Let us note that part of the reason for this thread getting to where it is now was some whiny snippet about why Karmashock never reads AC posts by someone who couldn't be bothered to check if they were replying to Karmashock and assumed I was Karmashock. Now, we see the number one problem with posting AC, no one can tell AC apart. An AC wrote that quote and an AC is verbally abusing me now. If you really were different from the previous AC, then you should have said something.

You mean the weasel phrase "there are very very few places in the US that are 'proper' urban settings." that preceded the universal statement? I sure hope people notice, now that you've brought attention to it. Aside from the very very few cases where I fail hard, I always win these sorts of arguments. Heh.

Again, universal statements are disproved by counterexamples. And concerning someone's, possibly your, weaseling, these "very very few large cities" though few in number are naturally enormous counterexamples. We are speaking of a lot of people in these urban centers. It is dishonest to say there's only a few ("very very few" seems to indicate something much more scarce than just a few, doesn't it?) while neglecting the size of them.

Murder and filesharing are prosecuted differently, because the law handles them differently.

i stopped reading there

that has nothing to do with the point

the point is the harshness of the punishment fitting the crime or not

if you can't understand the simple point that the punishment massively overreacts to the "crime", you are not worth interacting with

legality is not necessarily morality

they mostly overlap, but where the two have the most problems is disproportionate punishment: massive jailtime for smoking marijuana cigarette or crushing financial ruin for downloading a file for example

it was illegal for a black person to ride in a section reserved for white people. until last week it was illegal for gays to marry. it is illegal to smoke marijuana in most of the usa, but that will change soon too

aaron swartz downloaded files. the pirate bay team shared files

for this they are treated with more severity than actual murders

this is not morality and not a legal status quo that requires your respect nor ensures your compliance

where the punishments are massively more brutal than the crimes, you have a legal area itself which is immoral. for example (i'm not saying they are same, it's an analogy for you to understand the topic) in some places that practice sharia law, you chop off a person's hand for stealing, or stone them to death for adultery. this brutality means the legal status quo in that society is actually more immoral than the crimes they are punishing, and such societies do not actually prevent immoral and illegal acts. in fact, they simply convince citizens to treat each other and the authorities with as much cruelty as the authorities deliver to its citizens. we see areas of the world where brutality is proscirbed by authorities creating societies where violence and brutality reign as normal

again, i'm not saying that file downloading is exactly like daesh, i am trying to make you understand how brutal punishments are not respectable and in fact result in worse social conditions

in the same way, there is no respect due to the punishments that western countries like the usa proscribe for file sharing on the internet

the proper response to the legal status quo is to defy and defile the illegitimate and immoral laws wherever and whenever you can, until there is enough of a fire that society demands a rethinking of the laws to be proportional to the actual moral severity of the crimes in question

rather than the agenda of the corporations who have bribed the government to make the punishments so cruel, which is what you are really defending with your words: not morality, but corruption

Big whoop, I sit on my 30-foot sailboat in Barrington Harbor. I am no where near what one would call well off. Having a boat does not mean you are rich.

I didn't say anything about "rich". I just said that if you have a job that allows you to be on your own boat at 10am on a Wednesday morning, it's probably not a "shitty job".

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com...

Best economics group blog on the Internet. Led by Yves Smith, who's writing about the 2008 banking crisis was absolutely brilliant and spot-on. Also Philip Pilkington, who's blog "Fixing the Economists" is essential reading. Non-ideological (unless you disagree with them, in which case you will claim - falsely - that they're ideological). Their economics expertise is unquestioned.

I read their blog every day and every time I find myself disagreeing with something they've written, I learn that I was wrong.

No money was lost, no value was lost

CARTOON: Man wearing a barrel running up to shack. Thin woman feeding scrawny baby from a can. CAPTION: Honey, great news! A guy on the Internet told me no value was lost!

PBS had a doc on the coffee thing, and it turns out it isn't companies like Starbucks, Keurig, etc that are the issue with the pricing - it's the source markets. Coffee is harvested and sold to what amounts to an auction house for a single product, then the speculators, etc bid up or bid down the price of the batches based on amount and quality, and then the winners resell on to the "open" market, where the coffee companies purchase from.

So you have middle-men all taking their cut, and of course the farmers themselves get a "take it or leave it" amount from the auction houses. Those auction houses are about omnipresent anywhere coffee is grown and are mandated by trade (and sometimes national) law.

Growers in South America are starting to bypass this nonsense entirely by growing, harvesting, roasting (basically the entire coffee production process) and then selling directly to companies, since there are no regulations requiring processed coffee to be sold at one of those auctions, only the raw beans.

