Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:sure, works for France (Score 1) 296

Ha ha, as I said, once you redefine the words you can claim all sorts of nonsense.

1927, New Century Dictionary
Inflation: "The act of inflating, or the state of being inflated, specifically expansion or increase of the currency of a country by the issuing of paper money especially paper money not redeemable in specie or that is insufficiently secured by precious metal."

Not even a mention of prices.

Deflation is defined as the opposite of inflation.

Of-course the earlier in the dictionary world you go the more correct the definition, and the closer to the present, the more propaganda and nonsense is added to the definition, inserting the level of prices into definition of expansion and contraction of money supply. Prices do not inflate or deflate of-course, only total supply of money inflates and deflates. Inflation and deflation are changes in the measurement units, not changes in the economic output. Once you redefine the meanings of the words you lose all meaning altogether.

Once you ask the wrong question it doesn't matter what the answer is.

Comment Re:sure, works for France (Score 1) 296

Of-course I completely forgot to mention all of the service prices that are rising, from accounting, to lawyers, to court fees, to mailing, to education, to car repair, etc.

Did I forget to mention coffee and coffee shops?

Obviously water

They will talk about drought and bandits and weather and climate and every single excuse under the Sun except for the actual real cause of this nonsense: inflation.

Comment Re:sure, works for France (Score 1) 296

You are not buying stuff at the same price as 6 years ago, maybe you should actually pay attention to the receipts.

beef, pork, avocado, fruits, veggies, almonds, pinenuts, walnuts, mozarella, cheddar, other cheeses, seafood, grains, soy, soy, palm oil, milk, gasoline, beer and more beer, limes, canadian bacon, barley, restaurants, restaurants, restaurants,electrical energy, car rentals, hotel rooms, cab fairs,

air travel and air travel gets more expensive in many other ways, various extra fees, less room, more seats on planes

aluminium, nickel, zinc, steel, natural gas

I can do this all day, I just don't want to waste that much time on you.

See, maybe you are not doing your own shopping, that's possible, if you can afford a butler then maybe you don't need to worry about prices and you never notice what others do. In the real world the prices are going up.

It is not only local USA prices that are going up of-course, globally prices are going up, assets and goods being bid up by ever increasing money supply, which the globe prints in response to the printed US dollar.

I wonder what it's like to live in such a thick bubble.

Comment Re:Appropriate punishment (Score 0) 250

"Read my lips: no new taxes."
"Iraq has WMDs."
"If you like your plan, you can keep it."

that came to my head in just 1 millisecond. You can find millions more just like those ones. I mean I do not have a problem fining all those involved into those lies enough to rebuild the economies and societies, I would also jail them all, but the world doesn't really work like that. I suggest starting by educating yourself and buying into propaganda, whatever it may be.

Comment Re:sure, works for France (Score 1) 296

Inflation is here, inflation is real, you have your eyes and ears closed in wilful ignorance of facts. The prices are rising, and while at first the money printing was mostly pushing asset prices, for the last few years actually consumer prices have been going up quite a bit faster (actually more like an order of magnitude faster) than the nonsensical government numbers.

Again, there is only conspiracy of ignorance on your part, obviously you are in fact not paying any attention whatsoever to the gradual changes that government introduces into the calculations of inflation and the GDP. As one tiny example last year the GDP calculations started double counting salaries that people are getting in creative fields, like production of movies, authoring books, creating music and such. These are now not only counted as salaries but also double counted as 'investments'. If a business was doing what government is doing in accounting and finances, the business owners would have been investigated for a massive fraud. Since you are not paying any attention, you are not noticing or pretending not to notice of such gradual changes, that's conspiracy of ignorance.

You are clearly not paying attention to the rising prices in everything, from education to health care and insurance, to energy, to food. You are probably celebrating the rising stock market and housing prices as something 'good', while in reality in a growing economy prices would have been falling due to increases in efficiencies and actual productivity.

