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Helsing posted:Here's Peter Schiff, a prominent Austrian economist, predicting the collapse of the housing bubble during a debate with Reagan adviser Art Laffer. Pretty impressive, right? He even recognizes that this won't just be a minor slowdown, but rather a major economic disruption. Just going to seize in on this very briefly since it came up in a rather one sided debate with my Austrian 'friend'. Generally speaking, if you look at a bunch of the prominent Austrian Economists who predicted the housing bubble, you will find one major thing in common, they're doomsayers Schiff and Gerald Celente are the worst of the offenders, but people hilariously love to bring up Schiff whenever they want to point out how right Austrians were about the housing bubble. Several times a year the man takes a look at the worst case scenario in the current economy, and starts yelling about how it is going to happen and you should buy foreign assets. The simple fact is that people like Schiff are broken clocks. They are right two times a day by virtue of throwing out so many negative predictions that they have to be right eventually, and due to confirmation bias no one ever remembers the dozens of other times they were wrong. Here is Peter Schiff saying that the dow jones was going to go down to 2-4000 within a year. This was in may of 2002: Wrong Here he is talking about how inflation is going to cause the value of the dollar to drop like a rock. To be clear, this video is from 2010, but I could pick a year at random and I can just about assure you that schiff will have told a major press outlet that the US was going to go into Hyper-Inflation within 1-2 years: Wrong again Schiffy boy! Here he is telling us we almost certainly won't make it until 2012. Unless the government totally intervenes and keeps things from falling apart... in which case he is totally not wrong: Oi... I'll just leave this last one here, but this is a listing of some of Schiff's public guesses. A lot more false than true there, and the ones that are true usually trend towards things like 'buy gold' =/ I really do not like this guy. Yeah, sorry for the rant post but I just get enraged when people pull that 'austrians predicted the bubble' bs. I predicted the damned bubble when I went looking for a house in 2006, I just didn't understand it cuz I knew gently caress all about economics at the time! "Hrm... you know, these houses are priced at 300,000 for a lovely 600 square foot hole. And they're increasing every year. Its bad when that stops right?" 
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Jan 19, 2012 08:17
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Quabzor posted:So long story short I am arguing with a facebook mom about This article Start with the fact that the original (And only) study that conclusively linked vaccines to Autism was done by Andrew Wakefield. That study was later (way too later) retracted by the publisher (The lancet). Further investigation has shown that the study was an elaborate fraud, that in addition to selecting his subjects from his child's birthday party rather than any clinical selection, he fudged the numbers. Andrew Wakefield has since been stripped of his medical license. He also received upwards of 500,000 British pounds from a law firm that was intending to sue vaccination companies. So yeah... anti-vaccination people are crazy assholes and you are right to want to tell her what is what.
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Jan 21, 2012 17:03
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shrike82 posted:I don't know about that. Witness the outrage whenever D&D has a discussion about 250K+ earners and people try to explain that they aren't the upper class. The outrage is because that explanation is almost always bullshit. I don't think my dentist or a high income football player is the cause of all of societies ills. I do think it is absolute bullshit when they try and claim that they aren't in the upper class or that their life is somehow especially difficult because they have to cut down on the money they spend on vacations/dog grooming. =/ Edit: Also we get pissed off because of the moving the goalposts bullshit. If being in the top 1% of income earners doesn't make you 'upper class' then what does it make you? Upper-middle class? Middle class? If these people are middle class then what do you call someone pulling $60,000? Because I sure as gently caress know that sub 30,000 is what we like to call poor. Caros fucked around with this message at 04:33 on Feb 6, 2013 |
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Feb 6, 2013 04:30
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Golbez posted:I was under the impression that "upper class" was more than an economic indicator, it indicated substantial ownership. A computer programmer who makes $200k/year is upper middle class; someone who lives off their store or share holdings is upper class. I think the only problem with that split in incomes is that it lumps them together way too heavily. Someone who is making 45,000 is 'middle class' the same as someone making 250,000 or more despite the wildly different living conditions, and it leads to that false equivilency that 'hey, we're both middle class why should I have to pay more taxes.' It also doesn't help that when people see 250,000 they get that twinge where they think of that as total assets, not as 'this is how much that person made this year', because for a lot of people such as myself it is such an absurd concept to think that someone could be making that much money a year. =/
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Feb 6, 2013 17:38
