Exactly, also there was this one, from April 11. /. is in love with flies, maybe /. has flies for editors, that would explain the attention span...

I'll see your story and raise you mine. I bought a video card on eBay back in December, paid 1200 for it and waited for it to arrive to a pick up centre, but the seller used a wrong name on the package and so the package was returned. From POV of eBay the shipping was 'completed' because the tracking number was there, showing 'delivered', but the address of the delivery was back in New York, not my destination address. Then the 'seller' supposedly sent the package to me the second time, but this time wouldn't provide the tracking number, and the package never arrived. Talking to eBay appeared to be fruitless (as a side note, the 'seller' put the same item back for sale, and since she doesn't normally sell computer parts, I assume it was the same video card that was put for sale once again). I contacted eBay and PayPal, nothing. Eventually I worked it out through my credit card, they pressed on PayPal I guess, I got the money back but not thanks to eBay or PayPal. AFAIC (and I told them that) they continued working with somebody selling stolen property, but it didn't matter to them.

Actually I would say it is time to move more work into other countries.

No, you are not adults, you are a bunch of propaganda filled wimps, who will echo the nonsense thrown at you from the earliest age, telling you that your government knows what is best for you and that you should rely on it for everything rather than on yourself, that you should allow it to steal property, to murder, because you think your idea of 'society' so much more important than individual humans.

AFAIC you are embarrassing yourself with your pro-government brainwashed stance. A car manufacturer built the factory to manufacture cars not tanks. It is his property and obviously he will not profit from a war (unlike politicians) because during war people's resources are rationed, the economy switches to war economy, there isn't a way to sell as many cars as during non-war times, so instead of losing a business to war economy a car manufacturer would produce your tanks. Your problem is of-course that you want theft, that you believe government theft of private property is justified and I am here to tell you that there are no circumstances where it is so. Even if a gigantic meteor is coming towards the planet, no government should be able to steal private property to convert it into anti-meteor production. It is in the best interest of individual humans to do so under those conditions, and the society then must choose to pay or not to pay for this switch, and society means actions of all individuals in it, not of a centralised government of any kind. Your thinking is too primitive to seriously take into account.

As to being 'compensated' for this theft (so called 'nationalisation'), that's irrelevant. No individual human should be compelled to do what he is unwilling to do under normal free market conditions. Our individual freedoms are more important than your ideology of government control even during difficult times. Nationalisation under all circumstances is theft, otherwise it wouldn't be required, because otherwise market forces would be allowed to work and individual choices would dictate the direction, not some politicians.

Yes, but then there are the data brokers who put that all together for their customers. Selling and exchanging data is a big business. A company can buy the raw data in some cases or share their data where it goes into a pool and the broker provides (sells) you details about customers, prospects, leads, partners, etc.

/. must be full of welfare recepients with mod points, there is no other reason to mod the parent comment 'troll' unless your lifestyle depends on a large government stealing on your behalf.

By the way, theft by government for war is also just theft and there is nothing "in public interest" about it. If the public is so interested in using a factory to produce tanks rather than automobiles, the public then shouldn't use mafia tactics to steal the factory and call it 'nationalization', but it should make it worthwhile for the factory owner to produce tanks rather than cars. Everything else is theft. You want your war and your tanks? You didn't build that factory to take it, but you may provide the owner of the factory with a contract big enough to have him build your tanks, but then you actually have to pay for war, rather than steal for it from the market. Maybe people would be less inclined to start wars if they actually had to pay for them.

It is called theft, it is a very simple concept really. When property is taken away by force of government it is even worse than if a small time crook does it, the justifications are plenty, the law was broken, the morality pushed into dirt and stepped all over, war or no war, irrelevant. It is theft, nothing else.

I like the "to take control" euphemism for steal.

Putin is stealing private property, that's the actual headline here. There can be no real economic development if private property rights are not protected, specifically not protected from government theft. This wouldn't be the first time Putin stole something, by the way, even before Crimea I mean. Of-course he basically stole democratic elections in Russia, I guess nothing can beat that.

