I have never been to America, which is a terrible oversight, considering I've seen much of the rest of the world. I would love to see it but doubt I ever will now - especially with the deep seated fear of flying I have.Sean Hayden wrote: ↑Sun Sep 02, 2018 6:23 pmHow about Oklahoma? Have you ever been to Oklahoma? It's the only place I've ever been denied a hotel room. I get sick just thinking about dealing with Oklahoma.
You'd have to ask the crazy lady in curlers why. I imagine she thought my buddy and I were going to go suck each other off or something.Rum wrote: ↑Sun Sep 02, 2018 6:29 pmI have never been to America, which is a terrible oversight, considering I've seen much of the rest of the world. I would love to see it but doubt I ever will now - especially with the deep seated fear of flying I have.Sean Hayden wrote: ↑Sun Sep 02, 2018 6:23 pmHow about Oklahoma? Have you ever been to Oklahoma? It's the only place I've ever been denied a hotel room. I get sick just thinking about dealing with Oklahoma.
Why were you denied a hotel room in Oklahoma??
I don't know. What do you know about Indiana that I don't?Sean Hayden wrote: ↑Sun Sep 02, 2018 6:17 pmWell, we do have really bad governments in a lot of respects. Would you want Indiana in your business? --be honest
Texas, Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas pay in. Though Kansas may end up receiving more as we go. Oklahoma is more in the poor group:Sean Hayden wrote: ↑Sun Sep 02, 2018 6:58 pmI live in Houston so we're pretty much the same. I do everything online. --everything
But Texas as a whole takes very little from the government. In fact we are one of --maybe the only-- red states that gives more to the feds than we take. Which means we have fewer services for people that need them.
Śiva wrote: ↑Sun Sep 02, 2018 7:55 pmI don't know. What do you know about Indiana that I don't?Sean Hayden wrote: ↑Sun Sep 02, 2018 6:17 pmWell, we do have really bad governments in a lot of respects. Would you want Indiana in your business? --be honest
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... MP=soc_567The royal commission into banks has uncovered fraud and misconduct on a massive scale, amounting to nearly $1bn and perhaps more. The usual defences of “bad apples” and “rogue advisers” have fallen apart as it becomes evident the problems are systemic, driven by relentless pressure from the top to maximise profits at all costs.
The royal commission into misconduct in the banking, superannuation and financial services industry has shown that dishonesty and sharp practice are endemic in the retail banking and finance sector. But if retail banking, involving direct personal contact with customers, is plagued with fraud and malpractice, what can we say about the wholesale criminality of the larger financial markets for foreign exchange, interest rates and derivatives?
A billion dollars sounds like a lot but it pales into insignificance compared to the repeated frauds that have been exposed in global financial markets, and the much greater volume that is almost certainly going undetected. Moreover, while misconduct in retail banking raises important issues of consumer protection, fraud in the broader financial system calls the entire market system into question.
Since the emergence of financialised capitalism in the 1970s, society has relied on the collective judgement of the financial sector to guide and control everything from the fiscal policy of governments to the allocation of capital for infrastructure. This has produced immense profits for the financial sector, and huge incomes for finance professionals, but there is no evidence of improved economic performance. On the contrary, despite obvious evidence of technological progress, productivity has stagnated.
The global financial crisis exposed the fraudulence of the global banking sector. Trillions of dollars of worthless securities were sold as if they were as safe as US Treasury bonds. Frauds like that of Bernie Madoff’s hedge fund, amounting to $50bn, were barely a rounding error.
At the time, it seemed that radical change was inevitable. And, indeed radical austerity policies were imposed on ordinary people around the world. However, while ordinary people suffered the banks, and bankers, were bailed out. No one of any significance went to jail, and the few who lost their jobs could rely on golden parachutes, often amounting to millions of dollars
There was a lesson to be learned here, and the bankers learned it well. Even before the bailout was complete, the bankers were up to new tricks, such as rigging the London interbank borrowing rate (Libor). A long string of exposure criminal activity has followed, including tax evasion, money laundering and large-scale fraud, all undertaken by the world’s biggest and most respected financial institutions.
Australian banks have been relatively minor players, but this mainly reflects the limited opportunities for fraud in our small market. Even so, their rap sheet is one that would put an ordinary confidence trickster to shame. All the major banks were involved in a rate rigging scandal in 2010, focused on the bank bill swap rate (BBSW) our equivalent of Libor. ANZ, NAB and the Commonwealth paid penalties, while Westpac got off on the grounds that its attempts to manipulate the rate had been unsuccessful.
Similarly, all of the big banks, as well as Macquarie have been found to have engaged in fraudulent foreign exchange trading. CBA was found to have been involved in large scale money laundering. ANZ, Citigroup and Deutsche Bank are currently facing charges of cartel behaviour in relation to trading in ANZ shares.
None of this is surprising. In Australia, as elsewhere, financial wrongdoing is hardly ever punished, unless it involves underlings stealing from the banks themselves. Rather, our regulators go for so-called “enforcable undertakings” which, as far as can be determined, are never actually enforced.
Banking has developed an ingrained culture of dishonesty, illustrated by a fascinating experiment reported in Nature in 2014. The experiment involved a task in which participants could cheat by misreporting the outcome of a coin toss. The design was such that individual cheats could not be caught, but the overall rate of cheating was measurable. All the participants were bankers but before undertaking the task, some participants were “primed” by questions about their home and family life. Others were primed to think about their role as bankers. The bankers as a group reported on average too many financially rewarding tosses. But they were generally honest when focused on their domestic identity.
