@greatgooglymoogly

Thanks for taking the time to watch it.

Like I said in my previous comment, this talk needs to take a lot of shortcuts, otherwise its length would surpass anyone's attention span.

So, point by point.

By "balanced budget", I suppose you refer to the federal budget. A balanced budget is not neccessarily a bad thing, but it is undesirable in most case. The key reason is sectoral balances. The economy can divided into three sectors: public, private, foreign. Since one person's spending is another person's income, the sum of all spending and income of these three sectors is zero by definition.

More precisely: if the public sector runs a surplus and the private sector runs a surplus, the foreign sector needs to run a deficit of a corresponding size.

Two examples:
- the government runs a balanced budget, no surplus, no deficit
- the private sector runs a surplus (savings) of 2% of GDP
- the foreign sector must, by definition, run a deficit of 2% of GDP (your country runs a current account surplus of 2% of GDP)

- the government runs a deficit of 2% of GDP
- the foreign sector runs a surplus of 3% (your current account deficit of 3%)
- your private sector must, by definition, run a deficit of 1% of GDP, aka burn through savings or run up debt

If you intend to allow the private sector to net save, you need to run either a current account surplus or a public sector deficit, or both. Since we don't export goods to Mars just yet, not all countries can run current account surpluses, so you need to run a public sector deficit if you want your private sector to net save. No two ways about it.

Germany runs a balanced public budget, sort of, and its private sector net saves. But that comes at the cost of a current account surplus to the tune of €250B. That's 250 billion Euros worth of debt other countries have to accumulate so that both the private and public sector in Germany can avoid deficits. Parasitic is what I'd call this behaviour, and I'm German.

If you feel ambitious, you could try to have both surplus and deficit within the private sector by allowing households to net save while "forcing" corporations to run the corresponding deficits. But to any politician trying that, I'd advise to avoid air travel.

As for the "devaluation of the currency", see my previous comment.

Also, she didn't use real numbers, because a) the talk is short and numbers kill people's attention rather quickly, and b) it's a policy decision to use debt to finance a deficit. One might just as well monetise it, like I explained in my previous comment.

Helicopter money would be quite helpful these days, actually. Even monetarists like AEP say so. If fiscal policy is off the table (deficit hawkery), what else are you left with...

As for your question related to the Fed, let me quote Eric Tymoigne on why MMT views both central bank and Treasury as part of the consolidated government:

"MMT authors tend to like to work with a consolidated government because they see it as an effective strategy for policy purpose (see next section), but also because the unconsolidated case just hides under layers of institutional complexity the main point: one way or another the Fed finances the Treasury, always. This monetary financing is not an option and is not by itself inflationary."

MMT principle: the central bank needs to be under democratic control, aka be part of government. The Fed in particular can pride itself on its independance all it wants, it still cannot fulfill any of its goals without the Treasury's help. It cannot diverge from government policies too long. Unlike the ECB, which is a nightmare in its construction.

Anyway, what does he mean by "one way or another the Fed finances the Treasury, always"? Well, the simple case is debt monetisation, direct financing. However, the Fed also participates by ensuring that Primary Dealers have enough reserves to make a reasonable bid on treasuries. The Fed makes sure that auctions of treasuries will always succeed. Always. Either by providing reserves to ensure buyers can afford the treasuries, by replacing maturing treasuries or buying them outright. No chance whatsoever for bond vigilantes. Betting against treasuries is pointless, you will always lose.

But what about taxation as a means to finance the Treasury? Well, the video's Monopoly example illustrated quite nicely, you cannot collect taxes until you have spent currency into circulation. Spending comes before taxation, it does not depend on it. Until reserves are injected into the banking system, either by the Fed through asset purchases or the Treasury through spending, taxes cannot be paid. Again, monetary financing is not optional. If the Treasury borrows money from the public, it borrows back money it previously spent.

Yes, I ignored the distribution of wealth, taxation, the fixation on growth and a million other things. That's a different discussion.

@SDGundamX -- I've lived in Thailand for almost 10 years, and a lot of the things she mentions for Japan are similar here or at least have semi-related corresponding cultural rules.

I also definitely have "farang privilege" which would be the Thai equivalent of "gaijin privilege". Not showing emotion is also big here, especially with regards to anger. Thais avoid confrontation at pretty much all costs. Which in and of itself can be infuriating -- sometimes a process or system is woefully inadequate or blatantly broken, but point it out as an area of concern (even in a constructive way) and an entire room of Thais will break into nervous silence out of fear of insulting or appearing critical of whoever is responsible for said system.

