Is he really helping?

Started by fugibo, June 19, 2009, 09:51:18 pm

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Blizzard

As long as the monetary system exists, that's not possible. Governments support their companies in order to keep their economy well. If the companies do well, the economy improves which makes the economy of a country improve and that's the government's goal. Since all companies are focused on profit which is based on maximum exploitation of human labor and maximizing profit by selling lowest possible quality at the highest prices, we have quite a problem. Why low quality? Imagine you buy a cellphone that has a durability of 50 years that has maximum capabilities today and you don't need anything else. You probably won't ever buy another one. That's not the companies goal. They want you to buy another cellphone next year so they produce low quality material which they use to make cellphones.
As long as everything stays this way, it is impossible to have a government that is not corrupted.
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Quote from: winkioI do not speak to bricks, either as individuals or in wall form.

Quote from: Barney StinsonWhen I get sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead. True story.

fugibo

Quote from: Blizzard on June 23, 2009, 05:13:00 am
As long as the monetary system exists, that's not possible. Governments support their companies in order to keep their economy well. If the companies do well, the economy improves which makes the economy of a country improve and that's the government's goal. Since all companies are focused on profit which is based on maximum exploitation of human labor and maximizing profit by selling lowest possible quality at the highest prices, we have quite a problem. Why low quality? Imagine you buy a cellphone that has a durability of 50 years that has maximum capabilities today and you don't need anything else. You probably won't ever buy another one. That's not the companies goal. They want you to buy another cellphone next year so they produce low quality material which they use to make cellphones.
As long as everything stays this way, it is impossible to have a government that is not corrupted.


And Communism tends to just get corrupt. So yeah, we're all screwed.

Diokatsu

Quote from: Longfellow on June 23, 2009, 08:20:57 am
Quote from: Blizzard on June 23, 2009, 05:13:00 am
As long as the monetary system exists, that's not possible. Governments support their companies in order to keep their economy well. If the companies do well, the economy improves which makes the economy of a country improve and that's the government's goal. Since all companies are focused on profit which is based on maximum exploitation of human labor and maximizing profit by selling lowest possible quality at the highest prices, we have quite a problem. Why low quality? Imagine you buy a cellphone that has a durability of 50 years that has maximum capabilities today and you don't need anything else. You probably won't ever buy another one. That's not the companies goal. They want you to buy another cellphone next year so they produce low quality material which they use to make cellphones.
As long as everything stays this way, it is impossible to have a government that is not corrupted.


And Communism tends to just get corrupt. So yeah, we're all screwed.

Anarchy never corrupts. <3 D=

Everything eventually falls apart if not maintained. The capitalist economic order was bound to fall. That's how capitalism works, in cycles of good and bad.

fugibo

Yes. Which is what I've been saying all along: LEAVE IT ALONE. IT'LL FIX ITSELF. DEAL WITH LIFE IN THE MEANTIME.

Diokatsu

People when doing well:
"BACK OFF! I CAN HANDLE MY LIFE JUST FINE! OF COURSE I WON'T HELP ANYONE ELSE, THEY'RE JUST LAZY!"

People when life sucks:
"PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE HELP! I'M SORRY I DIDN'T HELP OTHER PEOPLE BUT I LEARNED MY LESSON!"

People are so bogus.

Ryex

Quote from: Diokatsu on June 23, 2009, 01:38:44 pm
People when doing well:
"BACK OFF! I CAN HANDLE MY LIFE JUST FINE! OF COURSE I WON'T HELP ANYONE ELSE, THEY'RE JUST LAZY!"

People when life sucks:
"PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE HELP! I'M SORRY I DIDN'T HELP OTHER PEOPLE BUT I LEARNED MY LESSON!"

People are so bogus.


are you saying your any better? there is not much that I can offer here and that is this,
capitalism = best possible long term money system that allows for technological advancement. let's face it, if not for capitalism 99% of today tech would not exist yet.
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Diokatsu

Quote from: Ryexander on June 23, 2009, 02:06:06 pm
Quote from: Diokatsu on June 23, 2009, 01:38:44 pm
People when doing well:
"BACK OFF! I CAN HANDLE MY LIFE JUST FINE! OF COURSE I WON'T HELP ANYONE ELSE, THEY'RE JUST LAZY!"

People when life sucks:
"PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE HELP! I'M SORRY I DIDN'T HELP OTHER PEOPLE BUT I LEARNED MY LESSON!"

