that Donald Trump and Deez Nuts are getting. People are seriously disgusted with the political class. I’m certain that the first reasonably persuasive demagogue who comes along will give America and its political class exactly what it deserves. Maybe it’ll even be Trump!
Uhh, I’d just like to remind everybody the last time this country had anything resembling a quasi-military coup was when Haig was appointed White House Chief of Staff during Watergate. Yes, THAT Alexander Haig.
The military officers who would make good political leaders are smart and too principled to launch a coup against the civilian government. I suspect we’d see mass resignations of the officer corps before the government did something incredibly stupid or any attempted coup. This action would undoubtedly slap some sense into the political class.
Whether that would change anything is a different matter entirely.
Been to Colorado Springs lately?
The US is already so militarised that the real question is: “If there was a military coup in the US, would anybody notice?”
No one here seems to want to consider the possibility that an American coup by the Army junior officer corps could very well be from the Left. Think, Nasser in Egypt, the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, the Young Turks in the Ottoman Empire, and more to come.
If there’s a military coup in the U.S., it will come from the private military contractors.
Are there Leftists in the US military? Serious question. I would tend to think hardly at all. Like maybe 23 total.
More than you think but less than Ambrit imagines.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/how-wall-streets-bankers-stayed-out-of-jail/399368/
“Any narrative of how we got to this point has to start with the so-called Holder Doctrine, a June 1999 memorandum written by the then–deputy attorney general warning of the dangers of prosecuting big banks—a variant of the “too big to fail” argument that has since become so familiar. Holder’s memo asserted that “collateral consequences” from prosecutions—including corporate instability or collapse—should be taken into account when deciding whether to prosecute a big financial institution. That sentiment was echoed as late as 2012 by Lanny Breuer, then the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, who said in a speech at the New York City Bar Association that he felt it was his duty to consider the health of the company, the industry, and the markets in deciding whether or not to file charges.”
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The richer someone is the more important they are to the “economy”.(which is defined as the top 0.01%)…Funny how the more we protect the rich, the poorer the rest of us get…
Criticism of Holder seems to be going around lately. Are Obama and White House staff trying to put the blame on Holder? Despite Holder’s closeness to the President, Obama only has one mention in the seventh paragraph mentioning his call to action from 2009.
Any narrative to how we got to this point should include questions about why Holder of the Holder memorandum, Waco, Ruby Ridge, his work on behalf of big agriculture in South America, and the Elian Gonzalez swat team has any business working in any level of government.
Fun debate:
Who was worse attorney general:
Eric Holder
John Mitchell
John Mitchell knew enough to break the law, Eric Holder just avoided having anything to do with it. So on that basis, I’d have to say Holder is the worse of the two.
trick question
Alberto González
Is it also his duty to consider the health of the church, the spirituality industry, and the associated markets when it comes to abusive priests (similarly, abusive teachers)?
“Google Mulling Plan To Sell Self-Driving Cars”. What else is new? ALL cars are self-driving. An automobile is not a horse, it has an engine, and therefore is in no need of any coercion from its passengers to impel it forward. We direct or pilot our vehicles, we don’t actually ‘drive’ them. What google is talking about is an autopiloted automobile.
Bloomberg terminals — so 20th century:
Fedguvs must be burning up the wires on their Bloomberg chats this week. Or maybe they have their own private server? Try Jyel@yellenemail.com …
Happy memories from this day in 2008. Not too much.
Rest in pieces, Lehman Brothers.
Does Soccer Have a Brain-Trauma Problem? Yes, it does. Heaving played the beautiful game since I can remember myself, heading the ball would at times leave me quite woozy, particularly a wet football. Then there are the head-to-head collisions going up for the ball, and the occasional elbow or boot to the head. Plus following the twitter accounts of some professional footballers can leave one with the impression that they are definitely brain impaired.
It’s the brain rattling around in the skull, not the hit*, that’s the problem. We are going to have a huge problem from soldiers who were in IED incidents but had no issues because of modern helmets. The helmets don’t stop the brain from rattling.
*Obviously, the hit is the problem, but the stop and go motion from uncontrolled leaping is part of the issue.
The so-called “shaken baby syndrome”…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaken_baby_syndrome
Does Soccer Have a Brain-Trauma Problem?
Indeed.
I have heard at least as bad as American football w/ regard to head butting balls and incidental collisions.
F=MA no matter what the sport.
As a victim, I can also add reading (too much) can be unhealthy for the eyes (perhaps even eye trauma).
It causes near-sightedness, a physical adaptation of the eye to focusing close all the time.
http://www.newsadvance.com/news/local/sen-bernie-sanders-decries-massive-injustice-of-income-inequality-during/article_8ae7ff92-5aeb-11e5-82b1-9bd7b86d38c9.html?mode=jqm
Bernie was in the lion’s den this morning.