I love living here, but sometimes the cultural differences can be an obstacle...

It almost sounds like he is suggesting to keep an open mind and learn about other cultures, religions & mythology in order to understand those perspectives; and overall to be humble to the mystery: that we do not know.

In my opinion some of his opinions were a little contradictory - he doesn't believe in any sort of god or gods, but it seems that a wiser statement would be that he doesn't know, which would correspond with the "I don't believe in atheists" theme.

Furthermore, I honestly don't think that those who (in Hedges' words), "do not explore the religious impulse" are inhuman. Even if someone never explores it in their lifetime. In my opinion - the late bloomers who have disconnected themselves from all inclination of organized religion or spirituality, to find it on their own later in life might have a few more advantages than those that did not disconnect themselves from it at some point.

My personal preference is that I do believe in god because I want to believe in god. Whether it's a metaphor, completely abstract energy, a point in spacetime, a massive intelligent energy field that existed long before the big-bang, a life-force found only on Earth or the Milky Way or a fucking super mega alien technological consciousness program experiment or even a microscopic white dude flying on a microscopic magic carpet or all of the above and none of the above. I just believe even though my version of whatever creation/god is, is completely unidentifiable, it's everything and it's nothing.

I wonder what that odd bump in 1994 over "other injuries" corresponds to...

Oh NM, it was that Kerrigan/Harding shit. That makes sense.

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

We need a Kiwi correspondent. They will go first by a couple of hours.

I actually have a deck of cards that is prepared so that you can do this trick. To prep the deck you sand the back of every card so that there is a bit of a rough surface. When the backs of two cards are placed against each other they will stick together if enough pressure is applied but will slide apart if you ease off.

Cards are paired together so that they add up to fifteen (back to back) and suits are paired together as well (clubs with diamonds and hearts with spades). For instance you would pair the 2 of Diamonds with the King of Clubs, the 3 of Hearts with the Queen of Spades, the 4 of Spades with the Jack of Hearts, the 5 of Clubs with the 10 of Diamonds et cetera... Aces are paired with each other.

When you set up the deck you set it up so that all of the clubs and hearts are on one side and if you flip the deck over you will see all of the diamonds and spades. A spare joker is used to mark which sides has the spades and diamonds and must be face down so it's back is seen when you pull the deck out. If the victim call out a diamond or spade you flip the deck over and find the corresponding card and the deck will look normal because of the joker's backside. If the victim calls out hearst or clubs you pull out the deck and remove the joker saying "oh, ho ho. How'd this get here?" and then find the corresponding card.

Just make sure that you sit down to do the trick so that people don't see that back of your deck...


Is my explanation okay? It's kind of a weird trick...

Edit: okay I got it kind of wrong but this video explains it waaaay better:

https://youtu.be/yUo32TSZES4?t=6s

Congratulations! Your video, 2015 White House Correspondents' Dinner - President Obama, has reached the #1 spot in the current Top 15 New Videos listing. This is a very difficult thing to accomplish but you managed to pull it off. For your contribution you have been awarded 2 Power Points.

This achievement has earned you your "Golden One" Level 3 Badge!

Your video, 2015 White House Correspondents' Dinner - President Obama, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Some more haha from the dinner
http://digg.com/video/cecily-strong-best-jokes-correspondents-dinner-2015

Pretty disappointing bit really. I mean I get his point (that people generally have a poor understanding of nebulous surveillance techniques and lack of interest unless it is tangibly relevant), but he doesn't need 30+ minutes and a cruddy interview to make it.

I would prefer he would take Stewart's model of making the interviews generally serious rather than conducting them TDS correspondent style.

A violation of the 1799 Logan Act, which says starkly:

“Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”

But hold on. .....

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/47-gop-senators-broke-law-iran-letter/story?id=29528727

Ask the engineers whether religion influenced their lives or not - you don't speak for them.

"Religion" doesn't claim anything (it's not an entity). People who have religious beliefs sometimes have. I've never seen it claimed except in movies. Perhaps you live in an area where it is often claimed (and I feel sorry for you if that is the case). Either way - don't paint religious people the world over with the same brush because of your limited experience (note: everyone has limited experience one way or another - it's just the way it is).

Science doesn't do anything by itself. People use the scientific method to achieve things. In a device like this, it is a biomedical engineer doing most of the work. Funnily enough this happens to be my field (I moved over to it from health science a few years back - just a few years study left....).