People are so bogus.


are you saying your any better? there is not much that I can offer here and that is this,
capitalism = best possible long term money system that allows for technological advancement. let's face it, if not for capitalism 99% of today tech would not exist yet.

Who said I was better? But I completely disagree with your opinion of Capitalism. Capitalism is idealistic. It expects everyone to be innovative, fair and work hard towards satisfying demands. Do you honestly think people are so good? There is no perfect system of economics, but I would rather have Socialism first off. Socialism requires that industry be innovative, lest it be discarded. It's a strict government regulation that allows for powerful economic growth directed by the people who lead our country. It's unity and cohesion between the economic, the people and the government, something that our country has none of. Socialism is an activeand sweeping central power that demands a productive economy. Don't kid yourself into thinking free trade is a true way to gain prfit. Profit is gained by innovation, innovation is gained by funding neccessary research. The government has the power and the resources to alter and shape our economy into what is neccessary to survive. People left to themselves without a common goal cannot be trusted to perform. They will do whatever they can to make it to the top, while others fall after them. Capitalism is innately corrupt. It's founding idea is greed. People want more so they'll do more. But people are smarter than that. There are plenty of ways to get around regulations especially when they are so laxly enforced.

Blizzard

Exactly. The founding idea of capitalism is greed. The big flaw of socialsm, though, is that there is no pure socialism. All that we have seen during history is communism and they are not the same thing. Socialism by itself is not corrupted, but the "implementations" of socialism are. People often confuse those two terms and automatically think that socialism is bad while it's actually communism that is bad.
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Quote from: winkioI do not speak to bricks, either as individuals or in wall form.

Quote from: Barney StinsonWhen I get sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead. True story.

winkio

Sorry to revive this a month later, but it's taking it in a new direction, so that makes it... new?  I thought you all might like to know a little bit more about what is happening with the economy and such.

So basically, the world markets are still drastically overvalued and unstable.  No amount of stimulus is ever going to fix them, and they will crash, one way or another, very BIG, and very soon.  Like, within a year or two.  After that crash, then the economy starts coming back, and it can come back very quickly if we support it correctly.  And the sooner the crash happens, the easier it will be to recover.

If we crash withing the next 6-9 months, the economy could be back at full strength by 2011-2012.

We all can get carried away, but the economy isn't so fragile as you think:  It's been through the Great Depression and all sorts of other crap.  And back then, people had no idea what to do when the market crashed.  The US is not in any danger of collapsing at any point in the foreseeable future, although other countries will start gaining more power.  Capitalism will never collapse until social change demands it.

While you people get your information from your own beliefs and discussing with other amateurs on the internet, I actually got my facts from experts working in the field.  The top experts working in the field.  Now we can all speculate!

fugibo

Quote from: winkio on July 22, 2009, 03:08:43 pm
Sorry to revive this a month later, but it's taking it in a new direction, so that makes it... new?  I thought you all might like to know a little bit more about what is happening with the economy and such.

So basically, the world markets are still drastically overvalued and unstable.  No amount of stimulus is ever going to fix them, and they will crash, one way or another, very BIG, and very soon.  Like, within a year or two.  After that crash, then the economy starts coming back, and it can come back very quickly if we support it correctly.  And the sooner the crash happens, the easier it will be to recover.

If we crash withing the next 6-9 months, the economy could be back at full strength by 2011-2012.

We all can get carried away, but the economy isn't so fragile as you think:  It's been through the Great Depression and all sorts of other crap.  And back then, people had no idea what to do when the market crashed.  The US is not in any danger of collapsing at any point in the foreseeable future, although other countries will start gaining more power.  Capitalism will never collapse until social change demands it.

While you people get your information from your own beliefs and discussing with other amateurs on the internet, I actually got my facts from experts working in the field.  The top experts working in the field.  Now we can all speculate!


If you haven't noticed, Obama is the DEFINITION of "Social Change."

winkio

I assume you are talking about

QuoteCapitalism will never collapse until social change demands it.


Obama is social change, but he is just moving towards socialism, he's not really eliminating capitalism.

Blizzard

(No problem for reviving the topic as there's been new development in politics lately.)

I'll start by expanding my point from my last post.