As is, productivity is falling, not gaining, there are no increases. You are probably a somewhat rational person in other areas of life (you probably wouldn't stick your finger into fire for example, at least not more than once), however you are absolutely willing to cheer for yet another growing bubble in assets, real estate and bonds that the Fed is inflating even though the negative results of the last bubbles haven't even been fixed and will not be fixed because the fixes are not allowed.

All this money printing inflates larger and larger bubbles, they implode and then instead of allowing the economy to work through all the resource misallocations and incorrect pricing information, the government tries to avoid the pain associated with the recession (which is the actual fix to the problem) by printing and throwing even more money into the system. They can do that for a while, but that is coming to an inevitable end.

When I started talking about the inflation problems (more than 5 years ago, by the way), I already saw inflation, which you simply denied existed because you are participating in this wilful 'conspiracy', conspiracy of ignorance. Inflation was here, the inflating money supply was causing rise in the asset markets, now it is also in the bond market. Now inflation finally worked its way through to the consumer market, you can deny its existence as well, and again, AFAIC this is wilful ignorance. If you turn on any radio show where people call in, if you look at all the news, you would not be able to escape all the stories about people not being able to afford things due to rising prices. There is double digit inflation, no less. 8-10% increases in consumer prices (not in the electronics field, here the efficiencies in the free market are so huge, that they negate large amount of inflation), food, energy, utilities, health care, education, basically the items and services that people cannot go without are going up all the time.

Manufacturers do what they can, but you can only reduce quality and quantity inside a package so much, at some point you have to just increase prices, you can't sell 1 sheet of toilet paper at the price of a roll, you can only make that paper thinner up to a point, at some point you have to raise prices, which is what everybody is observing. While those, who run businesses see it much more clearly (after all, they have to know what they are buying and what they are paying in a more precise way), the general public is also concerned about inflation more than about anything else, people are paying more for less and they know it.

The Fed and government can pretend that there is no inflation and in the same breath they can also state that there are 'good news', prices going up in asset markets, in housing markets, etc. They can downplay energy prices rising, they can pretend that food and energy and other costs are irrelevant and they can pretend that rising consumer prices are good for the economy all they like and it is your prerogative to keep yourself in wilful ignorance, listening and agreeing with these people.

I will not stop talking about inflation, it was a problem 10 years ago and it is a much bigger problem today and while 5 years ago I wasn't certain whether USD will be eventually hyperinflated, at this point I have no doubt that it will. The fact that it takes years for this to happen is not at all surprising.

Cancer doesn't kill person in one day, inflation doesn't destroy economy in one decade, both are long term problems and both lead to destruction. In 2007 people were still jubilant about the housing market even though many predicted the bubble will implode since about 2003. So it took 5 years for that to hit and the predictions in 2003 were just as correct as the predictions in 2007, both were met with derision and wilful ignorance.

Nothing changed, people are not learning from history, they are cheering for more asset bubbles today, being led forward under the flags of the Federal reserve and the 'Treasury'.

Comment Re:sure, works for France (Score 1) 296

Which is why every American takes 6 weeks in the summer.

- this does nothing at all to contradict what I am saying, in fact it supports my position, not yours.

My position is that people need to be able to negotiate their own terms of employment, their own method of payment and most people select cash instead of vacation time in USA, but specifically this is happening because USA workers are very unproductive, because vast majority of them are employed in the service sector and this is a very unproductive sector as a whole, paying very low wages, it requires little training and the competition for these low wage unskilled position is high.

This means that the USA economy is extremely unproductive and most Americans cannot afford to take vacations, they need every dollar they get just to survive.

In this very thread I posted a number of comments explaining my point of view

and there were many 'back and forward' comments as well. The arguments presented against my position are not based on sound understanding of the economy, prices, money, they are mostly based on ideology, but ideology does not create a sound economy.

