8:18 – "Germany is very financially responsible".

The clip makes a few good points, twists others and omits some central issues. But I want to comment on the quote above most of all, because it forms the basis for all kinds of arguments and recommendations.

The claim that Germany is financially responsible stems from what has been paraded around domestically as the "schwarze Null" (black zero), meaning a balanced budget. Given how focused most economic debates are around the national debt or the current budget deficit, it shouldn't come as a surprise that not running a deficit evokes positive responses in the public. If there has ever been an easy sell, politically, it's this.

However, it's not that simple.

For instance, the sectoral balance rule dictates, by pure accounting identity, that the sum of public balance, private balance and external balance is 0 at all times. In case of Germany, this means that the balanced public budget (no surplus, just a fat zero) requires a current account surplus of the same size as private savings – or an accumulation of private debt. For someone to run a surplus, someone else has to run a deficit. In this case, foreign economies have to run a deficit vis-á-vis Germany, so that neither the German government nor the German private sector have to run a deficit.

The composition of each sector is another topic entirely, but the point remains: no surplus in Germany without a deficit in the periphery. If everyone is to be like Germany, Klingons have to run the respective deficit.

My question: is it financially responsible to depend on other economies' deficits to keep your own house in order? Is it responsible to engage in this kind of behaviour after having locked yourself into a monetary union with less competitive economies who have no way of defending themselves through currency devaluation?

Second point: capital accounts and current accounts are two sides of the same coin. If Germany runs a current account surplus of X%, it also runs a capital account deficit of X%. Doesn't explain anything, but it's the same for the countries at the other side of these trade imbalances. Spain's current account deficit with Germany meant a capital inflow of the same size.

Let's look at EuroStat's dataset for current accounts. Germany had run a minor current account deficit during the late '90s and a small surplus up to 2003. From then on, it went up, up, up. Given the size of Germany's economy within Europe, that jump from 2% to 7.5% is enormous. Pre-GFC, the majority of this surplus went to... yap, PIIGS. Their deficits multiplied.

Subsequently, capital of equals size flowed into these countries, looking for investments. No nation, none, can absorb this amount of capital without it resulting in a massive misallocation, be it stock bubbles, housing bubbles, highways to nowhere or lavish consumption. Michael Pettis wrote a magnificent account (Syriza and the French indemnity of 1871-73) of this and explains how Germany handled a similar inflow of capital after the Franco-Prussian war: it crashed their economy.

As Pettis correctly points out, the question of causality remains. Was the capital flow a pull or a push?

The dataset linked above says it all happened at just about the same time, in all countries. It also happened at the same time as Germany's parliament signed of on "Agenda 2010", which is the cause of massive wage suppression in Germany. Germany intentionally lowered its unit labour costs and undercut the agreed upon inflation target (2%). German employees and retirees were forced to live below their means, so the export sector could gain competitiveness against all the other nations, including those in the same currency union. Beggar-thy-neighbour on steroids.

Greece overshot the inflation target. They lived beyond their means. But due to their size, it's economically negligable. France stayed on point the entire time, has higher productivity than Germany and still gets defamed as the lame duck of Europe. Yet Germany, after more than a decade of financial warfare against its fellow members of the EU/EZ, is hailed as the beacon of financial responsibility.

Mercantilism always comes at the cost of others. And the EU is living proof.

What brand of racism? Well, thanks to the amazing technology of the sift, let's do a little search..... oh look.
"Slavery is irrelevant to the plight of the black man today."

"If Blacks did not commit more crimes than other groups then women would not be clutching their purses and other demographic groups would not be as afraid."

"Your right but in Zimmerman neighborhood there have been break in by young black men. Hence young black thiefs' set the precedent for Martin to be followed." Hey, crap grammar into the bargain too!

"Funny how you don't hear jack what Black pastors protest against GAY marriage" Racism and homophobia.... bonus!

"And you wonder why blacks are still call the n word."

No, you're a fucking beacon of racial harmony and enlightenment.

You're goddamn right I'm angry. Being angry is the correct response to this. And no, I don't need any "anger management" bullshit, because I control my anger and channel it into doing useful things.

And the US national debt is 16.3 trillion. Relevant?

I'd be the last person to hold up Thailand as a shining beacon of a country doing things right in general ... but when it comes to health care I figure I'm better off here than at home.

MASSIVE LONG POST WARNING: feel free to skip this

I usually like Vsauce a lot, but I disagree with just about every assumption and every conclusion he makes in this video.

Anthropogenic vs external extinction event -
I think the likelihood of an anthropogenic extinction event is low. Even in the cold war, at the apex of "mutually assured destruction" risk, IF that destruction was triggered I think it would have been extremely unlikely to make humans go extinct. The US and USSR might have nuked each other to near-extinction, but even with fairly mobile nuclear fallout / nuclear winter, etc. I think that enough humans would have remained in other areas to remain a viable population.

Even if ONE single person had access to every single nuclear weapon in existence, and they went nuts and tried to use them ALL with the goal of killing every single human being on the planet, I still bet there would be enough pockets of survivors in remote areas to prevent humans from going utterly extinct.