I don't agree that capitalism will never collapse. I don't think it will happen soon, but one day it definitely will. And I am convinced that capitalism will collapse by itself, because the system's purpose is itself. The system is based on greed and therefore corruption can't be avoided. People are making money out of money itself, you can make money with no new value being produced. The current economic crisis happens because the world owes money. But to who does the entire world owe money? To itself. It's all about interest rates. Imagine that the entire world takes a loan from one bank and doesn't spend anything. The next day the entire world owes more money to the bank due to interest rates. But there is no more money than that in the world. Even if the money is returned, due to the interest rates, it's not all the money so there will be interest rates on the remaining debt. At this point the entire situation is already screwed up. The bank has all the money in the world, yet the world still owes the bank money. The only way to cover this debt is to take another loan. And at this point it's beyond screwed up.

It's similar with the consumption cycle. Consumers work at corporations to earn money and to produce goods. They then use money to buy those goods. The corporations want to make profit out of it and at least one person (i.e. owner) needs to get some money as well, even though he doesn't work at all, so something needs to be changed. That change is increasing the price and decreasing payments for labor. The difference is pure profit for the owner. But now people can't afford to buy all the goods they used to since they have less money and everything costs more. The life standard of the consumers decreases while the life standard of the corporation owner increases. The problem here (besides the fact that it's "unfair") is that this is a diverging system. At one point paying people less and less will result them in buying less and less goods to such a degree that demand goes down. Rather than decreasing prices (because of the greed of the corporation owner, he wouldn't satisfy with earning less, nooooooo, never), the production goes down. Because production goes down, people get paid less and people lose their jobs resulting them in buying even less goods. And here we go, a collapse cannot be avoided.
Sure, our economy is much more complex than this simply example. But that complexity doesn't come from other factors, it comes from the huge number of corporations. Capitalism is a system which purpose is to feed itself. At one point a breakdown is inevitable. The foundation is greed which leads to corruption and rather than saving many other people, corporations will rather exploit them as much as possible until the point of breakdown.

Now you might think "No way, the government won't allow such things to happen". Wrong. The value of a country is based on their economy. Governments have to support economy in order to have a more valuable country. Since economy are pretty much the values of the corporations, they support the corporations rather than supporting the people (because socialism is evil, oh noez). Instead of forcing corporations to decreases prices and increase payments, they cut down payments for government controlled sectors (e.g. service sector, lots a people work in the service sector), they cut down on common goods (education, healthcare, insurances). That results in people having less money, corporations earning less, the government having to cut down on even more stuff.
You think that's stupid? You think only a retarded idiot wouldn't see a thing like this? You think a government would never do such a stupid thing? Look at the world. It's happening in many countries right now (mine included). I seriously started to doubt the sanity of governments all over the world.

One last issue that people will ask is how the corporations could be allowed to increases prices just as they please. It's simple. They create fake rarity. The rarer something is, the more it costs. If they "fake" that production material is rare and costly, they have a justification to increase the selling prices of the product. Oil isn't rare. There's still plenty of it on Earth. The balance between demand and supply is the thing that controls the price. They create a fake rarity of something that isn't rare thus increasing prices, corporations earning even more by selling even less. Yet again there is a greater gap between classes that's being created.

Conclusion:
There is no crisis. How can the world owe money to itself? That's a paradox.
People earning less and spending less forces corporations to either decrease prices (which would decrease the life standard of the higher classes) or decrease payments and fire lower class citizen (which would not decrease the life standard of the higher classes but instead decrease the life standard of the lower classes). The former would result in sustaining a balance while the latter would cause people having less money and spending less even further which brings us to the beginning of the consumption cycle. Because the very foundation of capitalism is greed, the latter will happen which will ultimately lead to its collapse.
The entire monetary system is completely outdated (several thousands of years). Of course, collapse of capitalism will either spawn another system (there seems not to be a new system anywhere so far) or require a complete restructure which includes stop using the monetary system and changing to society (only likely to happen if enough people have been reduced to low enough class citizen to start a freaking revolution already).
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Quote from: winkioI do not speak to bricks, either as individuals or in wall form.

Quote from: Barney StinsonWhen I get sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead. True story.

winkio

July 23, 2009, 10:08:27 am #32 Last Edit: July 23, 2009, 11:41:29 am by winkio
According to your thinking, Blizzard, capitalism should have collapsed in the 1920s/30s, in the US at least, when large corporations owned way more of the national wealth than they do now, and greed was a much bigger factor.  The funny thing about capitalism, though, is that those companies who can't compete or are too greedy are eventually flushed out of the system.  Capitalism isn't perfect, but it is extraordinarily stable (petroleum doubled in price, and everybody was pretty much okay), especially with our current knowledge of economics.  And when it's done right (5 out of every 50 or so years...), it works pretty well.

