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AATREK CURES KIDS posted:Y'all're lucky, drinking to forget just makes me more miserable. I can drink happily nowadays because the best candidate for the Republicans is still Jeb Bush, and they're showing signs of thinking it would be a good idea to attack Hillary Clinton over her husband's infidelity. You say that like it won't be effective for a large number of Americans.
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May 7, 2014 09:17
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amanasleep posted:This is almost comically nonsensical, since the majority needed to impeach is one they already have, and the majority they do not possess is not sufficient to convict. This is leaving aside that the NSA stuff is about the last thing that any Republican congress would use as grounds for impeachment. They don't want to do it now because the optics are poo poo at the moment. Impeaching Obama before an election looks incredibly petty and would drive democratic voters to the polls in huge numbers as a gently caress you to the republicans. In 2015 its a whole different ballgame as they will probably have a larger 'mandate' by controlling both houses. I will be sad to see him go however. I could see it for Benghazi or something, but NSA spying? That doesn't piss off the republican base all that much, and it doesn't have the sting of a scandal which is the whole idea to an impeachment they know they are going to fail. I have a 50/50 feeling they will go for impeachment because they are loving insane, but I don't see how it would ever be about the NSA.
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May 19, 2014 02:52
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Amergin posted:My point is that I expect better from NPR than "this person killed a black kid and is half-white therefore he's white." Except that Zimmerman is visibly Caucasian, with a 'white' name. Literally the only reason I know he has any Hispanic background is because I have been told. And that is on top of the fact that people of Hispanic descent are traditionally still considered 'white'. There is a reason that the term 'non Hispanic white' exists on a lot of political surveys when it comes to self identification. The same is true of Obama incidentally. He looks black, he identifies as black. He isn't the countries first 'half black' president. Caros fucked around with this message at 22:34 on May 20, 2014 |
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May 20, 2014 22:31
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absolem posted:Fun stuff, definitely A...are you real? Wait, I just read to the bottom of this and realized that you are an austrian. Since I can't find the link to my old quote on the issue, I'm going to go ahead and repeat it really quick before I go to bed. quote:The crash was predicted well in advance by many Austrian economists. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with subprime lending, its just playing with worse odds, so you should do less of it. There are a lot of things wrong with your post. Pretty much everything in fact, but this in particular is so wrong that I can't let it go unopposed. So who are these Austrian economists? Well there are typically six to seven of them: Mark Thornton, Frank Shostak, Stefan Karlsson, Peter Schiff, Robert Wenzel, Hans F. Sennholz and Gereld Celente. I'm going to touch on them in turn: Mark Thornton - Mark Thornton made his most public comments on this in a series of 2004 articles. These articles are noticable for recognizing that the housing market was in a bubble (which everyone knew) and that there could be a crash. Pretty much everything else in his articles, including his rationale for why the housing bubble exists (He thinks it is inflation rather than artificially low interest rates causing the giant pool of money to go looking for higher investments) is wrong. Thornton makes no mention of CDS' CDO's or any of the wonderful little instruments that caused a housing price collapse to turn into the great depression 2. Next. Frank Shostack - gently caress I hate the formatting on Mises.org. Shostack predicted there would be a housing bubble because there was a lot of money. That is it. My loving dog could have prognosticated that. My two year old niece at the time probably mumbled something about housing prices being too high into her cereal. Next. Stephan Karlsson - Again we have another Austrian who noticed that housing prices doubling in the course of four years was probably not a good thing. This does not mean he predicted the great recession, because the primary driving factor of the recession was not the crash of housing prices, but the freezing of the commercial paper market caused