pastProlog

Fortune's Global 500 top 10 is:

  Walmart $482B in revenue a year
  State Grid $329B
  China Natural Petroleum $299B
  Sinopec $294B
  Shell $272B
  ExxonMobil $246B
  Volkswagen $236B
  Toyota $236B
  Apple $233B
  BP $255B

Six oil companies and two car companies. Trillions of dollars in revenue every year, from oil and other fossil fuels. They have massive think tanks, government lobbyists, media and PR reach etc. They're the center of the world economy and world power.

Yet this climate denier ("I'm not really a climate denier!") writes for the Wall Street Journal (Rupert Murdoch's financial publications are a great place for peer reviewed science - well this guy is a poli-sci major anyhow) about how he is being persecuted by powerful forces.

Please. These people are so out of control they're going to burn up the world. I see someone who mentioned the California droughts, Tennessee etc. was downvoted.

The inertia of these companies at the center of the world economy is to keep doing what they're doing, which is suicidal. Solar etc. has advanced to where changes can be made which are less drastic than expected, but not with this fellow and his supporters here.

As America is going to shit, it's expected that even the silver lining of Silicon Valley's vanguard here are blind to reality and swallow some poli-sci majors climate denial propaganda to Murdoch's paper instead of reading peer-reviewed scientific papers. It goes along with the downward trajectory of the US - the low US growth, crummy unicorns etc. Our incoming pussy-grabbing president used this assessment as his campaign platform, and I agree with him to the limited extent that America is no longer a great country.

I have to cast my eyes to the People's Republic of China to see not only robust growth, but the solar, nuclear and other renewable energy sources. Along with their enormous economic growth over the past few decades, it will be the Chinese who will save things for us, while Americans stumble into the muck of Trump, climate denial and what you can see going on here.

pastProlog

10년 전discuss

Trump is appointing the daughter-in-law of Amway's founder to run the Department of Education. No surprise, she sees it as a money-making (charter school) opportunity for corporations.

pastProlog

10년 전discuss

> The entire concept of fiat currency is abstraction

Then why does the US still maintain over 8000 tons of gold at Fort Knox and elsewhere, 45 years after closing the gold window?

Of course even before 1971 paper currency was an abstraction as well - it was a piece of paper to get a commodity, not the commodity itself.

pastProlog

10년 전discuss

One of the great men of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. That he will be vilified by the soon-to-be-led-by-Trump empire to his north, and Cuba's old idle class, which now lives in Florida, is a given. The empire's last outpost in Guantanamo Bay is where the empire takes other anti-imperialists it has kidnapped and holds them indefinitely without any sort of trial or Geneva convention procedure, and tortures and waterboards them. How different it is in the Cuba outside there, where Castro maintained his country's independence, and saw to the needs of all his country's people. While maintaining a large force of international health aid workers around the world, as well as aiding in such conflicts as the fight against the apartheid South African invasion of Angola.

It is amazing that a small island could defy the empire to his north for half a century. Such courage is probably what caused Khrushchev to send him nuclear missiles when talk of invasion of the rebelling perceived colony became widespread in the US. Courage, fortitude, the love of the people and international solidarity helped maintain the Cuban people's defiance of and independence from the empire which is soon to be Trump's.

pastProlog

10년 전discuss

> It seems reasonable to argue that bail-outs for banks amid broad woes for workers led to a loss of confidence in the system.

Well that's one thing. We were told abolishing Glass-Steagall needed to be done because it was only something liberals who like big government wanted and was a 66 year old relic of the New Deal. Then the bankers come to the taxpayers 9 years later and demand to be bailed out because they're now "too big to fail" and if they're not handed a fortune of the taxpayers money quickly with little debate, the world economy would collapse.

pastProlog

10년 전discuss

> The 'idle' class is not actually 'idle', and if they are then usually their parents were not 'idle'

Heirs who do not work and live off the profits of worker's labor are idle. Certainly their parents are idle as well. If that were not the case there wouldn't be phrases like nouveau riche and old money. You can watch billionaire heir Jamie Johnson's documentaries to see more with regards to this.

> 'Every individual... neither intends to promote...'

