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Submitted on 2009/04/10 at 1:07pm by high tech redneck

“profits for investing, not for working for a living”
There used to be a time I was amazed how the labor class kept taking the abuses piled upon them.
On Cspan I just watched Jesse Jackson say Obama would have been the first president to enter office with a student loan if his books hadn’t been so successful and he recently got to pay off the loans with his book profits. Jesse was very angry that blacks still have to pay for student loans and housing loans when bankers can get much cheaper or even free talf loans. He was adamant that we should give free education to everyone that wants it. I go into the library and I read mosler economics and it doesn’t cost me anything but my very valuable time, so what is Jesse so mad about? MIT offers many of thier courses for free over the internet. I think most laborers could put down the budweiser and not go fishing this weekend and READ if they really wanted too.
Who wants to enable working class to equality in the investor class?
Warren you don’t want a bunch of poor working class blacks to be ahead of you in line to fill up their boats with gas when you want to take the superboat out for a joyride do you? Why should their boating needs/wants eat into 3 or 4 hours of your boating time while you wait to gas up? Also you don’t want a bunch of working class blacks out clogging the roads on sunday drives when you want to take the supercar out for a 200mph jaunt do you? What good does a supercar do you when you are in bumper to bumper traffic doing 5mph? There are very deep rooted desires in most of the “investor” class to keep the status quo.
The gods of Greece lived up on Mt. Olympus, they didn’t want to be burdened with the sufferings of overcrowded streets and cities down in the valley.

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Submitted on 2009/04/12 at 3:14am by Comments Encouraged

If they have little purchasing power, what does it matter how many social security dollars you get? How sad you worked your whole life for a promise from the government that was used like a carrot to sucker you like a donkey.
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/`b
/####J
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Submitted on 2009/04/10 at 4:55pm by Pocahontas

Making Banking Boring – Paul Krugman

I agree Warren, I think they should do what Krugman says and take away your supercar, your house, and your superboat. It is not enough to just make banking boring again, to stop this boom/bust cycle we need to strip YOU and every other person like you of the wealth you have to send a message this will not be tolerated anymore. That will remove the incentive for future generations to try these tricks again, thinking they can get away with it.
It is ridiculous that because you clicked buttons back and forth trading financial instruments that you should live so much better than other human beings. My native american indian friends tried to play the white mans game and open casinos on the reservations and the governator is taxing us and taking all our wealth back – where are our bailouts?
Your distribution of the wealth in this world needs to be returned to the borg, sooner rather than later.

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Submitted on 2009/04/08 at 5:22pm

Wikipedia review of Lila:
Major themes
As in his past book, the narrative is embedded between rounds of philosophical discussion. The main goal of this book is to develop a complete metaphysical system based on the idea of Quality introduced in his first book. Unlike his previous book, in which he creates a dichotomy between Classical and Romantic Quality, this book centers on the division of Quality into the Static and the Dynamic.
Another goal of this book is to critique the field of anthropology. Pirsig claims traditional objectivity renders the field ineffective. He then turns his concept of Quality toward an explanation of the difficulties Western society has had in understanding the values and perspectives of American Indians. One interesting conclusion is that modern American culture is the result of a melding of Native American and European values.
Another theme analyzed using the Metaphysics of Quality is the interaction between Intellectual and Social patterns. Pirsig states that until the end of the Victorian era, social patterns dominated the conduct of members of the American culture. In the aftermath of World War I, intellectual patterns and the scientific method acceded to that position, becoming responsible for directing the nation’s goals and actions. The later occurrences of fascism are seen as an anti-intellectual struggle to return social patterns to the dominant position. The hippie movement, having perceived the flaws inherent in both social and intellectual patterns, sought to transcend them, but failed to provide a stable replacement, degenerating instead into lower level biological patterns as noted in its calls for free love.
Criticism
The book has been criticised for being presented in a way that suits neither fact nor fiction. The title suggests a factual inquiry, but the characters appear fictional. While the book’s narrative is mostly from the perspective of the main character, who is a thinly disguised version of the author, some sections come directly from Lila, and since her thoughts generally support the author’s viewpoint in real life, appear a bit dishonest. [3]
The basis of the philosophical argument presented by the book is that Quality (which can be very basically understood as similar to Sophocles’ ‘good’, or as, in some religions, ‘god’, in the sense that Quality is universal and undefinable; at once the stimulus and the goal of human development) is a property of the interaction between subject and object and is more fundamental than either; subjects and objects only attain existence through interaction, and that interaction, Quality, therefore comes first. This has been challenged as unconvincing when set aside an alternative explanation in terms of evolutionary psychology. One of Pirsig’s examples, of a man sitting on a hot stove and perceiving the experience as one of ‘low quality’, to some, fails to demonstrate that quality is a fundamental property of things, since it is easy to explain his actions in terms of an evolutionarily evolved instinct to avoid things that our senses tell us will damage our bodies.[3]
In an interview, the author has said that he is disappointed that more ’seriously thinking people’ do not really understand his ideas fully. Many people, he says, write to him that they re-read the book many times but still don’t really understand it, adding “I have read many reviews criticising my ideas, but I have yet to see anything that proves me wrong. I’d like to give a prize to the first person who can convince me that my ideas about a metaphysics of quality are wrong.”[4]

