Shenzen

He's not. What might help is a book by TJ Stiles - "The First Tycoon" about Cornelius Vanderbilt. "Corporations" were public entities funded by private money ostensibly to build canals before the time of railroads.

There's less distinction between public and private than we are usually told. Private is different in that those organizations can be dissolved more easily and use money flows as part of governance.

Charles Calomiris notes that Canada has a very small number of banks - mainly just the one - an they've never had any sort of financial crisis.

His thesis is that there's an intuition-defeating tendency about bank stability and size. The US has a "small bank lobby" and it's always been a problem. Small banks were like a pile of rags soaked in oil during the Great Depression. The Smoot-Hawley tariffs were the match..

it's interesting at least.

But to be fair, China simply stood still while the European barbarians sped up. The Mandarin Maxim was - that which is not forbidden is required, and that which is not required is forbidden.

That last bit is harder to prove. See "We Shall Remain". It's complicated. Much of it was unintentional biological warfare - the village the Pilgrims set up was on a site where an entire tribe had been wiped out by some sort of plague.

none of that money went anywhere. It was given to banks, which used it as reserves and the Fed paid Interest On Reserves.

The money supply in the US has not even kept up with population growth.

This may well be the best thing that could happen. All currencies are completely fungible now, anyway.

The natural facts about that paper mean it's hardly worthless. Checked bond rates lately? We need to raise interest rates *artificially* if we are to do it at all. If it was "worthless", the interest rates would be much higher or they wouldn't trade at all.

Most of the ills of the world are explained by low US interest rates.

What else is it that you think they have been doing?

Rome was never remotely stable. It was succession by assassination and total market capture by those like Crassus.

"There is a lot of ruin in a Nation" - Adam Smith.

I see, so the fact that it survived for nearly 10 times as long as the US ( so far) doesn't impress you?

(Counting from about 400 BC to the fall of Byzantium in 1453. Roman legend puts their founding 300 or so years earlier than that.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

There's some outliers, though: Cisco routers nowadays ship with elaborate seals, rivaling currency anti-copy provisions.

Sounds good, but you'd have to coordinate the entire supply chain on barcode standards and recordkeeping, and secure the internet. Then, one untrained mail clerk breaks the production run.

Lots of bad things happened a couple hundred years ago, when the European powers colonized the rest of the world, planted a flag and figured they owned continents. The Dutch, the Germans, the Spanish, the French, and to a lesser extent the English perpetrated real atrocities in their colonies.

Lots of bad things are happening still, but the US and the Europeans aren't the main bad guys any more. Progress.

OK, don't buy our ICs or our test equipment or our wheat. Make your pasta from local stuff. Defend yourselves. Lear to speak Russian. Or Arabic.

Yikes, that's amazing. Setting out the entire population to kill poor little birds. Mao was maybe the biggest murderer in human history.

The Bhopal plant was built with Union Carbide money, and the chemical process. They were NOT allowed, by Indian law, to have ANY control over the design, construction or operation of the plant. The disaster was caused by a night watchman who routinely sabotaged the process so he could go home early on Friday night. He opened valves to pour water into some pipes that caused a reaction and plugged up the pipes, shuting the process down. He had done this at least a dozen times. One time, he put more water in than before, and it caused a completely unknown polymerization reaction to develop and go into thermal runaway, with the well-known catastrophic results.

Jon

well, not any more.

On a sunny day (Sat, 5 Dec 2015 13:55:19 -0600) it happened Les Cargill wrote in :

I think it was Nixon who decoupled the value of the dollar from gold. That way you do not see it is just wallpaper...

.Checked

Building ipods?

No, the empire was created by Caesar, he took slaves from the countries he conquered. The slaves had an uprising, it was struck down, but the bickering politics after that gave slaves power. Those slaves _did_not_give_a_dime_about the empire, subconsciously hatet it, and wanted its destruction (sounds familiar), so had no incentive and neither the knowledge nor the will or the capabilities to keep it . They alienated their allies (that were of course only allies held at gun point), and the whole thing crumbled. When you get invaded by Mexico and South America from the south, Canada from the north, maybe with some Russia, China and Japan and Korea from the west, and Europe and Russia from the east, OK let me put it this way: I have this globe, N America is really small, glowball worming will sink that Hawaii stronghold into the sea and Italy is not that big these days either,

On a sunny day (Sat, 5 Dec 2015 14:22:33 -0600) it happened Les Cargill wrote in :

Rolling down hill.

What logistics?

If you want to see some logistics look at China, one party system, decisions are made and executed.

In 'merrica republicans hit demonrats and demonrats byte republicans and that is all there is happening. Blacks hate whites, and see my other posting in this thread about why the Roman empire collapsed. When excavations happen, maybe in thousands of years, books will be written about 'how could such a big empire disappear all of the sudden', theories. The Romans were just like the US initially. 'And Carthago must be destroyed' Remember who said that?

Rock and rolling mm, those days of what was it 'Country Joe and the Fish', cannot even remember the name of that happening. Youth rising up against the Vietnam war, hippies.... Got the soundtrack (record disappeared, gave it away). Those guys? Been assimilated I guess :-)

On a sunny day (Sat, 5 Dec 2015 12:18:47 -0500) it happened mixed nuts wrote in :

Thats is nice, so I was wrong, Did not know that, great video clip :-)

Maybe it inspired Von Braun.

Anyways the light bulb was invented in 2 places too.

Oh oh oh oh oh you poor deluded soul...

And the elephant that you don't see is China.

joe

I was pointing to Obamacare as an example of losing our principles.

America was the belief that a truck driver or a farmer knows his job better than the president, that people can govern themselves and make their own choices (distributed control / liberty) better than Barack Obama can make life (and daily job) choices for them.

