>> ^marinara:

>> ^NetRunner:
Exports alone don't account for the rise in prosperity post-WWII. A lot of it was that we'd build up a huge industrial infrastructure that pivoted from making bombers and tanks to making refrigerators and cars.


so you're saying the postwar boom was not because Americans were making money on exports, but because factory production was so profitable. If you think 18% of world exports wasn't the reason for the boom, then I have nothing
Read my comment again. I'm saying the higher exports was a part of it, but not the entire reason.

You're taking position that the one and only reason America got more prosperous was because exports were higher, and to support this argument that this alone was the cause, you just provide a chart showing that they were higher back then.

Seriously, think about it. Would the American standard of living improve if the only change in the economy post WWII was that we sold a larger portion of what we produced to other countries? Wouldn't we have to have consumed more domestically to make our standard of living go up?

>> ^marinara:
The debt can't go up forever, period. I agree w/ you on this: you can grow your way out of a huge debt. What reason do you have to think that we're going to go back to huge GDP growth here in the USA? I'm saying, either we need to grow, or control the debt. Don't you agree?

I do agree. My position is that our debt isn't a problem right now, and that most of the expected problem in the future would be fixed if we got unemployment and GDP back up to trend.

>> ^marinara:
You're saying we need deficit spending to grow. We've had lots of deficit spending, and where is the growth? I'm talking over the last decade.

But what did we spend it on? Tax cuts for the wealthy, a couple wars, and a prescription drug benefit that was tooled mostly as a payoff to big Pharma.

We also did that in a period of expansion, which is when Keynesian prescriptions sound positively right-wing -- according to it we should've engaged in fiscal austerity during the expansion (like Clinton did), rather than trying to engage deficit spending aimed entirely at the supply side of the economy.

>> ^marinara:
[W]e have to fix what's wrong before we can recover.


I can't argue with that. So what's wrong, and how do we fix it?

PS: Krugman on Iceland vs. Ireland. Revisiting it, he never calls it Keynesian, but Iceland is talking a considerably more left-wing tack than Ireland, and Iceland is recovering a lot faster.

>> ^NetRunner:
Exports alone don't account for the rise in prosperity post-WWII. A lot of it was that we'd build up a huge industrial infrastructure that pivoted from making bombers and tanks to making refrigerators and cars.


so you're saying the postwar boom was not because Americans were making money on exports, but because factory production was so profitable. If you think 18% of world exports wasn't the reason for the boom, then I have nothing
http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch5en/conc5en/shareworldexports.html

>> ^NetRunner:

I think you're assuming all debt leads to inflation. Have you looked at the stats on debt and inflation recently? Debt's going up fast, but inflation has stayed flat and long-term bond interest rates have fallen,
The debt can't go up forever, period. I agree w/ you on this: you can grow your way out of a huge debt. What reason do you have to think that we're going to go back to huge GDP growth here in the USA? I'm saying, either we need to grow, or control the debt. Don't you agree? also... http://money.cnn.com/2011/02/02/news/economy/interest_national_debt/index.htm

I can't find any evidence that the recovery in iceland was "Keynesian "

You're saying we need deficit spending to grow. We've had lots of deficit spending, and where is the growth? I'm talking over the last decade. I don't disagree that extra spending will help. I do assert that interest rates change, that you can't just spend X and get outcome Y. Rather, we have to fix what's wrong before we can recover.

>> ^marinara:

1. WWII is a bad example b/c USA had no economic competition after WWII.

Nations aren't businesses. Most of what's produced in the US is sold in the US, always has been, and likely always will be. Exports alone don't account for the rise in prosperity post-WWII. A lot of it was that we'd build up a huge industrial infrastructure that pivoted from making bombers and tanks to making refrigerators and cars.

>> ^marinara:
2. Are you assuming some level of debt after the 'space alien boost'?
I think you are. Or maybe you assume inflation doesn't hurt or something.

I think you're assuming all debt leads to inflation. Have you looked at the stats on debt and inflation recently? Debt's going up fast, but inflation has stayed flat and long-term bond interest rates have fallen, even after S&P tried their best to make them spike by downgrading our credit rating.

>> ^marinara:
Iceland politicians took on their banks, we didn't and now they're recovering while we aren't.


Incidentally, Iceland followed textbook Keynesian macroeconomic policy. Now they're better off than the countries who just tried to stick to austerity and tight money (the former by choice, the latter not).