Meanwhile, religious people built much of what you enjoy today which utilises the scientific method as a starting point.

Your idea of religion, while sometimes true in a very limited sense, is maligned and doesn't correspond with anything but the current anti-religion zeitgeist. Which is a pity because you seem like a smart person and could do much good for other people (and in general hating on people doesn't achieve that). Perhaps in time you'll reconsider people with religious beliefs in a better light.

Well if your videos are listed by hotness then it was near the top of the front page. If your videos are listed by newness then the front page just corresponds to the last videos that have received ten vote. So due to it not having ten votes and you not seeing it on the front page, i conclude your listing is by newness thus you don't see it on the front page. How did i do

@RedSky

The need to be kept afloat by European funds is pretty high on the list of things Syriza is keen to do away with. Varoufakis was clear on this pretty early on, at least 2009 as far as I know. They treated it as a problem of liquidity instead of a problem of insolvency, and therefore any funds funnelled into Greece were basically disappearing down a black hole. They are bleeding cash left, right and center, and the continuous flow of credit from Europe doesn't help a bit in its current form.

As of now, they can't pay shit. Any additional credit has to be used to pay back interest on previous credit. Their meagre primary surplus is less than their interest payments. With that in mind, some of the ideas floating around sound rather intriguing, especially given the horrendous failure all the previous agreements have produced. These ideas include: cap interest payment (1.5% of primary surplus), use the rest for investment or humanitarian relief; no payments on debt below 3% growth, 50% of agreed upon payments at 3-6% growth, full payments at 6+% growth.

Yet even those ideas are purely theoretical, because there is no growth in Greece. The celebrated growth in Q3 2014 of 0.7% might very well be a fluke, as Bill Mitchell described here (prices falling faster than incomes). For Greece to be able to have any meaningful growth, they'd require not just a complete reconstruction of its institutions (structural reforms), but also massive investment.

And there's where it breaks down again, since you rightfully pointed out that the Germans in particular won't spend a dime on Greece, especially not with investment in Germany in equally dire shape (shortfall of about a trillion € since 2000).


Which brings me to another point: Germany vs France.

Productivity in both countries was en par in 1999, and productivity in France in 2014 was only slightly below German numbers. "Living within your means" is a very popular phrase in the current discussion, which basically means living in accordance with your productivity.

Subsequently, there should be a similar development of unit labour costs within a monetary union, with growth targets set by the central bank. In our case, that would be just below 2%. Like I've previously said, Greece lived beyond its means in this regard, and significantly so.

But what about France and Germany? The black line marks the target, blue is France, red is Germany. That's beggar-thy-neighbour. That's gaining competetiveness at the cost of your fellow Euro pals. That's suppressing domestic demand in order to push exports.

German reforms killed its domestic market (retail sales stagnant since early '90s) and created an aggregate trade surplus to the tune of 2 trillion Euros. That's 2 trillion Euros of deficit in other countries. And we're looking at an additional 200-210 billion Euros this year. If running trade deficits is bad, so is running trade surpluses.

Ironically, there's even been legislation in Germany since 1967, instructing the government to balance its books in matters of trade (and other areas). They've been in violation of it for 15 years.

With this in mind, everytime a German politician calls for the other countries to run trade surpluses just like Germany, I get furious. Some of them, on the European level, even have the audacity to say that everyone should run trade surpluses, and all it takes to get there is massive wage cuts. That's open lunacy and a failure of basic math. No surplus without deficits, no savings without debt.

And while we're at it, it's not the savings rate in Germany that bothers me. It's the moral superiority that is being ascribed to running surpluses in every way imaginable. Every part of society is expected to have a positive savings rate, because debt is bad. Well, if everyone's saving and nobody's accruing the corresponding debt, you get the current situation where there is no investment whatsoever, a gargantuan shortfall in demand given the national productivity, and a cool 200 billion Euros of debt a year that foreign actors have to rake up so that Germany can have its massive growth of 0.5-1.5% annually.

Finding borrowers for all that cash is getting more difficult by the day. The ECB's QE is basically one big search for new borrowers, since everyone either doesn't want to borrow or cannot borrow anymore.

If Germany wanted to help the Eurozone, they'd start by increasing their ULC vis-á-vis the rest of the countries. Competitiveness should be regulated through the foreign exchange rate, not this parasitic race to the bottom within the zone. Ten years of 4% increase in wages, annually. That ought to be a start.

