For Californicators

OTOH, he did start out as an idiot.

Then we need to find and burn your famly tree to the ground.

Granted.

Yes, in casinos it's a zero-sum game.

But a living, breathing economy ain't a casino!

Kinda like warmingism and the "greenhouse effect" - a living, breathing atmosphere is not a pane of glass!

Cheers! Rich

Where are they throwing it? I'd like to dive that dumpster! ;-)

Cheers! Rich

"stuff"

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It wasn't significantly worse than Social Security, was it? Same model--early 'investors' are paid from contributions of later 'investors'.

That's just arithmetic (though few bother to do it).

-- Cheers, James Arthur

And everybody's all pissed off at Goldman-Sachs because they were the only ones astute enough to bet the "don't come" lie on the housing bubble. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

I did that for a while. It was boring.

True. Organizing / directing an effort, spearheading, focusing, these have value.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

A quick Yahoo! yields:

OTOH,

Brown told The Chronicle's editorial board Friday that he supports a two-tier pension plan, which could mean union members may have to contribute more to their plans or take pay cuts to ensure they are actuarially sound."

It's really a question of the money--we (errrr, you) don't have it. Painful choices lie ahead.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

No fair Rich--keep your hand down and give the other kids a chance...

-- Grins, James Arthur

That isn't quite true sometimes the house, bookies or lottery have their odds wrong and get taken to the cleaners. Examples include:

Blackjack - house can be beaten by card counting and variable bets. Proved by Edward Thopre using computer assistance on an IBM 704 in 1960.

Bookies - wrong odds by more than an order of magnitude for a hole in one by a player at a major golf tournament. The Hole-in-One gang took them to the cleaners (originally from BA Inflight Magazine)

The other famous one in the UK was a sucker bet by everyone who was ever in the RAF on "Airborne" at 50:1 to win at the Epsom Derby. It did and about half the bookmakers in the UK went bust as a direct result.

Irish Lottery - too many small prizes so failed to a brute force attack by a syndicat with a buy every ticket strategy

I agree that on average and long term the house always wins. But not if you know what you are doing and have the discipline to walk away whilst still ahead. Some one armed bandits vary the odds in the players favour if they haven't been used for a while. Most people cannot resist putting their winnings back in the slot (and more besides) Pub quiz machines were also easy if you had sufficiently good general knowledge.

Regards, Martin Brown

ay from

I thought we were talking about the US--poor countries don't pay you to have kids!!

Here we do, and I know lots of people all around me who make a career of it.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

They're like bad truck drivers, they can't seem to pull out on time!

Most likely due to over socialization programs not forcing them to use their brains.. It tends to turn into a melon and cause time response problems!

So, how many idiot kids did Uncle Sam pay your mom to drop?

away from

the

get

Well, maybe so in isolated cases, but all I can find is about $90 extra a month for more kids on welfare in the US. Not much of an incentive to have more kids. More like a burden.

Argument:

"Many conservatives criticize welfare because it increases benefits when a mother has another child. This, they argue, is an economic incentive to have more children, an ill-considered policy which inflates the rolls of our welfare programs. As columnist Ellen Goodman wrote: "A family that works does not get a raise for having a child. Why then should a family that doesn't work?" (1)

Unfortunately, this argument is incorrect. Working families do receive "financial incentives" to have more children, and far larger ones than welfare provides. A working family receives a $2,450 tax deduction per child, and can claim up to $2,400 in tax credits to offset the costs of child care. By comparison, a welfare mother can only expect about $90 per month in increased AFDC payments for another child.

Not surprisingly, these "incentives" are too small to influence the behavior of potential parents, especially in a decision as life- altering and important as having a child. Ten major studies have been conducted on this issue in the last six years alone, and not one has found any connection between the level of payments offered and a woman's decision to bear children. (2) "

-Bill

It is also not what I said at all. Can't you read?

There are useful financiers that do fund business. Although I have to say that British bankers are not that keen on manufacturing.

Evidently you cannot read or comprehend.

That sounds just like a Republican gun nut shooting at anything you don't understand.

A task at which they fail more often than they succeed. Their pay is determined by an old boy network that makes sure if the win they get paid way over the odds and if they lose they get a golden parachute. When they screw up so monumentally they should be held personally liable for some of the insane losses they created for their employers and for taxpayers who had to bail them out.

Moral hazard consists of a culture where heads we win tails you lose is underwritten by the taxpayer because the banks are "too big to fail".

Regards, Martin Brown

You might think so, but these are very clever players with extremely good expensive legal advice. They never quite step over the line into clear criminality, but go as far into the dark grey as their legal advice will permit. I can't think of any successful high profile white collar fraud cases that have succeeded in the UK offhand. And I can think of several where the thing has flopped because the methods used were too complex for a jury of ordinary people to understand. The SFO has an appalling track record and could not even secure a conviction of the Maxwells who so cunningly robbed their pensioners.

This one was pure criminality on *his* part. But what about all the major players and institutions that put money with him whilst knowing that the returns were very obviously too good to be true. There were warning signs (just as there were for the recent online forex collapse).

I don't know about that. I'd say about a third of my cohort sold their souls and went into the city.

Creating order out of chaos clearly does have value.

Constructing transactions to hide bad debts off balance sheet or exploit international tax loopholes was more what I had in mind. Enron is a pretty good canonical example of both the good and bad sides of this. So of what they did was innovative and useful. They will be remembered mostly for the other stuff though.

Regards, Martin Brown

No, they simply go to the new dealerships that open in the Cahmans, the Bahamas, or even in Mexico and buy them there, outside the US jurisdictions...

Also, the really rich don't buy that much, not really, compared to what they 'make.' Most of their funds go into making more money somewhere. Sure, they occasionally buy a big ticket item, but not that often. Also, there aren't that many of them! That is always the myth that the 'tax the rich' crowd don't get. They may seem to have a lot, but even if you tax the heck out of them, you don't get enough to run a country. That money is held by all the poor working slobs like us!

Charlie

Yes, although keep in mind that if they're investing in bonds, the money market, etc., that can then be lent out to others to buy things -- so indirectly it still helps.