>> ^marinara:

I doubt that any amount of spending could 'fix' the economy. Instead, you'd have to borrow-spend continuously, like pumping air into a burst balloon.


I think first you have to commit to a theory about what's wrong with the economy now -- not symptoms, like unemployment is high, but what the underlying root cause is.

There are a lot of things it's not being caused by. It's not been caused by any physical damage to our country's industry or infrastructure. It's not been caused by people suddenly waking up one morning having forgotten how to make things. We didn't suddenly lose all our natural resources. What, in terms of real economic capacity did we lose? Anything? Anything at all?

The other half of the "fake alien invasion" thing is that it tends to focus our minds on what's real (factories, workers, materials), and what's not (debt, money, inflation), and helps us realize how ridiculous it is that we would let concern about debt or inflation stand in the way of us putting our resources to work to save ourselves from being turned into some alien race's dinner.

Once you realize that, all you need to do to get the rest of the way is to realize that the best way to save yourself from problems with debt and inflation is to put your resources to work making as much stuff as possible, you start to see why Keynesians are annoyed that they might need to fake an alien invasion to get people to do the sensible thing...

>> ^pyloricvalve:

That's a good summary of the Keynesian response. I guess my answer would be that even supposing the 10% unemployed were neatly then employed in building these weapons this would just be temporary. Later they will eventually all be unemployed again having wasted time and money in training for "fictional" work.

It seems to me that building real military spaceships would require real skills, real work, real factories, real technology, and there's no particular reason why if the demand for military spaceships evaporated, that they wouldn't just pivot into trying to serve a different market, like, say, commercial spacecraft.

That's the kind of adaptation free markets are supposed to be good at, right?

>> ^pyloricvalve:

Even if that work had some beneficial side effects, making unnatural economic growth will still be a net cost to the economy versus spending time finding real jobs. These are what they really 'should' in some sense be doing. To do this would surely be better unless you claim the 10% will continue unemployed permanently.

There's no reason to think additional idleness accelerates the process of someone finding their "right" job. That also presupposes that there's a right and a wrong job, and that there's inherently some economic damage being done by seeing someone doing real work producing real goods rather than having them stay idle and wait for Godot.

>> ^pyloricvalve:

These arguments can be seen in the two Hayek/Keynes rap videos. There are two inconsistent models of the economy. How can we decide which one is right? This argument is very old so I guess it's not that easy... Maybe look at long run growth in more and less interventionist countries? I suspect growth will be faster in the less interventionist nation.

Actually, it's not really a persisting argument amongst actual trained economists. The Austrian theory of economics has been invalidated time and time again by facts, but it lives on because it's a branch of economics that appeals to the ideological right.

That's not to say everything Hayek ever said was wrong, but the Hayekian idea that Keynesian fiscal and monetary policy will inevitably lead to utter ruin has definitely not been borne out by the facts. Also, no country that has followed a Hayekian prescription for recessions (keep money tight, and implement fiscal austerity) has ever done anything but deepen their recession and prolong their recovery.

i never let anyone dictate how i should feel about myself based on their limited understandings and poor vocabulary.
words will always be inadequate to truly express what we are feeling/thinking/dreaming and they will always evolve into more nuanced meanings.
savage pointed out the pivotal crux of language:context.

speaking only for myself i dont really appreciate faggot too much,i prefer cunt.now THAT is a great word.
and i am never letting go of "gay" that word fits in to waaaay too many situations,none of which have to do with homosexuality.

context and intent can be fairly easily discerned for anyone who is paying attention and has half a brain.
for those that take offense to these words..out of context..well,i suspect they may take offense to a great many things and i for one am not going to stop being me in order to appease someones tender sensibilities based on an archaic and irrelevant meaning.

It's amazing how much music scores help enhance the emotion of moment - something really that has only been harnessed by composers within the last twenty years with beautiful intentionality.

I've always wondered what it would be like to transpose modern scores on to pivotal moments in classic movies to see if it would help enhance those moments and, for this, it certainly does.

>> ^blankfist:

Burden of proof? Evidence? Well, it's hard to have any evidence when the government rushes off under the cover of night and runs top secret exercises with zero transparency except for what they tell me they did. But, let's look at the facts. OBL was unarmed, he was shot, the government reported an untruth that a gun battle was waged, they also reported an untruth about him using his wife as a shield, they claimed they ran a DNA test and identified OBL, then cleaned him and dumped his body in the ocean all within 24 hours.

