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No hurry. I hope.

Sad day:

John

I guess "GRA =3D G-ive barack your i-RA; he'll gladly pay you Tuesday" would've been better.

Yep. That's our guy.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

The AFL-CIO can only be seen as monopolists. They'd have taken over the country, except that they killed all their hosts.

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Germany is part of the EU. If the Greeks fail to service the debt it has in Germany, it won't be servicing the debt held in France, the UK or the Netherlands either, and their taxpayers will be equally pissed. What is pising off the German taxpayers is that the rescue package is seen as a source of inflation, and the Germans have been terrified of inflation since 1923.

Greece has the world's largest shipping fleet. This may not be an industry, but it is certaly a source of revenue. Try not to guess this sort of information - Wikipedia may not be perfect, but it's more reliable than your imagination.

You've exported a lot of your industry to China. Greece is a small country - about 11 million people - and it's industry, such as it is, isn't widely publicised. It is a developed country, and the GPD per head is about the same as that of France, Italy and Germany.

So what? There's nothing there from Australia either, or Switzerland.

Political theatre isn't all that productive, but that sort of thing is a lot cheaper than - say - invading Irak, which was equally rational.

I don't know of one. The IMF does seem to be the best available solution; it's pretty bad, but better than any available alterative in the world we have got, in much the same way that democracy - with all its defects - is the best way of running a country.

Obviously. But it's applying bang-bang control where proportional, integral and derivative control would let the economy transiton to the desired state rather faster. Because the IMF is run by American educated monetarist economists, whose "economic science" has very limited predictive power, they haven't a hope of implementing any kind of feed-forward control strategy.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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That's not an option. The EU support ws condtional on painful and immediate reform, and if the Greek goverment doesn't deliver on that, the support goes away.

Although the article doesn't make this explicit, its all about the economics of "pump-priming" stimulation of the economy, to compensate for the damage done by the collapse of teh US housing price bubble, which had conjured up an immense amount of credit out of thin air.

National governments have had to conjure up comparable amounts of credit by deficit financing to keep the economy running at a respectable fraction of its potential productivity.

The alternative do-nothing approach, as practiced by Hoover in 1929, leads to vast tracts of industry standing idle with 25% unemployment, dramatically reducing production and consumption.

The argument isn't about "producing as much as you consume" - it's about maintaining consumption and production under circumstances where both would otherwise collapse.

Managing the transition back to balanced budgets without crimping the level of economic activity too much isn't a trivial job, and the banks don't help by bleating about financial responsiblity as if their US colleagues hadn't created the problem in the first place by being totally irresponsible.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I can praise Darwin's insights while believing in modern evolutionary theory, which includes all the stuff about DNA that Darwin couldn't imagine.

I can similary approve of the useful parts of Marx and Engels work - their contributions to economic theory and practice - while noting that their political insights weren't all that useful.

God only knows what an "outright Marxist" might be these days. Greegor might like to try and identify one as an example of the type.

Chomsky isn't a Marxist - according to Wikipedia "he describes himself as a socialist who sympathizes with anarcho-syndicalism, but is strongly critical of Leninist branches of socialism", and Americans usually understand "Marxist" to represent somebody who endorses the Marxist-Lenin tradition, which I certainly don't, along with everybody else who has noticed how that panned out.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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You are plowing it back into the business -"expense capital equipment"

- which you presumably own. You don't seem to be exracting a commercial rate of return on the equity that you have built up in the business, but if the business is becoming more valuable, year by year, and you own it, the increase in value could be seen as your return on capital.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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True. But non-unionised labour is almost always in a hopelessly weak negotiating position vis-a-vis employers. By definition, employers have capital, and are better placed to survive a strike or lock-out than the workers and their families. Futhermore, the employer is often a single organisation, which can practice divide-and-conquer on non- unionised workers in a way that the workers can only dream about.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Don't be silly. Unions are alive and tolerably healthy in Europe, and are quite sensible enough to function as benign symbiotes.

The one time that I got to function as a - very low level - trade union representative, most of the - very limited - time I spent acting in that capacity was devoted to persuading the personnel department that some foreman or boss had treated a subordinate badly or irresponsibly. There were two cases that i can recall, spread over a period of about a year.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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No way. There are elections coming up in the Netherlands, but the local right-wing nitwit is Geert Wilders whose "party of freedom" is mainly interested in being nasty to Muslim immigrants and making sure that more of them don't get into the country. Sort of like Arizona, but with added extra religous prejudice.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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The Greeks didn't lack credit. They lacked productivity. Credit just let them party hearty and run up debt, with the French and the Germans picking up the tab. Thay won't be able to repay the assistance unless they get to work.

(Hint hint)

With your understanding of dynamics, it's a good thing you don't design electronics.

