I hate to say it, but @Drachen_Jager has a point. Most countries do rely on immigrant labor, but we specifically and intentionally rely on illegal immigrant labor. Legal immigrants have the protection of labor laws, you can't work them 14 hours a day for $3 an hour with no overtime then stiff them if you feel like it, but you can do that to illegals, it's still better than what they can get at home usually.

While you haven't hired illegals, you have benefited from their cheap labor if you've bought agricultural products from America. I'm afraid we have not decided the cheap labor isn't worth the risk yet.....at best about 45% of us voted that way, which is as good a measure as any. I think if we do eliminate illegal laborers we'll see a backlash over the price hikes that must follow from many of the same people screaming for a wall today.

While some do use border jumping as an alternative to a difficult, long application process doesn't mean that most border jumpers would be accepted...criminal records, illiteracy, homelessness, and desperation can make that process impossible or many. Some have other options, many don't.

Not sure what you mean about being addicts. Addiction is not the only motivation out there, you know....nor is it the only excuse tolerated for inappropriate behavior.

You did not listen? How could you have heard anything? Main stream media swayed its followers into a false bliss of an easy sure thing Clinton win.


The other 1/2 of the county listen to facts. no pay increase in years, insurance premiums hikes, illegals being send back time and time again, some even committing violent crimes and zero, zilch happens to them. Jobs leaving the country left and right. Buying power of the dollar diminishing. Falsely reported employment rate and low job creation of any presidency.

And then you have all the Hillary shit.


But hey its over. The people have spoken, A historic landslide. A mandate from the people showing their disgrace towards the political establishment.

Not a great song, a little heavy handed, but some fantastic visuals. Pikachu in the wasteland... haha.

I actually experienced something like the bit @1:24 a few weeks ago, while hiking in a national forest (in the fall, in New England). I whipped out my phone to snap a pic of a fern,and noticed that, despite being surrounded by absolute beauty, my S3 still pushes the saturation up on the display when I'm taking a picture. Everything was already so colorful that it was immediately noticeable, and gave me the horrible impression of facsimile. Very much the real version of that bit from the video.

Lots of tech shit is getting freaky lately.

overworked into a stupor Where was this in the story?

I'm not here to bitch at you I just don't get the argument you make.

You then implied that these workers have to work 2 to 3 jobs ( hence stupor) just to make ends meet because those at the top are making too much.

What about the guy ( gal) at the top making fat stacks. I agree it does rub me wrong but still how does it directly hurt the minimum wage employee?


If the employee has has / develops skills he makes more. According to you logic this would be like robbing his fellow workmates, stealing money that can go towards them.

If you started you own company struggled to make ends meet and slowly built up a company should you not receive the fruits of you labor?

When you have an entry position what should you pay? Dishwasher should not be making 30K /yr ( 15$/hr). This is what you are generally saying.

My Boss had a 5 Million bonus and salary hike to near 4 million. Yes this pisses me off but it does not correlate to what I make.
Even if you took that and spread it across all employees ( 300k) it would only be about 30 bucks each.


Would you rather just see a cap of salaries to 1 Million?

They what if you suddenly became the next Gates or Jobs would you want to be paid what you are worth?

If you are going to go to 15$/hr why not more? Some could argue that this is too low? What about the company that made all salaries 70K the other year? 15$/hr seems pretty stingy.

Well, cheers for sticking with it anyway, I really appreciate it.

It's a one hour talk on the deficit in particular, and most of what she says is based on MMT principles that would add another 5 hours to her talk if she were to explain them. With neoclassical economics, you can sort of jump right in, given how they are taught at schools and regurgitated by talking heads and politicians, day in and day out. MMT runs contrary to many pieces of "common sense" and since you can't really give 10 hour talks everytime, this is what you end up with – bits and pieces that require previous knowledge.

