http://www.theonion.com/content/news/u_s_holds_going_out_of_business

It's not so much that the good, competent people aren't usually willing to improve things, as if they need some catalyst. It's that, most of the time, the (for lack of a better word) shitty people will fight the good, competent people tooth and nail until the situation is so obviously bad that it can't be denied and can't be sustained. And the shitty people vastly outnumber the good, competent people.

Anything else would be a premature admission of guilt on the part of the shitty people. They won't admit guilt until they're backed into a corner.

Anyway, this is what usually happens, there are exceptions of course.

I'd like to know exactly which central banks we're doing those swaps with, so I emailed his office and asked them to give me a link to the report they're citing in the video. If they give me a link I'll post it.

As far as currency swaps, they essentially amount to arbitrage on the part of whichever central bank is inflating their money supply the fastest. AFAICT, it should be legislators in other countries jumping their central banks for doing currency swaps with us. We seem to be getting the better deal here.

Found this about currency swaps, take it FWIW:
http://www.marketskeptics.com/2009/04/fed-using-currency-swaps-to-boost.html

If you're not familiar with the process of binary diff (I wasn't) there's a paper linked from the article that explains some about bsdiff:

http://www.daemonology.net/papers/bsdiff.pdf

Wayback from 2007/07/09:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070709234208/http://www.daemonology.net/papers/bsdiff.pdf

The one thing that has been correlated to curbing population growth to replacement levels, education, is denied to the third world. The Anglo-American axis has had policies for decades that deny educational, economic, and technological growth to the third world.

And this hits the point, it's all lies:

Tighter control of the internet:
Stated reasons - kiddie pr0n, terrorism, "cyber-bullying"
Real reasons - control of the means of communication

Gun control:
Stated reasons - reduce crime
Real reasons - disarmament of potential resistance

No fly list:
Stated reasons - terrorism
Real reasons - removal of presumption of innocence and right to a trial by jury, control of the means of transportation, expanding the list in the future (they're trying to expand it to gun control right now)

Drug war:
Stated reasons - protect the women and children
Real reasons - PROFIT!!ONEONE, removal of presumption of innocence, control over populace (Rand style "everything's a crime") through selective enforcement, excuse to build a police state

Invasion of Afghanistan:
Stated reasons - Bin Laden, Taliban
Real reasons - Unocal pipeline, encirclement of Russia and China

Invasion of Iraq:
Stated reasons - 911, wmd
Real reasons - send a message to oil exporters thinking about trading in non-USD currencies

The overpopulation, global-cooling-climate-warming-change (the wing dedicated to carbon taxes, not the people who genuinely care about environmental damage, and want to see real solutions) is no different. Ask yourself, why are we even debating carbon credits when the following three things have not happened in America:

1) Nuclear power plants have sprung up like wildfire, run by national/state governments for the benefit of the people, like water service in many cities
2) Trillions of have dollars have been spent researching batteries for cars, solar cells, better software and net infrastructure for telecommuting, rather than given to the financial establishment
3) America finally gets a real high speed rail network, like every other grown up country in the world

The reason that we're going to have carbon taxes, yet we have not done these things (1 and 3 we have the tech for already) is because, shock, they don't care about the environment or overpopulation!

Here are some suggestions:

We could build nuke plants.
Nuclear is icky. NIMBY.
But what if we put it in the woods and cordoned off a 10 mil--
No, ICKY. Next.

We could build high speed rail to move freight more efficiently and take huge rigs off the Insterstate highways. We could have high speed rail ports in LA, and bring in our crap from China through there rather than trucking it in from Mexico.
La la la, I can't hear you!

We could stop funding the IMF, which has a history of crushing development in the third world. This would allow them to get educated and start doing things more efficiently. It would also curb population growth in a completely humane and voluntary way.
The IMF is a cornerstone of the international finance system!

We could abolish patents, or at least stop trying to enforce them on the third world through the WTO. They obviously can't pay anyway, but giving them free reign over technology could really speed up their development.
Intellectual property is the new backbone of the American economy. It's what allows us to synergize our enervations in dynamic environments! And pretty soon (any day now), we're going to have magical replicators, raw materials will all be commodities, and IP will be the only meaningful property.

Magical replicators?
LA LA LA!