as a result of lovely practices within the banks. A housing bubble crash would have hurt, a total loss of faith in the economy caused by 40-1 leverage went well beyond that. Next. Robert Wenzel/Raymond Sabat(its complicated) - This asshat predicted a bubble in 2004 under a pen name. Whupty loving do. Hans loving Sennhoz - Are you sensing a pattern here? Predicted a housing bubble. Woooooo! Gereld Celente - Yay something new! Okay, so unlike his friends Gereld Celente did actually predict the 2008 collapse. He then predicted the 2009 collapse we all remember so horribly. And the 2012 hyperinflation. Do you guys remember how: "By 2012 America will become an undeveloped nation, that there will be a revolution marked by food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches, and that holidays will be more about obtaining food, not gifts. “We’re going to see the end of the retail Christmas… we’re going to see a fundamental shift take place… putting food on the table is going to be more important that putting gifts under the Christmas tree,” said Celente, adding that the situation would be “worse than the great depression" I sure don't. Gereld Celente is a doomsayer, he's a broken clock who is right twice a day because he repeatedly says everything will be lovely. Peter Schiff - Here we are, the shitstopper. Peter Schiff is the only Austrian economist I am aware of to have accurately predicted several major facets of the collapse years in advance. So what is his thing? Well he's like Celente... more or less. Peter Schiff runs a company called Euro Pacific Capital and/or precious metals. The entire focus of EPC is that schiff, its founder believes that the US economy is going to end up in the toilet, so you should invest in overseas markets and especially precious metals, such as gold. Whether this hatred of the US is because of some delusion or because his father has been in and out of jail for tax evasion for decades I'm still not sure on. What is important to remember here is that Schiff thinks the US is going to bomb, he has thought this way since 1997, and he has been outspoken in it constantly. So with that in mind Schiff is out there screaming to the heavens that the US economy is going to collapse. So what should you do? Invest in his company and buy precious metals. The man is selling a product, and that product is the idea that the US is going to collapse. The simple fact is that Peter Schiff lost his clients money in the financial collapse. The granddaddy of all "Austrians predicted the collapse" lost loving money when it happened because his 'prediction' just involved saying the same thing he'd said every year, and the same thing he has been saying every year since. Peter Schiff has predicted hyper-inflation in the US every year since 2007. Seven years running and we are still hyper-not-inflated. Austrians predict thousands of catastrophes annually. They are almost universally wrong because their ideology is based off of junk science. The fact that you can go back and find seven of them vaguely pointing in the direction of houses during the single largest housing bubble is not some mystical sign that they know what they were doing. I loving predicted the bubble in 2005 when I was told "You should buy a house, housing prices never go down." and thought that it was stupid. That does not mean that 23 year old me knew gently caress all what he was talking about. Sorry for the effort post but... gently caress. quote:Good to see jrodefeld has decided to join us again but I'm not sure about the name change. I'm going to be honest, I miss JRod. This asshat's reply won't be nearly as entertaining or neurotic. Caros fucked around with this message at 09:55 on May 22, 2014 |
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May 22, 2014 09:51
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Mr Interweb posted:That sounds like every single one of them tried to say the same poo poo every year and eventually all of them got lucky. I don't see the distinction between Peter Schiff (who is lauded by "serious" news people) and everyone else. The difference is that most of the rest of them made one or two comments on the issue in or around 2005 and otherwise didn't say much else. This is telling because most of them don't have anything at all to say on the matter beyond acknowledging the basic fact that there was a housing bubble. Schiff is a little different in that circa 2006 he actually talked about some of the underlying causes such as cdos. They are all frauds mind you. In that they are all together. Incidently, if you want to know how stupid Schiff is, he has endorsed bitcoins as a good thing. Personally I think it's a craven move to up his libertarian credit, but it's still dumb as gently caress.