I'd offer talks by other MMT proponents such as William Mitchell (UNSW), Randy Wray (UMKC) or Michael Hudson (UMKC), but they are even less comprehensible. Sorry. Eric Tymoigne provided a wonderful primer on banking over at NEP, but it's long and dry.

Since I'm significantly worse at explaining the basics of MMT, I'm not even going to try to "weave a narrative" and instead I'll just work my way through it, point by point.

@notarobot

"Let's address inequality by taking on debt to increase spending to help transfer money to large private corporations."

You don't have to take on debt. The US as the sole legal issuer of the Dollar can always "print more". That's what the short Greenspan clip was all about. Of course, you don't actually print Federal Reserve Notes to pay for federal expenses. It's the digital age, after all.

If the federal government were to acquire, say, ten more KC-46 from Boeing, some minion at the Treasury would give some minion at the Fed a call and say "We need $2 billion, could you arrange the transfer?" The Fed minion then proceeds to debit $2B from the Treasury's account at the Fed (Treasury General Account, TGA) and credits $2B to Boeing's account at Bank X. Plain accounting.

If TGA runs negative, there are two options. The Treasury could sell bonds, take on new debt. Or it could monetise debt by selling those bonds straight to the Fed – think Overt Monetary Financing.

The second option is the interesting one: a swap of public debt for account credits. Any interest on this debt would be transfered straight back in the TGA. It's all left pocket, right pocket, really. Both the Fed and the Treasury are part of the consolidated government.

However, running a deficit amounts to a new injection of reserves. This puts a downward pressure on the overnight interest rate (Fed Funds Rate in the US, FFR) unless it is offset by an increase in outstanding debt by the Treasury (or a draw-down of the TT&Ls, but that's minor in this case). So the sale of t-bonds is not a neccessity, it's how the Treasury supports the Fed's monetary policy by raising the FFR. If the target FFR is 0%, there's no need for the Treasury to drain reserves by selling bonds.

Additionally, you might want to sell t-bonds to provide the private sector with the ability to earn interest on a safe asset (pension funds, etc). Treasury bonds are as solid as it gets, unlike municipal bonds of Detroit or stocks of Deutsche Bank.

To quote Randy Wray: "And, indeed, treasury securities really are nothing more than a saving account at the Fed that pay more interest than do reserve deposits (bank “checking accounts”) at the Fed."

Point is: for a government that uses its own sovereign, free-floating currency, it is a political decision to take on debt to finance its deficit, not an economic neccessity.

"Weimar Republic"

I'm rather glad that you went with Weimar Germany and not Zimbabwe, because I know a lot more about the former than the latter. The very, very short version: the economy of 1920's Germany was in ruins and its vastly reduced supply capacity couldn't match the increase in nominal spending. In an economy at maximum capacity, spending increases are a bad idea, especially if meant to pay reparations.

Let's try a longer version. Your point, I assume, is that an increase in the money supply leads to (hyper-)inflation. That's Quantity Theory of Monetary 101, MV=PY. Amount of money in circulation times velocity of circulation equals average prices times real output. However, QTM works on two assumptions that are quite... questionable.

First, it assumes full employment (max output, Y is constant). Or in other terms, an economy running at full capacity. Does anyone know any economy today that is running at full capacity? I don't. In fact, I was born in '83 and in my lifetime, we haven't had full employment in any major country. Some people refer to 3% unemployment as "full employment", even though 3% unemployment in the '60s would have been referred to as "mass unemployment".

Second, it assumes a constant velocity of circulation (V is constant). That's how many times a Dollar has been "used" over a year. However, velocity was proven to be rather volatile by countless studies.

If both Y and V are constant, any increase in the money supply M would mean an increase in prices P. The only way for an economy at full capacity to compensate for increased spending would be a rationing of said spending through higher prices. Inflation goes up when demand outpaces supply, right?

