On October 25 2011 04:06 DrainX wrote: Well. If you look at Scandinavian countries that have high taxes and a big social safety net, free education and free healthcare, they are usually more equal than countries with low taxes[1]. The amount of redistribution doesn't have to correlate with the amount of corporate influence over policy. I think that capitalism in its nature creates inequality but I agree that an inefficient corrupt state which is being controlled by corporations can make it even worse. Not all regulation, not all social policy and not all forms of taxation and redistribution is bad though. If it is done the right way it can be used to soften the destructive force of capitalism instead of increasing it.
Scandinavia countries have populations the size of New Jersey.
So?
Depends on whether you think it'd a good idea to pool your government resources with countries such as Greece and Italy. Or if you think it'll be a good idea to allow Germany's 80 million to constantly out vote yours. Or if you think politicians would be as responsive to the people's voice when it's diluted by 300 million instead of 8 million.
Sure, Scandinavia has a higher GDP and currently a more stable economy than many of the countries in southern Europe. With the European union I think we are slowly moving to a Europe more like the one you describe. I don't see any reason why the general principle I describe wouldn't work on a larger scale though. I don't think that Scandinavia is as unique as you believe. Maybe the US or the EU both have too large a population for one government. I see no reason why, but maybe that is true. Even if that is the case, why not just move the power to a more local(state) level in the US? I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to make a similar system work over there.
Only having it working on a small scale over here doesn't disprove it's possible effectiveness at a larger scale elsewhere.
The Scandinavian welfaresystem as a whole is in no way feasible on too large a scale.
Scandinavia has some of the highest education-levels in the world and has some very good and respected universities. A lot of the sale is generated through niches, with need of precision and high requirement of technology. This is simply not feasible to have at too large a scale since there are not enough niches to build large societies around. Maybe a larger group of top tier universities can help create more jobs. But it is most likely not gonna be enough.
The worst part is of course the transition. It would be very drastic even over 20 years of transition and how do you keep the country running through the transition? Most likely it will not work as well as in scandinavia before far later. It is like trying to illegalize weapons in the US. It is simply not feasible to do 100 % and expect a positive outcome.
On the other hand it should be possible and feasible to "adopt" some of the ideas from scandinavian societies to improve other countries and USA in this instance.
Sorry for intruding on this conversation but I'm not really sure what this Intel vs AMD argument is all about. Kiarip is talking in generalities without specifics to Intel / AMD, while I'm not clear on Ropid's intent in bringing up Intel's tactics in competition against AMD.
On October 25 2011 14:33 Ropid wrote: Without AMD, Intel would never have built the type of x86 CPUs we have now.
This is natural in competitive markets.
On October 25 2011 12:54 Ropid wrote: Intel vs. AMD with Intel only giving PC manufacturers a good deal for CPUs, if they agree to not sell any PCs with AMD CPUs? It was about ten years ago, I think.
On October 25 2011 14:33 Ropid wrote: The following processor generation after the news broke about Intel's illegal machinations, Intel's offerings were performance and price wise behind AMD's. From an outsider's view, it looked as if Intel had invested in marketing and ruining the competition rather than building the better CPU.
Intel was indeed using market tactics against AMD. Market-incumbents like Intel do have significant advantages over their competitors. That they are tempted to use it once in a while is predictable. What Intel did is in essence pay for an exclusivity contract from PC manufactures with lower cost of parts. It looks bad coming from a company that has 80% of the market share, but in many markets, exclusivity contracts are common. However, I am interested in the outcome. Did Intel's tactics succeed? Did Intel gain market share or lose market share from this tactic?
Yeah the largest complaint i saw was that it was done at night. They fired rubber bullets, tier gas and used flashed grenades, from the time they used a bull horn to announce that they were going to kick out anyone there to the time they did so was, from witness about 3 to 5 mins for people to get out. Not all protesters were peaceful about it, but that's to be expected when a wide range of people from black flag anarchist to the mentally ill who just thought it be a good place to set up camp that were a part of occupy oakland. numbers i think was around 84 arrests no serious injuries
The police at all occupy movement in the US have done a variety of questionable things although not all so aggressive, i believe occupy san jose? every morning the police come and take away all their ice and coolers so no refrigeration can be present for storing food.