Sure, an anthropogenic event could be devastating -- catastrophic even -- to human life. But I think humanity could recover even from an event with an associated human death rate of 95% or more -- and I think the likelihood of anything like that is real slim.

So that leaves natural or external extinction events. The KT extinction (end of the dinosaurs) is the most recent major event, and it happened 65 million years ago. Homo sapiens have been around 150-200,000 years, and as a species we've been through some fairly extreme climatic changes. For example, humans survived the last ice age around 10-20,000 years ago -- so even without technology, tools, buildings, etc. we managed to survive a climate shift that extreme. Mammals survived the KT extinction, quite possible that we could have too -- especially if we were to face it with access to modern technology/tools/knowledge/etc.

So I think it would probably take something even more extreme than the asteroid responsible for KT to utterly wipe us out. Events like that are temporally rare enough that I don't think we need to lose any sleep over them. And again, it would take something massive to wipe out more than 95% of the human population. We're spread out, we live in pretty high numbers on basically every landmass on earth (perhaps minus Antarctica), we're adapted to many many different environments ... pretty hard to kill us off entirely.


"Humans are too smart to go extinct" @1:17 -
I think we're too dumb to go extinct. Or at least too lazy. The biggest threats we face are anthropogenic, but even the most driven and intentionally malevolent human or group of humans would have a hard time hunting down *everybody, everywhere*.


Doomsday argument -
I must admit that I don't really understand this one. The guess of how many total humans there will be, EVER, seems extremely arbitrary. But anyway, I tend to think it might fall apart if you try to use it to make the same assertions about, say, bacterial life instead of human life. Some specific species of bacteria have been around for way way longer than humans, and in numbers that dwarf human populations. So, the 100 billionth bacteria didn't end up needing to be worried about its "birth number", nor did the 100 trillionth.


Human extinction "soon" vs. "later" -
Most plausibly likely threats "soon" are anthropogenic. The further we push into "later", the more the balance swings towards external threats, I think. But we're talking about very small probabilities (in my opinion anyway) on either side of the scale. But I don't think that "human ingenuity will always stay one step ahead of any extinction event thrown at it" (@4:54). Increased human ingenuity is directly correlated with increased likelihood of anthropogenic extinction, so that's pretty much the opposite. For external extinction events, I think it is actually fairly hard to imagine some external scenario or event that could have wiped out humans 100, 20, 5, 2, or 1 thousand years ago that wouldn't wipe us out today even with our advances and ingenuity. And anything really bad enough to wipe us out is not going to wait for us to be ready for it...


Fermi paradox -
This is the most reasonable bit of the whole video, but it doesn't present the most common / best response. Other stars, galaxies, etc. are really far away. The Milky Way galaxy is 100,000+ light years across. The nearest other galaxy (Andromeda) is 2.2 million light years away. A living being (or descendents of living beings) coming to us either of those distances would have to survive as long as the entire history of human life, all while moving at near the speed of light, and have set out headed straight for us from the get-go all those millions and millions of years ago. So lack of other visitors is not surprising at all.

Evidence of other life would be far more likely to find, but even that would have to be in a form we could understand. Human radio signals heading out into space are less than 100 years old. Anything sentient and actively looking for us, even within the cosmically *tiny* radius of 100 light years, would have to have to evolved in such a way that they also use radio; otherwise the clearest evidence of US living here on Earth would be undetectable to them. Just because that's what we're looking for, doesn't mean that other intelligent beings would take the same approach.

Add all that up, and I don't think that the Fermi paradox is much cause for alarm. Maybe there are/have been LOTS of intelligent life forms out there, but they have been sending out beacons in formats we don't recognize, or they are simply too far away for those beacons to have reached us yet.


OK, I think I'm done. Clearly I found the video interesting, to post that long of a rambling response... But I was disappointed in it compared to usual Vsauce stuff. Still, upvote for the thoughts provoked and potential discussion, even though I disagree with most of the content and conclusions.

Oh Shep, you are sometimes a beacon of common sense and rationality in the midst of a sea of fear-mongering idiots.

It would follow, therefore, that everyone would choose their religion according to their own temperament and there would be no regional grouping of belief.

Would you say, for example, that catholicism in ireland has had no effect on its prevailing culture and no part in the various atrocities that culture has inflicted on the people unfortunate enough to be born into it?

Islam is particularly poorly placed to distance itself from the actions of its adherents. It's a common, but not really excusable, error to generalise from christianity's 'contradictory mess' and necessity of invention in interpretation to what in reality is islam's lamentably direct instructions to its followers.

The difference between countries like turkey and saudi arabia, though turkey's hardly a shining beacon of freedom, is secularity and proximity to more enlightened neighbours. Arguing that some muslims are like this and some muslims are like that is preposterously mendacious when the mean truth is: the less religious people are, the more ethical they are.