We could plan our cities and towns much better to leave more room for bikers and walkers. Of course, to do this, we would have to stop the oil-for-USD system. Otherwise Americans wouldn't have any economic incentive to do it.
But that would crash the entire economy! *

We could fund public domain open source software to make telecommuting much easier. We could nullify the patents on h264.
You want to give the people a Just Works open source OS? But how will we control that OS vicariously through the company that makes it? And you want to give the plebs even more encryption? What are you hiding on your hard drive, citizen?



This whole overpopulation/carbon tax agenda, and in general, the agenda across much of the world right now, is nothing but neofeudalism: control of the means of production, transportation, and communication.

The domination of all things economic, intellectual, and military by, surprise, surprise, a tiny elite.

* This one is actually true.

This capability is especially convenient for managing network overload due to P2P traffic. Conventionally, P2P is filtered out using a technique called deep packet inspection, or DPI, which looks at the data portion of all packets. With flow management, you can detect P2P because it relies on many long-duration flows per user. Then, without peeking into the packets' data, you can limit their transmission to rates you deem fair.

If routers started doing this, wouldn't torrent clients just start randomizing their port numbers? According to him, different port numbers will get counted as a different "flow". I'd think, if they wanted to do this, they'd at least have to look at IPs, port numbers are easy to change.

I agree that we should have a publicly run bank, although I don't know about eliminating private banks. What all are you counting in that, even investment banks? Here's what I'd like to see:

Abolish the fed, and reconstitute the Treasury under a new Bank of the United States, this will NOT be a central bank. It would be a publicly run depository institution, with full reserves, cooperative with atm companies, and little branches all over the country, everywhere there's a post office. This will offer general depository services to individuals and businesses, and of course, it would handle all government accounts by law. So basically, kill the free checking industry where private banks currently do everything. The bank would be financed through annual account fees and maybe transaction fees for users that are having a lot of transactions, and costing the system more.

But it pays no interest, of course. No savings, no money markets, nothing like that. It is a publicly run service that lets you deposit and withdraw cash, money orders, cashiers checks, and transactions with a standard magstripe card. The head of the bank is elected, say 3 year terms or something.

Now if you want interest, or any kind of investment at all, you go to the private banks (or DIY, a broker, a credit union, whatever). They can offer whatever services they feel like, as long as they stay within the law, which will be reduced a lot, and they honor their contracts. No reserve requirements, that's what the public bank's for. No mandated interbank lending rate, they're big boys, and they WILL be allowed to fail spectacularly. No usury laws, we don't need a nanny state.

And now, the money supply. This is where I'm on the fence. The money supply would be controlled by the new Bank of the US, through the direction of congress. I'm inclined to say that the money supply should be constant, and we should have a Constitutional amendment saying as much, but I haven't thought this through enough. Another way is to index the money supply to current population. But I do believe it should have an objective metric on it, not just, "BLS has shown solid economic growth the past 3 quarters, particularly in the imaginary property and hamburger manufacturing sectors, so we're going to inject a bazillion gajillion dollars into the economy to represent the added wealth in our glorious synergistic society."

But the difference between restricting money supply absolutely and restricting it severely is insignificant compared to what we're doing now, which is like pumping cholesterol intravenously to the world's fattest man. Even a gold/silver standard, which I don't support, would still be lightyears better than what we do today.

You may be thinking that what I wrote above would crash the economy. Probably, but it's gotta happen sooner or later. If any big change happens, the house of cards that we have now is sure to collapse. We may as well use the opportunity to get on some sound footing, while we don't have anything else to lose. Instead, when our economy eventually collapses, we'll probably deal with it by sending our military around the world "liberating" natural resources.

As far as laws for holding stock, I agree that they should be held long term, but I'm hesitant to want that made law. Doesn't seem any more right to me than outlawing gambling.

The saddest part of this whole mess, all these state and local governments based their budgets on INSANE real estate bubbleeconomics.

And a lot of them divested their public pensions of anything resembling a store of wealth, and put it into the wall street casino. So I guess when those people retire, I'll be footing the bill for that too.

I thought this Wilson quote was interesting.

[Government] is not a machine; but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living things can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live. On the contrary, its life is dependent upon their quick co-operation, their ready response to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of purpose. . . . There can be no successful government without the intimate, instinctive co-ordination of the organs of life and action. . . . Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. All that progressives ask or desire is permission--in an era when "development," "evolution," is the scientific word--to interpret the Constitution according to Darwinian principle.

It assumes that the goal is successful government, not individual freedom. To be fair though, the Constitution, even as it was originally written, still gave us more than enough rope to hang ourselves, which it shouldn't have. People taking advantage of that throughout our history are only part of the problem.