OT: Goodbye to the American Dream

[Bill Sloman]

On Tuesday, 1 September 2015 13:24:28 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:

On Monday, August 31, 2015 at 7:39:39 PM UTC-4, Les Cargill wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 07:40:23 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:

On Sunday, August 30, 2015 at 11:00:23 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Monday, 31 August 2015 11:43:17 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Sunday, August 30, 2015 at 7:23:24 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Monday, 31 August 2015 04:54:39 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Sunday, August 30, 2015 at 2:20:55 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Sun, 30 Aug 2015 10:39:24 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:

snip

The bill for the pseudo-stimulus (about .3 GDP*years worth) has to come
due eventually. We spent about 5 years printing 6% of GDP in phony
prosperity, borrowed from our future. The only question is whether we'll
make monthly installments (reductions in future growth), or have the bill
come due all at once.

The bill for the 1930's non-stimulus - the Great Depression - was a 25% reduction in GDP.

The 30's were nothing but 'stimulus' starting with Hoover (playing George
W. Bush to Obama's FDR). That created the Great Depression from what should
have been a transient panic. Rent-seeking, Smoot-Hawley, and chiefly,
unstable lawless government & federal deficits, terrorizing production
and borrowing from future prosperity. Same same.

That is your "flat earth" take on the situation. Hoover's stimulus wasn't substantial enough to do anything useful.

Industrial production didn't get back to the 1929 level until 1937, then took another hit when James Arthur think-alikes prematurely cut back the stimulus, after which it fell and didn't recover until 1939.

Actually that's another myth. Stimulus, being artificial, never lit the fire
it was supposed to light.

As you keep on telling us. It's just a coincidence that Hoover presided over decline, and Roosevelt presided over recovery.

As soon as the money stops, instant withdrawal
and retraction, as you've just acknowledged. (If it had worked, it wouldn't
have needed until 1937 to ignite a self-sustaining recovery.) We just had
the same experience with Obama's wasteulous, and Japan's been mired in it
since the late 1980's.

It did work, from 1933 to 1937, and it's premature retraction was what created the 1937 recession.

Let's briefly examine that. If a government showers money to 'stimulate' the
economy for five years (per your theory), you're saying that's not long enough
for desperate businesses to rehire, consumption to rise, and create a
self-sustaining recovery if, as you assume, the loop gain is >1 ?

You're barking mad. Businesses would be hiring in three months. By five years
they'd be in their nth wave of new hiring, with wages percolating throughout
the economy and stimulating your precious demand to whatever maximal extent it
ever would. Five years is far more than enough to ignite a fire if your
theory were correct, but, it didn't. It never happened. It doesn't work.

It creates artificial activity that stops the instant the artificial input
disappears--you just cited the proof! No lasting 'recovery' is launched.

Japan's been doing it nearly three decades and it still hasn't worked.

That's because IT DOESN'T WORK. Stealing from one's future to party in the
present is a significantly under-unity proposition. Q.E.D.

Cheers,
James Arthur

Some businesses explode/implode in a year or two, and some grow or
fade away over generations.

To grow, a business has to evolve products, grow a customer base,
develop a talented staff and management, and learn how to design,
manufacture, and sell. I'd estimate that the average business has a
stimulus-response time constant in the range of 10 to 20 years. A
small change in gain (and 35% corporate taxation is not small) can
have a huge effect on that tau.

Sloman advocates government stimulus because he doesn't have a
business and hasn't worked in decades. He's a natural socialist.

The problem with government stimulus is that the money has to come
from somewhere.

It has to come from some*when*. @ 2% GDP growth, a fifty-year
period erodes $100 to 37.5 cents on the dollar. At 4% growth,
it's $0.17 per dollar.

We don't run the government like a pawn shop.

This money can come from the Fed, which can make it out of thin air.

The signal you've gone too far is the spread on bond yields - which
has been effectively zero or negative for some time.

ISTM you're getting lost in the abstractions. They can't print *valuable
stuff*, so in printing more coupons for "valuable stuff," they dilute the
value of the existing coupons.

Another problem is the the recipients of stimulus are
selected politically, so usually squander the resources.

Much larger problem, although the resources are seldom squandered outright.

The "money
multiplier" of stimulus gets praised,

And it should...

but not many people want to talk
about the much bigger de-multiplier that pays for stimulus. The Broken
Window theory is still popular among the non-working class.


If you can get money in the hands of people who are pretty poor,
chances are real good it'll increase the overall movement
of money.

But that's a big "if". We suck out loud at redistribution.

No, it's still crap. Giving thirty million people a dollar each--perfectly
redistributed--doesn't build a factory. It sprouts a few more McDonald's
franchises, which dry up once the money's gone.

This is a hypothesis. It hasn't been tested. What has been tested is giving most of the stimulus money to Americans who have already got plenty, and it's an experimental fact that they don't spend much of it.

Having the poor spend it in MacDonald's franchises may not be ideal, but at least they can be relied on to spend most of it.

Since America's national investment policy seems to be to build factories in low wage countries around the globe (mostly in China, though they are now starting to pay their workers better) one has to wonder why James Arthur thinks that the aim of the stimulus spending should have been to build factories in the US. That would entail spending money on education in the US to train the workers to the point where they could usefully work in those factories (as opposed to importing them from Mexico or where-ever).

Bastiat was against state-funded education - because it had to be paid for with money extorted from tax-payers like him - so James Arthur will be against it too.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Tuesday, 1 September 2015 13:37:30 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:

On Monday, August 31, 2015 at 7:48:21 PM UTC-4, Les Cargill wrote:
dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
On Monday, August 31, 2015 at 11:56:58 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 07:40:23 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:

On Sunday, August 30, 2015 at 11:00:23 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

[stimulus]

It did work, from 1933 to 1937, and it's premature retraction was what created the 1937 recession.

Let's briefly examine that. If a government showers money to
'stimulate' the economy for five years (per your theory), you're saying
that's not long enough for desperate businesses to rehire, consumption
to rise, and create aself-sustaining recovery if, as you assume, the
loop gain is >1 ?

You're barking mad. Businesses would be hiring in three months. By
five years they'd be in their nth wave of new hiring, with wages
percolating throughout the economy and stimulating your precious demand
to whatever maximal extent it ever would. Five years is far more than
enough to ignite a fire if your theory were correct, but, it didn't.. It > > >>> never happened. It doesn't work.

