Posts by issue-taker

Why is that idiot Osbo continuing with austerity when we know it doesn't work?

Re: Stimulus works

I miss Gillard.

Re: What recession?

briefly, standing wisdom is that we could be in a continuing boom right now, largely propelled by ~Tech~ if it wasn't for the <s>recession</s> numismacide, that is, deliberate culling of swathes of the global economy last decade. Anyone who isn't a predatory london merchant banker is well justified in complaining that their lives have been revalued downward, and demanding justice on those responsible. It's just words. Money is horrible.

Re: I have a general economic rule of thumb...

so your proposal is to turn this into about a cream pie fight to rank wealth-creators by wealth-creation? Oh but isn't that the standing rhetorical hard-right tactic? A tactic thoroughly rebutted elsewhere. ~Job creation~ is not the preserve of the wealth or the entrepreneur or the policy-maker, and it's not even the most useful task in a society, just one of the most obviously measured ones.

If wealth is used as a mathematically useful economic measure, it does not capture human capital, the effects of human health of various kinds, does not yet capture environmental stability, biodiversity and health, nor consumer confidence, so on and so forth...

If wealth is used as an economic measure that does capture all of the above, it's not going to be mathematically useful under currently envisioned methods.

I'm sure you can agree, especially in light of this, the concept of money is horribly flawed.

Perhaps you aren't proposing continued use of money in this sense at all. Perhaps you are saying literally rewarding, perhaps equally, anyone who makes any net contribution to collective long-term wealth however so widely defined. Because a reward is a reward and a contribution is a contribution, and at times like this anything would help, right? But then you'd be a filthy leftie loony marxist of the worst order to be found in this thread, like me.

Re: What the...?

The country has at best mumbled drunkenly through a loo roll, ashamed to be heard in case its ideas might be inspected thoroughly and found to be baseless, incoherent and embarrassing.

Brits collectively panicked and went for something like a status quo, if they hadn't already completely flipped out and done something, *anything* to change the record (well done Scots). As has already been said, that majority was won by having only 600k more tory voters than in 2010. That's a .8% increase in their vote share in 2015 over 2010, and of percentage of the entire electorate, that's about a .5% increase.

The country has spoken!! In rounding errors, but it's burbling something. Are you paralysed by fear? Because the current establishment wants you to be.

Re: What the...?

Furthermore, or should I say Worst-all -- turnout wasn't even two thirds. It went up 1% from 2010, to 66.1

Of the two-thirds of possible votes cast, 36.9 was the tory improvement to 2010's 36.1. Comparing that, perhaps unfairly (Arrow's abloobloo) to the 75.6% of people allowed to vote (electoral 100% - tory 36.1% * 66.1%) who at the very least Could Not Bring Themselves To Vote Tory really dampens claims of legitimacy or public endorsement.

One cannot and I shall not lay the blame for electoral disillusionment solely at the feet of tories (from the irish word for horse thief) the right (from aristocracy of the french revolution) or the man (from, like, patriarchy, man).

I will lay the blame for us having to squeeze inadequate conclusions about political feedback in this country from measly rounding errors on old people (they like the colour blue) and our crappy, melodramatic electoral system (what's that, more constituencies changed to the left than changed to the right? better return a more right wing govt). Having a referendum on fixing the latter is one of the infinite Godel natures for our outdated society.

Re: What the...?

Odd that this article agitates the more emotionally motivated commenters. ~Tech~ as a cultural sphere is generally socially left ("reality has a well-known <s>liberal</s> <i>leftie</i> bias"). Sometimes economically centrist or right. That's two axes I'm discussing "wings" of political opinion on (politicalcompass.org)

Worstall can be self-servingly rightwing, economically at least. He can be as flimsily factless as Niall Ferguson if you pay close attention or if he hasn't given himself enough time for this weeks columns. He once tried to completely dismiss Piketty's "Capital" in a single update for this column. Cunningly, by alleviating anglo countries of the charge of inequality by redefining "poor people" as people with only 5K in shares and dividends etc. Suddenly the rich of the wealthiest 75-95 percentiles looked less stupendously encumbered.

And to fill space over at the FT, if I recall correctly, he sought to demonstrate that economic inequality, job instability and more rights for employer and corporation at the cost of the rights of the individual were good for an economy as a whole. Supposedly, Scandinavian countries, with their absence of a legally defined nationwide minimum wage and state-enforced employment contracts must be libertarian. He contrasted their economic performance with the supposedly "left-wing" romance, Mediterranean countries which aren't weathering the numismacide as well. Thus a victory for broadly right-wing, liberal (in the classical or non-usonian sense) policy, given scandis have healthier, longer-lived people, more productive economies, lower crime and unemployment yadda yadda.