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For anyone who is curious this is the video he is talking about. Its mostly Schiff being a giant rear end in a top hat for the better part of two hours and pick apart simple arguments of people who are for the most part less educated (but not necessarily ignorant) on the subject of economics than him. This is about par for the course for Peter Schiff. Frankly I could go over this entire video for hours pointing out all the times that he is wrong, there are hundreds and hundreds of them. The whole thing is just a giant mess of him making assertions and basic liberterian arguments while smugly talking about how he started his own company so gently caress the poors. Unfortunately Peter Schiff has become rather famous in the last half decade because he was 'right' about the housing bubble. I've actually done numerous posts on the forum about this and the gist of it is that Peter Schiff is right because he is a broken clock. Like Gerald Celente and most of the other liberterians who called the bubble, he called it because he is continually bear market. If you select any time period in the last decade or more you can almost certainly find quotes from Peter Schiff talking about how terrible things are going to be, about how "X" is going to crash and hyperinflation and, and, and. He predicted the housing bubble in that he saw that there was a bubble and said "Hey guys, things will go to poo poo." If you want to tell who actually predicted the bubble, look at the people who put their money down on it, or who were at least hit least hard by it. Schiff took as big a hit as anyone. quote:What's the counter argument to the right-wing talking point about the rich being the "job creators?" I saw some youtube video where this rich businessman (his last name was Schiff or something) was arguing with the Wall St. protestors and he kept going back to this, like "I've created hundreds of jobs, how many have you created?" While most people have already addressed this I will add to the latter half of it. The great thing about the fact that he continually says that he has created hundreds of jobs is that it is a lie. Euro Pacific Capital, Schiff's company, employs 53 people. Even more hilariously is that he can't even effectively say that he takes money for his hedge fund and uses it to help start businesses, unless those businesses are in china, because EPC's primary focus is "to offer globally diversified investment options to discerning retail investors and forward thinking institutions." EPC primarily deals in Non-US stocks and national bonds, with slight dabbling in currency and precious metal speculation. Peter Schiff actively takes money out of the US economy and sends it overseas, then bitches about how he is a job creator etc. I absolutely loving hate this man and would not spit on him if he were dying of thirst. Did I mention his wealthy father who helped him with a large trust fund and got him his first job is in prison for tax evasion? Yeah...
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Feb 15, 2013 07:08
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OwlBot 2000 posted:Taxing corporations won't help create jobs. Besides, you can't argue that we don't have a very progressive income system in the USA: Arguably it will have some positive effect because they will have more inventive to invest that money back into expanding the business as they are taxed on profit. It also won't have any significant ill effects. Your 'progressive' taxation chart is very well and good. Now compare it to the share of income charts for each percentile and historic norms.
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Jun 2, 2013 19:12
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KernelSlanders posted:How does that work exactly? The 85% rule is already in place, so they can't just quadruple their premium unless they quadruple their expenses also. Pay raise for the CEO is qualified as an expense?
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Oct 2, 2013 01:29
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computer parts posted:Can anyone refute this list about Fukushima? It's your usual "pick 30 different points that require too much effort to contradict in a short period of time" sort of article. The problem with trying to refute garbage like that is that the answer to 99% of it is "No, reality doesn't work that way." As an example: quote:It also quotes several nuclear experts who say that estimate is likely conservative and the real toll could be closer to 80,000 cancers. Now in all fairness the article should have reported that the supposed nuclear experts are actually homeless vagrants living in the now defunct science wing of Night Vale community college. They did go on to say "loving ATOMS! THEY'RE EVERYWHERE! THEY WILL KILL US ALL AND THEN WE TOO WILL BECOME NOTHING MORE THAN A MINDLESS COLLECTION OF ATOMS!" Most of that list can actually just be debunked by following the link and actually reading it. For example in the above 80,000 cancer article, We found that fish had an average of 18 becquerels of cesium per kilogram. Canada's limit is 1000 becquerels, and that corresponds to about 8 cancers per 1000 people exposed. So by my math you would need to eat 55 kilograms of tainted fish over the course of one year to have a 0.008% increased risk of cancer over a seventy year period. Even better, try searching the quotes in some of those articles to see how full of poo poo he is. This quote, for example, does not actually appear in the article it is supposedly from: quote:Some fish samples tested to date have had very high levels of radiation: one sea bass sample collected in July, for example, had 1,000 becquerels per kilogram of cesium. Caros fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Oct 25, 2013 |
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Oct 25, 2013 19:30