It creates artificial activity that stops the instant the artificial
input disappears--you just cited the proof! No lasting 'recovery' is
launched.

Japan's been doing it nearly three decades and it still hasn't worked.

That's because IT DOESN'T WORK. Stealing from one's future to party in
the present is a significantly under-unity proposition. Q.E.D.

Strange kind of "proof". James Arthur spells out what he thinks should have happened - and didn't - and thinks that this proves something. It does prove he can't think straight, as if we needed any extra evidence of that.

Some businesses explode/implode in a year or two, and some grow or
fade away over generations.

To grow, a business has to evolve products, grow a customer base,
develop a talented staff and management, and learn how to design,
manufacture, and sell. I'd estimate that the average business has a
stimulus-response time constant in the range of 10 to 20 years.

Granted. The wasteulus theory was about getting existing businesses
rolling and up to speed again though, shovel-ready etc. All the
infrastructure should already be in place, idled, ready to roll. That
should respond quickly.

That didn't happen in the 1930's because it had been left to rot for three years under Hoover.

And of course, it didn't, because the whole notion's a fairy-tale that's
utterly ignorant of human nature--bogus social-engineering. You grow a
bunch of weeds, and they die the day you run out of water to flood them.

James Arthur's preferred economic theories involve the rational and perfectly informed investor - a mathematically tractable soul who can be modelled on the most primitive computer. He's the one who is out hiring after three months of stimulus. That is a fairy-tale.

But in this case, they never even really acted on the "stimulus". It
literally never went to anybody outside of the odd Soylyndra or such.

Subsidies don't work for a variety of reasons, except when they do.

A small change in gain (and 35% corporate taxation is not small) can
have a huge effect on that tau.

Sloman advocates government stimulus because he doesn't have a
business and hasn't worked in decades. He's a natural socialist.

So what? Would I think differently if I'd got any of the jobs I've been applying for?

And modern socialism is decidedly unnatural. It has taken decades of experimentation to get it right - in Scandinavia and Germany. There have been a lot of mistakes along the road - James Arthur saw a few of them for himself in the old East Germany, and thinks that what he saw there defines modern socialism.

The problem with government stimulus is that the money has to come
from somewhere.

Right. They suck it out of the economy, then splash what's left after
spillage onto crops in the desert. Kudzu--hey, that's nice and green!

It isn't sucked out of the economy, but rather borrowed from people who are leaving on desposit in their bank account, waiting for their neighbours to go bankrupt so tha they can buy up their assets fro 10 cents on the dollar..

but they don't put the money in piles and burn it - it cycles
through the rest of the economy. It's just not nearly enough to
make a dent.

Plenty of federal spending cycled through the economy, it simply doesn't work.
Sorry, it's a bankrupt theory, a sub-zero sum technique.

In James Arthur's expert opinion. Of course, if you have made a reasoned decision that Keynes was wrong, and all the mountains of evidence that demonstrate that he was right are merely misapprehensions, you can think that. And that the earth is flat.

Do you have any examples of deficit-funded stimulus ever actually working,
i.e., igniting a long-term, self-sustaining recovery?

The US from 2008 to the present? It's been slower than it should have been, because the stimulus hasn't been rigorously directed at people who could be relied on to spend it, but it's worked a whole lot better than Hoover's policies did from 1930 to 1933.

They try to hide that reality by borrowing (instead of immediate taxation),

... and they should...

I don't believe a government of the People should be diligently engaged in
deceiving the People. I just have a basic philosophical problem with it.

But you are happy to deceive yourself, and anybody silly enough to take you seriously.

> They're also stupid and slow,

They aren't stupid enough to fall for the nonsense that you've been persuade is true.

> so besides having no right to make such decisions, they're in no position to > either.

As decided by Jsames Arthur, on the basis of his superior knowledge - or - more accurately, his more or less consistent set of delusions.

but fool no one. (Even Keynes said his gimmick was only good for a few
months until everyone got wise to the new flows being bogus, temporary,
and debts to be paid back later.)

Keynes was a remarkably intelligent man, and didn't understand how good less clever people could be at deluding themselves. Pity James Arthur wasn't around to show him what a skilled example could manage.

Dan Kahneman demonstrated that most of the self-delusion goes on at a sub-conscious level. You see the world and make quick automatic judgments about what's going on, which influence subsequent decisions in ways that aren't entirely rational. We do a lot of quick and dirty computation without actually noticing that we've done it.

But permanent programs like Food Stamps *do* work pretty well for that.
And they're cheap. But food production is pretty efficient, so a small
degree of inefficiency gets lost in the noise.

They're great for depressing wages and creating poverty traps. I'd challenge
you to think past this and ask, since we agree that food is cheap, why would
we assume able-bodied people wouldn't be able to afford it, and why would we
create a system that enforces that vision?

If they can't get work, it's hard to get enough money to pay for the cheapest food.

Another problem is the the recipients of stimulus are
selected politically, so usually squander the resources.

Right. If the stimulated thing were good it wouldn't need public dole..
It's the loser projects that need propping, and they fold when the props
fail.

That's not what stimulus is about.

The paperwork overhead doesn't help...

True. As dumb as it is, it sucks the life out of someone who's working full-
speed to get something to market.

The 'winner' outfits have to pay for it all, which, in a time of stress,
kills some of them off. Net loss.

Not as big as the net loss created by a full-blown depression.

Hoover's approach killed off 25% of US manufacturing capacity. Obama's has kept the economy growing, not all that fast, but not shrinking.

Not ... likely. I mean a good healthy firm won't get killed
off by that sort of thing.

The people laid off in 2009 will be glad to hear that.

Most of them got laid off by the bubble-fed home construction industry

The "money
multiplier" of stimulus gets praised, but not many people want to talk
about the much bigger de-multiplier that pays for stimulus.

Greenspan did a study, calculated the Keynesian Multiplier of Barack's > > stimulus as negative. Su-prise, su-prise, su-prise.

Sounds like Not Invented Here. Greenspan's term at the Fed ended in 2006.
He won't have liked anything done by his successor. And he admired Ayn Rand.. Anything he says must be right - if not far-right.

Might have been; nobody's really done the math. But most of the Obama
stimulus was a nonstarter - it never really happened at all.