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May 22, 2014 10:37
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absolem posted:See, now you've entirely misrepresented my stance. Maybe I didn't simplify enough for you- Again you start in with this horseshit? You are right insofar as you can say that no group is entirely blameless. The US shouldn't have kept interest rates so low, and some consumers probably should have been better off about their decisions. However, while you can't say anyone is blameless, this truth is in the middle bullshit seems to imply that blame is spread equally, which is just factually untrue. For starters, consumption was driven by the banks. Once the banks realized this was making them lots and lots of money they began to heavily push home ownership on consumers. Now the reason I blame the banks for this is that unlike your typical consumer, they are far more financially literate. If you are a gardener making 30,000 a year and the citibank comes to you, or sends you a piece of mail and says you can buy a $250,000 home, why wouldn't you take it? This is Citi, the largest bank in the country. If they are offering you a loan clearly you can pay it, because why would a billion dollar bank offer you a bad loan? Predatory lending was a huge aspect of the crisis, and even in instances where it was not the banks are more responsible simply by dint of being the ones with the knowledge to know that this was stupid. When banks started issuing NINJA (No Income, No Jobs or Assets) loans to anyone with a pulse (or even without) they became the driving factor of the market. At any point the bubble could have been slowed or popped early simply by acting in a responsible manner rather than a feeding frenzy. And of course you continue to gloss over the securitization chain which was ultimately the driving force responsible for the bubble and for its heinous impact on the world economy. Simply put the banks would never have inflated the home bubble to the extent that they did if they had been regulated in this aspect (which they vehemently opposed). The whole bubble was predicated on the fact that the banks could give a mortgage and then get it off their books within a few weeks instead of a few decades, and the only reason they were capable of doing so was the fraudulent process that gave us Collateralized Debt Obligations and Credit Default Swaps and the like. Talk about these and we might take you even vaguely seriously.
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May 22, 2014 18:16
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absolem posted:I agree that there was a lot of bank-regulator nonsense going on, but you have to think about what banks (or businesses in general want). They want to make as much money as possible. Now, most of the time they realize that that is best accomplished by being cautious, which is why they have all those risk experts and such. However, in this case they managed to be convinced (by themselves and the regulators) that there would always be buyers for these packages, which is patently false. Banks would have been more cautious if they hadn't expected to be saved. The synthetic derivative market is predicated on risk in that all banking is, but putting huge numbers of contracts together in order to achieve some sort of average risk per package that then can obfuscate the scope of the package tends to allow for more risk. Another thing to remember is that most every bank that helped make this mess had people at it who knew this much subprime stuff was a bad idea and said so, just like there were consumers who realized that they couldn't actually afford things that were being sold. Just one more thing before I go out for a while. I find the simplest way to look at the bank-consumer relationship as that of an Adult and a Child. Sure there are some stupid adults and some precocious and smart children, but by and large the Adult knows a lot more than the child, and should be the more responsible of the two when it comes to danger. Your typical bank is far, far more financially knowledgable than your typical consumer, most consumers simply trust their bank when they are told something because they are the experts. If you go to the bank to get a mortgage you expect that the bank isn't going to be trying to screw you by putting you into a brutal ARM, or trying to encourage you to buy a house that you can't possibly afford. I still find it shocking that Mortgage lenders in the states don't have fiduciary duty to their clients like they do in Canada. Blows my loving mind. quote:I understand that startlingly few of you know anything about economics and that you probably don't care to learn. Oh you're just going to get around great here. As I understand it D&D has several professional economists as part of its regular posters. We also have a ton of people like me who used to be libertarians who know exactly what type of stupidity you qualify as economics. It might behoove you to sit and lurk for a while before declaring how much smarter you are to a forum that has quite simply already heard all your poo poo before. quote:Poor people did not cause the financial crisis. You can't go around saying X group is at fault for Y or people with A skin color should pay back people of B skin color for the wrongs done to them. We are individuals and are not guilty of the wrongs of people who look, talk, act, or spend like us. I can absolutely go around apportioning blame (the financial sector was the primary driver of the great recession). As for the latter bit, you are still benefiting from the wrongs done to them, and as such should be obligated to help narrow the gap between those who were historically slaves and those who are now merely driven into poverty and horrible conditions by policy and negative stereotyping. Someone post that "White person is the easiest videogame difficulty" thing will you?