Obamacare captures the assumption that Americans aren't fit to govern themselves or make their own choices. Obamacare institutionalizes the idea that ordinary people have to be ruled by someone better.

But Obamacare is showing the immediate results of this philospohy: unintended consequences. Making your neighbors pay for your needs now pays better than working to meet your own needs for many, so those people are working less. Smart people. Motivated people. Working less. Intentionally. Because it makes sense for them.

It's an immediate proof that they know better than Obama--they've already outsmarted his scheme, instantly optimizing their own situations in (harmful) ways he never imagined.

Big picture: America is regressing to the classic 18th century, pre-Revolutionary European monarchy: central-control by a not-all-knowing monarch, who is lightly constrained by a weak Parliament, supported by a compliant judiciary, and a massive bureaucracy--a ruling class, with powerful individuals and businesses as supplicants. Citizens barely matter to policy--the ruling class rules, exempting themselves from the programs they pass.

We used to let people optimize their own situations by figuring out how to optimize their production. Now we're encouraging people to optimize how much they can take from everyone else, via this new system.

The difference to prosperity, to living standards, to stability--even long-term survival--is profound.

One of those encourages people to work together to advance their own situations and the entire society, the other pits them against each other. One promotes synergy, the other destruction.

Cheers, James Arthur

We'll assume Rick doesn't buy, use, or benefit from anything made by other people who work together, and happen to incorporate.

Cars, and medicines, energy, science, clothing, and food are bad.

Cheers, James Arthur

Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) was not the operator of the plant. Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) was, a company which UCC owned more than half at the time of the accident and had employees on the board of UCIL. So UCC could exert all control over any aspect of the plant and its operation they felt was needed.

Regardless, the issue is not which corporation owned the Bhopal plant, but the fact that it was a disaster caused by the operation of a plant run for maximum profit.

The fantastic story you tell is found nowhere. Only UCC has claimed sabotage caused the accident.

'In Congressional testimony on March 26, 1985, Union Carbide?s CEO Warren Anderson stated that there was ?no evidence whatsoever that sabotage was behind the incident at Bhopal.? (3) Mr. Anderson was also quoted at a March, 1985 press briefing as saying that sabotage is ?always a potential and you have to worry about it. That?s why you need the redundancy"'

So UCC understands the need for safeguards against sabotage.

'UCC has shrunk to one sixth of its size since the Bhopal disaster in an effort to restructure and divest itself. By doing so, the company avoided a hostile takeover, placed a significant portion of UCC's assets out of legal reach of the victims and gave its shareholder and top executives bountiful profits [1]. The company still operates under the ownership of Dow Chemicals and still states on its website that the Bhopal disaster was "cause by deliberate sabotage". [28].'

This is the illustration of why pure "wealth creation" is not such a good thing. When a company creates a problem it should at least own up to it and do what it can for remediation rather than hiding its assets to protect the profits of the shareholders.

I was in that position once. Sales were bad, money tight. The PHB calculated I cost thrice as much on the books doing my job as doing nothing. (Engineering salaries had 2x added to cover overhead, while overhead employees' salaries were booked at straight cost.) So, the CEO literally told me to do nothing, not to design anything. Told me face-to-face.

Meanwhile, sales were off because the company desperately needed to replace its older-generation products.

I followed instructions for about two weeks before deciding that, as long as I didn't have anything to do, I might as well design a new line of products.

I started closing my door, and designing in secret, hiding documents like a POW, trusted technician on lookout for visitors, me rolling up and stashing vellums whenever someone came by.

Word got out some months into the process; the ideas caught fire. I worked

Interesting point. I was about to say NASA has been corrupted / diverted / disrupted by the _policies_ imposed on them, and argue that's different from being actually corrupt (i.e., people of bad character with bad intentions). But, I'm not sure that's either true, or matters. The outcomes are indistinguishable, viewed by an independent observer.

Cheers, James Arthur

Someone can't do math. Yes, there is a large multiplier for project staff to cover overhead, etc. But that multiplier is determined by the overhead costs (raised when you are charged to overhead) divided by the direct charges (raised when you direct charge). In the end where you are assigned does not impact the actual cost to the company, only how it shows up in the accounting.

If it was your immediate manager who told you that, then I get it. He pays you from his budget or lets you charge to overhead.

I agree the mere number of banks isn't as significant as how they behave. Their culture is critical.

I agree with the idea, mostly. If a large bank were able to effectively service the local populations across the whole country, that'd be fine. If their culture constantly pressed them to improve service, reduce costs, and adapt to their local customers' needs, that's great. If the bank headquartered in New York kept offices that personally knew their customers in Ottumwah, IA, and knew Mr. Doe to be honest and worth their trust--worthy of a taxpayer-backed loan's (shudder) trust, that's fine. Hard to do on a continental scale.

Historically we've needed competition to ensure that, otherwise a bank--or any other outfit--drifts toward serving its own needs instead. That's human nature. And if you're big, dumb, and responding to external forces instead of your customers... That's what we're creating today.

Since they're all part of the Borg, responding to the same external forces, that creates a single-point failure mechanism: if the federal policy driving them goofs, they all fail.

That's fair, yet it underscores the point that their system's productivity and standard of living had saturated at a low level of productivity and human dignity, while our ideas about freeing a nation's distributed, untapped intelligence--the People, and letting them freely produce and exchange goods and services--sped ahead.

Functionally, distributed autonomy just works better, for the same reasons we have an internet and billions of PCs instead of a single, centrally-managed mainframe.

Freedom is happier and freer, more tolerant of peoples' diverse needs and preferences, etc. Freedom is better.

Cheers, James Arthur