It wasn't as big as it should have been. It was put together before everybody had realised just how much liquidity the GFC had taken out of the financial system, and once the Republicans had a majority in Congress they made sure that most of it went to people who'd vote for them.

But it was - and is - real and the difference it made it pretty obvious in the economic indices. There's a Great Depression style fall in economic output for just one quarter - of 1.5% - before the stimulus kicked in. During the Great Depression, that decline was sustained and bettered for three years, until the economy turned around under Roosevelt, from a level 25% below what it had been in 1929.

Agreed, which is why it was a waste. They did a lot of shoveling, but they
were shoveling something other than jobs.

The "shovel-ready projects" put a of of money into the pockets of rich sub-contractors, who weren't the ideal targets for stimulus payments.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Tuesday, 1 September 2015 13:47:20 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:

On Monday, August 31, 2015 at 7:56:30 PM UTC-4, Les Cargill wrote:
dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
snip

Barack Obama means 'by force.' Charity is never forced.

That's disingenuous. Pay them taxes; it's worth it.

That's incredibly arrogant, and incorrect. It's not in my interest to fund
the demise of my own country. I'm morally opposed.

And intellectually challenged. Not that you can't process data, but you are selective about the results that you will recognise as valid.

> It's not in my interest to pay large amounts to create poverty and permanent > non-productive rent-seekers. If Barack wants something built, let him build > it, himself.

But you like the Tea Party which is chock-a-block with unproductive rent-seekers. What's your take on Donald Trump? He seems to be dumber than Sarah Palin, and just as attractive to the moronic fringe.

Will he be the third party candidate who gives Hillary the presidency?

So, I'll continue holding my tax liability to nothingness, and you can pay
69 cents on the dollar to promote and encourage poverty. Deal?

To encourage policies that James Arthur believes will promote and encourage poverty, based on his exhaustive reading of Bastiat (who died in 1850), and his comprehensive rejection of Keynes (who only died in 1946, and whose ideas are thus nowhere near mature enough to be taken seriously).

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Tuesday, 1 September 2015 14:21:57 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:

On Monday, August 31, 2015 at 11:34:09 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Tuesday, 1 September 2015 00:40:33 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Sunday, August 30, 2015 at 11:00:23 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Monday, 31 August 2015 11:43:17 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:

As soon as the money stops, instant withdrawal
and retraction, as you've just acknowledged. (If it had worked, it
wouldn't have needed until 1937 to ignite a self-sustaining
recovery.) We just had the same experience with Obama's wasteulous,
and Japan's been mired in it since the late 1980's.

It did work, from 1933 to 1937, and it's premature retraction was what created the 1937 recession.

Let's briefly examine that. If a government showers money to 'stimulate'
the economy for five years (per your theory), you're saying that's not
long enough for desperate businesses to rehire, consumption to rise, and
create a self-sustaining recovery if, as you assume, the loop gain is >1 ?

It clearly wasn't long enough to persuade businesses that they were out of recession.

That's idiotic, and avoids the question. But since the stimulus actually
started circa 1929, I mis-phrased it: Do you really insist that EIGHT years
of stimulus isn't enough to initiate a self-sustaining recovery?

Three years of utterly negligible stimulus under Hoover didn't do anything to stop the economy shrinking. It's a dose related thing - if the economy is shrinking at 6% per year, people notice that and act accordingly.

They reacted to the cutting back of the stimulus by going into a self-protective mode, minimising investment in all but the most certainly profitable prospects.

Of course, that's what rational people do. Stimulus today = tax tomorrow,
so people stash the stimulus and brace for the taxes. The project was
doomed from the start.

It worked fine from 1933 to 1937. Nobody was bracing for taxes while the stimulus was still running, and they resumed expanding their businesses pretty much as soon as the stimulus was turned back on.

Even Keynes said the stimulus has to happen before businessmen and consumers
realized the funds were borrowed, & accruing a debt they'd pay later.

Dan Kahneman got a Nobel prize in economics in 2002 for explaining why people
don't act as rationally as all that. Keynes was a remarkably clever man, and may have over-estimated the rest of the world.

Except in this day and age of the internet, those arguments were made and
understood, published, and discussed *before* the stimulus even passed, so
Keynes' two-month-ish 'fooling the public' window was reduced to nada.

Didn't stop the stimulus from working fine in 2009. There's one quarter of 1.5% economic shrinkage - essentially the Great Depression rate - before the stimulus got running, and after that the economy is growing, slower than it should have done, but then the stimulus was smaller than it should have been.

I've pointed this out to you before, and you react by producing some half-baked rubbish telling me what my proposition should have predicted - and didn't happen - and claim that this is some kind of counter argument. See above for more of the same.

All these socialist fantasies assume people are stupid and will sit
passively by while they're fleeced. They aren't and don't.

Except that they aren't being fleeced. Hoover's inaction fleeced the US of 25% of it's economic capacity between 1930 and 1933. That hasn't happened this time around.

The stimulus package is expensive, but it's effective, and cheaper than your ill-judged do-nothing option.

The interesting question is why none of the bankers who engineered the GFC have gone to prison. The 1929 crash exposed a lot of fraud, and those crooks did get prosecuted. The sub-prime mortgage crisis was all about commoditising over-valued mortgage debt, which has to be fraud, but nobody seems to have been prosecuted.

At the time you put all the blame on the Community Reinvestment Act but it turned out that the loans guaranteed under it were no more likely to go bad than loans from regular banks, and it was the fringe banking sector that had done all the damage.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

On Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 10:23:06 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Tuesday, 1 September 2015 13:37:30 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Monday, August 31, 2015 at 7:48:21 PM UTC-4, Les Cargill wrote:
dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
On Monday, August 31, 2015 at 11:56:58 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 07:40:23 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:

On Sunday, August 30, 2015 at 11:00:23 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

[stimulus]

It did work, from 1933 to 1937, and it's premature retraction was what created the 1937 recession.

Let's briefly examine that. If a government showers money to
'stimulate' the economy for five years (per your theory), you're saying
that's not long enough for desperate businesses to rehire, consumption
to rise, and create aself-sustaining recovery if, as you assume, the
loop gain is >1 ?

You're barking mad. Businesses would be hiring in three months. By
five years they'd be in their nth wave of new hiring, with wages
percolating throughout the economy and stimulating your precious demand
to whatever maximal extent it ever would. Five years is far more than
enough to ignite a fire if your theory were correct, but, it didn't. It > > >>> never happened. It doesn't work.