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May 22, 2014 18:28
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You fucker. You actually got me with this link. Because of course Mises.org would have a response to the 'you fell off the turnip truck' fallacy.
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May 22, 2014 18:30
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absolem posted:The bottom line really is that banks felt secure doing truly stupid and sometimes downright wrong stuff. Why they felt that way is because 1) Their pay structures were/are hosed up and 2) they thought they'd be protected by the gov't. Its tragic that regulation messes stuff up just enough to start a snowball and when we go full crisis mode the gov't steps in and fixes poo poo by saving the morons. I still maintain that all three axes of stupid were necessary for the crisis, but it is definitely fair to rank the banks as more culpable than consumers (the gov't is just as bad though, for regulating and then saving them). The government is not 'just as bad' because the people in charge of regulating the financial sector employees, and thus the people who failed, are themselves former or soon to be members of the financial sector. If me and five other guys rob a liquor store and one of the clerks is on it by leaving the safe open that doesn't mean the liquor store is at fault, it means there are six people who robbed it. Again you are doing this stupid truth in the middle bulletin while trying to pretend you are not. No one is saying that there were not bad borrowers or that the government is blameless. We are however saying that the majority of the blame can be placed at the feet of the group that knowingly engaged in fraud, unsafe lending practises and so on. You started your rant by blaming the government almost exclusively. You are wrong, so let's see you walk it back all the way. Oh, and do you have any rebuttal to the whole 'austrians' were right thing? Or are you conceding that since you clearly just didn't know the facts?
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May 22, 2014 19:23
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absolem posted:Consumers (poor or otherwise) are responsible in part because they bought the stuff. Sure, information was asymmetric, but Sure the banks knowingly misrepresented financial products to financially illiterate consumers. Sure they packaged a bunch of garbage subprime loans together and sold them as AAA rated securities to pension funds. Sure they engaged in predatory lending practises and you admit that the customer's had less information than they did. But who gives a gently caress right? Clearly the consumer is the responsible one. Please go into detail on how the government caused banks to give multimillion dollar bonuses to people running their companies into the ground and how the government is responsible when many of the countries largest institutions effectively put a gun to the economies head and said bail us out or we shoot. In particular I'd like to get your opinion on the Texas AIG letter, and the margin calls from Goldman Sachs which drove AIG to bankruptcy and nearly killed the pension funds of 2 million Americans so the Lloyd blankfein could quote "get my loving money." I'll wait.
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May 22, 2014 19:30
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absolem posted:It makes no sense to charge entire groups with a crime. Nice try, but no. Go back and read my post again. I didn't simply call them crazy. I pointed out that only one of them said anything about the root cause of the systemic financial collapse (securitizarion) and that one was only right insofar as that in 2007 he said that maybe mortgage backed securities were not that great. He then proceeded to lose millions of dollars of customers money despite this 'knowledge' Their voices are not valuable because they said nothing of worth. They pointed out there was a housing bubble which anyone with a brain knew. They gave no prescriptions on how to fix it, nor did they understand the complex mechanisms that were at the root of what made a housing bubble into a worldwide recession. As an aside, have you considered being slightly less smug? Because snugness when you are consistently I'll informed is a bad trait to have, especially here.
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May 22, 2014 19:47
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absolem posted:I wish they had "shot". Saving them has hosed us even more. I too wish the US government had decided to let effectiveky every major (and most minor by extension) US financial institution fail. I have always wanted to live in a bizarre road warrior like state. Seriously do you even comprehend what this would have entailed? AIG the company that held pension funds for millions of America going bankrupt, and eventually giving back pennies on the dollar. Bank of America, one of the largest mortgage holders in the US disappearing over the course of a weekend. Should we have nationalized them? Absolutely. Take them over, fire everyone in management etc. But the idea of just letting the US financial system completely collapse shows such a total lack of understanding that it's astonishing. They call them too big to fail because if they'd been allowed to fail it wouldn't have been your happy little Austrian market correction. It would have made the great depression look like a jolly little walk through the park. Edit: gently caress I just have to reiterate this because your stupidity is so mindboggling that I cannot focus. The collapse just of AIG would have obliterated the total pension savings of 4.3 million Americans. Saved your whole life for retirement? Tough poo poo! This is what you unironically wished would happen. Caros fucked around with this message at 20:28 on May 22, 2014 |
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May 22, 2014 20:25
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Nonsense posted:The result is they'll do it again, and never be punished for it. The alternative is depression, that leaves little room to feel anything good about our country's current trajectory if you ask me. There were alternatives at the time. Heavy regulation and outright nationalization of the endangered firms was the go to. If we'd done that we might have brought some sanity back to thing. And yes, it is loving depressing as all hell.