Never mind that with a little more digging or a little less malignant misinformation he could have found these Mediterranean countries -- he focused on Italy -- are pretty much policy-wise on a par with us brits. And crucially, that scandis are ethereal elf-people super-socialists with their minimum wage set by yearly collective bargaining, so as not to be thwarted embarassingly by inflation on a regular basis, like below average earners are here. And that in fact they are the hardest employees to terminate in the world, because of more collective bargaining and a history or well-regulated unionism.

Job security and steady compensation make a happier, more productive workforce, but that was an inconvenient conclusion for Worstall and his FT readers to reach. After all, they regard themselves as the deserving, wryly fondleslab-perusing upper echelon of a splendidly isolationist technocracy. Fact me in my poverty spout oh yes.

Foxconn's going to 'exploit' Indian labour? SCORE! Bye, poverty

Re: And the logical conclusion .....

You're close. I was thinking of moving to France. Six or seven hour days. And I really think it could work very well. Maybe force the politicians and bankers to unionise and limit their hours worked too. Then they'll be less stressed and make fewer silly decisions, and we've suddenly got a huge chance to make politics and finance a lot more diverse.

Re: Lefty pay? @IssueTaker

See, the rose-tinted accusation was what I did rather more elegantly in my original comment. You are the one with the fanciful view of altruistic organisations, I continue to contend. But we don't need to get into a semantic fight (partly because generalisable data is sparse) on the relative crapness of public services and charities that could supposedly supplant them.

Because the issues you list are all the same for charities. There have been two generations of charities springing up to "work around that wholesales waste of resourcs" of other charities. Consider the cycling of responsibilities between the Gates Foundation, USAID, and the RED debacle in the last decade alone. The value of services that a state can provide is so emergent and abstract (for now, while soft science remains translucent at best) that a market doesn't know how to rate these organisations, and image therefore dominates. You might have succumbed to this.

Your criticisms are unqualified, mostly because they imply static relative crapness. I think we could come to agreement on the idea that there are smaller organisations that can adapt faster and temporarily offer more efficiency toward reductive, hot topic ends than a state. Like reducing the number of children in poverty, which is an arbitrarily defined condition in practice.

But assessing that relative adaptation effect in a world where the nature of communication and economics changes is one of the more important reasons why we have a preponderance of obscure professionals with entire classes of responsibility neither you nor most of the world could understand. Right now, it really looks like you've made a personal value judgement rather than a rational economic decision. There doesn't seem to be much consideration for emergence.

There are also specialist charity pension providers, also needlessly lucrative for the execs. The only time I spent in the public sector was carrying a rifle -- though that was admittedly because the real world was too difficult in some senses. Though I do occasionally work for charities, most recently a year and a half ago. Way cushier. Choo choo. Mate.

Re: And the logical conclusion .....

i don't see it in terms of a labour surplus, I see in terms of working conditions and productivity being more strenuous than they need to be.

We could limit hours per week like certain euro countries and lower unemployment. And that's just if we decide unemployment is a useful measure. It would also improve our health, very likely our productivity, quality of life, overall equality... wow Marx really is turning up a lot today.

what with your failing to question his evidence, reasoning, or the sensationalism of the sources you find yourself alarmed by, I'm not sure you ever weren't a raving capitalist

There's orders of magnitude difference in suffering between a neo-belgian congo and "only" hundreds of thousands a year perishing horribly worldwide trying to cross borders or make a better standard of living for themselves.

Re: Lefty pay? @James Cane

"A fair chance" can be creatively interpreted, evidently.

Charity's a sticking plaster, a short term emergency fix, for a person having to use their bare hands to clear up broken glass. I mean to say if a charitable institution exists such that you presumably subscribe to it, then there is in fact a systemic need for whatever service that organisation provides. There should be a provision for gloves and equipment in that broken-glass-clearer's contract, if broken glass clearing is something our economy as a whole has a use for. We oughtn't exploit the people clearing broken glass by using some personal discretion in allowing them to not suffer.

You've essentially funded a small fragmented part of a welfare state with ethics distorted by your personal whims, with likely orders of magnitude lower efficiency, higher chance of corruption, little to no oversight, and a colossal vested interest in calling excessive attention to itself by any means necessary.

And you've done this "several" times over. You're promoting a system that worsens inequality.

I'm glad you have so much disposable income. That's nice. But your run-on post is a confession to rabid egotism, not a qualification of your superficial good-guy credentials. And that's why people suspect you don't care about people.

Argh

thread hijack

where are the Register IRC channels?

NSA Prism: Why I'm boycotting US cloud tech - and you should too

you have some wonderful replies from history buffs, but absolutely, this piece puts widely understood words to a very complex issue.