It creates artificial activity that stops the instant the artificial
input disappears--you just cited the proof! No lasting 'recovery' is
launched.

Japan's been doing it nearly three decades and it still hasn't worked.

That's because IT DOESN'T WORK. Stealing from one's future to party in
the present is a significantly under-unity proposition. Q.E.D.

Strange kind of "proof". James Arthur spells out what he thinks should have happened - and didn't - and thinks that this proves something. It does prove he can't think straight, as if we needed any extra evidence of that.

Some businesses explode/implode in a year or two, and some grow or
fade away over generations.

To grow, a business has to evolve products, grow a customer base,
develop a talented staff and management, and learn how to design,
manufacture, and sell. I'd estimate that the average business has a
stimulus-response time constant in the range of 10 to 20 years.

Granted. The wasteulus theory was about getting existing businesses
rolling and up to speed again though, shovel-ready etc. All the
infrastructure should already be in place, idled, ready to roll. That
should respond quickly.

That didn't happen in the 1930's because it had been left to rot for three years under Hoover.

http://www.hoover.org/research/stimulus-and-depression-untold-story
"After the initial stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent economic plunge, a recovery began in the summer of 1932, well before the New Deal. The Federal Reserve Board's Index of Industrial production rose nearly 50% between the Depression's trough of July 1932 and June 1933."

Cheers,
James Arthur

 

[amdx]

On 8/31/2015 9:44 PM, John Larkin wrote:

But that's a big "if". We suck out loud at redistribution.

Job creation (REAL job creation) is the best form of redistribution,

Without doubt.

because it creates wealth to redistribute.



Sometimes. But this has been extremely slow since 2008 ( and even
before ) and you can't attribute it to the guy in the oval office,
tax policy or much else, really.

I do attribute it to tax policy. And immigration policy.

I'll throw in Obamacare, companies have limited employees (under 50)
and they have put many more employees on part time to sidestep the
Obamacare rules.

Then we have a decline of incomes, some of that because of immigration
policy.
In my business an excess of immigrated/imported shrimp has kept the
price the same since Jan 1, 2000.
To be fair, the price has been up and down, but I expect a continued
drop in price. A recent (2 to 4 year) increase was caused by a disease
called Early Mortality Syndrome, the cause has been found and solved on
a farm by farm basis, so prices have dropped with higher
immigration/importation.


Mikek

 

[amdx]

On 8/31/2015 12:18 AM, rickman wrote:

When investing in funds success is mostly a matter of luck and perhaps
timing. Large segments of the market must go up for funds to appreciate
appreciably.

My timing is good, I started investing in the late 80's. No luck
involved, just save and invest.

That is hard to predict although getting out before a
bubble bursts is not so hard. Just don't stick around to gain every
last nickle.

Then you must be a multimillionaire. Since you know when the market
is at the last 6 cents before the bubble bursts.
So, are we in a bubble now? Should I sell?

Mikek

PS. The the Nasdaq futures are down 108 points 1/2 hr before open.

 

[John Larkin]

On Tue, 1 Sep 2015 07:39:18 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 8/31/2015 9:44 PM, John Larkin wrote:


But that's a big "if". We suck out loud at redistribution.

Job creation (REAL job creation) is the best form of redistribution,

Without doubt.

because it creates wealth to redistribute.



Sometimes. But this has been extremely slow since 2008 ( and even
before ) and you can't attribute it to the guy in the oval office,
tax policy or much else, really.

I do attribute it to tax policy. And immigration policy.


I'll throw in Obamacare, companies have limited employees (under 50)
and they have put many more employees on part time to sidestep the
Obamacare rules.

Then we have a decline of incomes, some of that because of immigration
policy.
In my business an excess of immigrated/imported shrimp has kept the
price the same since Jan 1, 2000.

The big farm-raised imported shrimp have no taste. Rock shrimp are
awful. Sometimes, not often, we can get Gulf shrimp at Whole Foods.
Very rarely we can get them with heads, which are really vital to
making a good sauce for shrimp-and-grits.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/53724080/Food/Shrimp%2BGrits_2.JPG

To be fair, the price has been up and down, but I expect a continued
drop in price. A recent (2 to 4 year) increase was caused by a disease
called Early Mortality Syndrome, the cause has been found and solved on
a farm by farm basis, so prices have dropped with higher
immigration/importation.

When I was a kid in New Orleans, we were poor, so we ate shrimp when
we couldn't afford hamburger. That was before all the shrimp were
renamed "prawns", loaded into 747 cargo planes, and shipped to
yankees.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
lunatic fringe electronics

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[John Larkin]

On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 21:38:35 -0500, Les Cargill
<lcargill99@comcast.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 18:41:22 -0500, Les Cargill
lcargill99@comcast.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 07:40:23 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:

On Sunday, August 30, 2015 at 11:00:23 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Monday, 31 August 2015 11:43:17 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Sunday, August 30, 2015 at 7:23:24 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Monday, 31 August 2015 04:54:39 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Sunday, August 30, 2015 at 2:20:55 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Sun, 30 Aug 2015 10:39:24 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:

snip

The bill for the pseudo-stimulus (about .3 GDP*years worth) has to come
due eventually. We spent about 5 years printing 6% of GDP in phony
prosperity, borrowed from our future. The only question is whether we'll
make monthly installments (reductions in future growth), or have the bill
come due all at once.

The bill for the 1930's non-stimulus - the Great Depression - was a 25% reduction in GDP.

The 30's were nothing but 'stimulus' starting with Hoover (playing George
W. Bush to Obama's FDR). That created the Great Depression from what should
have been a transient panic. Rent-seeking, Smoot-Hawley, and chiefly,
unstable lawless government & federal deficits, terrorizing production
and borrowing from future prosperity. Same same.

That is your "flat earth" take on the situation. Hoover's stimulus wasn't substantial enough to do anything useful.

Industrial production didn't get back to the 1929 level until 1937, then took another hit when James Arthur think-alikes prematurely cut back the stimulus, after which it fell and didn't recover until 1939.

Actually that's another myth. Stimulus, being artificial, never lit the fire
it was supposed to light.

As you keep on telling us. It's just a coincidence that Hoover presided over decline, and Roosevelt presided over recovery.