The job of the government is to tax large corporations who higher prices or lower wages more than they should (by outsourcing, for example), and then feed that money back to the public through the bureaucracy.  It rarely does that job, but..

Another 'paradox' is that the world is always gaining more money; the GDP of each developing and developed country has, for the most part, risen each year.  Where is this money coming from?  Higher population and more efficient and advanced workforce.

While I agree with you that we will soon enough move on to a more advanced economic system, I think it's going to be that people demand it, not that capitalism collapses.

EDIT: about money, while it does have really horrible things associated with it, getting rid of money will not necessarily get rid of those horrible things.  It will get rid of greed of dollars.  It will not get rid of greed of power.  Right now, those two are synonymous, more or less.  Power would still be obtained even without money, in my opinion.  Also, stupid societal flaws like the children of great upper class individuals getting way more in life than their merit can account for, would still be there without money.  Success is success, money or no.  If you didn't allow people to rise above the middle class status, that may solve some of those problems.  It would be interesting to see how that plays out in society.

Blizzard

You should really watch Zeitgeist Addendum, then you'll understand what I mean. I can't really well explain 90 minutes of a presentation in just one post. There's even the part with the Great Depression explained and how it was just one big step towards the collapse and not the collapse itself. The banks pretty much "saved" the situation back then. Just watch it.
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Quote from: winkioI do not speak to bricks, either as individuals or in wall form.

Quote from: Barney StinsonWhen I get sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead. True story.

winkio

I will later tonight then.  Which for me means in 4-8 hours.

Blizzard

July 23, 2009, 03:29:53 pm #35 Last Edit: July 23, 2009, 03:30:59 pm by Blizzard
There should be a free download online. Just google for it. Ignore the part about the utopian new society (I personally believe that it has many, many unmentioned flaws, mostly human factor), just concentrate on the first part that explains why the current system doesn't work as well as we liked it to.
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Quote from: winkioI do not speak to bricks, either as individuals or in wall form.

Quote from: Barney StinsonWhen I get sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead. True story.

omegapirate2000

I agree with Blizzards view of the movie.
Spoiler: ShowHide

winkio

July 23, 2009, 10:34:07 pm #37 Last Edit: July 23, 2009, 10:56:32 pm by winkio
okay, I just watched part 1 of the movie, I think it's the part you are referring to, about money, debt, and inflation.  It sounded way too oversimplified, so I am researching it further right now.  I'll post my comments in a bit.

EDIT: Here is a statement: debt allows the population and the economy to expand.

Let me liken it to something we can grasp much more easily: Starcraft.  Each person/business is a Command center, right near a resource patch with minerals.  By going into a 50 mineral + interest debt to a different command ceneter, you can produce an scv, which will increase your mining rate thus increasing your wealth by more than 50 minerals.  You can now afford to pay it back and have extra.  It's not a perfect metaphor, but the idea is this:  money is created on both sides of a transaction during lending.  The real value, in a stable economy, should meet or exceed the fake debt value.

What I am saying is that money produces money.  If you buy a block of wood, then make a chair out of it, you have made something from nothing.  In a stable economy, the value of the chair meets or exceeds the value of the loan and the extra value associated with it in the banks.

Blizzard

July 24, 2009, 03:32:04 am #38 Last Edit: July 24, 2009, 03:34:59 am by Blizzard
Yes, but that isn't making money out of money. It's using money to create new value. A chair isn't money. The problem happens when you make money out of money (banks and interest rates). No new value is created. This should be covered in part 2. Due to some circumstances I didn't watch part 1 yet. I might do it tonight.

I agree that lending money can ultimately result in creating new value and expand the economy. But as soon as the process starts going the other way and you keep losing money to cover your debts, there's a problem. If you can't recover from that, bankrupting is inevitable.
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Quote from: winkioI do not speak to bricks, either as individuals or in wall form.

Quote from: Barney StinsonWhen I get sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead. True story.

Fantasist

July 24, 2009, 07:19:23 am #39 Last Edit: July 24, 2009, 07:58:00 am by Blizzard
Quote(Zeitgeist anyone?)

Oh hell yes :D No wonder I see where you're coming from. I'm not too familiar or interested with the political orientation of the world, but the current monetary system is going to take us nowhere.

Offtopic: I've watched both the parts and I love the presentation among other things.
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