John

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And rightfully so. Because there are numerous other countries that have overspent and are now teetering. We have only seen the tip of the iceberg so far. Mark my words.

GDP is around $30k per capita. And that's the problem, that doesn't support the lavish perks like early retirement, too many gvt workers, and so on. Other Western countries with lesser perks are around 1/3rd higher.

Combine that with rampant tax evasion in Greece and a tax authority that was asleep at the wheel and you'll know what I meant.

It is not, the GDP is lower.

Australia largely lives off of its minerals and other goodies, as long as they have some. Switzerland, well, we all know what they do besides making watch movements and precision machinery :-)

[...]

There comes a time when bang is needed, not bang-bang. Meaning someone has to hit the emergency stop button because the system that was entrusted with running the place has gone out of control. Just like you don't keep pulling the yoke on an aircraft to maintain altitude when the stall horn is blaring because that would end in a fiery crash. You have to prepare everyone for an "off field landing" and then land as soon as possible.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

And which we use, and which wears out, and which will have an ebay value close to zero when it's worn out... if we're lucky. More likely we'll have to pay to have it hauled away. There's no pot of gold there.

Damn, you are clueless about how a business actually works.

You don't seem to be exracting a

I will never, under any reasonable scenario, cash out for anything approaching the sum of salaries and benefits I have disbursed to employees over the years. IBM and Exxon and Boeing manage small profits in good years, losses in bad years, but every month they generate a mountain of payroll checks. The numbers of my business aren't much different from Boeing's, or that of any modestly successful restaurant: a few percent "profit" (which isn't cash in the bank) on sales and a few percent return on equity (or loss, depending) and about 50% of gross revenue going directly to employees. ANd lots of taxes paid.

When I die, the government will make an absurd valuation of the heap, including "goodwill", and levy enough death taxes to wipe it out, roughly 6 times over. I suppose if they want to wipe out the businesses that create jobs and pay taxes, it's their choice.

John

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I have never felt that. I have feet and can leave one job for a better one, if I can find it. Anybody can do that. Unions freeze people in jobs even as technology changes, sort of a ststic friction, so stops the best-fit mechanism that moving around provides.

By definition, employers

Boeing has numerous unions, any one of which can shut down all airplane production, and make outrageous demands for themselves, which they do fairly often. In the auto industry, it's done across multiple companies as "pattern bargaining", which is one reason I've never bought a crappy American car.

The successful businesses in the USA are mostly non-union.

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Don't know how old you are but if there ain't a big stash in those IRAs and you don't have some plum pension coming your way I'd start saving now :-)

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

That's also ok, over that long time frame. However, by now I have whittled mine down to around 2000 miles/year and my wife's is at around

1000 miles/year. Hiking shoes, different thing, we wear down 2-3 pairs each year.

Or to say it arrogantly, there's some high-level people in the AGW propaganda machine that only talk about the environment, and then there's people who actually do something about it :-)

Yes, and that's got to stop. In that respect we have some encouraging trends in America, recently. Still, there will be lots of people who'll be dirt poor once they retire. They just don't know it yet.

[...]

Engineers have to do what industry does, broaden their scope beyond our borders. I have always done that but am constantly surprised by how many engineers don't. Ok, it does require working at odd hours sometimes and it does require honing some foreign language skills.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

Sloman, Do you see yourself as egotistical, smarter, or superior to other people?

In the US, your arguments and reasoning are more typical of the occasional misfit, usually 17 or 18 years old and struggling for IDENTITY, and going for shock value.

Generally, these people lack real world experience, and so obsess about the ACADEMIC. As they get more real world experience, they soon realize the difference between academia and real world.

Did you think that the KOOK LEFT was populated mostly by PRODUCERS?

You claim you are over 50, yet you still place great stock in academic sources, and you claim to be an Aussie ex pat living off your wife in Netherlands, yet you obsess about economics in the USA.

Your situation as you've described it is a bit like a cartoon! A 50+ year old misfit NON-PRODUCER who lives off his wife and advocates socialism?

How amazing is that?

There are some American retirees who were cold hard capitalists but lost almost everything in 2008-2009 and now that they see themselves as recipients of socialistic handouts, they are more receptive to ideas of socialism.

How amazing is that?

On May 18, 10:35=A0am, John Larkin JL > And which we use, and which wears out, and JL > which will have an ebay value close to zero JL > when it's worn out... if we're lucky. More likely JL > we'll have to pay to have it hauled away. JL > There's no pot of gold there. JL >

JL > Damn, you are clueless about JL > how a business actually works.

Sloman's supposedly over 50 years old, yet he seems to think like an 18 year old with ACADEMIC THEORY and propaganda substituting for actual life experience.