As soon as the money stops, instant withdrawal
and retraction, as you've just acknowledged. (If it had worked, it wouldn't
have needed until 1937 to ignite a self-sustaining recovery.) We just had
the same experience with Obama's wasteulous, and Japan's been mired in it
since the late 1980's.

It did work, from 1933 to 1937, and it's premature retraction was what created the 1937 recession.

Let's briefly examine that. If a government showers money to 'stimulate' the
economy for five years (per your theory), you're saying that's not long enough
for desperate businesses to rehire, consumption to rise, and create a
self-sustaining recovery if, as you assume, the loop gain is >1 ?

You're barking mad. Businesses would be hiring in three months. By five years
they'd be in their nth wave of new hiring, with wages percolating throughout
the economy and stimulating your precious demand to whatever maximal extent it
ever would. Five years is far more than enough to ignite a fire if your
theory were correct, but, it didn't. It never happened. It doesn't work.

It creates artificial activity that stops the instant the artificial input
disappears--you just cited the proof! No lasting 'recovery' is launched.

Japan's been doing it nearly three decades and it still hasn't worked.

That's because IT DOESN'T WORK. Stealing from one's future to party in the
present is a significantly under-unity proposition. Q.E.D.

Cheers,
James Arthur

Some businesses explode/implode in a year or two, and some grow or
fade away over generations.

To grow, a business has to evolve products, grow a customer base,
develop a talented staff and management, and learn how to design,
manufacture, and sell. I'd estimate that the average business has a
stimulus-response time constant in the range of 10 to 20 years. A
small change in gain (and 35% corporate taxation is not small) can
have a huge effect on that tau.

Sloman advocates government stimulus because he doesn't have a
business and hasn't worked in decades. He's a natural socialist.

The problem with government stimulus is that the money has to come
from somewhere.

It has to come from some*when*. @ 2% GDP growth, a fifty-year
period erodes $100 to 37.5 cents on the dollar. At 4% growth,
it's $0.17 per dollar.

An ever-increasing public debt as a fraction of GDP eventually hits
the wall. Only enforced zero interest rates can delay the pain.


It depends on what you mean by "ever-increasing." And it depends
a lot.

Sorry for using engineering technical jargon in a sci* group. It means
that as time ambles along, the number keeps going up.

I have little doubt but that America could right now shoulder much
more public debt if GDP growth was better.

But the public debt keeps GDP down.

But we seem individually quite disinterested in that.

I sure am. I'd rather have jobs.

We don't run the government like a pawn shop.

This money can come from the Fed, which can make it out of thin air.

The signal you've gone too far is the spread on bond yields - which
has been effectively zero or negative for some time.

Another problem is the the recipients of stimulus are
selected politically, so usually squander the resources.

Much larger problem, although the resources are seldom squandered outright.

For nonstandard versions of "seldom."


Sorta. A mirror-image is something like Iridium, which has remained
valuable besides the dismal start it had.

If only squandering could be limited to 100% of the money spent!



The "money
multiplier" of stimulus gets praised,

And it should...

but not many people want to talk
about the much bigger de-multiplier that pays for stimulus. The Broken
Window theory is still popular among the non-working class.


If you can get money in the hands of people who are pretty poor,
chances are real good it'll increase the overall movement
of money.

Create lots of poor people first, then print some money to give them.
You'll see lots of movement.


But you don't create poor people. They occur naturally. Poverty is the
default state of Man.

That's meaningless, especially in the face of modern technology and
productivity. Government policy has trapped millions of people in a
permanent underclass. That is entirely unnecessary. And cruel.

 

[John Larkin]

On Sun, 30 Aug 2015 15:44:20 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 8/30/2015 11:01 AM, Les Cargill wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 29 Aug 2015 17:29:30 -0500, John Fields
jfields@austininstruments.com> wrote:
snip


And rich people are the only people who can defer significant
consumption in favor of investment.

Absolutely wrong!
The first year my wife and I were married we earned $18,000, we saved
$6,000*. You can live on less than you earn.

That makes you a rich person deferring consumption for investment.

Average family income is around $53,000. But 30% live on $40,000, that
means the average family could trim there expenses and save $13,000 a
year, do this and invest for 30 years and you are wealthy.

And the wealthy have to stash their wealth somewhere, so they invest.
If a culture consumes 100% of its earnings and invests zero, their
productivity will deteriorate. Printing currency won't help. That's
why stimulating consumption is idiotic: government should stimulate
jobs and productivity, which is remarkably easy.

 

[amdx]

On 9/1/2015 9:18 AM, John Larkin wrote:

On Tue, 1 Sep 2015 07:39:18 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 8/31/2015 9:44 PM, John Larkin wrote:


But that's a big "if". We suck out loud at redistribution.

Job creation (REAL job creation) is the best form of redistribution,

Without doubt.

because it creates wealth to redistribute.



Sometimes. But this has been extremely slow since 2008 ( and even
before ) and you can't attribute it to the guy in the oval office,
tax policy or much else, really.

I do attribute it to tax policy. And immigration policy.


I'll throw in Obamacare, companies have limited employees (under 50)
and they have put many more employees on part time to sidestep the
Obamacare rules.

Then we have a decline of incomes, some of that because of immigration
policy.
In my business an excess of immigrated/imported shrimp has kept the
price the same since Jan 1, 2000.

The big farm-raised imported shrimp have no taste.

Often true, although I have had some good sweet shrimp from South America.

>Rock shrimp are awful.

Can't agree with that! They are more lobster flavored.
I've made many sales to reticent customers by, removing the head,
using a pair of scissors pushed in at the mud vein to cut the shell on
the bottom side. Then I butterfly the shell and rinse it clean. Put one
or two in the microwave* for 10 seconds, let it cool 10 seconds and then
5 more seconds. I put nothing on it. I let the customer try it, they are
always impressed.
The usual complaint is they're to hard to peel. Cutting up the bottom
side with scissors negates that complaint.

* Microwaves vary, and the plate can make it take much longer.



Sometimes, not often, we can get Gulf shrimp at Whole Foods.

Very rarely we can get them with heads, which are really vital to
making a good sauce for shrimp-and-grits.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/53724080/Food/Shrimp%2BGrits_2.JPG

To be fair, the price has been up and down, but I expect a continued
drop in price. A recent (2 to 4 year) increase was caused by a disease
called Early Mortality Syndrome, the cause has been found and solved on
a farm by farm basis, so prices have dropped with higher
immigration/importation.