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Time to read Zinn posted:I don't know what economists are saying, but it seems to be most legislators' favorite, and the average cable-news intellectual on Facebook or blog comments uses a lot of hand-me-down ideas from it. I can't remember the last time I heard Keynes mentioned in any situation other than to disparage him (his defenders on D&D notwithstanding). One other thing to keep in mind is that Austrian Economics and American Libertarian are pretty much linked hand in hand these days, which can give you at least an idea of the overall support for Austrian Economics. Its not precise, and there are republicans who believe in some of the worst parts of Austrian Economics without being libertarians, but its a start. Libertarians account for roughly 7% of the vote, unsurprisingly that 7% breaks down to be mostly white, affluent and/or young. As other posters have mentioned, this seems to be the top out for their support, but they cast a shadow well in excess of their actual size because they are loud as all hell about it. The internet is a very good breeding ground for Austrian Economics because the demographics of the internet tend to skew towards the same people who would support this belief, the young, white and affluent. Austrian Economics is also deceptively simple. Instead of a massive course of study that can take years to properly learn, full of things like natural monopolies, externalities and so forth, the basic rules of Austrian Economics can be learned in a day (just read Econ 101!). Voluntary exchange is the best, anything that interferes with voluntary exchange is bad, all of these things are true because my LOGIC shows it to be true. For many people this resonates with the world view they've known from childhood, which is that the free market was way better than socialist, communist Russia, and they buy in wholesale. The problem with Austrian School Economics is that it sounds good on its face, but is really just like alternative medicine. Everything about it has either not been proven to work, or has been proven not to work.
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Nov 2, 2013 20:24
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twodot posted:I was entirely aware of this, I at no point denied this. What I have been saying is that: Do you have a proposed example of a 'good' voter ID law? And just to further this question, do you understand that the ID in voter ID stands for Identification, that voter ID laws expect the person to bring in something with them to validate who they are? I ask because earlier you suggested indellible ink programs, and while that is a very good alternative, it is not what people consider 'Voter ID'. Just want to be on the same page. I ask because so far you've suggested that they aren't always bad, but even Canada's laws, which can require something as simple as two pieces of mail tend to hurt more than they help in terms of voter disenfranchisement. Voter ID laws that knock 300,000 people off the ballot while stopping 5-10 cases of voter fraud are absurd. And just to address the original question of voter fraud, the WSJ blog has a pretty good piece on this. The main take away is that there were about 2,000 cases of people getting caught for voter fraud between 2000 and 2012. Roughly 166 a year, in a country of 300,000,000. While its possible and even likely that there are people that succeed, there would have to be 2,500 successful frauds for every failure to make up for the amount of young minorities that will be disenfranchised nation wide by voter ID laws. And that is just young minorities mind you.
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Jan 15, 2014 19:09
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twodot posted:First, while this is a common understanding of the phrase, it's not clear to me this is everyone's understanding of the phrase, but even working within this definition (and from my earlier post), I wouldn't have a problem with requiring people to bring in voter registration cards that could be issued the same day in/around polling places. But I don't see the point of playing a game where you get to set definitions, and we see if I'm a clever enough law maker to propose laws within those definitions that we both agree are ok. I'm not claiming to be the most clever law maker, so even if I couldn't propose any such laws it wouldn't preclude the existence of them (as I said in my earlier post). Are you denying the central point that we need to analyze the individual merits of a specific law to know whether it is good or not? (Note: the ability to categorize a law into the bucket "expect the person to bring in something with them to validate who they are" would require analyzing the specific law) Type voter ID into Google. I guarantee, without even looking, that you won't find an example of the phrase on the first two or three pages at least. Its the common usage of the phrase because that is what the vast majority of people understand as Voter ID. Beyond that, I'm not trying to play a game with you. You are making the assertion that not all voter ID laws are bad, but you cannot produce a concrete example of a Voter ID law that is good. From the sounds of things you can't even make up or propose a new one on the spot. How does that not make you consider the possibility that maybe Voter ID laws are, on the whole, a bad thing. Once again, this goes back to common usage. In the United States there are 30 'Voter ID' laws, which disenfranchised as many as five million voters nation wide in the last election. This is roughly 1.5% of total voters. Meanwhile, assuming 99% of voter fraud goes undetected there are only 16,500 fraudulent votes cast in any one year. This equates to 0.005% of the electorate or 0.035% of votes cast in the last presidential election. And once again, this is a very high estimate. Voter ID laws, as they are currently implimented or being implimented in the US are stupid and exist primarily to suppress minority and democratic voters. To quote Mike Turzai, Pennsylvania's GOP house majority leader: "Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done!" Edit: You have a huge fallacy in the end of your post when you suggest an 'either/or'. I would support basically all the things you suggested, but the whole point of Voter ID laws is to surpress turn out, so your suggestions there would never be proposed. The democratic process should be open and available to all, and Voter ID laws do nothing to help that.