What does this imply for policy? In essence, a system of financialised capitalism like the one that prevails at present will inevitably be dominated by the self-enrichment of financiers. The supposed functions of the financial system, such as the allocation of capital investment and the management of risk will be undertaken only to the extent that they provide opportunities for the extraction of rent from the system.
Forty years of experience confirms this analysis. Financialised capitalism serves to benefit the financial sector and the 1%, but does nothing to promote stable economic growth. This is not a problem that can be fixed by more and better regulation, like the suggestion of placing Asic inspectors inside banks. Only a drastic reduction in the size, power and influence of the financial sector will do the job.
That might seem like a utopian proposition. But the designers of the new global financial system in the wake of the second world war managed it. By stringently restricting the activities of the financial sector they made banking a boring, respectable and above all safe profession. In the process, they delivered three decades of unparalleled economic growth and widely shared prosperity.
We will probably have to wait for another crash before the power of the financial system can be tamed. But, given the incentives in the system for reckless dishonesty, that crash will come, sooner or later.
Oklahoma? Where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain? And the wavin' wheat can sure smell sweet, when the wind comes right behind the rain? That Oklahoma?Sean Hayden wrote:How about Oklahoma? Have you ever been to Oklahoma? It's the only place I've ever been denied a hotel room. I get sick just thinking about dealing with Oklahoma.
In no particular order:
>There are far more unemployed than there are job vacancies
>Automation is going to destroy human employment. The best business people in the world (e.g. Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Zuckerburg etc) understand this.
>What are we doing about this? Nothing other than increasing punitive measures and onerous liabilities on unemployed and disadvantaged people.
>Why do we do this, and why does the public put up with it?
>There are increasingly large numbers of homeless and people living in poverty in Australia (and the Anglo world)
>What is the point of a state if it can't provide the minimum level of dignity and security for essentially everyone? What do you all think the purpose of a state is?
>Our societies are essentially "work or die!". Never mind that there are nowhere near enough jobs, and at some point in the not very distant future there will be very few necessary jobs to be performed by humans. So why do we insist on the "work or die" model?
>Education is an INVESTMENT in society
>Health spending is an INVESTMENT in society. It's also a moral obligation.
>Renewable energy will create fuckloads of jobs
>Neoliberal governments never gave a fuck about losing thousands of jobs in the car industries and other manufacturing sectors. Why care about the coal industry? Answer: ideologically driven hypocrisy.
>Renewables with storage technologies are only more expensive than fossil fuels due to lacking the subsidies coal et al get.
>Swap the subsidies and the economics is different
>Fossil fuels are cheap because of subsidies and passing the costs of pollution on to future generations. This is stealing. It's anti-social behaviour and should be treated as such.
>Science is the most successful method for working out how the natural world works. Religion and conservative fee fees (i.e. fear of change) aren't.
>Growing inequality is bad for overall growth. If better growth is your goal, then reduce inequality.
>Inequality is at worse levels than any time in the last 120 odd years. Does that sound like progress? We have returned to the 1800's.
>Politicians have largely stopped representing the public will and instead are more focussed on entrenching their power and wealth. They have become an elite class above the normal rules and ethics of society.
>The most obvious expression of this is a refusal by both major parties to establish a federal anti-corruption watchdog.
>If you stole tens of thousands of dollars, you'd go to jail. When a politician does it, essentially nothing happens.
>The general public doesn't give a fuck about any of this unless it directly effects them.
>The general public doesn't care about torturing disadvantaged and innocent people in offshore prisons. They don't care that the government keeps as much of this secret as possible.
>The general public are all for climate change action, unless it involves them paying more tax for mitigation efforts.
>The general public don't care that 1-2 million people live below the poverty line in Australia (a quarter of which are children).
>The general public don't care that the rich have squirreled globally trillions in offshore tax havens.
>But they do care that an exceedingly small minority of people fraudulently claim pissy amounts of welfare benefits.
>The general public don't care about the relative chance of being killed in a terrorist attack versus a million other things.
>The general public are under-educated, in debt to the hilt, and increasingly facing lesser and lesser employment. They are justifiably scared. Is it any wonder they react to most issues on emotion?
>Conservatism is a disease:
- Who cares if you don't like homosexuals? Mind your own fucking business.
- Who cares if your irrational brains have convinced themselves that 'social Darwinism' - i.e. that some are naturally more deserving than others due to accidents of birth' - is a valid idea? Science disagrees with you.
- Who cares if you don't believe in climate change? Science isn't dependant on your aversion to change.
- Conservatives have been on the wrong side of civilised history basically every time. This alone shows that they aren't driven by any rational means. They are driven by fear of difference and change, and gross selfishness.
>Medical science should work on a drug that either allows conservatives to react less to their fears and/or shrinks their amygdalas (the ancient part of the brain that is responsible for fear).
>I'm serious. It's clearly a nasty ideology that results in unnecessary pain and suffering inflicted on others. It's an ideology of cutting off your nose to spite your face, on a societal level.
>There's no such thing as free will. All our choices are a result of our genetics and our environment.
>There is no serious science or philosophy to back the idea that we are dual natured (i.e. body and soul). It's an evolutionary quirk that we feel. Its totally understandable and individuals can believe what they want. But don't impose your irrational beliefs onto others.
>Saying a homeless person made a "choice" to be homeless is a meaningless statement. The genetic animal that is a human reacted to its environment (natural and social and indeed psychological) and the result was homelessness.
>They are a product of circumstance. It is immoral to treat them as if they chose this for themselves or that they deserve it because of some sort of failure.
>The moral thing to do is to help such people. There really isn't any debate about this.
>Yet we don't help them.
>A lot of people don't care about these issues. Some purport to care. Yet all these problems are getting worse.
Executive Summary: No one, other than a very tiny minority, actually care enough to do anything about this.
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