I disagree with this somewhat. It sounds poetic and whatnot, but contrary to your statement I still feel that understanding you know nothing at all is a sign of actual intelligence.
In the context of your post: "He who knows and knows he knows" easily applies to every fucking moron on the planet, who is convinced of their own self-righteousness.
Everyone *thinks* they 'know' to a fault. Ultimately none of us know anything, and to proceed through life with this perspective will not only let you avoid being a beacon of ignorance, but you will approach all things from the innocent perspective of wanting to learn more.

That's my philosophy anyway.

Happened across this while looking at avalanche videos

if you're interested,....

generally you wear a transceiver (sometimes called a beacon). Everyone wears one and it constantly transmits. If someone gets buried , the rescuers switch to search mode. Old transceivers just beeped faster as you got closer, but modern digital transceivers generally have a distance and direction readout. They're still only good for about 100 feet.

You have 15-20 mins to dig someone out before Bad Shit happens (oxygen depravation, etc). The digging itself takes most of the time, so finding them quickly is imperative. All of which assumes they haven't already died of trauma in the initial slide.

We need to start a program where we fit all sharks with a beacon of some kind and whenever they wander into swimming areas they are picked up by sensors and then a sound system on the beach starts playing the Jaws theme. That will get everyone out of the water in a jiffy.

In what way was i wrong? I said that you made a bias speculation, and you reply with "Wrong again! I actually made a speculation." - Well, that confirms what i said, sans the word bias, obviously because from your point of view you aren't biased. But your ...colourful language betrays you.

The stand-your-ground nonsense doesn't fly in what i consider (that's MY bias, my opinion) more civilised areas. Zimmerman wanted a fight, chased and got the fight he wanted, got out of his depth and killed a man all in the name of self defence. That is absolutely insane to me, but i respect any people's right to self determination; it's why i don't live somewhere that has laws which allow someone to pursue and kill without repercussions. I think you'll find that the law is contentious at best, and is only seen as a shining beacon of justice by racists. Those of us with less bias on those particular matters see it as a tragedy that could have been avoided if a certain person hadn't willingly pursued someone out of a desperate desire to be some kind of rentacop.

@Stormsinger, then why can't I buy the music or tv shows I want from Amazon?

How come hulu or netflix aren't available in my country? I've said it before, I am happy to spend money on the content I want, just make it available to me for a reasonable price (i.e. not nearly double what people in the US are paying for it http://www.steamprices.com/au/topripoffs)

At what point is it my fault that there is literally no legal way for me to purchase the content I want due to an arbitrary geographical restriction?

So if the entire internet is an experiment in alternative monetization, it's a dismal fucking failure.

You want some examples that work?

Steam Sales
Louis CK selling his entire show for $5
Kickstarter (hell Star Citizen alone)

Some people will always choose free. Fine, maybe they just can't afford it, and telling them to just not watch it is never going to work. Forget those people. Focus on the ones who believe that good content deserves rewarding. Make it easy for them to access your content (reasonable price, no drm or arbitrary restrictions) and they will pay.

Trying to stop piracy is pointless. It's out there and as I said, someone people genuinely have a moral issue with paying for content (the OSS zealots for example). Just assume it's going to be pirated (it already is!) and make it easy for those of us who want to pay for it to get it.

It's like you didn't understand the video, not surprisingly.

the point is that the care of veterans has been an ongoing issue since the founding of the nation. We send them off to war way too easily and tell them to fuck off when they return.

It's not a partisan issue.

In other words, there is nothing Obama could do that would satisfy the right, so you can just stop it with your "beacon of light" nonsense. Even if Obama totally embraced the rights policies in every step, (oh wait, that's what Obama/Romneycare is) you'd still manufacture a way to bitch.

You could have video evidence of Obama being born in Hawaii, the birthers would still whine or claim it was doctored.

In other words, we're not dealing with rational people here, so why should we cater to them?

Go back to school bob

Ifyou can't make the VA the beacon of light for healthcare how will Obama Care succeed? It can't. There is no problem that government can't make worse.

Sounds like the vets should keep their guns.

Freedoms are what we say they are and what we are willing to claim for ourselves. Laws are for morons and apes...domesticated primates.

Here's one I heard second-hand about the other day as reported early today by:
http://austriantribune.com/informationen/143636-nsa-allegedly-planted-beacons-servers-routers-and-other-network-gear-prior

Intercepting orders for servers, taking them to the Grinch-warehouse and outfitting them with virtually undetectable routing hardware, restoring the packaging material as it was and then sending them on to their 'customers.'

As the general here alludes to in his opener, the shit Snowden blew his whistle about resides in iceberg tips-If they reveal anything regarding the technology in place to keep track of ALL of humanity, military capabilities, breakthroughs in science or medicine etc., chances are good once the information gets to the masses the shits been around for quite some time.

What you think you know about their capabilities and the information hidden from the masses is old fucking news. The only meaningful question left is who are, "THEY?"

Tags for this video have been changed from 'louis ck, little boys, boys, live at the beacon theatre' to 'louis ck, little boys, boys, live at the beacon theatre, jizanthapus' - edited by brycewi19