But like I said, neither Y nor V are constant, so the application of this theory in this form is misleading to say the least. There's a lot of slack in every economy in the world, especially the US economy. Any increase in purchases will be met by corporations with excess capacity. They will, generally speaking, increase their market share rather than hike prices. Monopolies might not, but that's a different issue altogether.

Again, the short version: additional spending leads to increased inflation only if it cannot be met with unused capacity. Only in an economy at or near full capacity will it lead to significant inflation. And even then, excess private demand can easily be curbed: taxation.

As for the Angry Birds analogy: yeah, I'm not a fan either. But all the other talks on this topic are even worse, unfortunatly. There's only a handful of MMT economists doing these kinds of public talks and I haven't yet spotted a Neil deGrasse Tyson among them, if you know what I mean.

Congratulations! Your comment on From a nice hike to almost dying in a heartbeat. Holy crap. has just received enough votes from the community to earn you 1 Power Point. Thank you for your quality contribution to VideoSift.

Hiking near mt Aconcagua in Argentina (tallest mountain in the Americas, 22800 ft; across the border from Santiago Chile).

The original text accompanying the video is in Spanish, a tidied up Google Translation version is as follows:

“Avalanche between Horcones (park entrance) and Confluence (first base camp of the Aconcagua field). Julian Insarralde [who posted the video], Nico Aguero and Naco Choulet were working for INOUT ADVENTURE. During a trek lasting three days. We are going to customers to avoid them being splashed with mud as it is an area of avalanches at that time of year. The warning was a sound similar to an airplane sound, which is why Julian Insarralde is looking back and is able to warn that an avalanche is coming. That’s why we ran and we did not abandon people so that we were in the safe zone. They are things that can happen when we work in real natural environments”.

I'm thinking that if one were stranded in such a forest, your time and energy might be better spent in hiking out, or maybe in finding and cultivating edible plants. Given his hit ratio, he'd be going hungry most days.

Peter: You were my first best friend. We met in third grade and were unbreakable until freshman year when our lives went in different ways. We played Atari for days. We hiked the woods and made up adventures. We made abet on who would kiss a girl first. You won. You are such a deep part of who I am. I will miss you.

Doing a 17 mile hike here in 3 weeks

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

The worst part is that now that he's dead, some other hitch hiking robot will kill all of his robot cubs and copulate with the fembots.

My Boss earned earned $35+ million in 2014 which included 9% salary hike.


I just be happy with a 9% salary hike / year.

Your video, "Oi......This Is OUR Field....Take A HIKE!!", has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 56 Badge!

So as a relative newcomer* to the backcountry, here's my $0.02:

They were incredibly lucky.

Going into a gully like that after a snow storm is a "terrain trap" where even a small slide can accumulate very deep snow. Getting buried under 2-3m is bad, but 10m+? Unless you have the world snow shoveling champion team in your party, you're dead.

Good on them for carrying shovels and probes, but where were their transceivers? The article states that the victim had his transceiver with him but the others didn't. A single transceiver is about as useful as a prick in a nunnery.

The only reason that guy is alive is he managed to stick his ski pole above the snow. Without that, by the time they find him, they're not rescuing him, they're recovering the body.

Most importantly, they knew it was a sketchy line and they went anyway (and altogether.... jesus.... spread the fuck out... no-one gonna rescue you if you're all buried).

Right there, that's the fatal mistake. I know guys who have hiked for 6 hours to get to a run, looked at it and turned back. If you're not sure, don't go. Even if it means climbing back out.

So to sum up:
unsure about conditions: don't go
the entire party doesn't have a shovel/probe/transceiver each: don't go
if you absolutely have to go: one at a time and aim for a safe spot

/sermon

I'm being a bit of a prick on this. It's really easy to criticise, but I've been there and I know that powder fever takes hold. But *nature hates you and wants to kill you. Keep that in mind.

* I've been side-country riding for a few years, but started splitboarding last year.

Least YOUR MPs don't go around hiking up their thongs before question period.