Sure, ppl are confused at 20 because they haven't tried anything yet, they already have all that school debt by 20 and no idea what to do. Starting with some job at 14 would give people direction and would provide them with valuable experience.

Weimar Republic destroyed its currency via money printing, deflation should have been allowed to work its course, it wasn't.

USSR was printing trillions every year and had no production at all to justify any of that printing. It collapsed once it pretty much ran out of gold to buy food.

100 years of currency destruction in USA got you from a well working private rail road system, largest in the world at the time, to a bunch of unsustainable government subsidised roads, that cause massive pollution by burning all that oil that gets the Americans from their unsustainable suburbs to where they actually need to be - near some jobs that are still there and back. However the actual productivity is destroyed, instead of being world's largest creditor nation, as USA became over the 19th century, it is now largest debtor in history of the world, probably largest debtor in our Galaxy, running 500Billion USD/year trade deficits.

By the way cars and airplanes in USA were a product of the previous economy, the productive economy. Modern economy in USA would not have produced any of that, modern economy in USA has failing airlines and failing car companies all in need of being shut down and restructured, but instead being bailed out time and again.

Enjoy your 'win', I think it will not last for too long.

Prices are rising.

Prices would be rising much faster of-course if the foreigners weren't absorbing the inflation (taking US dollars in exchange for their production). What do you think 20 years of 500 Billion USD / year trade deficit means? It means that the money that is printed in the USA is transferred to companies that provide the USA with the products it consumes. The foreigners then take the US dollars to the foreign banks, the foreign banks buy the US dollars (exchange to the local currencies). The foreign central banks are just as responsible in this case, they also print money in response to the USA printing, so they take in the US dollars and either hold those dollars or buy US bonds with them.

Not only the USA was and still is benefiting from foreign productivity with all this money printing, it is also benefiting from foreigners buying up its debt, financing USA government spending.

In the short run (and I am talking about a few decades this has been happening) this gave Americans a boosted standard of living they couldn't pay for (they weren't producing themselves).

In the long run this destroyed productivity in the USA, because with all this debt financed consumption and growing government the only economy that USA is left with is taxes. USA lives off of other people's productivity and it's economy is tax and borrow and spend type of economy and this economy produced enough government, enough regulations, enough costs that manufacturing sector left the country.

So in the long term, what this created is a situation where Americans have no productive capacity of their own, the population is no longer able to produce, there are almost no factories, there are almost no skilled workers, able to work in factories, there is no real capital, only printed money, thus the real interest rates are sky high, which is why there is now more business destruction (starting in 2014) than new business creation in the States. More businesses shut down and/or left the country than were started in 2014.

That's the long term damage of inflation, that and also of-course all of the pensioners, who have to come out of their retirement, because they can no longer have any return on their life savings, there is no return on the money that is saved, the savers in USA are destroyed, the debtors are favoured. This policy is the government policy, the policy of the biggest debtor - the government.

The government will pretend that inflation doesn't exist because the wages aren't going up, well, the labour costs are going up, the wages are not, that's not a paradox, that's stagflation and depression, that's expected unlike the Keynesians believe it to be an impossibility.

The reality is that USA has no productivity gains, very few people in USA are more productive than before, the share buy back programs the socialists in the media and government are touting as an example of greedy corporations, hiding their money is another example of this problem, since vast majority of that cash that is on hold by companies is borrowed. The money is borrowed, the large companies that actually have large assets and thus can get the loans (based on newly created fiat) from the banks (unlike new businesses), believe that the future value of money is lower than relative value of their shares, so they borrow money at these artificial rates and use it to buy back their stock, thus also artificially boosting the stock prices. But hey, I would do that too if I could get my hands on cheap money from government, why not? That seems to be a much simpler way to 'boost earnings' in USA now than actually growing sales, which is impossible at this point, consumers are out of money, out of credit, the new housing bubble that the Fed was inflating is bursting already, so the 'wealth effect' will work in reverse now.

