Yes, it's a hard decision, but granny is not the only one getting abused. I use a US PO box for important mail, while ignoring the spam mail that arrives at home. My PO box rent was recently raised about
100% to cover losses, while my home mail remains free. I have pleaded with the postal workers to stop delivering junk mail to my home address that doesn't have my name on it (to occupant, resident, etc.) and they refuse to comply with my request. It's very apparent what they are doing. They know I can't easily change my primary PO box address, and so they double the price. And since the rent is free at my home address, they continue to fill it with junk that I don't want, and can't refuse.
Not at all. Short-term, unfunded (borrowed) stimulus spending is mostly a politically-driven waste of money. But long term, the damage accumulates. Sooner or later, the long term catches up with you.
Note that "stimulus" spending is no longer episodic. It is continuous and endemic in the US and most of Europe. Today's near-zero interest rates are an abberation. When rael rates kick back in, the PIIGS will probably have to default; they simply won't be able to pay the interest rates that anybody would be willing to give them.
The US will just print money.
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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
Not true. The USPS has a legal monopoly on "First Class" mail. FedEx and UPS can legally only deliver parcels and "time-critical" mail.
FedEx and UPS do a far better job delivering packages than the USPS, well, unless USPS is doing the actual delivery. Our mail carrier is actually pretty good but I've had some that were as dumb as Slowman.
That would be like the USPS to lose money delivering FedEx's packages.
Um, you obviously haven't studied the problem. Management *wants* to do the right thing but Congress (you know, the opposite of progress?) keeps getting in the way. It's a classical example of why government *CAN'T* work.
If the government wouldn't raid the highway "trust fund", it could easily pay for the roads, as it should.
Spoken like a true believer.
It surely ain't the USPS!
The bailouts are essentially raiding the (above) pension plans. Congress forces the USPS to put Billion$ in the pension fund, then turns around and gives it back. It's Congress that can't shoot straight, and never will when there are votes to be bought.
You're simply crazy.
Nonsense. Do you think WallMart could survive without pleasing its customers? The DMV sure can.
Bullshit. I could care less about the USPS' policies. I want them to make money and stop living off the taxpayer. That can't happen, so I want them to go out of business, like any inefficient business *should*.
Who are the prison's customers? BTW, Kentucky seems to be making money, as does Texas.
...and a few Constitution classes. General civics wouldn't hurt, either.
That is certainly what is happening in the UK. Although the offices being closed do not always make sense - in particular the PO will close the offices which cost it the most money to operate typically those in remote areas. These may actually be busy but expensive to supply & staff.
We also have cherry picking private competition that handles all bulk mail from banks, credit cards and utilities. The result is that the price of general service mail has just increased by 30% this week.
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Surface letter mail is essentially doomed it has been in decline ever since the invention of the fax for business and now with most people on broadband internet email, skype and txting have replaced letter writing.
I bought about two years supply of stamps when the change was announced (ordinary UK stamps don't have a purchase price face value displayed but a 1st or 2nd logo and sort phosphors to match). Most post offices had completely sold out of them well before the end of last month.
That is interesting. In the UK you *can* opt out of junk mail and some postal delivery workers have been disciplined by management for explaining to home customers how to do it (opt out of junk mailings).
I expect it is the same as in the UK that the PO gets paid by the bulk junk mail spammers for delivering each piece. I don't opt out because I have a wood burning stove and the waste paper is OK as kindling.
Actually the practitioners that work on the UK Treasury model are quite impressive numerical analysts. I happen to have met them once and even had a play with the model. It is very hard to do anything because of the lag between tweaking parameter(s) and seeing an effect in the simulation. Very easy to overshoot - and the real economy is even harder since the latest measurements themselves are typically uncertain!
One of them team was responsible for designing the UK's 3G bandwidth lottery which nearly bankrupted the entire mobile phone industry due to their irrational exhuberance in the resulting bidding war.
It isn't called the dismal science for nothing. Look at the various ill founded assumptions that go into the Black-Scholes equation and weep!
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And they got the Nobel Prize for this market destabilising rot.
Depends how much feedback and how much imaginary component there is - Mandelbrot fractal is related to it. For a single input output linear system the Routh stability criterion is definitive:
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The thing that usually kills financial market models is typically some kind of unexpected sharp devaluation of assets - in effect a step change. The models all tend to assume nice Brownian motion properties of random variables and make inadequate allowance for herd instinct.