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May 22, 2014 20:30
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Putin It In Mah rear end posted:First you need to absolutely have no impulse for introspection, no self awareness whatsoever, and then live a life completely insulated by privilege. This attitude cannot survive contact with hardship. I'm a walking example of this. I was firmly in the same court as absolem until I was subjected to a very real and painful reminder about how inequitable and unfair the world is. For most libertarians it really will take a life changing experience for them to realize how very, very wrong they are. quote:Who knows about the personality disorder, I seem to do ok. Who is John Galt? I'm guessing from my extensive knowledge of libertarian bullshit, coupled with your posts in this thread that you are probably of an objectivist bent. Thats fair enough, but do keep in mind that Ayn Rand pretty much set up objectivism as a way to make her own sociopathic tendancies more culturally acceptable. She had a facination with a serial killer most famous for his brutal murder of a young girl. This is not someone you should be looking to as a role model. quote:I wasn't trying to go back and change my opinion, I legitimately misspoke and wanted to make that clear. Oddly enough, I have thought about and articulated these things before. I said that I immoral = unjustifiable, that's true, I just forgot half of the things that I hold to be unjustifiable. I've made a hot mess of my argument now by being quick and sloppy. Since you are quoting Hans Herman Hoppe, I'm curious to know if you are aware that Hoppe is a serious social conservative and racist. That in Hoppe's ideologically perfect world people could and should exclude people from their 'society' based on race, creed, sexuality and so forth. He further believes that his private covenants (which are in essence not at all dissimilar from a small government, and which ironically have their own social contracts) would be led by "The natural social elites." a phrase that should make you at least a little uncomfortable if you are opposed to ideas such as white supremacy. How do you reconcile these arguements from Hoppe with what you like about his work? quote:I'm open to new ideas, but 1) I've made a hot mess of my argument that I'd like to at least try to fix and 2)I haven't seen much by way of counter-arguments, its mostly just acting like I'm a troll You know what? I'll bite. quote:This is my understanding of Hoppe's argument (it may not be his argument accurately, but I still think it's This is superfluous. quote:- Epistemological questions aside, I first want to start off with defining “property” vs. “property rights”. I'd argue that you have a problem right off the get go here. While within your narrow series of ethics property rights are inviolable, this is not necesarily true for groups outside your own narrow focus. In fact most humans on the planet would argue that there are a variety of situations in which violations of your property rights can be justified by virtue of a greater societal good. quote:- So, Hoppe begins by noting that resources are scarce (at least, some resources are. Under present conditions Most of this makes sense to a point. I'd argue that most ethics are not necessarily derived from arguments over property, that ethics pertaining to child rearing, rape, social interactions etc don't' necessarily have anything to do with property unless we accept your premise that every human interaction is an interaction based on property, which pretty much no one does. But this isn't a huge point of argument anyways. quote:- So the real question of ethical philosophy is to determine what sort of ethical theory can be justified, You have proven nothing. This whole section is straight up Randian A=A psuedo-philosophical garbage. I hate to be so blunt but it really, really is. Your argument here for the layman poster who doesn't care to read your words, is that since we are using discussion to solve this conflict that somehow proves that argumentation is preferable to violence. This sort of argument would get you laughed out of any philosophy department in the nation because it is both shallow and unbelievably wrong. We both agree that talking is the best way to resolve problems. That does not however prohibit 'force' as a nebulous concept from ever being justified, it simply means we would prefer to resolve problems through peaceful and voluntary interactions whenever possible. Briefly I'll step aside to bring up a traditional example: A man falls from a building and catches hold of a lamppost. He is hanging outside of your 110th story window, the fall will clearly kill him and he has no way to escape his fate but to enter through your window. Since you are not around to have an argument with him on whether or not he should be allowed to enter your apartment, clearly force is his best