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Jan 15, 2014 20:01
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twodot posted:Indelible ink is literally in Wikipedia's list of voter ID laws, which is literally the first link that comes up withen I search for voter ID law. If we are engaging in argument from results of an Internet search engine, then I think you have to agree that indelible ink is a voter ID measure. Buuuuuulshit. Here is what wikipedia has to say. quote:An alternative to voter ID in many countries is the use of indelible ink, into which a finger is dipped, which makes it difficult to vote more than once. It is an alternative to voter ID. As in it is not in and of itself voter ID. quote:Because there's nothing intrinsically bad about verifying people's ID when they vote. Most proposals disenfranchise people which is bad, but I don't any reason to believe those issues can't be avoided or mitigated. But its not. The thing you miss is political reality. No one with any clout is suggesting your ideas because the point of voter ID laws in the United States is to disenfranchise people. quote:Huh? My suggestions would never be proposed? Well I have bad news you for you, I propose them! We package all of those with compulsory voting, compulsory ID for anyone 18 or up, shall issue requirements for the IDs (if the state doesn't believe the person has sufficient documentation, the state is responsible for getting the documentation), issuing IDs must be free, we set the polls open times to match the time it takes to get an ID (which has a maximum thanks to shall issue), and issue IDs out of libraries or something. Once again you are either being pedantic or obtuse. I did not 'literally' mean that no one had ever proposed them. I meant that the policy has never come up as a credible suggestion on a state or national level. Because once again, Voter ID laws in the United States exist to disenfranchise voters. Neither party actually gives a poo poo about in person voter fraud because the amount is more or less meaningless. And even if you acknowledge that all of those things are true, it is still an undue burden for the poor (who have less time to vote in general) and an extra cost to elections to solve a problem that amounts to a rounding error.
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Jan 15, 2014 23:13
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twodot posted:What possible relevance does this have to the conversation unless you are suggesting the person that MisterBadIdea is talking to is a person with clout or making a credible suggestion on a state or national level (and I'm assuming you don't believe that)? Except that when he is talking with someone about politics about a specific set of policies, namely national voter ID laws, it stands to reason that he is talking about existing or suggested policies, not pie in the sky wonder policies that no one has or ever will suggest on a national, state or even municipal level.
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Jan 15, 2014 23:43
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twodot posted:This strikes me as a pretty good guess, but good guesses don't get you to here (also are there any proposed national voter ID laws by anyone of note? Seems like the Constitution would get in the way of that): You are correct that national voter ID laws are not a thing. But voter ID is still a national issue and until very recently the implementation of many of these schemes, which exist to disenfranchise voters, was halted by the civil rights act.
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Jan 16, 2014 01:31
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Typical Pubbie posted:I'm taking Principles of Macroeconomics and my hardcore Libertarian econ professor dedicated part of our classes's last lesson to UNFUNDED LIABILITIES. Basically, his claim is that America's projected debt out to 75 years is over $100 trillion dollars. All our children will be doomed to work in the Chinese coal mines unless "something" is done. Try punching him square in the jaw and laughing at him for being a professor who is less informed than your average SA poster. The simple answer is that social security has been an UNFUNDED LIABILITY for 79 years since 1935 when it was enacted without any major issues. Social Security, Medicare and Medicare prescription drug program are the 'big three' that get cited as the scary $100 trillion dollar unfunded liabilities. The fact is that these programs are pay-go. That is to say that they are paid for by payroll taxes on the current generation of workers rather than gathered up over a lifetime as a typical pension might work. The government is able to do this, unlike a private company, because they have the power to tax and it is a fair assumption that there will be people working in the future to pay for the upcoming retirees. Simply speaking that $100 trillion (which is actually closer to $30 trillion when looking at non-heritage action numbers) unfunded liability assumes that no one pays a dime for Social Security, Medicare or Medicare drug plan for 75 years. If no one is paying payroll taxes for 75 years I assume we have bigger problems, such as a gamma ray burst, to have been worrying about in the interim. The logic that says we have to pay this poo poo in advance is the same reason why the post office is struggling, because they are being made to save up years of pension funds to satisfy wackjobs who don't understand how government pensions work.