How do you know OBL was unarmed? Because the government said so? How do you know that it was an "untruth" that a gun battle was waged? I'm particularly interested in that one, since you're the only person I've seen advance the story that the SEALs didn't take any fire at all during the raid.

>> ^blankfist:
And you say the burden on proof is on the "we the people" of this country to prove or disprove the secret assassinations of our military and CIA? Rolling my eyes right now.

Hey, you're the one who's supposedly in favor of due process. The burden of proof is always on the accuser, not the accused. It doesn't matter what the accusation is, or who you're accusing.

You're right, you've got a hard case to prove...whatever it is you're trying to prove. That's why I think you should probably start looking for evidence, rather than running around pronouncing people guilty of things you can't prove. That is, at least if you're going to continue to hold yourself up as the arbiter of what constitutes due process and what doesn't.

>> ^blankfist:
Gladly. 1. It's Osama Bin Laden. He's the bogeyman for our loss of liberties over the past decade and the reason we've marched headlong into wars. 2. The other "examples" weren't met with such momentous applause as the death of OBL - and the cheers were mostly from progressives I've always hoped were pro-human rights (namely the right to due process here). But instead what I see are a bunch of apologists who are pro-partisanship even at the cost of human rights.

Ahh, pretty much what I expected. He's famous, and there are plenty of liberals who're glad he's dead.

So what you're saying is, rather than accept that maybe, just maybe Obama deserves credit for killing the bogeyman, and joining the liberal pivot to "so now we can bring everyone home, right?" You want to intentionally beat this drum to try to show that liberals are...what? You say "bloodthirsty" a lot, but at best this is an excuse to call people hypocrites for saying "in this case, I'm willing to make an exception."

Instead, your logic (such as it is) goes:

1. It isn't a war, it's purely a criminal matter (no matter what Congress says)
   
2. The official story says he was shot while reaching for a weapon, which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the SEALs could've captured him if they wanted, and just shot him anyways
   
3. It was Obama's order that even if they could capture him, they should kill him instead
   
4. Obama is the physical embodiment of pure liberalism, so anything he does must be based on a core tenet of liberalism
   
5. Therefore all liberals are bloodthirsty murderous cretins, especially that pro-Obama NetRunner guy

Don't you realize you're making an awful lot of prejudicial assumptions there?

I fought for my college karate team, and (if it wasn't already obvious to everyone) this type of kick is very difficult to pull off. Normal spin kicks (also difficult to land accurately) are done with the back leg. The front leg acts as a pivot that never leaves the ground, or perhaps hops a little due to momentum. This is the type of kick the defender is expecting - you can see him lower his arms to block the first leg. In this video, the kicker spins through and uses the pivot foot for the kick. The kick is delayed, so the defenders arms are out of position, and he enjoys an unblocked path to the defender's skull. There is a good bit of luck involved here, but the skill in placing the kick and generating the force is fantastic. Very impressive.

>> ^criticalthud:

@<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/shinyblurry" title="member since January 21st, 2011" class="profilelink">shinyblurry
probability, and a study of history indicates that it is much more likely that we create gods in our image, rather than gods creating us in theirs. The is natural result of an egocentric species, which creates projections of the self and imbues those projections with it's own valued qualities. Notice how, throughout history, our gods mirror ourselves, even changing in quality as society dictates.
Or we can go with the notion that we "know" the all-powerful and omnipitent...which is a mastabatory exercise in extreme arrogance.
my friend, there is a rather important disconnect between those who profess to "know" and those that profess to have no knowledge about what cannot be known. Atheism is not a belief that you are wrong and that your holy book is trash, it is instead a lack of belief, or lack of certainty in what is unknown and cannot be experienced except through death.
i was raised catholic. leaving was not a choice in what i believed, it was an acceptance of the unknown.


that was..
well..
AWESOME.
people basing their experiences on their own subjective reality and limited understanding and then conflating this experience into a known variable.
in this mans case being "born again" into a judau-christian theosophy.
good for him.seems it has given him a new way to not only perceive his surroundings but to experience life in a new paradigm.
but his experience does not translate to actual wisdom nor understanding.
it just means he had a pivotal,life changing experience and one he is attempting to marry the unknown into something more tangible...and human.

what a powerful experience that must have been for him.
who are we to question how he manifests an out-of-body experience?
seems to me it has fundamentally changed who he is on a most base level and that is not a bad thing.
so what if he conflates that experience with chrstianity?
he is still better for it in the long run.
so..
good for him.

