OK, so I remember a discussion that was had in one of my art history courses on modern art (a few years back) while I was attending the Emily Carr University of Art & Design

The value of art. Years ago during the depression, rich people, like the Rothschilds and such had so much money, they didn't know what to do with it. They began to invest in art, buying up all the famous pieces they could. It became a famous pass-time of the rich to buy art and flaunt it around. But the investors didn't just flaunt it, they sold it.

Now, these guys were profiteers as we all know, and so were all the players that surrounded the art world. These guys looked at art as an investment, always trading up and selling for more than they paid. Art was (and still is) a commodity.

Of course with any gold-rush industry, an industry is born around that commodity and art galleries sprung up everywhere. Art was all the rage. Gallery owners and promoters, traveling shows, salesmen, pretentious buyers and all those people that wanted to be part of the In-crowd, the inner-court, as it was, were frantic to be the next best thing.

Flash forward into the eighties. Break Dancing, Rap music, Graffiti and Street gangsters and the sub-culture that goes along with it was on the rise. Gallery curators were looking for the next "big thing". Someone noticed Banksy and brought him into the gallery. (I used to have the article on how it happened, I no longer do). They put up the "great works of Banksy. They brought the street/graffiti artist off the street and billed him as the new Commodity. They invested in him and promoted him. Every one in the In-crowd bought into him and his works sold for copious amounts of money.

Then the problem arose that the "King wasn't wearing any cloths." That's right, everyone started to realize that the art was crap, simply tagging brought in off the street and hung on the gallery walls.

Only it was too late because the BIG investors who sink their cash into these commodity/investments never allow themselves to loose money. They were duped and no one wanted to admit it.

So what did they do? Well like any King Pin that controls the markets, They ignore the mistake, threw a spin on it and pretend it didn't happen, No one want's to admit they spent $200,000 on a piece of CRAP. (or more, I don't remember the dollar amounts - and I'm sure it was quite a bit more, into the millions - I just don't have those facts handy, so I'm going with six-figures.)

So to this day, Banksy is still creating art, his works are still worth money (only because they say it is), and next to impossible to sell. The fame remains because Banksy's biggest contribution to the art world was to buy with caution, it's not a good commodity just because the art world jumps on it as the flavour of the day. Many investors lost a lot of money on his works and the art buying world got a slap in the face.

@RedSky

It's not that speculative activity has "nothing" to do with supply and demand. Of course it does. I'm saying that once you get past that initial set of contracts between the initial speculator and the farmer/mill/bread company/whatever, you get further and further away from supply and demand as a factor. You get people who are betting on price swings for profit rather than someone actually providing a service. The video did a pretty good job of illustrating the see-saw effect this has on markets, which makes prices unstable.

This see-saw effect causes severe and sudden price spikes and dips as people pile on short sales or speculative buying. The point is, if the price for a good increases 71% in a short period of time without extreme supply issues, it's likely a speculative effect. Yes, the video could have done a better job of explaining why biofuels, certain supply shortages, etc, don't account for nearly all of the price increase, but I've heard that broken down elsewhere. I'll try to find a source.

Furthermore, large US investment banks have convinced sovereign wealth funds (think Saudi royal money type funds) to invest in US commodities markets in recent years.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/11/AR2008081102462.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/02/24/us-commodities-sovereignwealth-idUSTRE51N28Z20090224

This is what these huge piles of money do to protect themselves. More recently, investors bought huge piles of Swiss Francs because it was the world's most stable currency. However, since such huge investment in the currency suddenly increased the value of the Franc, it caused Swiss exports to become more expensive. This started to destabilize their economy, as producers were having trouble keeping contracts with their buyers. So, the Swiss central bank started manipulating their currency value by offering to buy unlimited amounts of any foreign currency. They succeeded in dropping the Franc's value by around 10%. None of this activity had anything to do with supply or demand of Swiss goods...or goods anywhere for that matter. It was simply massive amounts of investment from a crowd mentality.

Same thing goes for the price of gold. It's just a giant hedge against inflation and/or price spikes in other markets...so you get these accumulations of money in "safe" areas, and that's how you get massive overvaluation of various goods and commodities (bubbles).