When I was a kid in New Orleans, we were poor, so we ate shrimp when
we couldn't afford hamburger. That was before all the shrimp were
renamed "prawns", loaded into 747 cargo planes, and shipped to
yankees.

My line when customers look at my big shrimp and call them prawns,
"If you call them Prawns I need to charge you more"

Down here, there are yankees and damn yankees, yankees come down spend
their money and go home, damn yankees come down and stay. I'm one of the
latter.

I sell in the Florida panhandle, when I get Louisiana customers, they
often say, I only pay half that back home. These days, I just say, it's
a long drive to save a few bucks. (I'm getting jaded after 15 years.)
It is true their prices are much lower than ours. The boats there can
get 2000 lbs in a night, here, it's more like 500 lbs, or 240 lbs, like
one boat last night.
Mikek

 

[amdx]

On 9/1/2015 12:08 PM, John Larkin wrote:

On Sun, 30 Aug 2015 15:44:20 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 8/30/2015 11:01 AM, Les Cargill wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 29 Aug 2015 17:29:30 -0500, John Fields
jfields@austininstruments.com> wrote:
snip


And rich people are the only people who can defer significant
consumption in favor of investment.

Absolutely wrong!
The first year my wife and I were married we earned $18,000, we saved
$6,000*. You can live on less than you earn.

That makes you a rich person deferring consumption for investment.

Well, I wasn't rich at $18,000.
But I I agree, deferring consumption for investment, makes you a rich
person. Although, it might take 30 years.

Average family income is around $53,000. But 30% live on $40,000, that
means the average family could trim there expenses and save $13,000 a
year, do this and invest for 30 years and you are wealthy.

And the wealthy have to stash their wealth somewhere, so they invest.
If a culture consumes 100% of its earnings and invests zero, their
productivity will deteriorate. Printing currency won't help. That's
why stimulating consumption is idiotic: government should stimulate
jobs and productivity, which is remarkably easy.

Obama has doubled a lot of jobs, took one full time job and made it
two part time jobs.
Are you suggesting we should remove penalties from employers?

Mikek

 

On Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 10:35:12 AM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Tuesday, 1 September 2015 13:47:20 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Monday, August 31, 2015 at 7:56:30 PM UTC-4, Les Cargill wrote:
dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:
snip

Barack Obama means 'by force.' Charity is never forced.

That's disingenuous. Pay them taxes; it's worth it.

That's incredibly arrogant, and incorrect. It's not in my interest to fund
the demise of my own country. I'm morally opposed.

And intellectually challenged. Not that you can't process data, but you are selective about the results that you will recognise as valid.

It's not in my interest to pay large amounts to create poverty and permanent > non-productive rent-seekers. If Barack wants something built, let him build > it, himself.

But you like the Tea Party which is chock-a-block with unproductive rent-seekers. What's your take on Donald Trump? He seems to be dumber than Sarah Palin, and just as attractive to the moronic fringe.

Will he be the third party candidate who gives Hillary the presidency?

So, I'll continue holding my tax liability to nothingness, and you can pay
69 cents on the dollar to promote and encourage poverty. Deal?

To encourage policies that James Arthur believes will promote and encourage poverty, based on his exhaustive reading of Bastiat (who died in 1850), and his comprehensive rejection of Keynes (who only died in 1946, and whose ideas are thus nowhere near mature enough to be taken seriously).

So you'd rather argue about icons? Your arguments are always about people,
never ideas.

It's a mistake to think others rely on authorities for their thinking.)

Cheers,
James Arthur

 

[John Larkin]

On Tue, 1 Sep 2015 12:33:44 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 9/1/2015 9:18 AM, John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 1 Sep 2015 07:39:18 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 8/31/2015 9:44 PM, John Larkin wrote:


But that's a big "if". We suck out loud at redistribution.

Job creation (REAL job creation) is the best form of redistribution,

Without doubt.

because it creates wealth to redistribute.



Sometimes. But this has been extremely slow since 2008 ( and even
before ) and you can't attribute it to the guy in the oval office,
tax policy or much else, really.

I do attribute it to tax policy. And immigration policy.


I'll throw in Obamacare, companies have limited employees (under 50)
and they have put many more employees on part time to sidestep the
Obamacare rules.

Then we have a decline of incomes, some of that because of immigration
policy.
In my business an excess of immigrated/imported shrimp has kept the
price the same since Jan 1, 2000.

The big farm-raised imported shrimp have no taste.

Often true, although I have had some good sweet shrimp from South America.

Rock shrimp are awful.

Can't agree with that! They are more lobster flavored.

Yeah, sort of small bland-flavored lobsters.

I've made many sales to reticent customers by, removing the head,
using a pair of scissors pushed in at the mud vein to cut the shell on
the bottom side. Then I butterfly the shell and rinse it clean. Put one
or two in the microwave* for 10 seconds, let it cool 10 seconds and then
5 more seconds. I put nothing on it. I let the customer try it, they are
always impressed.
The usual complaint is they're to hard to peel. Cutting up the bottom
side with scissors negates that complaint.

* Microwaves vary, and the plate can make it take much longer.



Sometimes, not often, we can get Gulf shrimp at Whole Foods.
Very rarely we can get them with heads, which are really vital to
making a good sauce for shrimp-and-grits.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/53724080/Food/Shrimp%2BGrits_2.JPG

To be fair, the price has been up and down, but I expect a continued
drop in price. A recent (2 to 4 year) increase was caused by a disease
called Early Mortality Syndrome, the cause has been found and solved on
a farm by farm basis, so prices have dropped with higher
immigration/importation.

When I was a kid in New Orleans, we were poor, so we ate shrimp when
we couldn't afford hamburger. That was before all the shrimp were
renamed "prawns", loaded into 747 cargo planes, and shipped to
yankees.


My line when customers look at my big shrimp and call them prawns,
"If you call them Prawns I need to charge you more"

Down here, there are yankees and damn yankees, yankees come down spend
their money and go home, damn yankees come down and stay. I'm one of the
latter.

