great talk about politics and silicon valley and bubbles

From an external point of view there is humor in watching you people going completely mental. And also curiosity as to how you can maintain your posi tion in the world with such internal disturbances. What seems to be happeni ng in the English speaking world is that you have people in an affluent mid dle class who have everything you can possibly have. They cannot understand then why they are being denied their emotions regarding race, world view, and striking out at people they don't like. How dare anyone deny them that , they are not denied anything else. And then you have the victims of that affluent middle class whose pay and w orking condition deteriorate year after year until they are unable to suppo rt their families even though they are working full time in a developed cou ntry. Those people end up looking for revenge and no-matter-what change. It's weird to see those two groups working together as happened with Brexit . The US is close to something similar.

Ask anybody who gets their "facts" from the Murdoch media.

More Republican pre-election propagnda from the Murdoch media. If John Larkin were up to doing complex intellectual task, I ask him to compare and contrast the current anti-Hillary campaign with Karl Rove's "Swift Boat People" anti-Kerry campaign.

Trump manages his companies into bankruptcy, and his policy is to grab pussy if it gets within reach. Not even dog-catcher material.

On Tuesday, November 1, 2016 at 12:29:54 PM UTC+11, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrot e:

g completely mental. And also curiosity as to how you can maintain your po sition in the world with such internal disturbances. What seems to be happe ning in the English speaking world is that you have people in an affluent m iddle class who have everything you can possibly have. They cannot understa nd then why they are being denied their emotions regarding race, world view , and striking out at people they don't like. How dare anyone deny them th at, they are not denied anything else.

working condition deteriorate year after year until they are unable to sup port their families even though they are working full time in a developed c ountry. Those people end up looking for revenge and no-matter-what change.

it. The US is close to something similar.

Thomas Pekitty

seems to have done most of the work that made it clear that income inequali ty is rising again. Wilkinson and Pickett document the effects of this rise .

Tne thing that's shocking about the wikidump is that, so far, everyone is talking about winning the political power game.

I haven't seen anyone express concern about what's actually good for the country, or good for working people, or what's constitutional. The only time the law is mentioned is when people are concerned about getting caught.

Call me naiive, but people in power should care about the effects they can have on the populace... beyond doing whatever it takes to get more power.

She's a mainstream politician - she knows that she has to keep "normal peop le" on-side. She has staff to tell her how well she's doing, and pays atten tion to them.

It's a week to the presidential election. That does concentrate attention o n the political power game.

The end-game run-up to the election is a bit late for that. The philosophic al bits were supposed to have been debated earlier.

Nope. I'm going to call you superficial. Trump isn't going to worry about w hat's good for the populace - he's concentrating on what will go down well with them. Hillary Clinton has the slightly easier job of reminding people that Donald Trump isn't the kind of narcissist sleaze-bag you want running any country, least of all the one you live in. What's good for the populace is not having Donald Trump as president - there's nothing deeply philosoph ical about that, just elementary character judgement, of the sort that most people can manage. Not you, James Arthur or Julian Barnes, of course.

Well yes. Meanwhile back on planet earth :(

The era (if it ever /really/ existed) of an honourable patrician ruling class evaporated in the early 80s.

The last minister to resign on a point of principle was Lord Carrington, the defence minister when the Argies invaded the Falklands. He resigned, despite having been in the office for only a couple of months, event though it was his predecessors' actions that enabled the invasion.

The /unfettered/ "greed is good" and "there is no such thing as society" mentality given reign by Thatcher and Reagan still plagues our societies.

In the UK, and I believe across the pond, the middle class are now being hit, and hit hard. They fear for their childrens' future, and for their retirement.

A generation ago the working class was hollowed out by workplace automation and export of blue-collar jobs to the developing countries. Now that is /starting/ to happen to white-collar jobs.

And those effects are exacerbated by the "because I'm worth it" naked kleptocracy of those in power.

Yes, pretty much.

Why do you select right-wingers as the villains here? In the USA, it was classic New York and Chicago machine politics, mostly Democrat, that exemplified winning power by any means. It was LBJ who organized that on a macro basis.

What shocks naiive little me is that the insiders almost never go public with their moral concerns. At the height of Clinton's Monica scandal, he got the female members of his cabinet - and his wife - to stand in public and lie to defend him. Why did they do that? Is the governing class composed entirely of people without principles? Do you have to fail some morality test to get into the Cabinet?

The Bernie/Trump movement isn't so much about them, as it is a reaction against the nearly monolithic - Democrat and Republican - governing industry, the self-selected ruthless.

Some of the same things that make the US a nation of pioneers and thinkers and inventors (and pretty good warriors) also makes for, well, dynamic politics.

Things will settle down after the election is over, just like things settle down after baseball season.

Well, /those/ people were responsible for the /specific/ actions I mentioned and therefore for the continuing consequences.

/Other/ people were responsible for /other/ actions, notably Bliar/Clinton for allowing the banks to lend ridiculous multiples of their assets, thus enabling the great recession.

Quite frankly I don't care whether they are labelled right wing or left leg or whatever.

As for villains? That's another two-dimensional label for a pigeonhole; the world is more subtle than that.

My principle is that I don't really care what a politician does with their private parts, so long as they don't screw the general populus.

Over here it is the unwashed masses feeling that /any/ change has to be better than the status quo. They are probably mostly wrong, but that's irrelevant.

From what I can tell, although the details are different, the broad principal forces/emotions are at work in the US.

Well, Albany is North of the Catskills. OTOH, NYC isn't either and it's just one big outhouse.

NYC has gotten worse. Guliani had it coming back but all of his work has been thrown out.

