OT: UK to move back to imperial units?

Jan Panteltje <pNaOnStPeAlMtje@yahoo.com> wrote in news:qic3oj$unm$1
@dont-email.me:

> They seem to have decent rockets too,

No, they do not. They have China's and maybe Russia's 35 year old
tech. Maybe even some lame shit from Iran. Hardly 'decent'

> and even have a satellite.

After 5 attempts, they put a *lame* 'camera bird' up. It is
probably already OOS.

They probably bought it.

N. Korea's capacity for electronics is near nil.

They still operate military vehicles that use carburetors and
points.

Some lame nation sold them 4K cameras so they could record and
broadcast to the world Kim trapsing through his retarded,
militarized, communist life.

For their violations, they do not need sanctioning, they need to be
ousted from the UN for doing things they said they would not do and
not doing things they said they would do.

The next time they pull one of these lame launches, they should get
that launch site destroyed.

We can say it was a NATO missile and response.

The UN should declare their behavior as a violation and threaten
the ouster with the next violation. And state that the violating
launch site will be destroyed.

Several nearby nations should be upset about the launches.

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Tuesday, August 6, 2019 at 11:50:49 PM UTC+10, John Larkin wrote:

On Mon, 5 Aug 2019 22:37:28 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:

On Tuesday, August 6, 2019 at 12:24:20 AM UTC-4, Rick C wrote:
On Monday, August 5, 2019 at 6:41:46 PM UTC-4, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:

Right. It took me a few decades to wrap my head around it,
but it amounts to this -- we've handed out $22 trillion
dollars in coupons for merchandise that doesn't exist. (A lot
more if you count Social Security and, especially, Medicare.)

So, necessarily, at some point we'll have a bunch of people
running around with coupons, but not able to cash them in on
all those goodies that never existed.

So what sort of mess would we be in if the government had never borrowed the money in the first place?

Why would there be a mess? Promising people things that don't
exist creates the mess. But they don't realize it until later.

Likely the same mess we would be in if the goverment didn't spend the money it borrows. Oh, you forgot about that part of the equation? Yes, the money is spent.

All government spending is ultimately a tax, money taken from
the economy. Borrowing just delays the bill, a way of hiding
the tax.

It's not a bunch of money created with nothing pumped into the economy.

Yes actually, that's exactly what it is. That's why they had to create
it. Money represents goods and services. Taxes are when the government
takes some of your goods and services, to spend on a public good (hopefully),
or to give to another person who gets your goods and services without
paying you for them (socialism).

One of the more prominent public goods is education, which is spent on children who don't pay anybody anything for them. A better educated work force is more productive, so society gets the money back eventually, but James Arthur isn't in favour of pulbic education and has the right-wing discounted cash flow mentality which deliberately rejects long-term investment.

The federal government uses borrowing to create money for goods and
services that it has not yet taken from the citizens. That is, to
promise things it cannot deliver.

In places that do it right - Scandinavia and northern Europe - the governments do deliver. In the US the tax-evading well-off have enough political clout to make sure that any such initiatives are done badly - usually by making sure that they are under-funded - and don't work.

Worse, government takes money - wealth and resources - that would have
been invested, and mostly wastes it. And wastes even more that it
doesn't even have. But still is committed to paying it back.

Governments are perfectly capable of investing the money they get from the tax-payers profitably. James Arthur is unwilling to beleive that, and advances the antics of the Soviet centrally planned economy as evidence of what any government that claims to be socialist might do. The centrally planned and controlled economy isn't any part of democratic socialism, but James Arthur seems to think that democaracy isn't either. He much prefers the kind of plutocracy he's used to.

"Goods and services" are quickly gone and forgotten. Investment in
productive capacity, and in people, and in infrastructure, builds.

Investment in education and effective health care is money spent on services. It does build a healthy and productive work force, but this isn't something that James Arthur is willing to admit, and John Larkin lets James Arthur do his thinking for him in this area.

> "You didn't build that" == "We didn't let you build anything."

People who want to set up businesses really resent the regulations that require them to do it right, rather than letting them cut corners, rip-off their employees and pour dangerous chemicals down the sink.

Love Canal isn't something they can remember. The EU is a heavily regulated area, but somehow Airbus manages to sell more planes tham Boeing.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney