AFAICT, by unionizing the state employees, Brown single-handedly planted the invasive species that caused California's current debt crisis, and wrecked the schools.
Bill Lockyer (D-Treasurer), weighs in, here:
-- Cheers, James Arthur
The people who view the world as a less then zero sum game are the scum that operate insider trading and use market rumours and naked shorts to drive perfectly viable businesses into the ground. They destroy jobs and shareholder value but make a handsome profit by betting on the outcome. They win handsomely and everyone else loses big time.
Madoff's pyramid scheme was another recent example of less than zero sum game that suckered a lot of people who should have known better.
Zero sum or worse outcomes are more common in the world of high finance than in science, engineering or art. The latter all seek to create new and novel *things* with real intrinsic value the former shuffle paper just to make money.
Regards, Martin Brown
Martin Brown:
Engineers = Saviours, Financers = Evil.
It's a wonderfully simple word the one in which simple minds live.
The only problem is that, as any Taleban, a simple mind may be tempted to label as evil everything he does not understand, and fight (by ranting or by bombing) that evil.
A simple mind should be more optimistic: if there are financiers and they are well paid it means that they perform a difficult, risky and important task. Namely, predicting the future.
A gambler is a more noble person than many of these financiers. The gambler truly loses when he cannot predict the future correctly. The world of finance got corrupted because when they were skimming big money on the upside of the bubble they proclaimed their brilliance and justified their untold riches (The multi-billion dollar bonuses to these guys really does piss me off because they got them primarily by being first in line at the FED window and because the fed allows too much fractional reserve lending - but I am more mad at Barney Frank/ government than the bankers). On the downside of the bubble they did not really have to pay for all their leveraged mistakes.
PS : If the government did not backstop their mistakes with Freddie/ Fannie this would probably not have happened. Also, I wish the FDIC would only guarantee 80-90% (My true free market side says 0%- but lets assume FDIC should exist) of the value of an account for example. That would help people look at where their money is.
Wrong. You describe crooks.
An example of less than zero-sum, sure. It has nothing to do with his world-view, other than he was a crook.
Two points:
Few engineers "shuffle paper just to make money".
"Shuffling paper" sometimes has a value.
Wrong. Gambling is a zero-sum game, by definition (more or less, depending on how you define the bounds of the "game").
Ok...
Agreed. ...so far.
People wouldn't use a bank. If the guarantee were less than 100%, I certainly wouldn't leave money in one at ~0% interest. I'm not so sure that's such a good idea. Risk nothing => gain nothing. That's what insured accounts are for.
What are you talking about ... I worked for the State of Calif in the early '70's as I worked my way through college.
The employee unions were strong back then ... way before "Moonbeam" came along. Moonbeam didn=92t start them, although he did use them.
All Calif has to do is tie pension plan pay-outs to investments and increase the min retirement age from 50 to something reasonable. As long as they have guaranteed entitlements regardless of economic climate there will always be trouble.
Of course the employee unions will fight this tooth and nail ...
What really is sickening is to listen to a state employee make fun of a welfare recipient ... some how the state employees views they're entitlement more worthy!
I agree a trivial amount of money .. if you can't cough it up, you should loose your citizenship till you do!
if you have a ton of kids ... and can't pay that's your problem!
Being well paid implies furnishing a useful function? And whan have financiers (or economists, or climatologists) ever demonstrated any systematic ability to predict the future? A minority of them do it by dumb luck; the majority are usually wrong.
John
That's silly. The house, casino or bookie or lottery, always wins.
John
John Larkin:
But, if you sum their wins with the losses of the players, you get zero.
Unless you take in account the amusement the players evidently get from gambling, in which case they are the winners. That's why, in exchange, they give money to the casino.
You could sum all the gold on Earth and argue that it's constant. That doesn't tell you much about economics.
John
John Larkin:
Evidently. That's one of the tenets of capitalism.
Football players, musicians and actors are equally paid but much less useful, if you wish. As a matter of fact, in war time, when the excess fat gets trimmed, they go t the front or play in propaganda movies, while finenciers generally make lots of money.
When they have made money. Look at Warren Buffet. He did not invest a single dime in dotcoms.
Probably you're not aware of the fact that the smartest people in the word, the bst professional in their respective fields are hired or consulted by those "bandits" to know wether a certain technology or process shows promises.
Somewhere (here or in one of the similar NGs) someone (you are too many, all with similar, english-sounding names) wrote in the past few hours some very interesting considerations about war as resources management.
Well, finance is the art of financial resource allocation. Nothing more, nothing less, like you allocate semiconductor resources.
Clearly, if financial resources are managed crazily by a corrupt government that would do anything to get re-elected by corrupt voters, financiers cannot do anything else but behave crazily.
John Larkin:
Why should I argue such a stupid thing? It's some 10.000 years that we are amassing gold. And few decades that we are throwing it away.
Well, gold is a perfect example. It has never been useful (except since we started to throw it away), but it's a proxy for any useful resource. In other words, it's money. And money tells a lot about economy.
It's not my idea but I like it: The oil is the mineral resulting from decomposition of the corpses of dinosaurs. Money is the mineral resulting from decomposition of the corpses of humans.
Vladimir Vassilevsky DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant
That makes zero sense, or somewhat less.
John
Again, it depends on where you draw the line. If you include the "house" in the game it's zero-sum. If the "entertainment" of the gambler is assigned a value (the gambler certainly assigns it a value), it's greater than zero-sum.
Silly. Gold is not all that has value.
Funny, you didn't start out here pretending to be a fascist.
That makes perfect sense as a value (which has money equvalent) is what person creates as the result of his life.
If I was Sloman, Fields or Weennie the Rightist, I would design that CLC thing for you just as a humanitarian help.
VLV
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