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Submitted on 2009/04/08 at 1:44pm by Comments Encouraged

Comments Encouraged, that needs to be revised to – Mosler Economic Hitler Youth Comments Encouraged – dissenting voices will be silenced. What point am I missing exactly when I walk into a miami bank and because I am a native american indian I don’t get a loan, but if I was the latino cousin of the loan officer, I get lots of money?

Trust the government – just ask my forefather geronimo!

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Submitted on 2009/04/08 at 1:39pm by Richard Benson

Censorship, so that like minds can stroke each other’s pet theories, wonderful!

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Submitted on 2009/04/08 at 1:34pm by Keynes Liquidity Fetish

Energy technology, superboat technology, supercar technology, aids and cancer research, etc etc etc – how does any of this progress with everyone on the planet becoming a Mike Norman clone and clicking buttons back and forth on a trading terminal all day? The whole system is a heaping pile of dogs**t, it does not make humans do anything productive, all it does is make them zombies to a bloomberg terminal.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123915041409099017.html#mod=todays_us_personal_journal

…For much of the past decade, Kenneth Kimmons of Bedford, Texas, was a buy-and-hold investor. He regularly socked away money in mutual funds across his 401(k) plans, individual retirement accounts and a brokerage account.

But after watching his investments fall by about 50% last year, he started trading individual stocks and options full-time last fall. He generally buys stocks at the start of the trading day — lately, it’s been bank stocks — and sells them a few hours later. “I just got tired of putting money away and losing it,” says the 31-year-old. He says he’s doubled his money since he started trading full-time.

…Mr. Catalano trades mostly stocks and exchange-traded funds, usually four to five times a week. He writes covered-call option contracts to generate income off his shares, a tactic that could lose him some of the upside if share prices rise substantially. Since he started trading in September, he is down about 5% but has done better than the market.
… “The problem I have with the buy-and-hold strategy is that it’s a bull-market strategy,” say Matthew Tuttle, a financial adviser in Stamford, Conn. “In the bust, you give all of your profits back.” Mr. Tuttle has recently taken a more active approach to trading. While short-term investors are likely to face higher tax bills — since short-term gains are taxed at higher rates than long-term gains — he notes that some people who incurred big losses last year will be able to carry those losses forward to offset taxes in future years.

…The uncertain environment has prompted David Dilley of Bonita Springs, Fla., to trade more frequently. The 76-year-old retiree believes there has been a “sea change” in economic philosophy … So, while he had considered himself a longtime buy-and-hold investor, he’s now trading Canadian oil trusts in his E*Trade account several times a week. Mr. Dilley didn’t provide exact numbers but says he’s beating the broader market averages so far this year.

…Sue Cirillo of Pelham Manor, N.Y., used to hold on to household names such as Apple. But last fall, she sold some of her longtime holdings, moved to cash and started trading. “The difference between now and then is that when I’ve made money, I take it off the table and look for the next opportunity,” says the 47-year-old music producer. “Before, I was more focused on companies that I felt were going to be profitable.” Now, she pays attention to daily market swings, subscribes to online advice services such as Mr. Parness’s for trading ideas, and has recently learned to short stocks.

…Mark Swenson of southern New Hampshire says he typically trades with exchange-traded funds, instead of buying individual stocks. The 40-year-old says he started trading for the first time last October, in part to generate additional income in case his work as a plumber dried up. Although he says he got “slaughtered” when he first started trading, he says that he has since made up much of that initial loss and that it’s easier for him to trade than do nothing.

“I could no longer stomach it — watching my money disappear,” he says. “For right now, it’s a traders’ market. Until I get the sense that the market is on the rise, I generally don’t plan on doing any buying and holding — not for the long term.”

…Linda Smith of Denver fired her broker, saying it was a waste of money to pay her adviser 1.5% in annual fees for picking mutual funds she believed she could pick herself. “No one on this planet knows better what to do with my finances than me,” says the 53-year-old. For the year, she figures her portfolio is up about 5%, including the interest from her CDs. “Nobody can time the market 100% correctly 100% of the time,” she says. “However, that doesn’t mean you can’t get lucky now and then.”

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