>> ^Deano:

That is very cool. Wish I had the ability to work out the maths behind that.


It's all circles. Sin, Cos, radius and diameters, etc.

Imagine 12 glass discs, side by side, travelling around in a circle, pivoting on a point beside the first disc. The further out the disc, the more rotations each disc has to make to "keep up" with the disc beside it. If you paint a dot on the edge of each disc, the dots will make a similar pattern, left to right (ignoring up-and-down movement), if you look down the row from the pivot point.

The discs farther out correspond to the shorter strings, the near discs to the longer strings

It's a shape that, because it "wobbles" around it's centre axis, rather than rotating around its centre axis like a wheel, it can present a consistent cross sectional width between two parallel planes. In reality, there are three points it rotates around at any particular time, depending on what point it's at.

Think of it as 3 pie shapes. It rotates on a point at the book, and when it finishes it's arc on the table, THAT becomes the new pivot, and the book travels on the arc, then the table, then the book... etc.

What's neat is you can do this with any odd-sided polygon. It won't work on even numbers.

Yeah, I'm deleting that last part as there's too many conditions for that to be simple.

I had to go back and re-watch the intro to know who the blonde Nazi they put up against Glenn was.

Answer: Fran Townsend, former Bush Homeland Security Adviser.

That explains the following pivot, which literally made me laugh out loud:

Townsend: Even Julian Assange himself has not made the argument that what he's doing is some sort of public service. ... He made no distinctions about the harm he might be doing to foreign governments, to the US government, to diplomats and soldiers around the world, he just wholesale threw this all out there.

Greeenwald: (Crosstalk) That's totally false. That's just a lie. He's published less than 1% of the 250,000 diplomatic cables that he came into possession of. ...

Townsend, shrilly: He has threatened to publish much more than he has, and there isn't any-- You know the notion that we should be grateful he hasn't committed a far larger crime than he's already committed is ridiculous!

...and this is after Glenn explained at length that journalists shouldn't be in the habit of calling people criminals until they've been convicted of a crime, or at the very least charged with one!

Oh, and anyone who's watched a single interview with Assange understands that he does think he's providing a public service. He doesn't use that phrase, but when he says stuff like "I believe it's important for people to know what secrets their government is keeping" he isn't talking about doing it for his own personal gain.

I swear, they have some sort of class they send these people to that trains them to pack as many lies as possible in as few words as possible. That way, anyone who responds won't have the opportunity to refute them all in a cable news interview, and at least some will get through to people unchallenged.

that was probably the best and most succinct clarification on the pivotal flaw of a truly socialist economy.
just like pure capitalism is unsustainable,socialism is bound to fall on its own assumptions and hubris.
*promote!

Thanks Enoch you are a pivotal force of my ascension.


In reply to this comment by enoch:
woohoo!
congrats on the gold brother!
best achievment in my opinion.

>> ^csnel3:

This could have been wriiten by the police. This is how they want us to act when they interact with us.
Pull over immediately. ? (really? what happened to get to a safe spot? Women on a dark road, go to a police or fire station).
Show your hands. grip the wheel. Turn on the lights so they can see in.
Dont talk back, be nice. Answer their questions unless you want to go to jail and tell it to the judge.
If you have nothing to hide , empty your pockets, otherwise be ready for trouble.
If your detained, just cooperate and get a lawyer. Dont make a fuss. Just do as your told or it will get worse.
Its hard to fight the police so just go down easy.
THis just seems like a film by The Man to keep the cattle calm, trying to pass as a movie that will help the cattle..


You must of watched a different video. The video I watched was all about how to resist officers requests without giving them a reason to escalate the situation to you getting beat down and charged with felony assault. Don't talk back? Really? There were several very key and pivotal things you NEED to say when dealing with police which this video taught us. Go down easy? It isn't easy resisting people who aren't afraid to use force and have guns. What you are trying to do is fruit of the poison tree tactics. Give them no ground to go to except the unreasonable use of force, and you have a case to get them in trouble. If you give them reason or worse, permission, you are inviting in your own pain.