General > General Technical Chat
First house for a young man
cdev:
Rstofer,
At the very cutting edge, sometimes a condition exists where no schools teach "it" (whatever it is) because no teachers know it well enough to teach it.
if they know it they are doing it, because its that new.
not teaching.
A good argument can ahnd should be made that the way we teach a great deal of knowledge could and should change to adapt to the exponentially rising curve.
Your Trumpeting this alleged "skills gap" - is parroting the phony PR campaign for the offshorers and outsourcers. Who are primarily driven by money, not anything else. As they put it, its the people of the United States, damn us, who often are self taught, lacking formal credentials, but sometimes also brilliant, who stand in the way of US corporations grandiose expansion schemes. (because we see the value of knowledge and want to share in the wealth it brings) We're not wowed by the mere fact of employment, we want to be challenged, we want to solve problems, but we also want to be treated well. We don't buy into the bean counters and economists race to the bottom windfall bullshit.
Well, those of us who are a bit older have seen it all before, during the 90s and it was 99% BS. Its a cargo cult mentality that ignores the facts of productivity and real wealth generation, which happens when it happens and more often than not despite government policy (except for education and things that have nothing to do with deregulation or banking, or cheap labor schemes.. those things are energy drainers and soul suckers that will kill creativity, which frankly is what they want. )
They dont want creativity, if they did they would behave differently in every possible way. They wouldn't know creativity if it bit them in the ass, seriously. They dont want the win win positive vibe of a creative community. They hate that when they see it and try to kill it. They are trying to kill public universities. They are trying to drain American families of their every penny. They are trying to set up a future which only they control, and it will backfire on them.
In their world, we're both in a declining job market (ie. race to the bottom) when it suits them and in a boom which demands endless new flesh when it suits them.
It doesnt add up.
What it really ius is a sort of familial abuse scenario where the people of this great land are being taken advantage of by the false promise of jobs.. Jobs are vanishing for the many but5 for a subset of people the future is bright, but they need to be paid a living wage, not eight dollars an hour.
Those are the businesses that moved to the South to shave a few bucks off their wages and now are moving jobs offshore or automating, giving them what they want wont fix the systemic problems, it will only cheat workers of their due and stimulate bad conditions in workplaces which should be improving and becoming more professional, not less.
No growth continues forever, and we should throw out the crooks whose overenthusiasm needs to be tempered by the reality that economic predictions made for trade deals have turned out to almost always have been wrong. So its a huge mistake to give them what they want, they are like addicts who will never be satisfied.
Like the banks, they are crooks, who are trying to lock in their ill gotten gains.
cdev:
Rstofer, its the US's strong position that any "innovative financial products" of any kinds whatsoever, no matter how predatory, should be allowed. At several points you've described regulations we used to have in the past (funny how many Americans dont realize that the laws have been changed and especially, WHY) that violate the US's core trade goal, in financial services, DEREGULATION = "progressive liberalisation" which means ever less regulation, irreversibly, for corporations. SO for you to say that some financial products should not be allowed because people wont know they are falling into a trap. why you're sounding too much like me!
What we have now is a lot like feudalism, with serfs being bound to the land.
Look at it this way, an 'opening' is a concession, suddenly everything gets locked down by the trick of "having been paid for".
"Other countries' (corporations) traded concessions to get their rights to exploit "serve" us, they paid for us fair and square. Thats what trade deals do.
If you then regulate - (you cant, its forbidden by an international agreement, thats why DoddFrank and the ACA are being eliminated, its really being rolled back (!)..)
Because, since we committed to open health insurance in 1998, that also meant we could not fix it after that date, because doing so would spoil its profitability for this hypotetical foreign investor, so a million Americans have had to die (really!) to avoid doing anything that deprives banks (insurance companies, etc.) from all around the world of their legitimate expectations of profits.
(Now thats likely a crime against humanity because we had the money all along to fix it- but didnt, in fact as insurance companies are experts at collecting money for decades and then dumping people when they get sick and then the government ends up paying, it actually would have been cheaper and still would be - if we didnt count the compensation which soon we will in theory SOON have to pay, under the GATS article XXI procedure, to simply give everybody involved healthcare for free!) And as we committed to this path back in the 90s, they will claim to deserve and will likely ask the WTO to force us to pay them, compensation. And they will likely win because it will be undebatable that indeed, we did add new regulations after February 26, 1998. Thats what will be at issue. Not whether any of our objections to the deal (postulating some future uncorrupt Administration, Congress, Senate, etc) make sense. Or not. Thats irrelevant. This is the system we have today, one which is totally rigged, so rigged they refuse to tell us about it knowing that they all would be laughed out of existence and office, and their deals would all be torn up.
Why do overseas banks want US customers? Lack of financial sophistication. Also, probably the least regulated market on Earth in a developed country.
Shouldnt we be happy that India wants our poor patients? Do insurance companies want the patients?