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Feb 15, 2014 08:45
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Typical Pubbie posted:I actually raised my hand during class and pressed him on this point. He claimed that the $65 or $85 or $100 trillion number (it depends on what Youtube video you're watching) is the remainder after future taxes have been collected. If he's full of poo poo I'd really like a reputable source to prove it. I'm thinking about writing a letter to the president of my university complaining about how my Principles of Macroeconomics class is being taught as Libertarian Political Science. Ohhh, he's using that version of it. Still wrong but in a different way. This breaks down reasonably well what is wrong with the idea. To summarize, seventy five year projections are garbage. Seventy five years ago today was 1939, and I can pretty much guarantee that budget projections and ideas about what the future economy were going to be like in 1939 didn't really bear out in relation to fact. Particularly in the modern age things change very, very quickly. More to the specifics, the big programs, Social Security and Medicare are retirement programs which are subject to even more changes than you'd expect. For example, if the US switches to single payer healthcare at pretty much and point in the next 40 years you can effectively eliminate the entire medicare part of the cost there, because US health costs will drop like a rock tied to a bigger rock tied to some kind of gravity increasing device which exponentially doubles the effect of gravity solely upon rocks. The point is that these numbers assume everything stays exactly the same, that costs keep increasing at the same rate they are now, even though they have been slowing, that no improvements are made to these programs, or changes of any kind really. The whole thing is just stupid when we can't even estimate our budget over the course of a decade.
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Feb 15, 2014 09:14
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Augustus posted:In a move that utterly shocked me, my libertarian friend came out for a higher minimum wage, calling the loss of low wage jobs simply losing "bad opportunies" and said some things about economic coercion, and she read the part about people being lifted out of poverty and agreed. One thing to remember about libertarians is that they aren't always bad people. A lot of libertarians, like myself when I was one, simply got attached to it at an impressionable point in their lives. It's also worth remembering that libertarianism is a very fluid ideology. Put two libertarians in a room together and the one thing they will agree on is that the other isn't a true libertarian. Because of this you have a lot of people who identify as libertarian but are functionally not all that different from a far left liberal.
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Feb 20, 2014 03:28
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Buried alive posted:^^^ What's VW's reasoning on this? I'm in favor, I just want to know what their thinking is. The Majority Report had a wonderful caller on this two weeks ago from a German VW plant. Basically the VW plant wanted to put solar panels on the roof to reduce their greenhouse emissions, and after bringing up the idea the workers council offered to pay for the panels and sell the electricity at a certain cost to the plant, saving VW the cost of a loan. VW benefitted because they didn't have to pay interest on the loan and will get cheap electricity. The plant workers will earn the money back and more over time by selling the electricity to the plant, and the environment is better since the plant is now solar powered. Yet hearing a VW worker explain this was like talking to someone from the future, with the assumption that the VW plant in question must be building the new 2052 hover car model. Generally speaking a Worker's Council/Union allows the management to talk to the employees as a group and make decisions based on that. Rather than have management say "Hey you're all working Saturday for half a day." they can go to the council and the council can talk to the workers and they can decide "Actually we'd rather just work an extra few hours on Friday to make up the difference". It allows for good worker relations and makes it so the plan and its management work well together.
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Feb 24, 2014 19:50
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Accretionist posted:Good article on employment effects: Minimum Wage Laws and the Labor Market: What Have We Learned Since Card and Krueger's Book Myth and Measurement? It is worth mentioning that study doesn't account for what would happen if Walmart had to pay minimum wage to everyone in their supply chain. The cost would go up but it would still be well within reason. The counter to my own retort however, is to point out that at $12/hr a lot of these employees would be further away from needing foodstamps or public assistance to survive, thus recouping much of that small bump in price by way of improved services or lower taxes (Do not lower taxes)
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Apr 21, 2014 01:17
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cbirdsong posted:I always liked John Scalzi's RPG analogy: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/ That... is an amazing analogy. Easily one of the best things I've picked up in this thread!
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May 3, 2014 22:50
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Can't believe I'm adding this but the link goes to an interesting study by the CATO institute of all places. It lists every instance of hyperinflation in modern history and is a wonderful thing to bust out when idiots try to play the 'oh no, but... but hyperinflation!' What is notable about it is that there is not a single instance of a country on that list that suffered hyperinflation without some major unrelated issue, ususally in the form of a war, or a massive shift of government etc. Its nice to be able to flash it and just say "Fyi, no stable democratic government has ever suffered hyperinflation."
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May 30, 2014 01:12
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