Precisely. You're quoting from Book IV, Chapter II of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. The chapter is titled "Of Restraints upon the Importation from Foreign Countries of such Goods as can be Produced at Home". Meaning restraints on international free trade. It's opening sentence is "By restraining, either by high duties or by absolute prohibitions, the importation of such goods from foreign countries as can be produced at home, the monopoly of the home market is more or less secured to the domestic industry employed in producing them."

The part you quote says fully:

"As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it."

The end being promoted by the invisible hand is as the only sentence discussing the invisible hand opens with "by preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry". The means to do that are described in the chapter title "of Restraints upon the Importation from Foreign Countries of such Goods as can be Produced at Home" through means described in the chapter's first sentence and elsewhere "by restraining, either by high duties or by absolute prohibitions, the importation of such goods from foreign countries as can be produced at home, the monopoly of the home market is more or less secured to the domestic industry employed in producing them".

It's not hard to see how the notion of the invisible hand has been twisted to its exact opposite meaning, as even when people point this fact out, they ignore the text and continue on with the meaning they think it has...

> The USSR could do it, all things consider, they could not do it well...Central planning as envisioned by Trosky, Lenin, Bukharin, Bauer and co is so impossible that it is impossible to enforce, people will automatically start working around the inefficacy of the system.

Actually the USSR economy functioned very well under Stalin. While the west was mired in the Great Depression, the USSR was growing by leaps and bounds. European (and even American) workers moved to Russia to get work, as did European (and American) firms. It managed to beat off a German invasion and raise the red flag in Berlin. By 1957 it was launching satellites and doing other such innovations ahead of the west. Nonetheless, in 1956 Khrushchev announced various major changes, including a decrease in capital allocation percentages, something which also happened in other Comecon countries. Those changes and other things did lead to stagnation, but they were a shift. In fact the Chinese stated so at a time, and eventually broke from the Russians due to this revisionism.

> Planning is about direction, and you can say lots about the US government but they don't point the economy in a particular direction

Of course it does. The direction was and is set out by DARPA, NSF, NIH. Who is funding the Boston Dynamics robots (answer: DARPA)? Who is providing money to SpaceX (answer: NASA)? Who is providing Boeing with revenues for the R&D necessary to build airplanes (Boeing is the second largest military contractor in the world)? Who is funding CRISPR/Cas9 research?

> The US was the most successful and innovative economic power on the planet when the federal government had less then 2% of GDP.

A number of factors are at play with this. One is that settlers arrived fairly historically recently in the US, gaining over 9 million square kilometers of land, much of it resourceful, plus the bonus of two big oceans to protect it. That in itself is quite a big windfall, a large European country like France is 5% of the size of the USA. Countries like Argentina has a similar trajectory, but 2 out of 3 Argentinians have indigenous heritage, whereas Americans killed almost all of the native population and took their land (about 1% of Americans have native heritage). Other factors are at play, but being handed over the equivalent of 20 Frances with two big oceans around it can do a lot to help one be a successful economic power.

pastProlog

10년 전discuss

> Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants.

If everybody is working in this process, then where do the people who expropriate the most from this process - the idle class heirs - get their profits?

> There is a fact still more astounding: the absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work.

The invisible hand...this is Adam Smith being misquoted. Adam Smith did use the metaphor of an invisible hand - Smith said the invisible hand was something that blocked free trade, not facilitated it. L. Read is using the metaphor in the exact opposite manner in which it was proposed.

Also, much of this could be said about a pencil being made in the USSR. Did any one person in the Soviet Union know how to make an entire pencil, from tree to graphite and such? Perhaps some government bureaucrat looked at his charts and ordered it to be made, but how different is that than the corporate bureaucrat looking at his charts and ordering pencils to be made?

Also, in our era of TARP bank bailouts, quantitative easing, farm subsidies and such, this notion of say the US government not having a central role in the economy as it exists is absurd. This medium we read and type on now was created through military contracts to Fairchild Semiconductor, DARPA grants for ARPAnet research and such, over many decades.

pastProlog

10년 전discuss

One thing missing from the list: a real worker's movement that is threatening to the wealthy.

People remember the Russian Revolution toward the end of World War I, what they tend to forget is that Hungary had a revolution and became a Soviet republic in 1919. Many things happened happened in different European countries at that time.

Germany had an attempt communist revolution starting in October of 1918 which went on for months, you could even say years.

