Romney on green cards

Wow. That gave my weird-o-meter a blip. You cussing a republican for doing something liberal. Wait a minute, that is just typical liberal stupidity.

?-)

be

Beautiful. I find it really hilarious the IMF after 50 years of shoving austerity programs down developing nations throats suddenly finds out it "doesn't work". Typical liberals, biting the hand that feeds it until the neither the hand nor the food comes any more.

?-)

Fix the way you use google groups, many other GG posters here manage not to insert lots of blank lines.

wages.

majority of them are hired into relatively mundane administrative positions at pay way less than engineering. It's no loss to discourage candidate students who would choose engineering solely because of the prospects of a high paying job. Those kinds are not going to be very good and probably don't make a career out of it.

I have met a lot of lawyers over the years and not one of them makes less than i as an engineer.

clamoring

a

engineering programs at the universities for decades, just so they could oversupply the market and lower wages. Didn't the IEEE take on the NSF in Congressional hearings a few years ago over their fake estimates of supply/demand estimates of the engineering workfarce?

None of that crap bothers me much. IEEE for sure said the "demand" was way too low, it is a trade guild after all. All of the estimates are full of shit. What really discourages many students from studying engineering math and science is that it takes discipline and learning how to reason. And learning reasoning is forbidden in American grade schools now.

?-)

cutting the mustard. He repeated that theme several times during the debate referring to unfilled high skill positions.

the

is nothing compared to what people have to go through in places like east Asia. The H1B visa program is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for many of these people who otherwise would have none, the vast majority of them come from desperately poor backgrounds. If the US has the openings then the program should be continued if not expanded for humanitarian as well as economic reasons. Elimination of competition will only weaken the so-called skilled workforce anyway.

Wow, you sound awfully bitter about the average quality of US engineering graduates. Tell the tales of your reason for this.

?-)

wages

The time i found actual census data on the topic they were paid 10 to 25 percent less.

YMMV

?-)

be

g

You've got to be a particularly right-wing nitwit to think that the IMF is composed of "liberals".

They aren't being liberal now - just realising that if everybody does what their victimns were forced to do in the past, the international economy may tank. They didn't care when they were screwing up individual countries - having one country forced into recession "for its own good" didn't mess up their lives or their incomes - but now that it might threaten their own generous incomes they get more nervous.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

The fault here lies with the dismal pseudo-science of economics. They had models that work well when the world is *NOT* in recession - they applied the same model to a completely different situation global recession (with the exception of China and maybe India) where on a global scale it has now been proved *experimentally* to be incorrect.

It was predicated on wildly incorrect and invalid assumptions of the sort that are so beloved of fiscal conservatives.

In a hard global recession you must avoid entering a death spiral of wage freezes with fewer people employed, so less taxes so less new build. It is better to keep people employed and build infrastructure in a recession than stop building and lay everyone off. UK was to some extent cushioned by having to build the Olympic stadiums but now...

What the Tory government have done here has pretty much saved the merchant bankers but wrecked the real economy. The lazy bastards in the City of London won't lend to perfectly good businesses now because they can get better profits by speculating on corn & soya commodity futures. They have no ethics and will do whatever makes the quickest buck - in this case it is promoting wide scale famine in Africa and elsewhere.

A reasonable recent history introduction is online at:

Although I think the title is a little bit hyperbolic.

They cannot lose on this bet since it is already well known that the global corn harvest is in serious trouble. Food prices will skyrocket.

--
Regards, 
Martin Brown

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Tourism, and to enable people to put a couple of year work in the US on their CV - it proves that they can function in an English-speaking environment. Working in the U.K. would be as good for certifying their language skills, but the US is bigger and has more companies that perform close to the state of the art.

I'm not too impressed with their judgment - they never hired me, and only interviewed me once, which eventually led to a permanent difference of opinion with their personnel department.

Though the chips are mostly made in Tiawan these days ...

You like to think so.

The whole world revolves around John Larkin - or at least that's the way he sees it.

Steve Jobs is dead. Microsoft is one of the best anti-monopoly arguments available.Oracle is mainly big, as opposed to good. HP has been split into several fragments, none of which is all that impressive. Dell is big but otherwide unremarkable. Google and Amazon are both impressive - but Google sees itself at the intellectual heir of Professor Karen Spärck-Jones whom I used to meet from time at Cambridge.

What have you done for us recently?

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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It's an equilibrium. If you've got to pay asronomic salaries so that your engineers can afford a place to live, you can't afford amny enegineers.

