Off Topic; The downfall of the US.

Except that you refuse to even consider history.

In SF? Maybe take their taxpayer-paid shopping cart away for a week...

You're a goddamned idiot that makes s*it up as you go.

You are wrong again, asswipe.

They do it because the LEOs are complacent about it. Regardless of any complaint.

AND a tagger would not know if there was a complaint anyway, you lying dumbass.

m :-)

Asia's where businesses usually flee these days, though it's also happening within the country. People are leaving California and other pseudo-liberal states in droves, Michigan lies in tatters having driven its employers off with their free-lunch demands, Illinois, New York, etc.

That's partly why these failed states want federal mandates--they don't want their people to have sanctuary anywhere else in the country.

James Arthur

I guess that is ONE advantage of living in a small town! We have a graffiti removal service for the town (free to the people, paid by the city!) where when you call, they come out, photograph the tag for later prosecution, custom mix and remove/cover the tag, usually within

Four years ago, it seemed you couldn't find a building or wall in the city without a tag. Now, you rarely see one. It works!

Charlie

So you've added the percentage of Americans in part-time work who want fulltime work to the regular unemployed to get your 19%, and then compare it with the 25% unemployment during the Great Depression, where a lot of people who were working reduced hours for reduced wages were counting themselves to be lucky to be employed at all.

This may strike you as legitimate - it is the kind of ignorant conjuring trick you have practiced before - but extrapolating from it to claim that you are "essentially at Great Depression-level unemployment" is transparent nonsense.

During the Great Depression the US GDP went down by about 25% from

The current crisis involved a 2.6% drop in GDP from 2008 to 2009 (adjusted for inflation), but the GDP went back up 2.8% from 2009 to

Unemployment may be a lagging indicator but even a twit like you ought to be able realise when he's posting total rubbish.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

No, /I/ didn't--I just showed you who did. It's a legitimate measure of unemployment, and one used by the government too. It's just not the for-dummies number, the one for popular consumption.

You just said the same thing twice. Yes, I compare the reported 19.9% underemployment today to your (unsubstantiated) Great Depression estimate of 25%. They're comparable, obviously, despite the utter waste of >$3T, so far. That was my point.

We were talking about unemployment, not GDP, and I demonstrated my point. If it's over your head, then it's over your head. I'm not walking down this new diversionary path you've invented (even though it supports my other overall contentions)--I've got work to do.

I understand things that you don't Bill. If that makes me a twit, then I'm a twit.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Don't see the connection. What makes you think that ?...

Regards,

Chris

and

..

It may strike you as a legitimate measure of unsatisfied demand for work, but it hasn't anything to do with what are usually quoted as umemployment statistics, and isn't comparable with the "unemployment" which reached 25% in the Great Depression.

I very much doubt that the unemployment estinmates from the Great Depression counted people who weren't working full-time as unemployed. The stories from the period certainly don't use the term that way.

And mine was that they obviously aren't compatible, with the subsidiary point that your claim that they are is indicative of some kind of cognitive disorder.

GDP and unemployment are both windows on the state of the economy. The economy currently is obviously nowhere near as damaged as it was during the Great Depression and your feeble-mind reinterpretation of the term "unemployment" is alarmist nonsense.

Dream on.

Sure. Most of the things you "understand" are total nonsense, but you don't seem to be equipped to realise this.

There's no doubt about that.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Same here in Phoenix. If you prevent a forum they finally give up. ...Jim Thompson

That's very altruistic and a sentiment I agree with, (no, not patronising) so long as you realise that the donor countries standard of living will suffer unless the slack in added value production, whatever, can be taken up elsewhere. More people out of work, local competing companies driven out of business because their products are no longer competitive on price, all has its effect. In extremis, if all companies export their jobs overseas so they can compete, the result is that there are even fewer people in work at home to buy the product, pay taxes etc.

So, what are we going to do with all the low skill people who used to make things, who added value ?. What do we have to trade with the rest of the world ?. To me, this is the key question, as we can't train everyone to be a rocket scientist. If we've done with manufacturing, all that's left is our inventiveness and ip.

You have my sympathy :-). Have worked freelance since the mid 1970's. Never wanted to run a business and solved the problem here by keeping it under the radar as a one man enterprise. Income is more limited, but means that I can concentrate on the work, not the paperwork. Just do a tax return at the year end, pay any tax due and that's it. More time to do things that i'm interested in, do whatif designs that may have product potential, continuing professioanl development, rather than work as unpaid manager and tax collector for the state. Of course, here are dozens of other taxes involved everytime you drive your car, buy something, need a house to live in etc etc, but everyone is in the same boat in that respect.

As for the latex paint, the law is an ass and when so, quite rightly invites contempt and disobedience. The long term solution is to move, but that's even more expense. You just can't win with self serving government.