On October 26 2011 04:30 semantics wrote: Yeah the largest complaint i saw was that it was done at night. They fired rubber bullets, tier gas and used flashed grenades, from the time they used a bull horn to announce that they were going to kick out anyone there to the time they did so was, from witness about 3 to 5 mins for people to get out. Not all protesters were peaceful about it, but that's to be expected when a wide range of people from black flag anarchist to the mentally ill who just thought it be a good place to set up camp that were a part of occupy oakland. numbers i think was around 84 arrests no serious injuries
The police at all occupy movement in the US have done a variety of questionable things although not all so aggressive, i belove occupy san jose? every morning the police come and take away all their ice and coolers so no reintegration can be present for storing food.
Under what jurisdiction are they doing that? Clean and safe drinking water act or something?
Seriously, this is getting so blatantly silly. Police are upping the levels of force by the day, media continues to warp and twist coverage to further alienate the movement. This is starting to get more and more out of hand.
To all those in the United States currently occupying parks, squares and other spaces, your comrades in Cairo are watching you in solidarity. Having received so much advice from you about transitioning to democracy, we thought it's our turn to pass on some advice.
Indeed, we are now in many ways involved in the same struggle. What most pundits call “The Arab Spring” has its roots in the demonstrations, riots, strikes and occupations taking place all around the world, its foundations lie in years-long struggles by people and popular movements. The moment that we find ourselves in is nothing new, as we in Egypt and others have been fighting against systems of repression, disenfranchisement and the unchecked ravages of global capitalism (yes, we said it, capitalism): a System that has made a world that is dangerous and cruel to its inhabitants. As the interests of government increasingly cater to the interests and comforts of private, transnational capital, our cities and homes have become progressively more abstract and violent places, subject to the casual ravages of the next economic development or urban renewal scheme.
An entire generation across the globe has grown up realizing, rationally and emotionally, that we have no future in the current order of things. Living under structural adjustment policies and the supposed expertise of international organizations like the World Bank and IMF, we watched as our resources, industries and public services were sold off and dismantled as the “free market” pushed an addiction to foreign goods, to foreign food even. The profits and benefits of those freed markets went elsewhere, while Egypt and other countries in the South found their immiseration reinforced by a massive increase in police repression and torture.
The current crisis in America and Western Europe has begun to bring this reality home to you as well: that as things stand we will all work ourselves raw, our backs broken by personal debt and public austerity. Not content with carving out the remnants of the public sphere and the welfare state, capitalism and the austerity-state now even attack the private realm and people's right to decent dwelling as thousands of foreclosed-upon homeowners find themselves both homeless and indebted to the banks who have forced them on to the streets.
So we stand with you not just in your attempts to bring down the old but to experiment with the new. We are not protesting. Who is there to protest to? What could we ask them for that they could grant? We are occupying. We are reclaiming those same spaces of public practice that have been commodified, privatized and locked into the hands of faceless bureaucracy , real estate portfolios, and police ‘protection’. Hold on to these spaces, nurture them, and let the boundaries of your occupations grow. After all, who built these parks, these plazas, these buildings? Whose labor made them real and livable? Why should it seem so natural that they should be withheld from us, policed and disciplined? Reclaiming these spaces and managing them justly and collectively is proof enough of our legitimacy.
In our own occupations of Tahrir, we encountered people entering the Square every day in tears because it was the first time they had walked through those streets and spaces without being harassed by police; it is not just the ideas that are important, these spaces are fundamental to the possibility of a new world. These are public spaces. Spaces forgathering, leisure, meeting, and interacting – these spaces should be the reason we live in cities. Where the state and the interests of owners have made them inaccessible, exclusive or dangerous, it is up to us to make sure that they are safe, inclusive and just. We have and must continue to open them to anyone that wants to build a better world, particularly for the marginalized, excluded and for those groups who have suffered the worst .