Envisage moving somewhere cheaper ...

For a while. Those bright kids will eventually have kids of their own, and they won't wanted them "educated" in the US system. Some Australian friends of ours were encouraged to return to Australia by their expereinces with the US education system - both sons are now Microsoft evangelists in Australia - apparently that's their official job title - so it seems that they didn't get out fast enough.

But you stayed there anyway.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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Actually, he never suffered any consequences from his spending, because it wasn't actually excessive - he used debt as a tool to let himself achieve a particular result. The New York Daily News doesn't think he ought have borrowed money in that way, probably because they think that he shouldn't have ended up as your president. His behaviour is exactly the opposite of incompetent management - he took a risk, and it paid off.

You are too dim - or too blinkered - to apprecaite that Kenysian deficit-financed stimuls spending is the same kind of risk and provmises the same kind of pay-off.

Not exactly. It depends on defining your flat earth approach to economics as common sense, rather than eceentric idiocy.

GDP and employment are both gorwing, if slowly. What's "not working".

 b) If it worked, it would have.

It's worked, and it's kept on working.

 c) It doesn't, didn't, and it's not working.

repetion doesn't make you bizarre point of view any less party poltical hogwash

 d) And, we're spending all this borrowed money badly, foolishly.

A proposition that might be true if you flat earth economc ideas were right. They are merely far-fright delusions.

Employment is rising, not falling.

Perhaps, but nowehere near as much as the altnative which you seem to be recommending whioch would be a full-fledged 1929-32 style Great Depression, with GDP and employment falling by 6% per year.

The sums are scarcely infinite, and the ill effects are less than the depression that the spending has aveerted.

The point about pump-priming stimuls is that the money is borrowed from people who aren't spending. If they were spending it, there wouldn't be amy need for the stimulus spending.

Do try to engage your brain before approaching the key-board.

Obama's not even left of centre.

And he could help them a lot more effecitvely is the stimulus spending was going to the poor rather than the rich, as Paul Krugman has pointed out from time to time. With the Republican majority in the congress that isn't going to happen.

It's not going up. Labour is doing poorly in recession, as it always does, and captial is doing relatively well.

Rising?

The GDP keeps on creeping up. James Arthur gets excited about the noise around the trend line, but he's is desperate denial.

The solution that James Arthur has in mind is a lot worse than the disease he thinks the US needs to cure, but he's fixated on his flat earth economic theories, and can't quite see that they didn't work for Hoover and wouldn't work any better today.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

doesn't

wages

Wow, that's the funniest thing you've ever posted. Brilliant in so many ways.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom timing and laser controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer 
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

doesn't

wages

What an insane misunderstanding of causalities. By your logic, the cost of housing engineers here is huge because of the demand for engineers, therefore employers can't afford to hire any engineers, so there are no engineers in Silicon Valley.

I'm sure glad that you're not an engineer in Silicon Valley.

You just did. I like it here.

Microsoft evangelists? Hilarious. That's about six levels down from Mormon missionaries, in both intelligence and integrity.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom timing and laser controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer 
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

: k

It took me a while to see the joke. Personnel departments who think that they can read engineer's CV accurately enough to act as gatekeepers are funny, but the mistakes they make are no fun for the engineers they reject or the companies that miss out on the engineers that they should have hired.

My favourite example of this kind of behaviour - at Cambridge Instruments - did have a happy ending. The Chinese engineer involved did an end run around the personell department - his wife played badmington with the wife of one of our engineers - and he got hired to revolutionise the way Cambridge Instruments put together it's electron microscope columns before he got head-hunted by an American firm.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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People have already mostly stopped loaning us money, at least at rates we can afford. So, the Fed's buying our debt instead.

---------

=al&promo_code=E8AA-1 WSJ: Fed Buying 61 Percent of US Debt

The Federal Reserve is propping up the entire U.S. economy by buying

61 percent of the government debt issued by the Treasury Department, a trend that cannot last, Lawrence Goodman, a former Treasury official and current president of the Center for Financial Stability, writes in a Wall Street Journal opinion article published Wednesday.

"Last year the Fed purchased a stunning 61 percent of the total net Treasury issuance, up from negligible amounts prior to the 2008 financial crisis," Goodman writes.

---------

James

It's easy. Government is an expense, a loss. Higher isn't better. Same as riding a bicycle with the brakes on. Deficit spending is deferred tax.