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Comment Re:sure, works for France (Score 1) 296

Keynesian nonsense. Real demand is not fuelled by fake money. Fake money only steals and misallocates scarce resources. If the Keynesian nonsensical idiotic moronic irrational ignorant ideas were anywhere near the ballpark even, Zimbabwe would have been the most prosperous country in the world and then every other country that ran its currency into hyperinflationary mode.

Inflation is destructive to the economy, not constructive. The most productive era in USA history was during a slightly deflationary period of time, before IRS and Fed existed. You wouldn't know any of it for a very simple reason: you don't know anything about history whatsoever, public "education", you see.

Comment Re:sure, works for France (Score 1) 296

the people that believe that are wrong for many reasons. Freedom being one, actually creating a moral hazard is another, eventual destruction of the economy due to government running things into the ground and then requiring more and more taxes and borrowing is third, inflation caused by printing to satisfy all that excessive spending is fourth, just pushing prices up for no reason by destroying normal competitive forces to set up government sponsored monopolies is fifth and I can go on.

Comment Re:sure, works for France (Score 1) 296

If there is a conspirancy here, it is the conspirancy of stupidity. Every couple of years the government actually posts information about the changes to the inflation calculations and what is counted toward the gdp. If inflation in the 1970s was counted the way it is "counted" today, it would have been negative, yet at the time Nixon imposed price controls to "fight inflation". It was the wrong thing to do, but at least the numbers were not fudged yet. As I said, the measuring stick is changing, yet idiots keep pretending or actually believing that nothing changed. They change definitions and you straight out buy the propaganda. It is actually out in the open, posted for everyone's consumption, but you choose ignorance. See, that is a conspiracy, conspiracg of willful ignorance by denying facts. Now, if you do not actually follow anything, you are not paying attention to the changes in the gdp and inflation accounting, though it is not done in any secrecy whatsoever, then it is a conspiracy of ignorance, but then stop pretending with me here. Use your willful ignorance of the facts, posted, public facts with somebody else, agreed?

There is no productivity increase when you produce nothing that you consume.

Comment Re:sure, works for France (Score 1) 296

Amount of total dollars in existance does nothing to increase total productivity (well, inflation does cause shift of capital and plenty of misallocation, so the more they print the less productive output is created, but that is beside the main point). Number of dollars is like number of units on a clock or a thermometer face. Sure, you can increase the number used to measure something, you can split anything you are measuring into smaller and smaller units. You can even pretend that the smaller units you are measuring something in have not changed because of that change (inflation) but it does not change the item you are measuring.

So printing a ton more of dollars, you are reducing the size of the unit (dollar) that you are measuring in, but what you are measuring did not change because of it. 100 dollars in existance becomes 10000 dollars in existance by printing (or virtual printing). This does not increase the economy, it only increases prices and shifts purchasing power from those who produced and saved to those who got their hands on the newly printed, counterfeit currency. Inflation is theft, redistribution from the productive and frugal to the unproductive and wasteful.

Real money is created by work, real money measures productive output. Fake money eliminates productivity by misalocating scarce resources, by stealing from the productive and subsidising the wasteful and useless.

Comment Re:sure, works for France (Score 1) 296

To work in manufacturing today it still takes experience, workers must be trained. Productivity of workers is growing in countries where businesses are still manufacturing, mining, producing something.

In USA there are very few jobs in manufacturing. Where people are mining in the USA, the people's wages are higher. However in the service sector the productivity gains are achieved by automating and getting rid of employees. The gains go to those, who are actually productive.

Most importantly, what you are looking at when talking about "productivity gains" is government stats on gdp, these underestimate inflation by a large factor. What is growing is not productivity in most cases but nominal prices due to all the money that is pumped into the system by the Fed. Under these conditions the productivity is falling not growing. Productive people produce, unproductive people print, borrow and run trade deficits that cannt be offset even by pickup in oil mining and exports. USA is even importing coal from Russia today instead of mining enough for itself. 90% of seafood are imports. There is no productivity, the government killed it and turned the entire country into dependents. Independance day? What a joke.

Slashdot Top Deals

Is your job running? You'd better go catch it!

Working...