Not necessarily, their proposal is just for the WTO to force us to make health insurance portable, along with a bunch of other things, (one of them is making it easier to outsource engineers) The rich countries are dragging their feet on the promises they made back in the 1990s, and India wants the WTO to force us to open up our services to former WTO DG (and ex NZ PM) Michael Moore called the "cleansing disinfectant of competition". Neoliberalism is a sort of cult, that sees corporations as the future. They want a "world without walls" for corporations.
Nobody is asking anybody to lose any money. They couldn't, anyway, insurance is a business whose intent is making money. and the hope is to make the rest of the world less generaous and more business friendly, for example, they would like governments to stop helping the poor. Instead, they want a partnership among thieves, where governments eliminate the risk for them in exchange for the FS firms taking away their responsibilities to their people. irreversibly.
Conditions in the US in 1998 (the year signatories to the agreement linked below froze regulation, newer regulations were frozen) were a nightmare for people with any kind of chronic condition, but very nice for insurers.
Whether its housing, banking or health insurance, don't make any mistake that anybody is doing anything out of the goodness of their hearts, no its all about maximizing profit and eliminating moral hazard.
Using this system they will create a new normal which is the lowest common denominator of regulation. Just in time for millions to lose their jobs. Imagine that.
If foreign financial services firms have been hyped up to see our market as more valuable than it turns out to be, just like happens with housing, it might turn out to be mutual, because their markets may turn out to not be generating the growth that we expect because we underestimate their level of exploitation and the lack of upward mobility there, too!
After all, there is a reason countries like India have so many poor people, and it has nothing to do with America.. (despite how they would like to blame it on us) Its a problem thats been thousands of years in the making. Both India and China had very bad inequality, (even under Communism which starved maybe as many as 30 million people in rural areas to death in the early 60s in a completely avoidable, ideologically driven "famine" without the rest of the world even realizing it had happened.)
I think our corporations are overestimating their profit potential in developing markets, because they are underestimating the willingness of their rich to exploit their poor. So, using an allaged need to mistreat our poor more giving up the bird in the hand, giving up good jobs here, or sending our poor patients there, in order to get more business there, is nuts.
Nomatter what we do there likely are only a few decades at most, before almost everything that can be automated will be, even in poor countries, will be. That will mean poverty for billions of their unemployed and ours as well, and many now employed wont be - So they wont buy our products in large numbers, no matter what we do.. in other words they wont be "growth" or any kind of replacement for the middle class we're so eager to lose, in fact have already written off as gone, instead it will be a total disaster.
Instead both will stagnate but both sets of crooks will have extracted all sorts of promises and changes they NEVER could have gotten at the ballot box based on this back room con . But the system will then crash and god knows what will come put of it.
Quite possibly then we all lose.
For health insurers (think India and Brazil, in particular) and bankers and other financial service offerers, they've been trained to look at the US as a gold mine of financially unsophisticated people whose savings are higher than they would be elsewhere. Ripe for the takings.
In exchange they are expected to let US banks do the same for to their people.
Don't foreign banks and health insurance firms deserve a little bit of that captive action?
After all, its practically free money, waiting to be stolen earned?
No, its a symptom of a total decline which will lead the world into a pit of destruction. Give them an inch they will take a mile. Of course, thats why they are using trade deals to wipe out every hint of compassion, like the compassion you describe, rstofer - telling gullible people what kinds of cons they should avoid. Once you start doing that, it will never stop. before you know it, the whole scheme goes down in flames and nobody gets filthy rich, except the poor who work hard for it. Nobody (important) should ever have to do that. Damn you!
/sarcasm.
tronde:
--- Quote from: Nusa on July 06, 2017, 06:19:57 pm ---A bit too much TLDR here. If you could make your points with fewer words, I might read them.
--- End quote ---
The essence of all the words is that those who don't want to waste time on educating themselves will be badly bitten.
tronde:
Question to bluescull:
I can see why you and your family fear for financial trouble in China. My understanding of the Chinese economy is that it does not follow the "western rules of economy" if you look at the government level because the government as an entity does not see money as a goal in itself. I know that one of the most important goals for the government is to remain in office, and money can be a tool to achieve just that so it is importat that way. But just to save up a huge pile of money is not importat in the same way as it is in the West.
So - how big losses for a Chinese citizen or family will they allow? I guess a large group of pepole can be rather difficult to handle if they loose a lot of money because of something as abstract as large scale economy?
Will your money actually be more safe in the american housing market than within China? If the Chinese economy really goes bust it will for sure affect most western countries too.
tronde:
--- Quote from: cdev on July 06, 2017, 07:06:52 pm ---
If they've been hyped up to see our market as more valuable than it turns out to be, just like happens with housing, it might turn out to be mutual, because their markets may turn out to not be generating the growth that we expect because we underestimate their level of exploitation and the lack of upward mobility there, too! Their rich will stay rich but they already own all the useless junk they need. And their poor, even the smart ones, will stay poor. All around the world.
So they wont buy our products in large numbers, in other words they wont be "growth" or any kind of replacement for the middle class we're so eager to lose, in fact have already written off as gone, instead it will be a total disaster.
--- End quote ---
Some reading from Nick Hanauer, one of the "super rich":
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version