Perhaps time to read Catch 22 again :-)...

Regards,

Chris

With intelligent long-term policies, the situation could be win-win. Fat chance!

John

On Sat, 12 Mar 2011 10:52:12 +0000, ChrisQ wrote:

Do tell. Compare the article at the end.

=20 Entrepreneurship in China=20

Let a million flowers bloom=20

China is often held up as an object lesson in state-directed capitalism. Yet its economic dynamism owes much to those outside the government?s embrace =A0

March 10th, 2011 | ZHEJIANG PROVINCE | From The Economist print edition=20

=A0=A0

IT is Sunday January 2nd, a national holiday, in a medium-sized Chinese city, just north of the Taiwan Strait . The temperature is well below freezing. There is no heating in the factory, which makes components for electrical tools. This probably reflects frugality rather than a ban, imposed by Mao Zedong, covering every building south of the Yangzi river. A thin haze of winter light comes through the windows. The only other sources of illumination are flickering cathode-ray computer terminals, which make silhouettes of the heavily clad workers sitting at them.=20

Down the corridor, in a huge office even colder than the main floor, the company?s president sits at the head of a low table surrounded by = friends. His hands are too busy to shiver, plucking tiny cups out of boiling water and making tea with a jumble of strainers and clay kettles. The cups are passed around, returned, and passed again, providing little jolts of warmth.=20

The friend to his left has his own company, also making tools: the two of them are links in China's vast, fast-expanding production line. Another man, possibly an official, is just leaving, having concluded discussions about a new factory. A fourth, who runs a private investment firm, explains why work goes on even during a holiday by citing the title of an American film: "Money Never Sleeps."=20

Each of the three businessmen at the table grew up in families which struggled even to afford food; each now owns at least four luxury cars. The results of similar stories can be seen outside other factories, where work also seems to be going on: in the car parks are BMWs, Jaguars, Land Rovers, Mercedes and Porsches. The prices of nearby flats equal those in the richest Western cities. And Chinese money is buying not only cars and property, but also the tractors and backhoes that are preparing the = ground for a new lot of buildings.=20

The twilight zone =20

Luxury goods notwithstanding, wealth is created quietly in Zhejiang's cities and other places that not long ago were wretchedly poor. None of the people interviewed for this story wanted to be named. Their companies tend to be small and privately owned. They make ordinary (but = increasingly good) products under their own names, or sophisticated ones under the strictest anonymity for well-known foreign companies which demand silence as a condition of doing business.=20

Of the foreigners? many demands, this is likely to be the most welcome. The right of China's private companies to exist is by no means clear. Private companies with more than eight employees began to emerge only in

Not all China's private businessmen are as reticent as the quiet men of Zhejiang. A handful of private entrepreneurs, it is true, have won the backing of the state in the form of finance or legal forbearance?and with it a bit of fame. This reinforces the common belief that China's economic success is an object lesson in state capitalism. The government owns the biggest companies: as the economy grows at double-digit rates year after year, vast state-owned enterprises are climbing the world's league tables in every industry from oil to banking. Yet alongside the mighty state engine myriad smaller ones are whirring?and probably more efficiently.=20

China's state-controlled entities are not particularly profitable. A = study by Qiao Liu, a professor at the University of Hong Kong , concludes that the average return on equity for companies wholly or partly owned by the state is barely 4%, despite the benefit of cheap leverage provided by government-controlled banks. According to a recently published paper by = Mr Liu and a colleague, Alan Siu, the returns of unlisted private firms are no less than ten percentage points higher.=20

Another sign of the economic energy of the private sector can be found in its rate of growth. According to China Macro Finance, a research firm in New York, the number of registered private businesses grew by more than

No one knows quite how much private companies contribute to China's fast-growing economy. Chinese firms fall into a bewildering variety of legal categories and their respective contributions to GDP are not reported in official statistics. However, enterprises that are not majority-owned by the state account for two-thirds of industrial output, according to the latest figures from the National Bureau of Statistics. And according to Eva Yi of Keywise Capital Management, a hedge fund, such firms account for about 75-80% of profit in Chinese industry (see chart =

The significance of the private sector, though, lies in its vibrancy rather than in precise measures. For a state-directed country, much of China's success comes from businesses that thrive in large part because they operate outside state control. =A0

=46rom nothing =20

It is commonly said that Zhejiang's greatest contribution to its citizens and ultimately to China's economic resurgence?was to provide them with nothing and to cut them off from outside help. The province's topography comprises mostly mountains and rivers. Until fast trains, highways and airports were built over the past 15 years, access was poor from everywhere except Taiwan . That made it, viewed from Beijing, the wrong place for public investment. As a result, what business did exist was largely private, and meager in the extreme.=20