It's all due to the level of complexity. "Speculative activity" is a stabilizer when the number of speculators is low, but it has a destabilizing effect as the number of speculators increases.

@mgittle

I agree that particularly the sheer volume of speculative versus physical transactions is an issue.

You say though that speculative activity has nothing to do with supply and demand though, which I disagree with as ultimately that's what it's looking to predict. After all speculation based on rumor and not fundamentals is essentially a ponzi scheme, ultimately the price will fall back down to true levels when enough further buyers cannot be found, or for that matter when counter parties can't be found. Food may to some extent be an exception here in that people can't choose not to buy it though, so there is less pressure on it to fall if it rises too far.

Ultimately I agree that whether it causes more instability is debatable, but you could just as easily argue that more transactions means a deeper, more liquid market and that the price instability is more as a result of the market pricing in food price changes more readily. My issue with the video was more than it only listed the other factors, saying nothing of their significance relative to the argument it was making, which seems disingenuous.\

Uargh... nooooo...... Germany doesn't want the Euro because of some guilt or whatever. As far as I can tell we want the Euro because we've got the second biggest export-economy in the world and are surrounded by our biggest buyers. It is in germany's best economic interest to keep the single currency going. Also, we really like all you guyz in se Europe. Buy our stuff.

Having listened ten seconds more: Dude is full of shit. "Supranational political dictatorship"? "Harmonise out of existence national identities"? "soviet socialist republics"?

And for typical britishness: Mentioning Germany invading Poland and that the British king against whom the Americas rebelled as being German. Which has nothing to do with anything.

Yep, pretty common. Even if you post to the PayPal address, you're hardly better off, buyers generally have everything in their favour. He can get those eBay fees refunded (PayPal will be harder) but it takes admittedly more time than it's worth and isn't guaranteed, sometimes you get a good service rep, other times you don't.

That's just eBay, it ain't a perfect system but when you want to sell something quick...it's hard to find anything else.

The example of "fair share" could just as easily been about receiving medical care, or any other service that the government provided. So, I think the logic holds. A "fair share" of the funding of Medicare would be everyone paying the same amount, assuming everyone gets an equal share of the benefit, which they currently do when they qualify. I'm not sure that an individual "benefits more from society" if they are rich. Maybe I missed the logic in that. Maybe you mean that they benefit more from society wanting the products/services they provide, the circumstance that makes most of the rich, rich, or just that they can purchase or consume more of what society has to offer?
The place to start with increasing government revenues is reforming the IRS and its complexity. And yes, doing away with some ridiculous deductions allowed, say the deduction on the mortgage of a second home. Increasing taxes does little to make businesses more honest, and we all know major deception occurred in the sub-prime mortgage debacle. Enough greed to go around the table there though, from home buyers/mortgage companies/banks/insurers/.....
It's a simple fact, already pointed out in this thread, that increased tax revenue will only put a dent in the deficit crisis and only serious spending cuts can get us out. Since entitlement programs represent the bulk of Federal spending, they have to be on the table to make meaningful budget improvement.

A Pyrrhic 'Victory'
By Thomas Sowell
8/10/2011

In Don Marquis' classic satirical book, "Archy and Mehitabel," Mehitabel the alley cat asks plaintively, "What have I done to deserve all these kittens?"

That seems to be the pained reaction of the Obama administration to the financial woes that led to the downgrading of America's credit rating, for the first time in history.

There are people who see no connection between what they have done and the consequences that follow. But Barack Obama is not likely to be one of them. He is a savvy politician who will undoubtedly be satisfied if enough voters fail to see a connection between what he has done and the consequences that followed.

To a remarkable extent, he has succeeded, with the help of his friends in the media and the Republicans' failure to articulate their case. Polls find more people blaming the Republicans for the financial crisis than are blaming the President.

Why was there a financial crisis in the first place? Because of runaway spending that sent the national debt up against the legal limit. But when all the big spending bills were being rushed through Congress, the Democrats had such an overwhelming majority in both houses of Congress that nothing the Republicans could do made the slightest difference.

Yet polls show that many people today are blaming the Republicans for the country's financial problems. But, by the time Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives, and thus became involved in negotiations over raising the national debt ceiling, the spending which caused that crisis in the first place had already been done -- and done by Democrats.

Had the Republicans gone along with President Obama's original request for a "clean" bill -- one simply raising the debt ceiling without any provisions about controlling federal spending -- would that have spared the country the embarrassment of having its government bonds downgraded by Standard & Poor's credit-rating agency?

To believe that would be to believe that it was the debt ceiling, rather than the runaway spending, that made Standard & Poor's think that we were no longer as good a credit risk for buyers of U.S. government bonds. In other words, to believe that is to believe that a Congressional blank check for continued record spending would have made Standard & Poor's think that we were a better credit risk.

If that is true, then why is Standard & Poor's still warning that it might have to downgrade America's credit rating yet again? Is that because of the national debt ceiling or because of the likelihood of continued runaway spending?

The national debt ceiling is just one of the many false assurances that the government gives the voting public. The national debt ceiling has never actually stopped the spending that causes the national debt to rise to the point where it is getting near that ceiling. The ceiling simply gets raised when that happens.

Just a week before the budget deal was made at the eleventh hour, it looked like the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives had scored a victory by getting the President and the Congressional Democrats to give up the idea of raising the tax rates -- and to cut spending instead. But now that the details are coming out, that "victory" looks very temporary, if not illusory.

The price of getting that deal has been having the Republicans agree to sitting on a special bipartisan Congressional committee that will either come to an agreement on spending cuts before Thanksgiving or have the budgets of both the Defense Department and Medicare cut drastically.

Since neither side can afford to be blamed for a disaster like that, this virtually guarantees that the Republicans will have to either go along with whatever new spending and taxing that the Democrats demand or risk losing the 2012 election by sharing the blame for another financial disaster.

In short, the Republicans have now been maneuvered into being held responsible for the spending orgy that Democrats alone had the votes to create. Republicans have been had -- and so has the country. The recent, short-lived budget deal turns out to be not even a Pyrrhic victory for the Republicans. It has the earmarks of a Pyrrhic defeat.

@visionep I come from a farm family in Kansas, so I'm a bit biased, but I tend to disagree with you on a few things. So upvote for your comment starting the discussion but here's my rebuttal --

1. "Not much" has the potential to be pretty good, considering that sources of ethanol are much more renewable than oil. Plus, a lot of the energy balance reviews of ethanol that I've seen or heard of talk about the input cost to produce the first gallon of fuel, ie. they include construction, fermentation tanks, etc. etc. That is fair, but it is worth noting that over the long term those startup input costs become less and less of a factor because the infrastructure already exists. The cost to refine the first gallon of crude oil into gasoline was higher than the bazillionth, also.

2. Some of the food production competition will remain long-term, and some is temporary. Right now in the US, we mostly use corn (field corn) to produce ethanol. Field corn can be ground into corn flour, but at least where I come from the majority of it went to feed lots to be used as food for beef cows prior to introduction of ethanol plants. Now, the produced corn is split between going to beef production or into ethanol.

Competition between beef vs. ethanol industries raised the price of corn some (both industries want that corn) which makes farmers happy. That in turn raised the price of beef a bit, but it didn't do much to prices for human-consumption food other than that, because field corn isn't used for that very much.

The reason that we use corn for ethanol now is that corn is plentiful; it is the major crop in my neck of the woods with wheat being the second but lagging far behind. Ethanol producers need something that ferments, corn fits the bill and is available. Minor crops like milo work basically just as well as corn, so if some weather event damages a corn field and it can be replanted with milo later in the season that is great for farmers because they now have a buyer that is willing to take milo.

In the future, we could use non-food cellulose crops like switchgrass for ethanol production, and the processing will only be slightly different. Switchgrass could be grown and harvested on land that is unsuitable for corn (corn does best with a lot of water), but there isn't a large supply of it right now because there hasn't been any demand for it historically.

So yes, there will always be some competition between what crop people decide to produce on a given piece of farmland, and that can affect food prices. But I think that over the long term, ethanol production could provide useful fuel that has positive benefits that outweigh impacts from potentially slightly higher food prices. Maybe. But then again, I am a biased source!

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

>> ^Yogi:
>> ^GeeSussFreeK:
I love it, when women have sex, they are whores. No one even mentioned the men using the site, sexist fucks

No when they have sex for Money they're whores. Also I think most of the criticism about this video is that they have to in this richest of all nations sell their bodies for an education. That's fucked up no matter how you slice it.

Not an education, but debts. She isn't fucking a teacher to get accepted, she is fucking for money, period. It would be akin to her getting into debt from buying a car that she needed to get to a job she wanted, and fucked on the side to pay for it. @NetRunner Strawman on freemarkets is pretty classy too. Because women shouldn't view sex as an empowering act, the should be shameful of any sexual experience outside of pure love. Because all of us here sell our bodies to the jobs that we love, unequivocally. Women fucking is a holy experience, give me a break. If a person could make a living off of fucking, eating, or shitting, more power to them...it is what your body would rather be doing.


Lemme try and make a more full statement, since my succinct snark clearly rubbed you the wrong way.

Mostly my point was that everything in this video is good news from the perspective of a free market fundamentalist. The scarce resource of quality education gets a price set by market forces -- a high price. It commands those prices because it's a valuable investment in human capital which investors (students) can expect to get a sizable return on over their lifetime. In order to acquire capital to make this investment in their own human capital, enterprising young women are leveraging their existing assets (namely, their "assets") through free and voluntary positive sum exchanges (i.e. prostitution). Now we have an even further advancement brought to us by the wonders of the free market -- some enterprising guy who helps facilitate these positive-sum voluntary exchanges by helping connect sellers (of pussy) and buyers (of pussy) for a modest fee. Another positive-sum voluntary exchange! Society as a whole has been made richer through all of this.

Now to people who aren't free market fundamentalists, this situation all seems wrong. Education shouldn't be something each individual has to pay for, it should be something society collectively decides is a good investment to make in its citizenry as a whole. We should pay for it by collecting taxes from everyone, but with most of the burden falling on those most able to pay (mostly rich old men, who might otherwise rather spend that money on prostitutes).

I don't know about other people, but I generally see working a job as being a form of slavery. I'm paid, but I wouldn't care about being paid if I didn't need to pay for things I need. Money and capitalism is just one arbitrary way to allocate resources, and there's no particular reason to blind ourselves to the reality that most of us would do something else with the time we're currently working if we didn't have to pay the bills for the things we need. We ultimately acquiesce to this arrangement because of coercion -- you can't get food from the Supermarket (or get land to grow your own food) without money, at least not unless you want to be arrested.

So my take on prostitution is that if you really do need to become a prostitute to get by, it's a form of rape. Technically it's consensual sex, but it's tainted consent.

If it were purely a recreational activity that you happen to make some money off of, I say no harm no foul. Hell, even if you decide you want that to be your primary source of income because you love the work, more power to you.

But if you wind up with a lot of young women weighing their dignity against the impact of college on their entire future, then I think we're asking them to make a sort of Sophie's choice that they shouldn't have to make. And worse, this guy is putting that Sophie's choice in front of as many young women as he can, in order to make a buck. It's disgusting.

And you can't deny that this is the shape of a society ruled by free market ideology. Everything for sale, nothing sacred, and nobody thinking about anything but personal material gain. It's not utopia, it's sick.

Man, now they're really starting to sound like grumpy old men.

The car thing, actually saying that cars ran better in the 70s is such complete bullshit. The efficiency of cars now is just off the scale in comparison. Cars with FAR smaller engines are getting MUCH more power and better fuel economy than cars back then. So that's a serious case of rose fricken tinted glasses. Parts in cars are SUPPOSED to be getting lighter, you don't want your car to be heavy, that just uses more darn fuel.

Don't get me wrong I agree with a lot of what's being said, but he's talking with a couple of sycophants here who don't question anything he's saying and are fawning over him.

I am well and truly on their side in regards to quality food/clothing/whatever places being under supported in favour of shit chain stores... and I think that it's something that I have come to appreciate more as I've got older (I'm just sooo old at 34 ), so maybe it's a case of those places needing to appeal more to the 'older' crowd, the 'discerning' buyer, make themselves feel more premium so that you're buying the experience of 'good' food over shit.

In any case when it comes to food and coffee it's nowhere near as dire as they paint it here in Melbourne, and I would bet it's not actually as bad as they paint in most cities.

*shudder* horrible horrible free market - right wing propaganda. "Built in welfare transfer system" = *lies

And these 'spontaneous' interviews with the token maximally pigmented dude and the painted dude? *lies

Early buyers are impatient idiots. The companies knows that there will always be impatient idiots who want to have the prestige of owning sth "first!" <-- (these people). So why not charge more if there are impatient idiots? When the companies run out of impatient idiots, they lower their prices. *lies .

Sorry, but I dislike ideologues (must have sth. to do with growing up in Germany)

@SDGundamX

Wow, where to start. Your reply to my latest comment illustrates how you (willingly or ignorantly?) continue to misconstrue the issue, building up strawman after strawman, putting words and notions in Harris' mouth and mine, while ignoring everything I post. And then you post an article that maliciously distorts the views of Harris and Hitchens, depicting them as solely intent on vilifying Islam. If that article really describes what you think than I should probably stop arguing with you and spend my time better, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt for now.

Yes, I read the book you linked, or at least what the preview offered, which was more than enough to show that it does not go against anything Harris or I argue, only against the strawmen you prop up. A few comments on the book nonetheless:

The introduction (the one not by the book's author) is full of wishy-washy 'everything-and-its-contraire' platitudes, and ironically refers to Muslims as a unified whole, which is exactly what you accuse H. and I of... that's a good start; it's okay to make sweeping generalizations if they're positive? But even this text recognises that the secular influence of the "West" upon Muslim modernists forces them away from the core tenets of Islam and it's sacred text, which then sees the rise of fundamentalist backlash. And then there's this tidbit in the conclusion:

"Muslims, we often forget, do not always act as Muslims or members of a religious community; rather, they respond to economic, social and political needs that may direct conduct more than ideological signposts do."

Well hello captain Obvious! Either he's trying to address Christian right white trash, in which case he should use a bilboard instead of a book (I kid, I kid), or he takes his projected audience for fools. Or maybe he's building up to the sort of strawmen you seem so fond of attacking.

Now to the actual book: the author suggests that the world concentrates on "Arab" Islam, and ignores the rest. Not only is that false (at least where H. and I are concerned), not only does it carry racist undertones (yes, "Arab" is, for lack of a better word, a "race"; "Muslim" is not), but it purposefully ignores that the Middle East is Islam's birthplace, and still regarded as it's "Mecca" (haha). It's fine and dandy to put the blame that it deserves on European colonialism, but the author seems to forget that the spread of Islam is mostly due to, hey, Arabo-Islamic colonisation (and/or military conquest, sometimes with a healthy sprinkling of "cleansing", i.e. persecution of non-muslims 'till there were none left). But hey, Christianity did the same.
A really weird part is when the author somehow turns our quasi-universal use of the "Christian" calender into an illustration of Euro-American "structural violence and hegemony". Wow.
All in all, I learned nothing new whatsoever from what I read of that book, and cannot recommend it.

So there are modern/accomodationist interpretations of the Qur'an and Islamic doctrine? So not all Muslims are crazy male Saladins (I'm not making this up)? No one here is disputing that. So there are also other factors at work here? Not being denied either.

Neither are we arguing that muslims are more likely to commit violence than anyone else. By taking away the bold when citing me, you changed the meaning of the citation, creating one of the strawmen you also use to attack Harris: the key words are "in the name of" (or, to paraphrase "with the justification/motivation" of religion).

What is being argued is that Islam, i.e. the doctrines found in the Qur'an and Hadith, justify - render moral even - actions that are unethical, harmful, violent (the same is true of the Bible, from which Sharia law stems, but it is much less practiced than under Islam). That is why I quote the Qur'an, which - whether you like it or not - constitutes the core of the religion called "Islam" ("submission", btw... a pretty bad start). Nor can you deny that said religion demands that its holy text be considered the infallible and ultimate word of God (33:36). Many Muslims ignore the worser parts? Yay hooray! Doesn't change that some do not.

As for evidence (of which the book you cite, at least the parts accessible to me, contained none), you will never get it from me because you want evidence that supports the strawman arguments you put in H.'s mouth and mine, and there's no way you're getting that from either. What you do get, from the small sample of examples above (in a mess of html, i admit), is evidence that Islam today, more than any other religion, is at the source of (e.g. application of Sharia law) or aggravates (e.g. honour killing, fgm) acts of violence, discrimination and barbarity.

Is the fact that more than half of the active terrorist groups in existence today wear their Islamist agenda proudly, often including it in their name, not "evidency" enough for you?

Is the fact that unethical practices are condoned by Islamic (and almost only Islamic) regimes, even enshrined in civil law (which is also religious law), not evidence of Islam's virulence?

What more do you want? You say "You can't attack the religion without attacking the people who believe in that religion". You, and the author of that pathetic excuse of an article you just linked to, are trying to project a generalising, hate and fear-mongering view on people like Harris and myself, something I find both ignorant and insulting. Of course I can criticise an ideology, warn against its potential (and existing) negative consequences, without targeting every one of its adherents, or even the majority thereof. When Hitchens points out that the idea of vicarious redemption, central to Christianity, is unethical, and the Christian God's treatment of Abraham disgusting, is he saying that all Christian's are unethical and disgusting?

You say: Prove that people in Islamic countries are suffering because of Islam and not because we colonized them, used them as pawns in our own political games, got overthrown or kicked out, then either left them to rot or turned them into our oil suppliers while funding autocratic regimes and looking the other way as they tortured and killed their own people. Prove that it's Islam and not the appalling lack of medical care, education, political access, or access to a reliable legal system that accounts for the violence. Prove that the tenets of Islam are a significant factor in the violence and not just lipservice paid to justify it.

Quite simple really: compare pre-Islamic revolution Iran with post-Islamic revolution Iran. Compare the twin fates of Pakistan and India, the former being "created" as an Islamic nation. Which of the two bears the record for honour killings (the Sihks and Hindus try hard to catch up, I know)? Which of the two was hiding the world's most famous terrorist and Islamic fundamentalist? Which of the two has one of the lowest rates of literacy for women? In which of these two countries, whose post-colonial fate is practically identical, do you have 7/10 chances to be sexually abused in a police station if you are a women? I could go on, but I think you get the point.

Colonialism and its modern forms (globalisation, etc.) have a lot of blame to shoulder, no doubt whatsoever. But that does not diminish in any way the import and effect of Islam's doctrines. Did colonialists invent sharia law, for example, or demand it be enforced? No. Mohamed and his ideology did.
Blaming everything on colonialism and "western" influence is a twisted form of pretentiousness, as if only the "west" could come up with bad stuff. Arabs, Asians, Africans, etc. are people too, they too can be atrocious, it's not just reserved for the whiteys! It's as wrong as blaming slavery entirely on Europe and the American colonies. The slave trade in Africa and the Middle East was going on long before "westerners" became buyers, and guess who was doing the trading?

As long as you insist on blinding yourself to the influence of Islam in the world today, or at least to its negative aspects, you will have a skewed and prejudiced view, exactly what you are accusing others of. Of course it is only one factor among many, but it is an important factor, whether that suits your guilt-by-association-ridden conscience or not.

>> ^EMPIRE:

he should definitely start selling to the general public. Maybe do a plastic mold for the track instead of wood, so he could produce more.
Very original, very nice.

better yet, sell it as a kit for buyer to assemble!

This seems odd in a way. One of them brought it up during the broadcast. I wonder why we don't sell the body parts instead of hand them over. Granted, that would make them even more costly in the end, but value is usually determined by a buyer and a seller, in this case, everything is donated (that I am aware). It seems like this is just a price for buyers as the "sellers" didn't pay any cost for it, which isn't exactly right, because they did have to have to skill to extract it...but they didn't "buy" it from the original owner...interesting.

Sure, even the circumcised American version isn't as bad as S&E say but I think I can see what they were talking about. Oldman's performance, while great, is kinda over the top a little but it's more an exercise in style than reality. Those are traditionally risky waters to tread in cinema and Besson doesn't have anything to feel bad about. The audience (and DVD buyers) have spoken and it's a verified hit.

I'm off to watch it again too...a calm moment before the storm.