There's a wide range of operating ranges. If the government has saved up a pot of money from prior surpluses, sure, it can use that as a flywheel to smooth over small dips. Keynes works in that SOA.

That doesn't work for long periods, and it doesn't work if the government is borrowing the money. Why? Because no one's fooled-- they know their expenses *will* shortly rise, so they put away for the future. They don't invest and expand.

As a 2nd order insult, government competes with private industry for loans, and gov't wins. Today we're doing that, yet printing more, countering some of the effects. They're tweaking everything madly. They shouldn't.

Both are true. In the crony-zone, government punishes its enemies and rewards its friends, to borrow Obama's phrase.

tra-d...

If somebody's getting paid for something, as a crude measure, then someone thought whatever that person did was worth something. It's a crude standard, but works overall. It works better than Obama allocating resources, or any other genius, for that matter.

There are YouTubes of JFK speeches from the 1961 recession, where JFK said a) lower marginal rates would boost business utilization and profits, which b) JFK said was good, and would increase employment, wages, AND revenues.

_That's_ a Democrat.

He wants a Constitution that provides for more distribution, and a bill of positive rights. That's as radical as it gets, if you understand the implications--that turns the most basic premises of America up-side down. It institutionalizes nannyism, cronyism, and invites tyranny.

[...]

Choking coal isn't helping, and neither is choking oil. Like it or not, oil's most of our energy, demand is inelastic, and small actions to limit supply have a disproportionate impact. The main reason prices aren't higher is the economy's still flat; demand is low.

Cool. But, we're set on halting fracking...

--
Cheers, 
James Arthur

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The mass-mind here amazes, indiscriminately lumping everything that isn't profligacy as "austerity."

Obviously cutting good stuff can hurt. Don't do that.

Obviously, when you cut nonsense, you initially start a wave of creative destruction--the do-nothing jobs disappear. Unemployment rises. Then, they get useful jobs. That takes time. Then you've got people making useful stuff, paying taxes, and not on assistance, a triple plus.

In any event, spending a lot more than you make is poor strategy.

--
Cheers, 
James Arthur

James Arthur finds it remarkably easy to leap to conclusions - he knows the conclusion he wants.

But no government leaves you with much larger losses.

I doubt if he'd have agreed with you. For one think, where would the governemnt have deposited this pot of money?

In a recession, they aren't investing and expanding in the first place. That's the whole problem. As FDR demonstrated, you can fool them into investing and expanding by creating economic activity by splashing out with borrowed money.

This is a matter of opinion. There are the ignorant nutcases like you, then there's neo-Keynesian economic orthodoxy, which is deeply into tweaking. Since they don't share your bizarre delusions, they don't see what they are doing as mad - less efeective than they'd like perhaps, but scarcely mad. Mad would be a 1937-style cold turkey premature withdrawal of the stimulus spending, not that you are equipped to realise this.

And the US Supreme Court goes out of its way to make sure that the government's friends can reward it right back.

With a Republican majority in Congress, how would Obama get to allocate resources?

an

The founding tax evaders gave you a constitution that did all of that. I've not seen any suggestion that Obama wants to change your constitution - despite the fact that it's a century or so past it's sell-by date. He just wants the people with money to spenda bit more of it on educating their work force and keeping them healthy.

This isn't even idealism - it's just enlightened self-interest. You aren't yet enlightened enough to follow the logic, and probably never will be, but economic reality may yet get through to people with more money to lose.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Worse. It competes with people's need for borrowing. It becomes a perpetual tax because it is never paid, only the interest, maybe.

Borrow in the good times. Borrow more in the down times. Good plan, eh?

Exactly.

 

Except if government is doing the "paying". There isn't any negative feedback to determine "worth". Government is an open loop.

That was your father's Democrat. By today's standards, JFK would be a far right-winger, closer to Buchanan than Obama.

It *is* tyranny.

...and prices are still double what they were when Obama was coroneted.

If Obama is reelected, it'll come to a screeching halt.

Keynes has been totally discredited, but Obummer and his fellow liberals (a s well as you) haven't gotten the memo. Government borrowing money to raise wealth in America (or any other country for that matter) is like me buying stuff on my credit card to raise my standard of living. Works great until the first credit card bill comes due.

The only proven way to raise the standard of living is by investing in busi nesses that provide value added in the form of products, services or intell ectual property. Government borrowing merely competes with capital that oth erwise will go to private industry. This is why Obummer's policies have fai led - and will ALWAYS fail if some other liberal moron try's them again.