Zhejiang's first successes came in the collection and recycling of four unlikely commodities, says Raymond Ma, who grew up in Wenzhou, the province's best-known city, and now heads China research for Fidelity, an international fund-management company. These were used packaging, plucked chicken feathers, tattered cotton and spent toothpaste tubes. The cotton, for example, would be picked apart and "refreshed" into new garments. = This trade eventually spread beyond the province?s borders and laid the foundations for other, more dynamic businesses. Governors sent from Beijing would invariably begin by attempting to impose state control, but gradually accepted private enterprise as the only way to eke out growth.=20

As China came out of its Maoist gloom, Zhejiang's scrappy entrepreneurs had already acquired, in the least auspicious circumstances, a culture of opportunity and a belief that anyone could become successful. These would prove to be extremely useful assets.=20

The anecdotes are almost endless. A Wenzhou businessman who is now ensconced in an office with an elegant address (but no heating) in Shanghai dropped out of high school in the 1980s. A relative lent him 30 yuan (then less than $10) which he paid to an agent for a job in a shoe factory at less than 300 yuan a month. From shoes he went on to electronics, from electronics to selling building materials, from selling building materials to manufacturing them. Today he employs 1,300 people.=20

Another native of Wenzhou , also now in Shanghai (but who chose to meet = in a heated coffee shop), left school at 16 and borrowed 360 yuan. That bought two noodle-making machines and a ticket for a 30-hour rail journey to a remote area of China, rumoured to be untapped territory. He sold the machines for 480 yuan. More orders followed. The business grew for six months, and then competition entered: it was time to start again. Selling buttons came next; then trading in scrap that could be used to make them; then factories to produce plastics for buttonmaking (and later for watchmaking). Now he is searching the world for machinery to create the high-grade plastics used in LED screens.=20

The focus on business often came at a high personal cost. A woman who began as a primary-school teacher in Wenzhou on 30 yuan a month moved to = a slightly better-paid job in a textile factory. She then became a printer, clothing exporter, property developer and, most recently, wine importer. She is by any measure a tycoon. Along the way she sent her children to Europe when the elder one was ten, to live with a sister who handles overseas sales. The means to support them were in China; their lives = would be better in France.

China's entrepreneurs were quick to shift into exports. State-approved trade fairs, notably one in Guangzhou , used to be rare opportunities to meet foreign customers. Now there are many more chances. In 1982 Yiwu, a city on Zhejiang's northern border, opened a permanent trade centre that in the past dozen years has become popular with foreign buyers. It is one of the largest indoor markets in the world, claiming 140,000 outlets. = They line the sides of narrow corridors, their doorways overflowing with bales of wire, crockery, wrenches, lights, cutlery, pens, toys, tools, = ornaments for the world?s holidaymakers and even newly manufactured Middle Eastern "antiques". Across the street are halal restaurants for the many Arab customers. =A0

A family multinational=20

The foreigners in Yiwu come to buy; increasingly, the Chinese are going abroad to sell. At the forefront are families like Natasha?s. Natasha lives in southern China with her child and husband, a petroleum engineer. Her sister graduated from a Chinese university and found herself, like many students, jobless but ambitious. =20

Souvenirs of somewhere else=20

In 2004 a Yiwu-like market was opening in Dubai. With Natasha's help the sister found on the Internet a local marble producer, with an annual turnover of 1m yuan, who wanted a Dubai representative. Off the sister went; a younger sister followed later. The family outlet in Dubai added a finishing factory and Natasha?s sisters donned headscarves and whatever other conservative garments were required to make sales calls to Iran , Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere. Recently, in response to clients? requests, marble slabs from Italy have been added to the product line. Another client needed bathrooms and kitchens, 200 units at a time: sourcing those in China became Natasha's job. Turnover for the Dubai office rose above

The capital mystery=20

Like any growing venture, China's private businesses need capital, and in much bigger amounts than 30 yuan for a job agent or 360 yuan for a couple of noodle machines. Its sources are a bit of a mystery: largely unofficial, even secretive. Very little seems to come from the big, state-owned banks, although China's government has made increasingly loud= =20 noises about small firms' need for finance. Loans to small and medium-sized enterprises comprise 4% or less of the total made by three = of the country's four largest banks, according to company reports. A few other smaller institutions have begun to emerge. Zhejiang Tailong Commercial Bank, a privately owned lender, has grown at a rate of more than 40% a year making smallish loans (averaging 500,000 yuan, or $76,000). It has imbibed the same entrepreneurial spirit as its = clientele, employing workers in two shifts to maintain office hours of 7.30am to