In the German elections, vote results were:

            Nazis  Socialists Communists
    05/28   2.6    29.8       10.6
    09/30   18.3   24.5       13.1
    07/32   37.2   21.5       14.3
    11/32   33.09  20.43      16.86

So in four years you see an increasingly powerful communist party going from getting one in ten German votes to one in six German votes. You also have communists and socialists outnumbering Nazis. Unfortunately for the left, the Catholic Center party got 11% of the vote, and after the Reichstag fire, the Nazi seizure of power occurred, and the the Center party voted for the enabling act and the de facto Nazi seizure of power became de jure.

But it was prompted by 37% of voters being reds, and 16% of voters being communists. Red voters outnumbered brown voters.

In Italy, the 1922 march on Rome followed the Biennio Rosso. The working class tried to take over and failed, and the fascists took over.

Returning to red power in Germany at the turn of 1932/1933 - on February 20, 1933, Hitler met with representatives of German industry - Gustav Krupp, Fritz Springorum from Hoesch, an IG Farben board member, Fritz von Opel, a board member of Siemens etc. In the midst of stormtroopers taking over the streets he asked them to bankroll the Nazis in the upcoming elections so they could pass the enabling act. German industry bankrolled the Nazis, because they feared the 37% red workers (the majority of the working class) and the rising power of the KPD.

The situation is nothing like that in the US. If anything, the little existing of the worker's movement is disintegrating - Michigan and Wisconsin just became right to work states. Board members of the Fortune 100 are not going to bankroll a party like the Nazis. There's no left to fight. The wealthy and upper middle class are becoming increasingly liberal, as there's no socialist movement to worry about, in comparison to 20th century Europe.

pastProlog

10년 전discuss

> free trade

Who said TPP had anything to do with free trade?

Various powerful interest groups lobby and shove economic capture for themselves into these deals, transferring power over these matters from American voters to some international group looking over their interest.

The TPP is chock full of economic capture goodies which have nothing to do with free trade.

pastProlog

10년 전discuss

One person who has been clear-headed about this for weeks is Michael Moore. Michigan and Wisconsin were supposed to be in the bag for Hillary, but that looks like where the surprise swing is coming from. Moore said from on the ground it felt like white working class people suffering from deindustrialization felt Hillary would do little for them, and might pick up the Molotov cocktail of Trump to throw into the system. His comments have been in lots of pro-Trump videos for weeks. Looks like he was right.

pastProlog

10년 전discuss

Many of the people on HN are in their twenties, some of us are slightly older.

In 1963, the Ku Klux Klan bombed a black church in Birmingham and killed four little girls, because the church supported the rights of blacks to vote. Blacks were still banned from attending University of Alabama in that year, the governor himself stood in the school's door to block the first student trying to attend, blocked by federal marshals. In 1964 three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi, with the help of local police. In 1961, groups riding on integrated buses in the south were attacked in several places, with the help of police, beaten to a pulp and the buses burned.

Even in the north - in 1965 Martin Luther King went on a march in Chicago against de facto segregated housing, which was met by what seemed to be a forming mob, he was hit by a brick and the white and black marchers were met with projectiles and feared a riot might ensue.

If you look at the Fox News viewer demographics, much of their audience were in their 20s and 30s when this was all happening. They grew up with it that way.

This isn't ancient history to some of us, and is American history. You go back farther and it is jim crow, lynching, and not all too far back, about 30 years before my grandfather was born, slavery.

Considering this, seeing blacks relegated to Oakland (which is itself being gentrified) and lacking in the makeup of startups in San Francisco is not surprising. Things have in some ways gotten better, but black men are still killed for little or no reason. Look at the case of Amadou Diallo, who was shot 41 times for opening his door - the police brass have been editing his entry on Wikipedia with exposed IPs, which has led to a little kerfuffle. So they're being paid by working taxpayers to rewrite history any how...

pastProlog

10년 전discuss

Far down in this article, Apple co-founder Rod Holt explains what he thought it was about Steve Jobs that put him into the vanguard.

http://louisproyect.org/2015/08/28/steve-jobs

Particularly the part where he talks about commodities and products, and the process and relations of production at early Apple.

I think what much of what Holt says will go over the heads of people not in the milieu of Holt, Proyect etc. Not all of it will though.

