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Everything posted by Pangloss
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I would be okay with sending troops to the Sudan as part of a UN peacekeeping effort.
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Interesting, pi. I wonder sometimes if it might be best served to just discard the word "socialism" on the proverbial ash-heap of history right alongside the word "communism". And throw in "capitalism" while we're at it. None of the modern, forward-looking contexts in which these terms are presently used are quite like what these terms used to mean. I think if you were to describe socialism, for example, as a society in which individuals can achieve (and are still structurally, systematically encouraged to do), but are also protected from harm, provided with education, and assisted in discovering their potential, not only for the welfare of the individual, but for the greater development of society, then people would be less afraid of exploring it. I think something that happens a lot here (in the US; does this happen overseas?) is that people envision themselves cherry-picking socialistic programs and embracing them into the capitalist system. Which of course is absurd, given the standard, historical contexts of those two systems.
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Ebert gave the South Park movie a below-average rating. That review can be found here: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19990630/REVIEWS/906300301/1023
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You'd *better* believe it. Because it's already affecting you. Directly. China's purchasing power has become astonishing. This is due in part to a truly prodigious amount of foreign loan capital. One year ago Japan was the second-highest consumer of oil, at around five-point-something million barrels per day. It became China about six months ago. Within a couple of years they'll likely surpass America's 20 million bpd. That's because they have 300 million middle-class citizens (more than America's total population), and the measure of what constitutes "middle class" is -- you guessed it -- car ownership. Why do you think the price of oil is going up? The capacity to produce an additional 15 million barrels per day does not presently exist, nor has it been demonstrated that it can even be developed in a reasonable time frame. (People talk about running out of oil, but that's not the immediate problem at all. We're closing in on the event that the oil industry has feared for half a century -- the so-called "turnover" point, where demand finally exceeds supply.) But it's not just oil. Ask anybody in manufacturing right now (including two manufacturing customers of mine here in South Florida) about buying steel, and they'll immediately cringe and utter some epithet about China. They've deeply backlogged the world's supply of steel with a vast works and building program. Communism isn't on the way out in China. It's stronger than ever. (About half of that has been called "non-performing", but that's cause for GREATER concern, not less -- guess what happens when those loans get called in and the calls are ignored?)
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It looks like Hollywood is not happy with Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Roger Ebert gave it one star, and his primary beef seems to be over the fact that the "White House gets a free pass" and that the famous Hollywood stars "exist in the movie essentially to be ridiculed for existing at all, I guess". http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041014/REVIEWS/40921007 I haven't seen it yet, but it sounds to me like they deserve a credit for not bowing to the pressures of political correctness, producing a satire that goes after BOTH sides. But I wonder how long it will be before the far left criticizes their decision to release the film just before the election. As if Michael Moore's movie has any more basis in reality.... Anyway, good for them. I can't wait to see it.
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"I'm just here for the gasoline."
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For the most part that's fair, and I'm sorry that you're afraid. But comparing a freely elected leader with a "third world dictator" is probably not the best way to make the case that the US has responsibilities. How about your responsibility to judge us honestly and with the truth?
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That we have more important things to worry about. Some of those sites are pretty funny, though.
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Not to pick on you or anything, but this is kinda what I was talking about above. People fall into this trap of thinking that non-democratic governments must automatically, by their nature, not have an open market. So I'll ask you this: Can you give me any examples of a market that's more open than China? China's free trade zones alone would seem to be contrary to your position.
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Yeah normally I wouldn't, if I were talking about unemployment. But he and I were talking about the overall economy. Children and retirees certainly contribute to that. The point I was trying to make was really just that unemployment is just a small part of the picture. A critical one, I agree, but if you want to talk about the big picture, then let's actually talk about the big picture. That's all I was saying there. Still haven't seen the second and third debates, by the way, if I sound a little quiet on the subject. I got hit with some deadlines.
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Which doesn't (by itself) mean it = success either, of course. But you're absolutely right, it doesn't = failure. The Soviet Union failed because of poor economic and political policies. By the way, if the United States fails some day it won't be because capitalism = failure, or democracy = failure. But I imagine some of the history books will record it that way. It just seems to be human nature.
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Well put. I would add that the mainstream TV news business has become a secretarial service for the New York Times, Reuters, AP and UPI. There's something fundamentally wrong, for example, when ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News all run a story on the exact same night about a new Cancer study -- that came out a month ago. And this kind of thing happens virtually every night. Just to give another example, a couple of weeks ago I emailed a reporter at some local TV station to let her know that the story she wrote on a Dell laptop recall incorrectly called one of the models and "Inspiration" (it's "Inspiron"). Not a big deal, I wrote, certainly an understandable mistake, but they may want to put a correction on their web site in case owners might notice it. It was a safety recall, after all, involving a fire hazard. She wrote back that since it had been reported that way in the wire story there was nothing she could do. No. Really.