I sell in the Florida panhandle, when I get Louisiana customers, they
often say, I only pay half that back home. These days, I just say, it's
a long drive to save a few bucks. (I'm getting jaded after 15 years.)
It is true their prices are much lower than ours. The boats there can
get 2000 lbs in a night, here, it's more like 500 lbs, or 240 lbs, like
one boat last night.
Mikek

The Gulf is warm and prolific, sort of a wet jungle. The critters
gobble up anything, even the oil spills.

We used to love to vacation around Pensacola and Destin and such.
Imagine, WHITE sand! The motels were cheap and the dunes were
deserted.

 

[John Larkin]

On Tue, 1 Sep 2015 12:43:52 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 9/1/2015 12:08 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Sun, 30 Aug 2015 15:44:20 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 8/30/2015 11:01 AM, Les Cargill wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 29 Aug 2015 17:29:30 -0500, John Fields
jfields@austininstruments.com> wrote:
snip


And rich people are the only people who can defer significant
consumption in favor of investment.

Absolutely wrong!
The first year my wife and I were married we earned $18,000, we saved
$6,000*. You can live on less than you earn.

That makes you a rich person deferring consumption for investment.

Well, I wasn't rich at $18,000.
But I I agree, deferring consumption for investment, makes you a rich
person. Although, it might take 30 years.



Average family income is around $53,000. But 30% live on $40,000, that
means the average family could trim there expenses and save $13,000 a
year, do this and invest for 30 years and you are wealthy.

And the wealthy have to stash their wealth somewhere, so they invest.
If a culture consumes 100% of its earnings and invests zero, their
productivity will deteriorate. Printing currency won't help. That's
why stimulating consumption is idiotic: government should stimulate
jobs and productivity, which is remarkably easy.


Obama has doubled a lot of jobs, took one full time job and made it
two part time jobs.
Are you suggesting we should remove penalties from employers?

Mikek

Bingo. Stop punishing people for creating jobs. Tax consumption.

 

[amdx]

On 9/1/2015 1:47 PM, John Larkin wrote:

On Tue, 1 Sep 2015 12:33:44 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 9/1/2015 9:18 AM, John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 1 Sep 2015 07:39:18 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 8/31/2015 9:44 PM, John Larkin wrote:


But that's a big "if". We suck out loud at redistribution.

Job creation (REAL job creation) is the best form of redistribution,

Without doubt.

because it creates wealth to redistribute.



Sometimes. But this has been extremely slow since 2008 ( and even
before ) and you can't attribute it to the guy in the oval office,
tax policy or much else, really.

I do attribute it to tax policy. And immigration policy.


I'll throw in Obamacare, companies have limited employees (under 50)
and they have put many more employees on part time to sidestep the
Obamacare rules.

Then we have a decline of incomes, some of that because of immigration
policy.
In my business an excess of immigrated/imported shrimp has kept the
price the same since Jan 1, 2000.

The big farm-raised imported shrimp have no taste.

Often true, although I have had some good sweet shrimp from South America.

Rock shrimp are awful.

Can't agree with that! They are more lobster flavored.

Yeah, sort of small bland-flavored lobsters.

I've made many sales to reticent customers by, removing the head,
using a pair of scissors pushed in at the mud vein to cut the shell on
the bottom side. Then I butterfly the shell and rinse it clean. Put one
or two in the microwave* for 10 seconds, let it cool 10 seconds and then
5 more seconds. I put nothing on it. I let the customer try it, they are
always impressed.
The usual complaint is they're to hard to peel. Cutting up the bottom
side with scissors negates that complaint.

* Microwaves vary, and the plate can make it take much longer.



Sometimes, not often, we can get Gulf shrimp at Whole Foods.
Very rarely we can get them with heads, which are really vital to
making a good sauce for shrimp-and-grits.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/53724080/Food/Shrimp%2BGrits_2.JPG

To be fair, the price has been up and down, but I expect a continued
drop in price. A recent (2 to 4 year) increase was caused by a disease
called Early Mortality Syndrome, the cause has been found and solved on
a farm by farm basis, so prices have dropped with higher
immigration/importation.

When I was a kid in New Orleans, we were poor, so we ate shrimp when
we couldn't afford hamburger. That was before all the shrimp were
renamed "prawns", loaded into 747 cargo planes, and shipped to
yankees.


My line when customers look at my big shrimp and call them prawns,
"If you call them Prawns I need to charge you more"

Down here, there are yankees and damn yankees, yankees come down spend
their money and go home, damn yankees come down and stay. I'm one of the
latter.

I sell in the Florida panhandle, when I get Louisiana customers, they
often say, I only pay half that back home. These days, I just say, it's
a long drive to save a few bucks. (I'm getting jaded after 15 years.)
It is true their prices are much lower than ours. The boats there can
get 2000 lbs in a night, here, it's more like 500 lbs, or 240 lbs, like
one boat last night.
Mikek


The Gulf is warm and prolific, sort of a wet jungle. The critters
gobble up anything, even the oil spills.

We used to love to vacation around Pensacola and Destin and such.
Imagine, WHITE sand! The motels were cheap and the dunes were
deserted.

You know it's not like that anymore, right?
Well, we do have the white sand, although hurricanes wash sand off the
beaches, then they pump new sand from far out in the ocean and it isn't
white. I think it's a push for diversity. ;-}

Mikek

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, 2 September 2015 03:01:44 UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 21:38:35 -0500, Les Cargill
lcargill99@comcast.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 18:41:22 -0500, Les Cargill
lcargill99@comcast.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 07:40:23 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:

On Sunday, August 30, 2015 at 11:00:23 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Monday, 31 August 2015 11:43:17 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Sunday, August 30, 2015 at 7:23:24 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Monday, 31 August 2015 04:54:39 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Sunday, August 30, 2015 at 2:20:55 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Sun, 30 Aug 2015 10:39:24 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:

<snip>

But you don't create poor people. They occur naturally. Poverty is the
default state of Man.

That's meaningless, especially in the face of modern technology and
productivity. Government policy has trapped millions of people in a
permanent underclass. That is entirely unnecessary. And cruel.

US government policy traps millions of people in a permanently under-educated and unemployable sub-class. That is entirely unnecessary. And cruel.

Scandinavia and Germany do very much better. Why can't the US government copy their policies?