One reason I find the Holt piece interesting is everyone else seems to come at the question from the same angle. Holt does not, but more importantly Jobs did not. Also Holt was there when Apple was incorporated, and had a very thoughtful sociological Weltanschauung back then.

You can tell everyone comes at it from the same angle by the OP title. How Steve Jobs became a billionaire. People who start from that point, a desire to get insanely rich and spend money and be admired, will probably never get to be be billionaire. I don't think that they'll get it either.

Most people like Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page etc. don't seem to be focused on wealth. Even someone like Larry Ellison who seems to be focused on wealth gets more stirred up talking about engineering one of the first usable relational databases than he does about his billions.

The US is in such a homogeneous ideological fog that it is easy to miss the forest for the trees. Holt was around when Apple started, but was not a participant in what C. Wright Mills called the great American celebration, so I find his viewpoint interesting, and in my opinion, more insightful than any other I've heard.

pastProlog

10년 전discuss

One reason the Industrial Revolution happened in northern England is manor lords began seizing the land that belonged in common to the peasants and enclosing it. Newly impoverished peasants would then become cheap labor for industrial factories. This is similar to what Deng Xiaoping and his successors did in China over the past few decades.

pastProlog

10년 전discuss

Putting aside who is better, Trump or Clinton - Clinton and the DNC establishment support National Security Letters, NSA spying, PRISM, Echelon, the idea that if you're not doing anything wrong, you have no expectation of privacy. On a more positive side, some of them believe in FOIA and government transparency.

Yet they don't believe what is good for the goose is good for the gander. Clinton made sure her e-mails were on a private server, immune from FOIA and subpoenas. What hypocrisy.

Their fight against the spread of encryption and security so that they could spy on everyone is what helped lead to the possibility of this leak happening. They have been hoisted by their own petard, and it is glorious to see.

pastProlog

10년 전discuss

During the 2008 recession, Monthly Review put together some scary 1960-2008 charts on economic indicators not mentioned in this article ( http://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion-and-... ).

Often overlooked is the capacity utilization rate - at what rate is capital plant being utilized. This number has been falling since the early 1970s. On the latest dwindling bounce of the ball, it hit a peak in November 2014 with 78.9%, and has since fallen to 75.4% ( http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/revisions/Current... ).

So the 2009-2016 industrial capacity peak was 78.9%. I don't have the data in front of me, but my recollection is from World War II to the early 1970s, the industrial capacity of the US never dipped as low as 78.9%. So the modern capacity utilization peaks are less than the old historical lows.

pastProlog

10년 전discuss

From 1933 to 1953, the Democratic party held the presidency in the United States. Twenty years out of power is said to have been one of the factors leading to McCarthyism. McCarthy called it "20 years of treason" (then once he started fighting Eisenhower he started talking about 21 years of treason). Republicans began accusing the entire Democratic establishment of being KGB spies. The head of the John Birch Society thought this was a foregone conclusion, he wrote a book about how the Republican establishment including Eisenhower were all KGB spies.

This cold war paranoia and political shift is all over Wikipedia. The faintest accusation of someone back then is all over their Wikipedia article. Much of the Democratic and liberal establishment from 1932-1952 is said to be Soviet spies on Wikipedia, and as far as I know, 100% of people who had questions about the Cold war. I don't know one liberal from that period who was more skeptical of the Cold war than Truman (who launched the Truman Doctrine in March 1947, then became involved in the Korean war) who is not accused of being a Soviet spy.

I wish I could remember the whole list. The article for journalist I. F. Stone. The article for treasury official Harry Dexter White. Commerce department official and later author Harry Magdoff. Lieutenant Colonel Duncan Lee who had the misfortune of being acquainted with the kooky, flighty Elizabeth Bentley. In the light of all of these, the article for secretary of state Dean Acheson all but accuses him of being pro-communist.

The "China hands" like Owen Lattimore (being accused of being an agent of the Chinese wouldn't do, so he was accused of being a Soviet agent). John S. Service who had the misfortune to be assigned to the Dixie Mission while working for the Foreign Service. Actually the article on China hand Theodore H. White manages to have been relatively unscathed by the crazies.