That leaves a huge gap, which has been filled by an unofficial system = that is discerning, vibrant and (depending on the authorities' sentiment of = the moment) even illegal. According to research by China's central bank cited by China Daily, a state-run, English language newspaper, 89% of Wenzhou's population and 57% of its enterprises have borrowed outside the banking system, paying interest rates of 10% for 30 days or 214% for a year. (Established businesses say rates of 1.5-2% a month are common.) Although the scope of this form of finance is not known, a Wenzhou businessman reckons that there are 100,000 people in his city who could each raise up to 1 billion yuan within 48 hours. So liquid is the system that, unlike private-equity groups in the West, Chinese partnerships often do not = raise money before seeking prospective investments; investments are found and then partnerships are formed in short order.=20

A Westerner with family ties in Fujian province, to the south of = Zhejiang, says he is constantly presented with opportunities. He rejects many of them, most recently one in importing second-hand women's handbags = (because criminals may have been involved) and another in exporting hair = extensions to Japan (too complicated), but he has embraced others, notably in coal (which doubled his money in a year). The system is entirely informal. Records, he says, are minimal and all investments are in cash. A by-product is a proliferation of vast steel safes in homes and offices.=20

This freedom from financial bureaucracy should not be underestimated. Transactions can unfold at breathtaking speed. Within three months, this Westerner said, his relatives had been involved in the purchase of one steel mill and, in a separate deal, the sale of another. Businesses can = be created or liquidated overnight. Rather than pay taxes, he adds, many companies make nominal payments to the local government. This is particularly true of Chinese based abroad, who move quickly from one country to another as opportunities, often tied to Chinese exports, = arise. =A0 Nevertheless, this form of business has inherent limits. To the extent that firms operate outside the law, they are vulnerable to shakedowns = from local officials and mood-swings in Beijing . Although success brings praise, too much of it can invite envy and scrutiny. Each new list compiled of China's greatest tycoons is often accompanied by stories = about those on earlier lists who later fell foul of the law. In his remarks = last year Mr Zheng, the provincial party official, said that the significance of private business was not understood: businessmen were often criticized (perhaps a veiled reference to being jailed) without good reason and if continually squeezed, would emigrate, sapping China's vitality. The prospect of expropriation undermines the willingness of these entrepreneurs to make the long-term investment needed to develop brands, novel products and capable middle-management.=20

One method used to bring private companies into the mainstream appears to be the sale of shares in a public offering. In the West, offerings of shares on a stock exchange are used to raise capital, to provide cash to the initial investors, to create a currency to buy other companies and perhaps to provide independent valuations and external discipline. All this may be true in China too. But share offerings play another essential role: they legitimise a company.=20

Before an offering, it is not uncommon for a company to fail on any = number of legal standards. It may not have full title to the land on which its factories sit. It has almost certainly avoided taxes. The process begins with bringing accounts into conventional forms, repaying taxes or paying for the land. The money for this, says an experienced banker, often comes from a "pre-IPO" offering to a small group of investors. These are perceived to be hugely lucrative to financial institutions, but vital to issuers. The resulting company is then deemed clean enough to pass a rigorous government inspection. Share sales usually happen only once: secondary offers, though common in other countries, are rare.=20

According to Mr Liu and Mr Siu, listed private companies continue to be more profitable than listed state-owned enterprises. However, their returns on equity are nothing like as good as those of unlisted private firms. This not only underscores the importance of China's upstart businessmen, but also raises questions about how Chinese enterprise will evolve. It is possible that returns dip simply because companies use = share issues to load up on capital, and hence overcapitalise themselves and depress returns on equity, at least in the short term. It is also = possible that they go public only when their best days are past. Another, more pessimistic, possibility is that as the Chinese private sector grows, comes under scrutiny and adopts commonly accepted structures, its = vitality will diminish.=20

It is often said in China that a new economic era has recently begun, described as guo jin min tui: state advances, private retreats. The government has reasons for such a change: it is tightening laws, building infrastructure and providing strategic guidance it considers necessary = for the country?s next steps. Many in the West applaud the expansion of the government?s sway, believing in the wisdom of the state in pushing = China's economy forward. But behind China's remarkable success has been an odd = and often unappreciated experiment in laissez-faire capitalism. =A0

Copyright =A9 2011 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved. =A0

Aren't the miracles of "modern accounting" wonderful?

Of course you wouldn't. I don't expect the blind to see.

Your articles here.

Illinois has a new grown business; hospitality for refugee legislators from adjacent states. Wisconsin and Indiana trade legislators and private businesses with Illinois. Both think it's a good deal. Yes, Illinois is in deep trouble.

Sorta like why large corporations like Obummer-care. ...and all other things big-government.

om

s is in

things

Obama's health restriction bill was a godsend for Massachusetts--their smaller version of the same fish (carp) was blowing up in their face.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Well too bad but, the current (and recent ~ 15 years) government interventions are the worst excesses.