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Doh! Kinda puts things in perspective, though, doesn't it?
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I don't believe that corporate owners generally affect news sources. Internal editorial/management bias is a greater factor, for the most part. After all, if Ted Turner were directly affecting CNN then every single story they did would be yellow journalism about the Evils of George Bush. And if Rupert Murdoch ran Fox News every story would be about the Evils of John Kerry. Neither is so severe, plus you have cases like the ultra-conservative Disney owning generally-liberal ABC News. The bias is *slight*, and therefore corporate input must be practically non-existent.
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I agree with the first two sentences, anyway. Both the wealthy and the poor get away with outright murder when it comes to taxation. NEITHER pays their fair share. Which is why I've always been a fan of flat tax and complete removal of corporate taxes. But color me wierd. (Sayonara has the fuscia crayon right now, but here's a nice mauve....) Greenspan's "monkeying" with the rates is helping, not hurting. Only partisan ideologues on the far left are saying otherwise, which really tells you everything you need to know right there. Between his slight steering and the fact that the economy is surging, we're doing pretty well. The concern is about what happens once the wage-price spiral kicks in. That's right -- the dreaded wage-price spiral. Right now the inflationary factors are, as you pointed out, energy (high price of oil) and healthcare. But watch what happens in six months, when the available labor pool is getting slimmer and the people who are being hired right now go in for their first raise. And yet Kerry keeps harping about "the worst economy since the great depression"! See that's what gets me about the far-left crowd (not that the far right is any better, but I'm going to give the far left a hard time for a minute; sue me). They're trying to convince us on the one hand that the economy is a disaster area. And yet are we still slashing interest rates to spur the economy? No, nobody even asks Greenspan that question anymore -- they asking when he's going to RAISE interest rates in order to stop inflation -- the exact OPPOSITE. Because the economy is SURGING and everyone knows this. So it's stupid and hypocritical to tell us that the economy is still in a shambles.
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(tears) You like me! You really like me!!!! (shakes statue over head)
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Just to spur conversation a bit.... Another thing I think is interesting about this is that it drives home a bit of a nail in the coffin of the long-standing American perception that democracy/freedom = capitalism = success. Here we have a country that is showing us that you don't need democracy to have capitalism, and you don't need democracy to have economic success in the post-Keynsian world. It's a very strong perception here -- kids grow up believing this. And yet it's never really been true, it's just that the signs of it not being true were fairly complex and mostly negative, and largely ignored. For example, Americans see the Soviet Union style planned economy as being different from what the US was doing at the time, but in fact that's really not the case -- we had a planned economy as well. And since Reagan, *everyone* has moved to more of a market-oriented economy. (Lots of good examples in South America too, where it was not unusual to see brutal dictators on the cutting edge of market economics.) Perception is a funny thing. I think a lot of Americans today are wondering how China could be becoming successful, since it's a "communism". What I've learned is that that's like saying my car is fast because it's blue.
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Yes, by 0.2% of the total population. (600,000/300,000,000) Eek. It's also grown steadily for 13 months straight, and by substantial sums. Don't get me wrong, it's perfectly valid to say that this recovery has been imperfect, and the primary signs of that imperfection are jobs and inflation. But you don't see people panicking over inflation (most people aren't even aware that it's an issue again), and inflation is actually more of a problem now than unemployment. But it is a recovery. Growth rate is as high as it was during the peak Clinton years, if not higher, and double what it was for Bush 1. And something like half of that growth is due to the tax cut. Y'all watch out for that ideological rhetoric now, ya hear?
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Well, this thread has certainly taken a nosedive.
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We've kinda beat around this bush a couple of times in other threads, so I thought it might be interesting to have it in its own thread. Just to kick it off, this was the news today, based on a new survey which says that the overweight and obesity percentages in China have been steadily climbing since the onset of modern capitalism. http://english.people.com.cn/200410/13/eng20041013_160102.html While the percentages may be lower in the US, there are so MANY people in China that they end up having almost as many overweight/obese people as the US has in its population! Often we've heard it said that the Chinese have as many people in their middle class as Americans have in their entire population. So this is kind of an amusing (albeit also serious) twist to that theme. Chinese middle class families are now showing their new status not only by buying an automobile, but by... well... acquiring heavier furniture. (cof)
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Darn scientists never clean their boards!
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I agree with that, except for the part about the BBC being the "only good news source".
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Interesting picture on the Astronomy Picture of the Day today: Sure makes you wonder about the ol' albedo, doesn't it?
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Sure, absolutely. The US is insular and massively consequential, AND the rest of the world needs a little Windex for its hypocrisy.