“Moon of Alabama” claims that most of the Refugees streaming into Europe are from “safe countries.” What safe countries? Syria? Turkey? Iraq? Afghanistan? Lebanon?anywhere in subsaharan Africa? This is clearly a Stalinist liar and you have no business reprinting anything from him.
Medical researchers and/or philanthropists could do soccer/football/futbol players worldwide a favor and start tracking down former players to sign them up for CTE examinations upon death. When I play with my sons and that ball hits my head, it almost invariably hurts. I don’t see how it can be anything but a negative for long-term health.
One decent proposal I saw on a linked article was to only allow headers in the penalty box. Balls coming off of goalies’ punts look like little missiles coming down onto players’ heads.
I wonder if wearing a helmet would help.
Only a little; that’s the problem American football is up against. And a helmet encourages taking harder hits. It’s the sudden stop that does the damage, not the visible bruise.
Hah! My completely unscientific ranking of the intelligence of certain athletes goes like this:
Boxers (lowest)
Soccer players (a bit above boxers)
Football players (strangely, they seem smarter than soccer players)
Baseball
Basketball (slightly above baseball…maybe basketball players don’t need to talk and ramble needlessly as much as baseball players)
“Denver canyon remains closed because too many people are taking selfies with bears”
If you’re taking a selfie with a bear, you have your back to the freaking bear. This is a Darwin award waiting to happen.
So butterflies were once thought to be demonic, and now people take selfies with bears. Are we evolving at all?
All I can say is that, 10,000 years ago (more or less), all the Einkorn wheat you could harvest was organic and free of chemicals (more or less).
“That’s progress.”
And my goddess, the crazy beer! And dancing.
The Sumerians had a Beer Goddess too. Complete with a poem or chant to the beer goddess – which was a recipe to make beer!
Kinda like when we sing “Hi Ho, Hi Ho. It’s off to work we go….
Clearly, things have gone to hell.
best/saddest comment of the day
“What a culture we live in, we are swimming in an ocean of information, and drowning in ignorance.”
“The Migrant Crisis”: Keeps reminding me of a science fiction book, “Downbelow Station,” by C. J. Cherryh, which is driven by a refugee crisis. From the Wikipedia summary: ” escorting a ragtag fleet fleeing from Russell’s and Mariner Stations to Pell. Similar convoys arrive from other stations destroyed or lost to Union, leading to an enormous crisis. The flood of unexpected refugees strains station resources.” Cherryh is a ferocious writer; the book is extremely vivid. Still lingers in my mind, 30 years later.
The moral dilemma is that a sudden (is there a good word for this, aside from “flood”?) arrival of large numbers of desperate, and destitute, people is, indeed, a severe strain for the society they enter. It’s hugely expensive, and in the present case, there are very serious cultural conflicts – ones that are already plaguing Europe. It’s a dilemma because there are also humanitarian imperatives. This is the reason refugees so often wind up in supervised camps that are generally pretty miserable.
Of course, the only good solution is not to create the refugees in the first place. Unfortunately, that isn’t an imperative for policy makers – and now it’s a little late. If only we could make refugees out of the guilty policy makers…
Respect for C. J. Cherryh! Interesting to note that Downbelow Station was originally named The Company War. I found it to be a disturbing read.
“Why we should design our computer chips to self-destruct”
Well, there’s a solution to the “legacy systems” problem – which seems to me far more serious than it sounds. What I’m seeing described here, originally in reference to introducing, say, the drachma, but it has much wider implications (Y2K, anyone?), is a process of steadily accumulating system rigidity. Rigid = brittle. Things change; rigid systems break. And of course, they lock in mistakes.
Military coup? Hell, there seems to be a State Department coup in progress. Apparently, Obama was unaware that the indefatigable Miss Nuland “asked” the Bulgarian figurehead foreign minister to ban Russian overflights bound for Syria, “…and when he found out, he was upset with the department for not having a more complete and vetted process to respond to the crisis…” So just who is in charge of US foreign policy, and the country as a whole??? Being a dual US-BG citizen this is beyond embarrassing.
PS Let’s also remember that Obama was also apparently unaware of Nuland’s moves in Ukraine too.
Usually I’d just respond that this is normal and just how the US government operates. Considering this is regarding the situation in Syria we gotta up it a notch or two.
ALERT! ALERT!! ALERT!!ONE1! TARFUN IN PROGRESS…
“…Intelligence chief: Iraq and Syria may not survive as states AP…”
Well no sugar: these “states” were created up as arbitrarily and artificiallly as many African states that are currently equally unstable:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement