I totally agree. It's incredibly sad. If the New York City subway system had run with this sort of precision through the 60s and 70s, the city might have never gone through terrible economic recession of the 70s...because the attraction of such an incredible infrastructure system is compelling for everyone.

You're kidding, right? You do realise even in Ireland that accent is considered to be somewhere between herpes and being crushed by a falling piano on the list of bad shit that can happen to you?

Best review I've read of them.

The world was doing just fine. I mean there was that global recession thing that just won't go away - doesn't matter how much new money you print up to throw at it! And there have been a series of earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and storms around the world, seemingly more devastating as global warming is either the culprit or just some wishy-washy idea the government would have you believe so that the chem-trails can continue. ...So there were those things.

But the world was still here - at least. So from that point of view things were okay. And then The Cranberries had to blow it and end 11 years of silence (ah, that sweet, sweet silence) and return with more of Delores' vocal strychnine and another round of pedestrian pub-rock prancing.

Some people are never satisfied. Personally, I'm so tired of the extremists views on both sides (and believe me, Pat Robertson is often the source of pretty nasty extreme views) that this was actually refreshing. Some people are just so cynical, they can't appreciate anything less than Pat Robertson and Jesus himself coming forward as atheists.

Here's my view on it for those who may care:

Religion is pretty worthless. Sure it's been the cause of lots of horrible (and good) things through history, but it's also an attempt to combine what some deem as fact with something that's so beyond fact that we can't even comprehend it. It's man made. Full of errors and contradictions, blah, blah, blah. We all know that. Basically it all just falls apart whenever you try to throw science in there. It's like judging an apple by the standards of screwdriver.

So let's look at just the spiritual side of things. This is where I hang out. I see it as something beyond science (though uses science as it's tool) and factual understanding. It goes beyond nitpicking this fact and that falsehood. It's just a thing in the air that you can either be in touch with or not. If you are (and I am) then it fills a gap. Gives you hope. Comfort. Peace. Lots of things that are indescribable. But you feel better when you have it and you can't choose to believe in it or not. You just do. If you don't buy into it, then there is no gap to begin with. Doesn't make you smarter or better. You just have different needs.

Now maybe that means that in some dark recess of your psyche that if you're in touch with this spiritual side of things, then you die believing you'll be in an amazing place for eternity. And so you are. Or you don't believe, and so you aren't. Neither is better or worse compared to the other because they have no business being compared to the other. They don't coexist. They just both exist.

I think whatever it is that you believe in sets a standard for your life. Following those things, being true to those things, is what it's all about. This completes you. You can't force them on others or yourself for that matter. You can't punish others for not playing by your rules. You just have to play by your own (as long as you don't harm others).

And I'm tired of spiritualism HAVING to mean pure magic. Science is magic. Science is the most amazing magic. Does things you'd never believe. It's not an insult. It's just makes the whole damn system that much more incredible. If you choose to call that magic, go right ahead. It's just a word. Before long we'll realize that science can do things magic only dreamed of and that's pretty damn magical.

By the way, I'm not typing this trying to change anyone's mind or act like it's some kind of original thought. I'm just typing some thoughts. I like this kind of shit. Debates are great and healthy. I'm just sick of people hating on or insulting folks for believing in their heart something that's different.

I don't think you're grumpy, radx. Granted, my posts tend to have that same ominous tone, in general so I guess I'm a grump too. If you really think about the scale of inequality today, the absolute plundering the ultra-rich enjoyed during the recent recession and the efforts to keep money in politics to perpetuate this cycle with brilliant tools like Citizens United, it's hard not to be bleak.

Unfortunately, what we like to call democracy simply does not have the teeth to affect meaningful change. I am encouraged by the relative economic performance from the list of countries that have scrapped first past the post (reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation ) except for maybe Portugal, but even with more effective elections there is still an extra seat for the rich in every government.

Even more unfortunate will be the painful revolution the world will endure to either change from capitalism to some other form of economics (maybe resourced-based, a-la Peter Joseph.) If we don't simply slide obediently into greater and greater concentrations of wealth for the ultra-rich, we get closer and closer to revolution. But all it will take will be one upheaval to spur the revolution into action, be it:
- another, even more severe recession (maybe the EU will implode, taking the world economy down with it)
- severe global warming positive feedback loop from the arctic methane stores
- nuclear war

And who the hell knows what else might set people off. Maybe a solar flare will fry all the satellites in orbit and the lack of new tweets will create a world-wide frenzy of irate twats. And who knows when it will happen. Maybe 5 years, maybe 50 years. Since money pulls the strings, I think we're doomed to guess as to the source of VoodooV's "tipping point."

I grew up a couple of miles away from here, it should be noted that this tent city has been well established for well over 20 years and is not a new phenomenon of recession.

We can afford to be the way we are because we exploited (still do) the fuck out of third world nations. Exploited = people's lives and suffering. At best we can all claim ignorance for our economic drunk driving homicide but the point is moot.

The greater point is; put us through a real recession and see where this humanity lies. No, not this fake crap we went through to enrich the rich with unemployment and trading. I mean where people can't buy food or gas. Where government programs don't exist. I mean where children are massively starving in the street.

I am highly disenchanted that this is the best we have come to because we can afford it. Some sorry shit we have created with billions in abundance. I believe in Marx's ideas of capitalism exploitation (Though hold no faith in his communist beliefs,) Webber's views on logical thoughts for the dollar and how it will fuck us over, and Carlin's views on how shitty we are--at our greatest pinnacle.

Capitalism is nearing the end of its useful life. Indeed, it has improved the lot for billions world wide but the wealth gap trend is concentrating power and money into a tiny and untouchable group if power elitists. I don't think we're heading for a USSR/China model of communism, but based on this repeating cycle of boom and bust where the oligarchy always comes out well ahead and the vast majority are left to suffer.

I heard throughout the talk that "Capitalism is stagnant," and "the problem is productivity." These points really ignore that those at the top of the heap actually profited during the financial crisis. I don't think this is simply a complaint about "fairness." I think this is the central issue.

Those with real wealth can leverage it to not only stay wealthy, but grow that wealth continuously. Since money begets influence, no significant change will take place until some major upheaval forces the masses into action. If Capitalism can keep adding bandage "corrections" after every recession, the status quo will probably continue.

Interesting. I've got a semi-relevant story, but I get long winded so feel free to skip to the next comments if you like.

My wife (Thai) and I (American) had our first daughter this year. When she first got pregnant, one of the doc's first priorities was to get us both tested for "Thalassemia", which I had never heard of before. Apparently it is a blood disorder that affects hemoglobin production and therefore red blood cells -- if both parents carry the (rather rare) recessive gene, it can be a pretty bad deal.

It turned out that my wife is in the 1% or so of Thais that carry the gene (but she doesn't express / suffer from it, it is recessive and she has the dominant gene also). I had to get tested as well, but they said it would be incredibly unlikely that I'd be positive and I wasn't. So, our daughter has a 25% chance of being a carrier like my wife but zero chance of suffering from the effects of it.

Anyway, I was curious about the disease and asked the doc why it is a big deal here (every pregnant couple MUST get screened for it here when getting hospital/prenatal care) but I'd never even heard of it in the US. It turns out that the disease / genetic mutation arose only in places with high rates of malaria. As it happens, the genetic effect on your blood cells that the mutation has makes you more resistant to malaria -- full-on exhibitors of it (two recessive genes) are far less likely to die of malaria than people that don't have the gene. That is, assuming that you don't have the extreme variants of it that make it very unlikely to survive early childhood. Basically, if you have the disease and yet are healthy enough to survive to adulthood, you're close to malaria immune (that's overstating it, but ballpark). The malaria parasite can't survive and reproduce properly on your funky Thalassemia-affected red blood cells.

I thought that was a pretty interesting evolutionary response that must have arisen from some populations being pretty much decimated by malaria back in pre-recorded history. Current carriers like my wife are probably the descendants of lucky folks that survived a deadly outbreak in history by virtue of having a disease/mutation that is, under normal circumstances, slightly or even extremely bad in species survival / reproductive fitness terms. I thought that was kinda cool -- but I'm glad that neither my wife nor my daughter are/can be full-on expressors of the gene.

I don't expect this to be fixed by politicians because they only benefit from such a system. Unfortunately one of the side-effects of having people with so much wealth and power that they are untouchable. They are above the law, above the court system and will never pay for the laws they have broken to gain their wealth and we have a political system in this country and around the world that will only help them do it. One would have thought that our politicians would have woken up after the 'Great Recession' but that clearly isn't the case. I only fear that the next great collapse will do even more harm as these people go unchecked in their greed and willingness to fuck over the middle class to make a buck.

"To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble."

Paul Krugman, 2002.

Remember "The New Economy"? particularly how new-fangled, computerized market analysis would do away with the old laws of economics altogether? That was the idea that guided US economic policy in the Clinton era.

Greenspan was a big proponent of the idea, although apparently he did at one point have his doubts. I don't know how much that ideology informed policy after the dotcom crash, and how much of it was just a desperate attempt to keep the US economy from tanking altogether, but the crisis was successfully weathered, or postponed until 2008...

That's great, but now they've got this idiot as a partner for life. And they need to come up with his beer whenever he wants it, no matter what! Beer truck broke down? FUCK YOU, PAY ME. Recession? FUCK YOU, PAY ME. Place got hit by lightning, huh? FUCK YOU, PAY ME.

And finally, when all the beer is gone, you light a match.

People, people, people. Walmart is not the REASON the entire civilised world is finding itself in this situation - walmart is a symptom of the problem.

Walmart is an organisation motivated by profit just like any other.

I heard energy companies posting record profits year in and year out before the recession. There's people at the upper ends of those kinds of companies taking wages, bonuses, pensions and god-knows-what that some people couldn't make in 10 years. They don't deserve it, they don't work 10 times harder then the next person down, but there is a culture of taking what you can.

People don't need that kind of wealth, they just want it. Now, in times of hardship, energy companies are demanding more money for their services because they are no longer making the profit they used to. Instead of relying on the wealth that they have amassed during times of good, they rely on us to give them more.

So they cut a load of jobs to maximise their profits, but now the people they fired can't afford their energy bills. And this is going on all over the place - it isn't just the energy companies, it's also walmart with whatever schemes they've got. It's the oil companies and the politicians with whatever schemes they've got.

And all these schemes intermix, people losing jobs, people unable to afford this here and there because we've stagnated our money, there was no trickle down wealth, it's stagnated so much that there's not enough available anymore to share between the people that need it.

So now the government starts giving out handouts to the elderly or unemployed - £300 for your winter heating bill. But that's a huge amount of money so we need to raise taxes - which is a solution to nothing but puts the problem further ahead and maybe you can work harder later to make up for it.

Meanwhile, half the jobs that are getting taxed are now moved abroad because production is cheaper there. So entire markets of jobs no longer exist, we lost all of our car manufacturers, coal mines (it's cheaper from china), etc. which amounts to millions of jobs, and there's not a lot left to tax. What's the solution now? Which country do we bail out with borrowed money that is earning interest? If the untold billions in profit was returned to the customers back when times were good, we wouldn't be in this situation. But instead it went towards making let's say 30 individual people a lot richer.

Do you see where i'm going with this? It's a culture of greed, and each point down the line there is just enough intentional maneuverability for people to take more than you deserve and/or need; you either are in the clique, in the power scheme, taking cash - or you're not and you're holding up the facade. This isn't what a society is meant to be - it's meant to be a group of people working for their own common benefit because when we don't we all suffer and no one is happy.

This model has a short life-cycle; the eventual result is a few people having a lot of little bits of green paper that don't mean anything because they've forced everyone into abject poverty.

"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in."
It doesn't get any simpler than that. Until these old men start planting some trees and giving a LOT back, we will stagnate and you don't want to learn this implied lesson the hard way.

Of course. That's what makes something nationally relevant. It doesn't even have to affect me. It just needs to impact more than some kid in New Mexico or something (I already don't remember). I'm just saying this isn't national news. There isn't some national epidemic of cops brutalizing 10 year olds.

There could be an epidemic of police brutality, and certainly of racial profiling. A human interest piece covering systemic coverups, dirty departments, anything that involved actual digging could be considered actual national news. In fact, many have been run by the "corporate media" on things like stop-and-frisk, terrorist profiling, and even things like corporate prison labor. I, like most lefties, am interested in well researched stories of that sort. This isn't that. It's some regurgitated local sob story. Typically their fact checking is bullshit to boot.

In other words they amplify noise and partisan rhetoric rather than inform. The Economist or the Times they are not. It's usually fine that they do what they do, it's just that you shouldn't confuse it for something that it isn't, like news.

>> ^scheherazade:

That really speaks to the general state of selfish humanity.
If it isn't affecting me, then I don't care.
People not affected by the economic downturn, don't care about the recession.
People not affected by psycho police, don't care about police brutality.
Enough people are affected by the economy for there to be a lot that want to hear about it in the news.
Only some people are sacrificed to the police gods, so only some care to hear about that in the news.
(Although with 1% of our population in jail, and 1 in 30 in jail or on parole, 1 in 9 black males ages 20 to 34 in jail, it's not that small of an amount... and it's particularly sinister when these people are shoved into private jails that charge the public to hold the prisoners, and then charge the prisoners for their stay [as if it's a hotel], and use the prisoners for cheap labor that they sell to companies that don't want to hire people for livable wages, with solitary if you don't work for them. - on top of most people in jail being guilty of "crimes" that involved no one but themselves and have no harm.)
Ultimately, when it's you that's out of a job, the economy matters a lot.
And when it's you getting tazed, beat up, and charged with assault (oh the irony), then police brutality matters a lot.
The sentiment of "don't waste my time with your sob stories, we've got real problems (that affect me)", really goes all ways.
You could just as well read : "Who cares about your economy, when the government is taking my health and putting me away for no more than the entertainment/venting of a public employee".
-scheherazade

That really speaks to the general state of selfish humanity.
If it isn't affecting me, then I don't care.

People not affected by the economic downturn, don't care about the recession.
People not affected by psycho police, don't care about police brutality.

Enough people are affected by the economy for there to be a lot that want to hear about it in the news.

Only some people are sacrificed to the police gods, so only some care to hear about that in the news.

(Although with 1% of our population in jail, and 1 in 30 in jail or on parole, 1 in 9 black males ages 20 to 34 in jail, it's not that small of an amount... and it's particularly sinister when these people are shoved into private jails that charge the public to hold the prisoners, and then charge the prisoners for their stay [as if it's a hotel], and use the prisoners for cheap labor that they sell to companies that don't want to hire people for livable wages, with solitary if you don't work for them. - on top of most people in jail being guilty of "crimes" that involved no one but themselves and have no harm.)

Ultimately, when it's you that's out of a job, the economy matters a lot.
And when it's you getting tazed, beat up, and charged with assault (oh the irony), then police brutality matters a lot.

The sentiment of "don't waste my time with your sob stories, we've got real problems (that affect me)", really goes all ways.
You could just as well read : "Who cares about your economy, when the government is taking my health and putting me away for no more than the entertainment/venting of a public employee".

-scheherazade

All I'm going to say is that this guy is completely wrong about the gold standard. This country was on gold for like 150 years and didn't collapse in an "inescapable deflationary spiral". That is nonsense trotted out by big government economist. In fact, the highest rates of GDP growth still remain gold standard years. The only reason the crash of 29 existed was because of the central bank's (which didn't exist prior to 1913) inflationary bubble in the 20s, which HAD to be corrected. And rather than letting it correct, Hoover and FDR resisted and intervened mightily. All prior recessions were allowed to run their course, this one wasn't. I mean, for god's sake, FDR was slaughtering livestock to prevent food prices from falling alongside wages. Is it any wonder the damn thing persisted for like 15 years?