Which market? Commodities markets ( like the Chicago Board of Trade ) used it for decades with no bad things happening. According to "The Big Short", Micheal Burry was able to detect that shorting the CDO/CDS markets was the right approach, so Black-Scholes is not sufficient to explain all of it.
The time scales for those things are radically different from the time scales of ... say, pork bellies. I have to wonder if that's not the main thing about this....
Sound like more "the map is not the territory."
Hubris is hubris. All the fancy tools are like four wheel drive - they just let you get stuck deeper in the mud.
Without it, the 1.6% per quarter decline in the US GDP that set in immediately after the sub-prime mortgage crisis would presumably have persisted (as it did from 1929 to 1933) and you'd have had a re-run of the Great Depression. Your business would probably have gone belly-up.
You shouldn't believe everything that James Arthur tells you. He's the economic equivalent of a flat-earther.
Accumulating a budget deficit is less damaging that having sound businesses going bust.
The sub-prime mortgage crisis was huge, and took a great deal of money out of the economy. It's taking a while to patch the damage that was done to bank balance sheets and the like. Stimulus spending is going on for longer than anybody likes, but prematurely deciding that it has been going on for too long has put an number of national economies back into recession - the UK and the Netherlands come to mind. You won't want to learn from other countries' experiences, but you might think about the 1937 recession in the US..
How much interest do you think that the PIIGs are paying a the moment? Whenever one of them has to pay more than 6% I see headlines on the financial pages of the Dutch newspapers, followed - a few days later - by a report on some EU initiative that has doused that particular fire.
Near-zero interest rates persisted for more than a decade in Japan.
That won't help your massive balance of payments deficit on international trade. If you can export enough liquified petroleum gas, you may be able to reduce your deficit - for a while - but fracking seems to work almost everywhere, so you probably won't have that market to yourselves for all that long.
Wrong, as usual. We timed the real estate market almost perfectly, so that bust didn't affect us. We have customers all over the world and the crash didn't affect us at all; in fact our revenues have increased.
Booms and busts come and go, and oscillate around a trend line dominated by long-term forces. You, like most politicians and economists, think short-term. I think long-term, which is why we are both older guys, but I have secure lifetime employment and you don't.
To paraphrase... economist, employ thyself!
Sound businesses are exporting jobs, because tax policy makes that a rational thing to do. I hope we never get to Spain's 25% unemployment, never have their lost generation.
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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
In 2009 when the crisis hit, Greece was spending 50% of GDP on government -- dead in the middle of Euro-zone governments -- while collecting only 39% of GDP in taxes.
Pardon me if I don't have time to correct all your mistakes--there are too many.
I never said tax collection is robbery--redistribution (usually) is.
E.g., President Zero stole GM from the bondholders and gave it to the unions, with bailouts of their pension and benefit funds funds at taxpayer expense.
That's theft.
Deficits to pay constituents today steals from children not yet even born. That's theft too.
Wrong!! The Post Office has a federally guaranteed monopoly. They're the only ones allowed in their market. (Have you ever gotten junk mail delivered by someone else?)
Yikes!! We never made any such decision! And it's not inexpensive if it's subsidized!
That's why public transportation is typically economically and environmentally nuts.
Wait--why does FedEx have that flexibility, and the Post Office not? Why on earth wouldn't the Post Office have gone after that lucrative sector invented by FedEx, or copied FedEx once FedEx invented it? It's because the Post Office is INCAPABLE. It's politically run.
Ah, thank you. Requiring things increases price. Requiring the Army to have a base they don't need in a given congressman's state increase price. But, that's how political decisions are made. Inefficiently.
It's inherent. It's unavoidable. Government is necessary, but anti- innovation, and horribly inefficient. And their incentive is to increase price, e.g., the Post Office union's recent successful bid for yet another huge taxpayer bailout, and relief from the need (or ability) to adapt and economize.
Possibly, but why aggregate people based on their employer to distribute risk? Auto insurers distribute risk, but we don't tie auto insurance to employment.
If you got your own policy when young and healthy, then carried it with you, that fixes a bunch of today's problems.
But, most of those problems are grossly exaggerated by the statists these days, to justify their making it all "free."
You can join groups to insure cars, you can't with health insurance, except when the group is an employer. Just level the playing field, not the economy.
...and causes just as many.
Of course but their only selling point is fear. That requires exaggeration.
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