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, 2 September 2015 03:09:06 UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Sun, 30 Aug 2015 15:44:20 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 8/30/2015 11:01 AM, Les Cargill wrote:
John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 29 Aug 2015 17:29:30 -0500, John Fields
jfields@austininstruments.com> wrote:
snip


And rich people are the only people who can defer significant
consumption in favor of investment.

Absolutely wrong!
The first year my wife and I were married we earned $18,000, we saved
$6,000*. You can live on less than you earn.

That makes you a rich person deferring consumption for investment.


Average family income is around $53,000. But 30% live on $40,000, that
means the average family could trim there expenses and save $13,000 a
year, do this and invest for 30 years and you are wealthy.

And the wealthy have to stash their wealth somewhere, so they invest.

Not in a recession, which is the core of Keynes insight.

If a culture consumes 100% of its earnings and invests zero, their
productivity will deteriorate.

As it does in a depression. US productivity shrank 25% during the Great Depression.

> Printing currency won't help.

The cure isn't printing currency, it's borrowing it from the rich, who aren't investing it for themselves, and spending the money on government-funded projects.

That's why stimulating consumption is idiotic: government should stimulate
jobs and productivity, which is remarkably easy.

John Larkin's argument is idiotic, because he doesn't understand how stimulus spending is funded, nor how it's intended to stimulate jobs and productivity. You can't stimulate spending without stimulating the businesses that provide the goods and services on which the new money is being spent.

Money is just a means of exchange. It can be used as a store of value, but if too many people are doing that, rather than investing in producing goods and services, you've got a recession, and if they keep on doing it you've got a depression.

John Larkin can be remarkably foolish, but in this particular instance he's suffering from associating with James Arthur, who thinks that Keynes is much too modern to be trusted.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, 2 September 2015 03:01:44 UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 21:38:35 -0500, Les Cargill
lcargill99@comcast.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 18:41:22 -0500, Les Cargill
lcargill99@comcast.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 07:40:23 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:

On Sunday, August 30, 2015 at 11:00:23 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Monday, 31 August 2015 11:43:17 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Sunday, August 30, 2015 at 7:23:24 PM UTC-4, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Monday, 31 August 2015 04:54:39 UTC+10, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:
On Sunday, August 30, 2015 at 2:20:55 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
On Sun, 30 Aug 2015 10:39:24 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:

<snip>

But you don't create poor people. They occur naturally. Poverty is the
default state of Man.

That's meaningless, especially in the face of modern technology and
productivity. Government policy has trapped millions of people in a
permanent underclass. That is entirely unnecessary. And cruel.

US government policy traps millions of people in a permanently under-educated and unemployable sub-class. That is entirely unnecessary. And cruel.

Scandinavia and Germany do very much better. Why can't the US government copy their policies?

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[John Larkin]

On Tue, 1 Sep 2015 15:42:14 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 9/1/2015 1:47 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 1 Sep 2015 12:33:44 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 9/1/2015 9:18 AM, John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 1 Sep 2015 07:39:18 -0500, amdx <nojunk@knology.net> wrote:

On 8/31/2015 9:44 PM, John Larkin wrote:


But that's a big "if". We suck out loud at redistribution.

Job creation (REAL job creation) is the best form of redistribution,

Without doubt.

because it creates wealth to redistribute.



Sometimes. But this has been extremely slow since 2008 ( and even
before ) and you can't attribute it to the guy in the oval office,
tax policy or much else, really.

I do attribute it to tax policy. And immigration policy.


I'll throw in Obamacare, companies have limited employees (under 50)
and they have put many more employees on part time to sidestep the
Obamacare rules.

Then we have a decline of incomes, some of that because of immigration
policy.
In my business an excess of immigrated/imported shrimp has kept the
price the same since Jan 1, 2000.

The big farm-raised imported shrimp have no taste.

Often true, although I have had some good sweet shrimp from South America.

Rock shrimp are awful.

Can't agree with that! They are more lobster flavored.

Yeah, sort of small bland-flavored lobsters.

I've made many sales to reticent customers by, removing the head,
using a pair of scissors pushed in at the mud vein to cut the shell on
the bottom side. Then I butterfly the shell and rinse it clean. Put one
or two in the microwave* for 10 seconds, let it cool 10 seconds and then
5 more seconds. I put nothing on it. I let the customer try it, they are
always impressed.
The usual complaint is they're to hard to peel. Cutting up the bottom
side with scissors negates that complaint.

* Microwaves vary, and the plate can make it take much longer.



Sometimes, not often, we can get Gulf shrimp at Whole Foods.
Very rarely we can get them with heads, which are really vital to
making a good sauce for shrimp-and-grits.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/53724080/Food/Shrimp%2BGrits_2.JPG

To be fair, the price has been up and down, but I expect a continued
drop in price. A recent (2 to 4 year) increase was caused by a disease
called Early Mortality Syndrome, the cause has been found and solved on
a farm by farm basis, so prices have dropped with higher
immigration/importation.

When I was a kid in New Orleans, we were poor, so we ate shrimp when
we couldn't afford hamburger. That was before all the shrimp were
renamed "prawns", loaded into 747 cargo planes, and shipped to
yankees.


My line when customers look at my big shrimp and call them prawns,
"If you call them Prawns I need to charge you more"

Down here, there are yankees and damn yankees, yankees come down spend
their money and go home, damn yankees come down and stay. I'm one of the
latter.

I sell in the Florida panhandle, when I get Louisiana customers, they
often say, I only pay half that back home. These days, I just say, it's
a long drive to save a few bucks. (I'm getting jaded after 15 years.)
It is true their prices are much lower than ours. The boats there can
get 2000 lbs in a night, here, it's more like 500 lbs, or 240 lbs, like
one boat last night.
Mikek


The Gulf is warm and prolific, sort of a wet jungle. The critters
gobble up anything, even the oil spills.

We used to love to vacation around Pensacola and Destin and such.
Imagine, WHITE sand! The motels were cheap and the dunes were
deserted.

You know it's not like that anymore, right?

What, it's not?

Well, we do have the white sand, although hurricanes wash sand off the
beaches, then they pump new sand from far out in the ocean and it isn't
white. I think it's a push for diversity. ;-}

In Louisiana, if we could find any sand at all, it was brown.
Somewhere east of Mobile the silt had mostly settled out of the river
water.

Galveston had nice beaches, too, in the other direction.

But not enough snow for skiing, too much pollen, not much electronics,
so I left. Getting fired helped, I guess.