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.
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.
I suggest starting by educating yourself
and not buying into propaganda, whatever it may be.
I also suggest
"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.
It's true that it is unique. Russians themselves say that St. Petersburg is half russian and half european. But I've also got russian friends I talk to, who are from Moscow, from small villages near the Ural mountains and other places within Russia.
It sounds like you've been won over by the facade of corrupt spending and wealth in touristy areas
You assume I was a tourist. I wasn't.
Russia is a huge country - the biggest on earth, in fact - and of course there are large differences between the various areas. I was in St. Petersburg as I said. It's probably one of the richer areas.
People don't love Putin because he's improved the country, they love him because like all dictators he's a master of propaganda and populism, or did you think all those photoshoots and the massive military parades each year and the nationalist rhetoric over Crimea were all just for his own personal scrapbook?
Russians don't care as much as we do. They separate private and business life a lot more strongly, from what I gather. Of course there's a lot of propaganda involved as well.
But you totally ignored that main argument I made. That no matter what you see Russia as today, compared to the very recent past it has improved dramatically, and those improvements started with Putin taking office. Whether its true or not, a lot of people see a connection.
You see, the scenario you outline isn't all that different from what happened at the beginning of the 20th century.
Except for two world wars, a totally changed global economical and political environment and, oh yes, the EU itself.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Europe was a mess of countries all out for blood, with century-old hatreds and politicians just waiting for an opportunity to start a war. Which is kind of exactly what happened just a few years into the 20th century.
Yeah... it would be absolutely the same... keep dreaming.
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'.
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...
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I agree with your main point, btw.
However, both on paper and from real-world experience, I dare to say that the judicative is the least troubled arm.
In most of Europe, the legislative and executive are pretty much identical and that bothers me to no end. Parliament passes laws and parliament elects the executive, and all the executives (ministers, etc.) are also members of parliament. These two arms are not seperated at all. The USA has the better system there, even though it is still imperfect in that the same parties exist in both.
If I were to re-write the political rules, I'd seperate the arms completely and make a law that political parties can be active in either the executive or the legistlative election processes, but not in both and any attempt to do so leads to immediate dissolution of the party in question with all assets seized and distributed to the poor.
Let me repeat that: It is absolutely technically possible to filter based on source IP address country.
Yes, you can also do various trickery to cloak your real source behind another source. That doesn't invalidate the point.
If Putin were to back down and support a peaceful resolution whose outcome might not satisfy Russian nationalists, he could find himself out of power.
Highly unlikely. Putin is beloved by the majority of russians, because under his government economy and internal security have improved dramatically. Most russians remember the 1990s when people were shot in the streets regularily, the way you only see in some old movies about when the Mafia ruled in some US cities. Compared to that time, they live in paradise now, and many attribute this change to Putin. Don't expect him to be out of power anytime soon. As for the russian elite, a lot of them own their fortune to this change. Never mistake criticism for opposition. Especially among politicians and the rich, it is fairly common to complain loudly about someone and still support them when it matters, because all the complaining and seeming hostility is simply an attempt to move them on certain topics.
The last thing Putin wants is a country with a lot of relatives of Russians getting the EU treatment and finding out how nice it is to be out of their largely lawless, virtual dictatorship of a state.
You should update your propaganda-driven beliefs. I've got a russian girlfriend and I've been to Russia myself. At least for where I was (St. Petersburg), it looks much like any european city, except more beautiful (but that's a St. Petersburg special, they made very sure to keep all the old palaces and buildings in shape).
Crime was horrible in the 1990s, my girlfriend says, but here's why most russians actually love Putin: Since he became the top dog, things have been continuously improving. Crime is low, economy is good, of course nothing is perfect, but compared to previous times, they're pretty great.
From what I've seen in daily life, I don't see anything that would make them jealous of a random EU member country. Supermarkets are full of basically the same products I can buy here, everyone has a car, public transport is better than in some european cities, the streets are in good condition and clean, I felt safe both at day and at night.
Of course Putin doesn't want Ukraine to join the EU. But that they will all be able to suddenly buy bananas and thus run away from communism is 1990s stuff and long since outdated.
FRY: This is a great, as long as you don't make me smell Uranus.
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.
To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide a test load.
