Economies are much bigger than just the government part. And the non-government part tends to be a lot more productive.

The fundamental flaw of Keynesian economics is that it conflates economic activity with economic growth. Just because you have a "stimulus policy" doesn't mean that you have economic growth. Japan showed that after the 1990 recession and the US and Europe are showing it now.

You're a pretentious cunt. The last stages of hypothermia cause people to UNDRESS. Check medical sources and Wikipedia if you want.

What is BS? After all, you do agree that inflation is a limit of deficit spending with a fiat currency.

I used to see this all over the place, where the non-Amazon sellers selling through Amazon's portal would be discounted to where, with shipping, they matched the Prime cost. Hard to find examples today - makes me wonder about price fixing.

For Marketplace items it's still common though - here's an example: http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ... Both hardback and paperback Amazon marketplace sellers are setting prices that, with shipping, more or less match the prime price. I suspect for marketplace items this is just the cheaper ones sell out, and the more expensive don't.

A story worthy of slashdot. Please post more of these (not being sarcastic).

I hope your mind regenerates pretty fast, otherwise that strategy isn't going to work for very long.

You even quoted my post where I complained about the very attitude you show here. I ask again what is the point of blaming a tool for a problem when the problem results from deliberately avoidance of using the tool?

Except that it is not. Buying law is not a regulatory void, but yet another case of too much regulation. In fact, that is a pretty broad symptom common to a lot of over-regulation situations IMHO. A true "regulatory void" would not have the buying of law - it would not be possible.

That only makes sense for an outsider. If the choice is an insider, I'd assume he was driving the reorg from the beginning.

I'm sure it will be called Windows 9 regardless, but yeah if he doesn't get that a phone needs a very different UI than a server, I'm not sure what could keep MS from arcing over into a long decline.

I haven't seen anything innovative on the UI side since Gates left. I'd love to see it again, but I suspect it would take a while to find that sort of talent again, and real managerial talent to keep whoever's currently entrenched out of the way.

I can't believe that Bill gates would lose that job against his will (he might be ready to focus fully on his charity, though). He just has too much stock, too many ties to other long-timers who also control %s, and is just too practiced in Microsoft-specific infighting.

For a large company, if the result of your hiring criteria, company-wide, shows a racial bias, you're asking for the "opportunity" to prove your innocence. At my current large company we're not supposed to put anything in the interview feedback unless it's both on the short list of approved criteria and we can describe specifics from the interview to back it up. Bit of a pain, really.

Small companies are a different world of course, and I've worked at a couple where the racism was pretty blatant (once for and once against my race - wasn't keen to stay at either).

I would blindly bet money that there exists both a LUA to JS and JS to LUA compiler. It's just the kind of world we live in.

I already explained why "business greed" doesn't begin to explain the California electricity crisis. A big thing to remember is that if things had gone as planned, the remaining two private utilities, Consolidated Edison and PH&E would have completed deregulation, customers would have been charged the higher market prices during peak load periods, demand would have dropped as a consequence, and the crisis wouldn't have happened. There would have been no huge opportunity for Enron to exploit.

The California state government prevented that from happening and created a huge mess as a result.

Alternately, California government could have relaxed the rules of the market and allowed the three utilities to buy more power outside of the expensive spot market. That actually happened around mid 2001. But it could have been done in August 2000, for example, when San Diego Gas & Electric had first filed a complaint about the issue.

The crisis is appropriately named because a) it was the electricity market and not the Enron market, and b) because the primary culprit wasn't Enron but the California government which acted in a remarkably harmful way for the better part of a year.

As a more in depth aside, your current examples are really weak.

Texas has a thriving electricity generation market. Of the increased costs claimed by the study your link cites, almost 70% came from "stranded costs" payments which weren't market-based (basically paying electricity utilities for losing their monopoly status). That's almost $7 billion out of an alleged $10 billion in additional costs. More came from the cost of building wind power infrastructure.

This was another non-market cost. Looks to me like we can account for almost all of the higher costs paid by customers in the deregulated market from just these two parts that weren't market related. They were part of the deregulation process, but not actually deregulation itself.

They were correct in that the above issues were contributing factors (they weren't "false" as you falsely claim). There were also the defective nature of the markets which allowed gaming of the market (by Enron and other generators and traders) and a remarkably disingenuous California government which interfered in the deregulation of the markets both by allowing the highly profitable Enron games to continue and by not allowing PG&E and Consolidated Edison to complete their deregulation process.

By all means, let's consider these failures. Do you have one in mind?

And here was one of the free clues.