What you do in these spaces is neither as grandiose and abstract nor as quotidian as “real democracy”; the nascent forms of praxis and social engagement being made in the occupations avoid the empty ideals and stale parliamentarianism that the term democracy has come to represent. And so the occupations must continue, because there is no one left to ask for reform. They must continue because we are creating what we can no longer wait for. But the ideologies of property and propriety will manifest themselves again. Whether through the overt opposition of property owners or municipalities to your encampments or the more subtle attempts to control space through traffic regulations, anti-camping laws or health and safety rules. There is a direct conflict between what we seek to make of our cities and our spaces and what the law and the systems of policing standing behind it would have us do. We faced such direct and indirect violence , and continue to face it . Those who said that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance and even force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend their tentative occupations and spaces: by the government's own admission; 99 police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were destroyed, and all of the ruling party's offices around Egypt were burned down. Barricades were erected, officers were beaten back and pelted with rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition on us. But at the end of the day on the 28 th of January they retreated, and we had won our cities.
It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less our desire to lose. If we do not resist, actively, when they come to take what we have won back, then we will surely lose. Do not confuse the tactics that we used when we shouted “peaceful” with fetishizing nonviolence; if the state had given up immediately we would have been overjoyed, but as they sought to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that there was no other option than to fight back. Had we laid down and allowed ourselves to be arrested, tortured, and martyred to “make a point”, we would be no less bloodied, beaten and dead. Be prepared to defend these things you have occupied, that you are building, because, after everything else has been taken from us, these reclaimed spaces are so very precious.
By way of concluding then, our only real advice to you is to continue, keep going and do not stop. Occupy more, find each other, build larger and larger networks and keep discovering new ways to experiment with social life, consensus, and democracy. Discover new ways to use these spaces, discover new ways to hold on to them and never givethem up again. Resist fiercely when you are under attack, but otherwise take pleasure in what you are doing, let it be easy, fun even. We are all watching one another now, and from Cairo we want to say that we are in solidarity with you, and we love you all for what you are doing.
But the ideologies of property and propriety will manifest themselves again. Whether through the overt opposition of property owners or municipalities to your encampments or the more subtle attempts to control space through traffic regulations, anti-camping laws or health and safety rules. There is a direct conflict between what we seek to make of our cities and our spaces and what the law and the systems of policing standing behind it would have us do.
It is rare to hear people with these views describe them in such a direct fashion. Hear it and think it over very carefully....
as far as the david icke vid i only watched about 10 mins before i had to go do something else, did he recommend an alternative? I didn't pick anything up on that, but i do agree banks need more skin in the game, frankly this is why i like credit unions as they listen to their members not to stock holders. Things like the dodd-frank act was a failure and how financial institutions operate need to be regulated and changed how they operate not necessarily how modern money is created, as you can't move to a material backed monetary format as that has more problems and still shares quite a few of the problems of speculation and compounding crap like we have now.
as far as the david icke vid i only watched about 10 mins before i had to go do something else, did he recommend an alternative? I didn't pick anything up on that, but i do agree banks need more skin in the game, frankly this is why i like credit unions as they listen to their members not to stock holders. Things like the dodd-frank act was a failure and how financial institutions operate need to be regulated and changed how they operate not necessarily how modern money is created, as you can't move to a material backed monetary format as that has more problems and still shares quite a few of the problems of speculation and compounding crap like we have now.
Uh well from that point in the video on he just talks about how "they" are trying to take over the world by centralizing the world and then controlling the world government. Then he says Global Warming is a hoax and 9/11 a US run operation.
So uh it gets a little crazy, though I think the idea that centralization tends to be a compounding effect (the more centralized something is the faster it can centralize because it has more power) is interesting.
