Shenzen

Virtue, in a society, matters. Some small percentage of dishonest people (2%?) could freeze the whole society. Or fewer--just look at what 19 people managed taking advantage of people's trust fourteen years ago, and the inefficiency and inconvenience they've visited on us ever since.

A society where people feel justified in taking from others--that is, where people feel justified in committing an injustice--that's not a formula that offers peace or justice or prosperity.

Cheers, James Arthur

^^^ now

Exactly, and that's where we are. Everyone wants theirs but doesn't see the reason they should have to work for it.

Note the date of the article is 2009, when the damage to the global economy caused by Big Banks and other financial institutions was still being felt everywhere. The Chinese and others were just filling a void and meeting a need by recycling, which would be highly laudable except for the misrepresentation and obfuscation. Their shenanigans probably have caused some problems for those who were suckered into buying these "counterfeit" parts, and other items that were found to contain harmful levels of some contaminants (according to modern standards). But arguably much more damage, economic and human, have been caused by heartless CEOs and profiteers who are heralded as heroes by the right wing.

Also, it is probably perfectly safe for ordinary people to walk through the impoverished Chinese neighborhoods where these bags of trash are piled and being used for recycling, with little worry about being gunned down by street thugs or roughed up by teenage gangs. Their society may condone counterfeiting and deceptive marketing, but promotes civility, respect, and non-violence. You won't find many crazy people or Islamic extremists and other "haters" going on rampages with automatic weapons.

Paul

I spent some time in the USSR, working in Moscow. Things were impressively corrupt. People played cards all day instead of working. People stole most of the materials from our construction site; they said "Why not? It doesn't belong to anybody."

+1. China suffers a lot of poverty, which translates as suffering and death. Poor countries turn a blind eye to such activity because it brings much needed wealth into the country.

wealth creation was a good thing last time I checked.

NT

}snip{

I thought it was supposed to go like:

"Of course not! It belongs to everybody." :)

joe

Long ago I had a job where some of the drawings had to be approved by NASA.

The first couple of times , the NASA guys stopped playing cards while I was in the room. Later they kept on playing while one of them signed the drawings.

I can not really blame them. NASA had it budget cut so there was no money to buy any materials to do testing. But they had not, maybe could not, cut the people's salaries. So they had to come to work, but there was nothing to do. Jobs were tight, so there was no getting a new job and doing real work.

This was in the late sixties as I remember.

Dan

The banks were just acting as amoral instruments of the federal government. The government set the rules, and they responded. And the rules the central gov't set were to favor certain people over others, a redistribution. Always unjust.

If you think that was bad (and it was), those banks are now fewer, and bigger, and doing the same thing, only more.

I'll take that bet. Multiply a billion people * 70+ years of grinding poverty to compute man-years of misery, add in the people accidentally killed in Mao's Great Leap Forward, those intentionally killed in the Cultural Revolution, and Tianamen Square. Compare that to the standards in the United States over the same time frame--it's not even close.

China's been around for thousands of years. They're benefiting by copying freer exchanges of goods and services (free markets & entrepreneurialism) from us today, but look where they still are after all this time, playing catch-up to a society one-tenth their age...

Iraq was like that under Saddam. Unless you stepped out of line.

Their society doesn't promote any of those, so much as claims a monopoly on violating them for the State.

You might want to consider what they do to dissidents.

Cheers, James Arthur

On a sunny day (Sat, 5 Dec 2015 05:50:27 -0800 (PST)) it happened snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote in :

Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Syria, South America, AND you committed genocide on the injuns too.

Some time ago I concluded that the only export product of value from the US is _dollars_. That women in charge of the printing presses calls it 'monetary easing'.

This ONLY works as long as that dollar is a global accepted currency. Too bad for the US that just this week the Renminbi was accepted as a part of the global currency standard too.

At this moment in time, where China has all your worthless paper, they use those dollars to their advantage to buy into S America, now Africa, Europe, and even some US stuff.

As soon as those dollars are spend they will no longer have an incentive to play them, and may well start printing Renminbi in quantity and play the same game on you. Thats is just an other nail in the coffin of USA.

4.95 years US will 'defend' itself with war, as it did after the great recession. That war will be nuculear so to speak, and everybody and their pet bird will have nukes.

The empire , just like the Roman empire, will fall, for the same reasons in the same way .

:-)

Yes, much wealth was created in Bhopal by Union Carbide, the greater Gulf of Mexico by BP, Hamlet, North Carolina by Imperial Foods, West, Texas by the West Fertilizer Company, Donora, Pennsylvania by US Steel, Minamata Bay, Japan by Chisso Corporation, Niagara Falls by Hooker Chemical Company (with help by the Niagara Falls School Board), Pasadena, Texas by Phillips 66 and the Cuyahoga watershed by a variety of companies.

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Rick

Oh please, that's not even close. >23 million perished in Mao's Hope and Change (Great Leap Forward) centrally-planned triumph alone.

From Wiki, "Despite the harmful agricultural innovations, the weather in

1958 was very favorable and the harvest promised to be good. Unfortunately, the amount of labour diverted to steel production and construction projects meant that much of the harvest was left to rot uncollected in some areas. This problem was exacerbated by a devastating locust swarm, which was caused when their natural predators were killed as part of the Great Sparrow Campaign. [...]