That's an historic claim, and one that keeps the people happy (they want to believe their country is the strongest in the world, or at least in the region), but it's one they need to let go of because it's based on China's power from centuries ago, and it could lose an actual naval war if all of the other countries with claims to the area fought against it, even if the US didn't get involved. The problem is that they can't figure out how to do that and save face with the people. The government fears the people far more than it lets on largely because a country with 1.3 billion people and only 3 million soldiers (including reserves), it's in a precarious position, even if all of the millions of national and local police could be pulled in.

They are a very long way from their roots. Deng Xiaoping threw off the last of Maoism, and since Deng's death, the country has only expanded its capitalist tendencies. They don't have the unquestioned authority that they once did. One of the major reasons for the highly public corruption purge (and probably private power consolidation) is the perception among the people that the entire government is corrupt all the way through. Public protests, once almost unthinkable in China, grew to be so common and vocal that the government decided to let them happen on occasion, as long as they are somewhat limited in time and size and don't call for government overthrow. That provides a vent--at least for now--for public anger, but it may not last.

China's past economic moves of shuffling people from the fields into the cities to boost the economy by providing cheap labor can only happen once or twice more because so many are in the cities now. It's an effective move in the medium-term, but Beijing wants to keep it as a last resort because it knows it's limited in how many more times it can happen. I think a lot of companies were relying on that to continue, and that's a big part of the construction drive. Few hedged their bets, and now entire residential blocks and apartment buildings sit empty, their owners unable to pay their mortgages, and their banks unable to collect and so unable to issue new loans. A similar effect happened to Japan in 1991 when the commercial real estate market crashed, taking the rest of the country with it. They're still trying to get out of that morass 20+ years later, barely keeping an average GDP growth rate above zero even before 2008.

So many people have been claiming that China is eating us alive because they focused only on Treasury bond purchases and see China's economy as this monolithic block when the situation there is very complex. China would not have bought those bonds if it didn't think they would pay back. They may end up being part of what cushions China as that $1.2 trillion returns over time, but I think the next few years are going to be at best very shaky, and at worst could see China plunge into recession or even depression. That will not bode well for the rest of Asia, and if the EU doesn't improve soon, could see the world economy dragged down again.

I suppose there are a few 5 pound laptops out there for power users that still use the 2.5" form factor, but they're disappearing rapidly. Things are moving fast in the SSD storage area and many are moving to the M.2 format. Though I suppose any increase in density is good as it means higher cap small format drives and cheaper options*.

*so that Microsoft and Apple can increase their profit margins on storage. The great thing about impossible to open PCs is that they can charge whatever the fuck they want for storage no matter how cheap it gets.

Actually, they're not. The ads which were shown were for executive coaching services, not actual job advertisements. Other examples, which were not noted explicitly in the article, were identified as "not statistically significant."

It seems insidious when Google is appearing to favor men over women for high priced jobs, so lets look at a different advertiser - Me.

A few years ago I was the music director for an all male chorus in a neighboring town. Every year we have a "guest night" where we invite people to come and join us, sing a couple a songs, and hope to get new men to audition and join our group. Advertising dollars are tight, so rather than ask Facebook to show our ad to everyone within 25 miles of our rehearsal spot, we asked just for men. Pretty simple, really.

Quantitative easing didn't work the same way that literally printing money does, something that many who don't have a solid grasp of economics don't understand. QE has kept the money circulating within a very limited span, and was used in part to purchase weak loan assets from banks. While those banks held them, they created significant risk and could impact the minimum holdings required by law. The Fed doesn't have the same kind of problem, and by purchasing the assets (which, collectively, are profitable) it could strengthen the banks and increase its own profit levels. Those profits are then largely sent to the federal government.

QE was also used to purchase a lot of Treasury bonds, but that's much more an accounting maneuver. When the Fed purchases the bonds from the Treasury, it holds them until maturity. When they mature, they're cashed in and the Treasury pays out to the Fed, which becomes part of the Fed's profits, the lion's share of which are turned over to the federal government. However, that part is closer to printing money because it increases the amount of money available to the federal government to spend in the more general economy.

This has turned into an important revenue stream for the federal government. In 2014, the Fed sent $97 billion of its $101 billion in profits to the Treasury. That number may continue to climb for a couple of years, but will decline over time as assets draw down; of the $4.5 trillion in assets held by the Fed, some $800 billion of that is in Treasury bonds that mature by the end of 2016. Other bonds will continue to mature, and loans will be paid off. The money created by the Fed will enter circulation eventually, but it will do so over time, and not in the same way as literally printing the money would have.

You said a mouthful there. Now and then, I am impressed with someone's point of view. I return to their site a few times. Sometimes more than a few. So VERY many of them end up stuffing their foot in their mouths. And, of course, there are some who apparently keep their heads up their asses, and I just happened to catch them on a day they pulled their heads out to breathe.

People worth listening to don't waste a lot of time blathering. They are to busy DOING SOMETHING!