and only option, even though he is agressing against you by breaking the window to access your apartment. Having proven some form of violence... wait. No. I haven't proven it either, what I have done is shown that there are instances in which agressing against someone else's property is the proper moral action for one person, while appearing improper to another. That is because morals are subjective, which is why the Non-Agression principle is stupid, because it is an absolute with no flexibility and no real ability to function in a complicated and messy world. quote:- Over one’s own body, the solution is simple: only a norm that states that each individual is the owner of An alternate solution to this conundrum is to not treat literally everything as though it were property. There are no inherent contradictions like this that pop up in my day to day life because I don't view myself as property. quote:- Over external resources (we have already determined that exclusive use is inevitable and that violence is For those of you reading along this is what is called the homesteading principle among libertarians. It seems logical enough on its face but I find that it falls apart when people realize this is not 1628, and that property, particularly land, is more a subject to a long chain of ownership than being laid claim to. quote:-I agree with previous users: Hoppe transcends the is-ought dichotomy. His ethic doesn’t establish a system Hoppe doesn't decide what is good or bad, he decides what is just or unjust... which is of course a fancy way of saying what is good or bad. Hoppean ethics, while rational are not inherently 'true', nor are the subject to verification under anything more than logic. You cannot verify moral laws, because despite what Ayn Rand has told you, there are not objective truths in this world outside of physical laws. You are a sack of meat, which is in turn a sack of base elements. Nothing you do from a moral perspective is objectively right or wrong.
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May 22, 2014 22:48
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Pohl posted:Haha, I can't believe that loving worked. Damnit! That motherfucker! I just finished putting up a carefully crafted Libertarian thread 
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May 23, 2014 00:11
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Joementum posted:I wouldn't worry. If yours is a better thread, the market dictates it will win out. I've said it before, I'll say it again you are my favorite source of politics on this forum Joementum. I wish I was half as witty as you.
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May 23, 2014 00:19
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XyloJW posted:Please stop discussing libertarianism when we now apparently have 2 (??) threads for that. In my defense, event he libertarian thinks I made the better thread. 
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May 23, 2014 02:40
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fool_of_sound posted:Yeah, those are totally different games I'd say Lasombra... but we've already kinda got that creepy racist overtone going.
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May 25, 2014 05:31
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A Winner is Jew posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQLV7nqD3CA Wait... wait! Karl Rove is now reporting that this joke did indeed get old sometime in mid 2013! It really doesn't.
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May 29, 2014 19:46
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Joementum posted:"If you like your religion, you can keep your religion." ~ Bobby Jindal on Obama's position on religious liberty. That is actually a reasonably sick burn coming from Bobby Jindal. I mean, its full of poo poo, but if you already buy into his crap that is pretty good.
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May 30, 2014 01:46
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paranoid randroid posted:Jim Inhofe needs your help to charge up his Impeachment Bomb, America. Then he should just get Satan to convince people.
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May 31, 2014 15:36
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Boon posted:Dude do you have some kind of complex? You're really bitter about this. Honestly I think this is the wrong way to argue your point. Yes, you have a lovely, lovely job. Most people will argue there are others with equally lovely jobs that don't get taken care of. A better reply would be to point out that we promised these benefits for one, and that for another it is in societies interests not to have a bunch of poor, former soldiers with poor career prospects and training in how to kill.
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May 31, 2014 19:07
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