With dramatically reduced yields, even urban areas suffered much reduced rations; however, mass starvation was largely confined to the countryside, where, as a result of drastically inflated production statistics, very little grain was left for the peasants to eat."

That's an independent variable--or are you saying communist countries didn't? Shall we go back to what happened to indigenous peoples in your country? Or any other? (Or what the American Indians did to one another, including slavery?)

Yes, America's new, freedom as a system of government is new on the face of the Earth, an experiment, and we've made some mistakes as the idea has developed. But China and Russia and Iran and Korea and many other places are oppresing *now* (and many times apparently, like Mao's Leap, from good intentions, underscoring the fact that they have a bad system based on faulty assumptions).

The main thing America has exported of value has been ideas, first and foremost that of freedom, then afterwards the innovations that such a society makes possible. Other nations that have copied us have benefited billions and billions of citizens' lives with medicines, machines, energy, materials, etc.

Note that some of these ideas even came from other societies--even totalitarian societies--but those societies could not take advantage of them. (Mere innovation isn't enough, you need an environment of freedom where it can thrive.)

You're not wrong about the collapse we face on our current course.

It certainly will if we don't right it. Societies don't sustain themselves, they're supported by systems and principles the U.S. is rapidly losing. I'm going to a Christmas party later today where nearly everyone is working less, because that now makes financial sense (Obamacare).

If everyone benefits chiefly from making and innovating, that produces a hugely different outcome from where people benefit chiefly at others' expense. One rises, the other crumbles.

Cheers, James Arthur

And weren't almost all of those people punished, sued, and/or imprisoned?

If you think things are bad when groups of temporarily unaccountable people get out of control, imagine when those same people are in government screwing up, not caring, and permanently unaccountable as a matter of law.

E.g., Mao's Great Leap, Lenin's famines, Cambodia's Killing Fields, Stalin's Holodomor, the latest financial collapse, and Obamacare(*). All centralized planning by people completely insulated from the consequences.

(*) ;-)

Cheers, James Arthur

On a sunny day (Sat, 5 Dec 2015 07:17:57 -0800 (PST)) it happened snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote in :

You do see, hopefully, that that contradicts itself? Just propaganda.

No it is part of what shall we call it, the US 'track record'.

Maybe, just to get a clue, you should look at what the Chinese have build. There is plenty on the internet.

LOL Just explain to me what US had / has to do in Vietnam, Iraq, and all those other places, supporting dictators everywhere. It seems to have a sort of paranoia for anything 'communist'. Maybe because it does not understand that system and that people can be very happy in such a system too, sometimes more than in that US system where they are constantly brainwashed that having ever more material goods makes you happy. It does not, but it keeps factories rolling. Well, 'did' actually, the factories are now in China and other cheap labor countries, your cities like Detroit (IIRC) are becoming ghost cities. You roads and bridges are falling apart, your electrical grid is a joke.

Your farmaceutical industry sees people as consumers, sells stuff that does not cure sicknesses but keep people ever hooked on their 'medicine' makes drugs against depression that your society creates that turns parts of peoples brain off, and changes them into mindless killers, how many of those shooters, apart from Muslim terrorists were on drugs?

God beware if a drug or medicine CURED the patients, end of the market.

Copied you? You must be kidding, 0bama care is trying to copy the Dutch health care system.

The Dutch invented the CD (optical disk) an Italian invented the nuculear bob, a German invented the liquid fuel rocket and it was German engineers Von Braun and his crew that took you to the moon, 'something you have lost the capability for once he died.

Bull, Russia was first with Sputnik and taking advantage if it, it scared the pants of US, and that is why they were copy-catting, see above.

Oh well, I do not see that link, explain plz. But sure, in the ideal society ? in US view or some views the work could be done by machines. Already a lot is done by machines 9robots), but those machines do not buy products.

Solution:" *bulb* a robot that does shopping. of course it should get some credit card filled by what it produces. But now we no longer need people...

LOL

So, maybe , oh yes, FOR SURE I can write a program for a robot that buys products, In its software it should have some algo that more stuff is better.

See, your society does not NEED humans.

WOW, I have dunnit!!

Quod Erat Demonstrandum,

This posting will go down in HISTORY. Prood the US capitalist system is FAKE!

Why are you changing the topic?

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Rick

Now that's what I call selective. Add up all the wealth and its consequences, and all the damage, and no sane person would say it's all a bad deal.

NT

it does if they're the right goods, eg effective medicines & other things that solve genuine problems. But much of what people buy looks like junk to me

NT

Mfrs seem alergic to providing organized part marking info, even for smaller parts which are not subject to this level of fraud.

Seems a poor defense against counterfeiting.

With modern stock control methods and communications capability, all it should take is a bar code swipe and internet connectivity to confirm that stock is real and that it is where it should be.

RL

I can really blame them. They could have kept doing something productive, something more fun than playing cards.

But government has no incentive to be productive, and it's arguable that NASA was, and is, as corrupt as the USSR.

On 12/5/2015 11:02 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote: [...]

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Grizzly H.