I'm sure there were some Russian spies in the US in the 1940s, and some American spies in Russia. Wikipedia still has this McCarthyist idea spread out over the high officials of that time were all KGB spies. Forget about anyone to the left of the 1947 Truman Doctrine to fight the Greek left, they're almost automatically concluded to be communist spies.

Then it's proffered that Venona proves all these people as spies. But Venona has code names, not names. Venona says something like "Agent TREE met us in Central Park in May 8, 1948". As so-and-so lived in New York in 1948, the editors use that fact to link a codename to a name. Venona is said to prove every accusation, but it does not. Most of the people who it does seem to confirm were European emigrees and people in the communist party orbit. Not the liberal WASPs in the Democratic establishment who are accused of being Soviet spies.

The Wikipedia articles on various Democratic officials in the 1930s and 1940s are really nuts. Even a neutral article like the Theodore White one has to mention that he was suspected to be a communist spy at one time.

pastProlog

10년 전discuss

> Battery technology is a lot like bitcoin and gold in that once it is manufactured, users are not dependent upon a state controlled centralized network for it.

Gold is just a commodity, it does not have any magical properties. Since gold is durable, uniform, divisible and portable, it makes a good currency.

pastProlog

10년 전discuss

> they should not be forced to join the union (with whom they disagree) just to be able to provide for their families.

But you're obviously OK with people being forced to join corporations (with whom they disagree) just to be able to provide for their families.

pastProlog

10년 전discuss

Maduro was elected president. There's no vote upcoming, just yet another recall referendum, this one which failed to get going in the courts.

Honduras on the other hand had an elected president. Obama bankrolled his generals, who overthrew him in a coup in 2009, and then he continued bankrolling them. Where are the US newspaper headlines about the Honduran dictatorship? The Organization of American States, with the exception of the US, is who was condemning this.

Insofar as Venezuela's oil business doing badly...what country is the the energy business doing well in? Fracking and North Dakotan energy businesses are going bankrupt left and right, which is said to be the fault of Arabian oil flows, but when Venezuela's economy suffers from the same thing it's said to be due to mismanagement or whatever nonsense.

Billionaire Jeff Bezos has his newspaper spin things in the interests of American billionaires, what a shock. The majority of Venezuelans don't give a damn what the yanquis think, they can just look to what they did to Honduras, a real dictatorship, seven years ago, and what they're still doing.

Americans loooove to get up and pontificate in some kind of imperial self-satisfaction. Like how the Osama bin Laden and the mujahideen would overthrow Afghanistan's secular government in the 1980s with America's arms, money and blessing. Kind of hit Americans in the ass when they strung Arabia with military bases, causing a response of a plane flying through the Pentagon from those guys they bankrolled in the 1980s like bin Laden. Blowback from America's imperial pretensions.

pastProlog

10년 전discuss

> the effective kind of cocky/jerk behavior that works well with some women

Some guys come to think that they are not cocky/jerky, but other guys are, and that this behavior "works well with some women".

It's odd to me how they can think this, although it's odd to me people have religious or other irrational beliefs.

An attractive man can be so attractive that he can be cocky or a jerk and yet still be attractive. It is that simple. If a man is less attractive, if he is a jerk that makes him even less attractive.

Let us say for the sake of argument that Dan Bilzerian acts like a jerk towards women. He is still a famous, fit, young millionaire. So that can be seen as one minus among a number of pluses. Perhaps another guy is unknown, very overweight, ten years older and broke. He acts nice, but gets little response, then sees Dan be a jerk, yet still be attractive. The reaction to this is not, "maybe I should work out and get fit" or "maybe I should work and make money", but "maybe I should be a jerk instead of being nice". Sorry, adding one more negative attribute to your pile of negative attributes is not going to help. Attractive guys are attractive despite the ability to be a jerk, not because of it.

I mean, Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali might be cocky before a match, but they could back it up with skill. Them talking trash before some matches is not what is central to their ability. It's an outgrowth of it. The crummiest player can talk trash before a match too.

I guess if a guy is unattractive, it's more comforting for him to think it is not because he out of shape or narcissitic or broke or unsocial or uptight, but it's because he's too nice and too great of a guy. It's surely one of the roots of this bizarre idea that girls don't want someone nice, they want a jerk. Actually, they want someone so attractive that girls still want them even if they act like a jerk.