In any case, I am sure you will be just fine, so don't worry about it. What do you care what I think?

Agreed, there is no need to push for any particular subject beyond ability to read, write and do basic arithmetic. Once those are covered, the kids should no longer be required to be in school. Should be able to go into trades (probably for most), trade schools, should let those, who are truly interested to continue education by removing huge artificial demand created with all the government subsidised debt (student loans) and should get rid of the minimum wage laws and laws that prevent 15 year olds from being hired.

In Germany there is a separation into different type of schooling, where most kids end up in Hauptschule and may actually start working from around age 15 (vocational training, training at work).

The next level of schooling is called Realschule, this one allows you to move to the next level if you can (Gymnasium) or to do vocational training. Gymnasium is your preparation for further education in a university.

What would make much more sense in USA would be to get rid of minimum wage laws, allow people to work for small compensation and train at work. If my company was based in USA I would hire 15 year olds in a heartbeat. I would train them for a couple of months if I wasn't forced to pay anybody anything more than they are worth if there were no laws that would make this arrangement prohibitively expensive. A 15 year old, who is interested in learning a profession and is willing to be an apprentice is not in any way worse than a 21 year old, who finished university with a worthless degree in women studies and is now unemployable, because the debt prevents him or her from taking a low paying job, while at the same time they have 0 skills (no more than a 15 year old without such 'education' would).

Of-course USA job numbers came out for July 2014

25-54 year olds lost net 142,000 jobs.

16-19 year olds gained 44,000 jobs.
20-24 year olds gained 43,000 jobs.
55-69 year olds gained159,000 jobs.

So teenagers are finding part time jobs in the economy (summer), the so called 'retired' are coming out of retirement, because they can't afford to be retired in this economy anymore and the people in the main working age bracket have fewer permanent jobs and out of the 205,000 jobs created, that's just the delta, it doesn't show how many good, well paying permanent jobs were actually lost and how many part time jobs were created.

While the net jobs created are 205,000, most of the jobs created are part time, lower paying jobs, while jobs that are lost are full time, better paying jobs.

So what is going on with the job market exactly? Well, the same thing that is going on with the economy. The numbers can be demonstrated to be 'good' if you do not pay attention to the details. The reality is the opposite, the numbers are not good.

I would say that the USA economy needs fewer people in the universities and more people in trade, more people picking up skills as apprentices, skills that would make them employable without getting into gigantic debt with all the student loans.

It is expensive to hire people in USA, while the wages are not very high, the actual labour cost to the employees is high due to various laws, regulations, taxes, litigation costs, insurance, etc, so this is a bad scenario, where people cost too much to their employees, get too little into their hands and apparently produce very little output, since the USA trade deficit keeps rising (500 Billion USD/year for years and going up).

The gold dollar was about to put a check on Lyndon Johnson's 'Great Society' crapola, but Nixon defaulted on the gold dollar, crossed the words 'I owe you' from 'I owe you X dollars' from the bank notes and called the little paper previously known as the 'Federal reserve note' into 'dollars'. This is what allowed the government to perpetuate its growth to the gargantuan size it is today and it is what killed USA economy reversing the economic growth in USA and eventually wiping out the economy completely.

As to statistics, some people compile this data, of-course unemployment rate shows some of this but the details of unemployment are much more important than the compiled averages, the poorer segment of society, the black Americans have suffered higher unemployment rate since the programs against poverty started, than ever before. Actually before the minimum wage was introduced in the 1938, unemployment among blacks youth (16-25, formative work years) was lower than among whites by 15%. Actually each 10% increase in minimum wage mandate had a disproportionate decrease in employment upon the minorities, which is counterproductive if the goal is to decrease poverty, of-course it was not, the goal was to turn people into dependants, voting for bigger and bigger government, while growing the said government.

The gold dollar was not allowing the government to carry with that goal and Nixon chose to default on the actual dollar than to abandon big government ideology.

Agreed. Without geany there, this comparison is not very useful. Whenever I was using Linux, I missed notepad++, until I found out about geany.