Thomas Sowell ? 'I have never understood why it is greed to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.'

In fact I've not understood the 'greed' meme at all. If I work harder and earn more, how has that hurt anyone? Does that not make more goods for all of society as a whole? How have I victimized anyone? Yet that's the community disorganizer's accusation, his premise.

And if you take what I made from working more and give it to someone who stayed home, how is that just? And, did you fix the recipient's circum stances?

(You didn't. You enabled him.)

Cheers, James Arthur

The key words in that are all "if"... Hence I agree with you, but only /within/ the /stated/ limitations of your statements.

The problem comes when greed leads to grabbing money at the expense of others, particularly where there hasn't been any harder work.

Example: CEOs etc routinely set their salary/bonuses by comparing them with other CEOs salary bonuses. That's the "because I'm worth it" attitude, unrelated to hard work. Doubly galling if the company loses value at the same time!

Example: how many people will work 25% harder if their salary/bonuses are increased from $10M to $12.5M?

Example: why isn't it hypocritical for a board to award themselves pay rises "to incentivise /us/ to work harder", while simultaneously cutting minions' pay "to incentivise /them/ to work harder"?

I don't think so.

I think it's going to get worse. The Democrats have successfully morphed us from limited self-government to a virtual dictator backed by an army of bureaucrats, Orwellian oversight, and a hand-picked junta to tell us all how to live.

But maybe the Orwellian oversight will hold us together in a state of fear, like Saddam's Iraq, Putin's Russia, or cold-war East Germany.

James Arthur

I agree :-( ...Jim Thompson

t to keep

's

I agree that many CEOs and board members seem grossly overpaid, but I also don't think it's any of my business.

I trust the workers, shareholders, and customers of a company to work things out through a competition of ideas and such to everyone's satis faction. Employees can quit. Employers can adapt, move, control wage costs, or price themselves out of competition and go broke. Customers can change suppliers.

CEO pay is also not very interesting because it's not a numerically significant problem--if the average Fortune 500 CEO made $20 million a year (which they don't), that's only $10 billion a year total. If you took it all and gave every American their "share," it's enough for a one-time $31 payment, each.

That's not what's making poor people poor, or enough to affect someone's povrety or non-poverty. It's not enough to buy a new pair of shoes.

'Poor' people in the U.S. are mostly those who 1. drop out of high school, 2. have kids out of wedlock, and 3. don't work.

Making sure those people know the risks they're taking and that they aren't hemmed in if they want to escape makes total sense.

But taking more from people who work doesn't fix anything. That actually creates poverty as second and third-order effects.

Cheers, James Arthur

The second-order effects are our business.

Example: if they sell a company to pocket the M&A bonuses, neglecting that the over-leveraged buyout means people will be made redundant and jobs shipped overseas. They've got their 30 pieces of silver, but a company (and more) is destroyed.

Example: the mere /perception/, valid or otherwise, that it is one set of rules for /them/ and a different set for /us/ is very corrosive. Over time that leads to serious societal problems and heads on pitchforks.

People will put up with a hell of a lot, /provided/ they know why and they believe it is fair. Unjustifiable unfairness leads to social disorder. (Other things do as well, of course)

Demonstrably that isn't happening. Those that have the power to influence such decisions are also part of the "because I'm worth it" strata, and they are /never/ going to rock the boat less their gravy spills out of the train. Or something ;)

Many employees can't. One company towns, family commitments etc.

Having a viable company sold from under you merely so that someone /else/ can "realise its value" is, um, pretty disheartening.

There's validity to that, but perception is important. The old "justification" of "trickle down economics" is manifestly false, of curse.

The points below are separate (very complex) issues that are outside the scope of this thread.

The last will become a problem for the likes of thee and me over the next few generations. The stolid "good citizen" middle class will be hollowed out by automation, in the same way as the working class has been over the past couple of generations.

Example: XRay interpreters used to be in every hospital. Now they are in India etc.

Reagan initiated the rise in US income inequality (and the rise in the US b alance of payments deficit) both of which were acts of villainous depravity . Thatcher merely destroyed UK manufacturing industry, did her level best t o destroy the British National Health Service, and introduced the council t ax, all which were decidedly unsavoury.

Those two particular right-winger deserve rather more opprobrium than they get, and much more than they get in the Murdoch media (which seems to be yo ur only source of information).

Tamanny Hall had been around a lot longer than LBJ, and it's power was fina lly broken in the 1960's, when LBJ was president.

Mayor Daley lasted a bit longer - George McGovern got him thrown out of the Democratic Convention in 1972, and he died in 1976.

If any of them had actually lied, Ted Starr would have prosecuted them. At worst they expressed solidarity. Presumably they didn't have any strong mor al concerns about a junior staffer engaging in overt hero-worship.

Your morality is entirely what you get spoon-fed by the Murdoch media. You are perfectly happy to post links to totally immoral denialist propaganda a bout anthropogenic global warming, so it's your own unfortunate ignorance t hat is on show here.

Bernie Sanders was reacting against the domination of the 1%, and offered t he 99% a realistic way of improving the situation.

Trump is a member of the 1%, who has exploited the fact that 99% are justif iably unhappy without offering anything that is likely to actually improve their situation - he can't even offer the same policy from one outing to th e next, which doesn't suggest that he has any kind of coherent plan to impl ement if he does win the election.

Absolutely! I think a lot of actors, athletes, sports reporters, hell, any reporters, are grossly overpaid, too. But I don't think it's any of my business, either. It's not coming out of my pocket.

What are you? Some sort of capitalist, or sumpin'? How can people actually live free, without a government goon telling them what's best for them?

Now divvy up what government flushes...

Keep preaching, brother!