Additionally, allow the ECB to fund the European Investment Bank directly, instead of this black hole of QE.

Or go one step further and seriously consider Varoufakis' ideas, including the old Keynesian concept of a global surplus recycling mechanism.

But all that is pure fantasy. I don't think a majority of Germans would support either of these measures, not with the overwhelming fear of inflation this society has. Add the continuous demonisation of debt and you get a guarantee that very few countries might be compatible to be in a longtime monetary union with Germany.

I'm guess from you're tone your American, or at least only figure Americans are going to be reading? You note that 'we' can't get to the moon, while Chinese rovers navigate it's surface. You note with alarm what coastal Florida will face from sea level rise, and not an entire nation like Kiribati. When we look at a global problem we can't ignore technology just because it's Chinese, or focus so hard on Florida's coast we ignore an entire nation in peril.

Sea levels aren't going to be fine in 2099 and then rise a foot on the eve of 2100. They will continue to rise about 3mm annually, as they have already for the last 100 years.(on a more granular level slightly less than 3mm nearer 1900 and slightly more nearer 2100 but the point stands). Coastal land owners aren't merely going to see this coming. They've watched it happening for nearly 100 years already and managed to cope thus far. Cope is of course a bad word for building housing near the coast and at less than a foot above sea level. It's like how occupants at the base of active volcanoes 'cope' with the occasional eruption. All that is to say, the problem for homes built in such locations has always been a matter of when not if disaster will strike. The entire island nation of Kiribati is barely above sea level. It is one tsunami away from annihilation. Climate change though is, let me be brutally honest, a small part of the problem. A tsunami in 1914 would've annihilated Kiribati, as a tsunami today in 2014 would, as a tsunami in 2114 would. And we are talking annihilate in a way the 2004 tsunami never touched. I mean an island that's all uninhabited, cleared to the ground and brand new, albeit a bit smaller for the wear. That scenario is going to happen sooner or later, even if the planet were cooling for the next 100 years so let's be cautious about preaching it's salvation through prevention of climate change.

Your points on food production are, sorry, wrong. You are correct enough that local food growth is a big part of the problem. You are dead wrong that most, or even any appreciable amount is to blame on climate change now or in the future. All the African nations starving for want of local food production lack it for the same reason, violence and instability. From this point forward referenced as 'men with guns'. The people in Africa have, or at least had, the means to grow their own food. Despite your insistence that men with guns couldn't stop them from eating then, they still did and continue to. A farmer has to control his land for a whole year to plant, raise and harvest his crop or his livestock. Trouble is men with guns come by at harvest time and take everything. In places like the DRC or Somalia they rape the farmer's wife and daughters too. This has been going on for decades and decades, and it obviously doesn't take many years for the farmer to decide it's time to move their family, if they are lucky enough to still be alive. That is the population make up of all the refugee camps of starving people wanting for food. It's not a climate change problem, it's a people are horrible to each other problem. A different climate, better or worse growing conditions, is a tiny and hardly worth noting dent in the real problem.
CO@ emission restrictions do not equate to global economic downturn, they could just as easily mean global economic upturn as new tech is adopted and implemented.
I stated meaningful CO2 emission changes. That means changes that will sway us to less than 1 foot of sea level change by 2100 and corresponding temperatures. Those are massive and rapid reductions, and I'm sorry but that can not be an economic boon too. I'm completely confident that electric cars and alternative or fusion power will have almost entirely supplanted fossil fuel usage before 2100, and because they are good business. Pushing today though for massive emission reductions can only be accomplish be reducing global consumption. People don't like that, and they jump all over any excuse to go to war if it means lifting those reductions. That's just the terrible nature of our species.

As for glaciers, I did read the article. You'll notice it observed that increasing the spatial resolution of models changed the picture entirely? The IPCC noted this and updated their findings accordingly as well(page 242). The best guess by 2100 is better than 50% of the glaciers through the entire range remaining. The uncertainty range even includes a potential, though less likely GAIN of mass:
. Results for the Himalaya range between 2% gain and 29% loss to 2035; to 2100, the range of losses is 15 to 78% under RCP4.5. The modelmean loss to 2100 is 45% under RCP4.5 and 68% under RCP8.5 (medium confidence). It is virtually certain that these projections are more reliable than in earlier erroneous assessment (Cruz et al., 2007) of complete disappearance by 2035.

If you still want to insist Nepal will be without glaciers in 2100 please provide a source of your own or stop insisting on contradicting the science to make things scarier.