I guess he goes more paranoid after about 10 mins, i mostly remember him talking about how modern money works with the obvious basis that most people who advocate against that system.
This guy does not know what he's talking about. At all. What does he want, the gold standard? Anyone who even eludes that the gold standard would work is a complete joke.
This guy does not know what he's talking about. At all. What does he want, the gold standard? Anyone who even eludes that the gold standard would work is a complete joke.
And anyone who believes creating money with debt attached to it is a good idea is far more ludicrous.
Who woulda thunk that rich people were getting richer and everyone else was getting fucked??
WASHINGTON — The top 1 percent of earners more than doubled their share of the nation’s income over the last three decades, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday, in a new report likely to figure prominently in the escalating political fight over how to revive the economy, create jobs and lower the federal debt. In addition, the report said, government policy has become less redistributive since the late 1970s, doing less to reduce the concentration of income.
“The equalizing effect of federal taxes was smaller” in 2007 than in 1979, as “the composition of federal revenues shifted away from progressive income taxes to less-progressive payroll taxes,” the budget office said. In its report, the budget office found that from 1979 to 2007, average inflation-adjusted after-tax income grew by 275 percent for the 1 percent of the population with the highest income. For others in the top 20 percent of the population, average real after-tax household income grew by 65 percent.
By contrast, the budget office said, for the poorest fifth of the population, average real after-tax household income rose 18 percent.
You'd figure with an 275 percent increase (inflation adjusted of course!), we poorer people would be feeling some of that trickle down by now...
On October 26 2011 01:31 TanGeng wrote: Sorry for intruding on this conversation but I'm not really sure what this Intel vs AMD argument is all about. Kiarip is talking in generalities without specifics to Intel / AMD, while I'm not clear on Ropid's intent in bringing up Intel's tactics in competition against AMD.
On October 25 2011 12:54 Ropid wrote: Intel vs. AMD with Intel only giving PC manufacturers a good deal for CPUs, if they agree to not sell any PCs with AMD CPUs? It was about ten years ago, I think.
On October 25 2011 14:33 Ropid wrote: The following processor generation after the news broke about Intel's illegal machinations, Intel's offerings were performance and price wise behind AMD's. From an outsider's view, it looked as if Intel had invested in marketing and ruining the competition rather than building the better CPU.
Intel was indeed using market tactics against AMD. Market-incumbents like Intel do have significant advantages over their competitors. That they are tempted to use it once in a while is predictable. What Intel did is in essence pay for an exclusivity contract from PC manufactures with lower cost of parts. It looks bad coming from a company that has 80% of the market share, but in many markets, exclusivity contracts are common. However, I am interested in the outcome. Did Intel's tactics succeed? Did Intel gain market share or lose market share from this tactic?
Kiarip sounded like all regulations are bad and asked for an example where regulations helped the market. This was the first example I remembered where it is clear that some kind of intervention and oversight was needed, and I thought everyone here would know about AMD and Intel's past.
If you do not know about what happened, AMD sued citing anti-trust laws, and Intel counter-sued about patents. The overall outcome was Intel paying $1.25 billion to AMD in a settlement. If you are interested, typing "AMD Intel settlement" into Google will lead you to news articles about the settlement, and those articles will generally have a paragraph roughly summarizing the circumstances in the past.
The question if Intel's tactics worked, I would guess it did, and it was worth it for Intel. AMD had the best product for a few short years, but never managed to use that fact to overtake Intel's market share. Intel did eventually catch up regarding the processor design. Without Intel's illegal machinations, AMD would have earned more money when they had the design lead. This would surely be better for competing with Intel nowadays, and the market would be better for everyone involved (including the PC end consumer), except Intel.
A strong reply to one of the most common criticisms of the protesters: That they are simply envious of the rich.
ETA: OH yeah, and this, from Oakland tonight:
There would be footage from above, but the two major-network choppers ended their livestream simultaneously, just minutes before the teargas was deployed. I'm not usually a big media-conspiracy guy, but that is just pathetic.
EPT
