Bit Coin: 2 bit bubble

OK, granted that I'm jumping right into the middle of it, but so much just does not add up! OK, to paraphrase from The Princess Bride, "You keep saying that. I don't think it means what you think it does."Just exactly what is this globalist agenda and why do you think it's bad? From what I can gather, it's how American manufacturing jobs have been going overseas which leads to jobs being lost here. Am I correct in that?Assume that's what you are saying, then what does socialism have to do with it? I mean outside of trying to get at least half-way decent wages for American workers so that in response the Capitalists turn to far cheaper labor overseas. If a capitalist can manufacture and ship an item for even a few pennies less overseas, then he will do it in less than a heartbeat. The driving force in capitalism (albeit not of the Adam Smith variety) is the bottom line, profit, and the evolution of capitalism drives towards becoming more and more competitive by increasing profits even if it means keeping your workers on slave wages (or eliminating those workers altogether, eg through automation like was done by some companies in the Great Tax Scam of 2017).So then it is capitalism, not socialism, that is responsible for globalization, for US jobs being lost to overseas. Why would you even begin to blame socialism for that? Huh? That doesn't make any sense. You are talking about progressive concerns which have virtually nothing to do with socialism.Socialists care about the workers, the very "guy next door" you're talking about. For the most part, capitalists don't care about their workers ... except in businesses involving highly skilled workers (eg, engineers). That was the very problem raised by the Industrial Revolution that Karl Marx was trying to address. I've written about the Luddites before, highly skilled craftsmen who made a very good living weaving wool into cloth. Then the factories moved in with weaving machinery that could not only outproduce them at vastly less cost, but which also used unskilled labor with a minimum amount of training. The workers, including children, were nothing more than cogs in the machinery working almost their entire waking lives for near-slave wages in very dangerous conditions that often proved deadly or at least crippling (in which case, the crippled worker was entirely on his/her own for what remained of their life); if any worker ever objected in any way, then he'd be out on the street and replaced by the next person waiting in that long line at the front gate.I would recommend the episode of Netflix' "Genius of the Modern World" about Karl Marx. He saw capitalism as highly effective and successful, but he also saw that as the problem. As capitalism grows, it evolves into a ravenous monster that devours everything around it and eventually even itself. Examples abound (eg, large corporations that buy out smaller competitors just to remove the competition from the market), including WalMart in so many ways. A fellow chief used to talk all the time about Walmart's practices. You being a young and budding capitalist come up with a good product, say some kind of snack food. Walmart offers you a deal for them to carry it, but they greatly reduce your profit margin in order to sell it for less. It's a huge deal and a great opportunity, so you agree. Then they start whittling your profit down more and more and eventually make you agree to second-source your product and you eventually find yourself out of business. A similar thing happened at MOS Scale International who developed an electronic shipping scale that interfaced with a computer; based on the weight, carrier, destination, etc it would calculate the shipping rate and print out the labels including the postage. They got a contract with the US Post Office who insisted on a second source, Unisys. Pretty soon, Unisys had the USPS contract instead of MOS Scale; now it's somebody else but you can still find the same tech in the post office but you cannot find MOS Scale anymore (I worked there in the early 90's and have looked for them; the old building is now a self-storage facility and the small office by the airport they had moved to is now occupied by somebody else). In addition, when Walmart moves into a US town, they get all kinds of tax breaks from the local government and then give their workers so few hours that they don't have to give them any benefits; part of new worker orientation training is explaining to them how to go on welfare. Meanwhile, across the border in Canada Walmart cannot pull those welfare tricks so they pay their workers decent wages and can still make a profit.I was impressed at how right Karl Marx was about the problems with capitalism, but I don't agree with his proposed solutions. There must be a better solution. In part, we have found a better solution with some of the results of socialism such as labor unions, labor laws, OSHA, child labor laws, weekends, etc. Things that capitalists keep trying to take away from us. And just what did The Great Tax Scam of 2017 result in? Except for a very few exceptions of employers doing the right thing, most of that tax cut went to buying back the company's shares artificially inflating their value (most large corporation executives are now paid in company stock, so that was their way to enrich themselves). Other companies, like FedEx (as I recall) invested in increased automation in order to reduce their workforce (cutting costs on the backs of the workers). Small businesses are the life blood of the economy. Most workers are employed by them, plus they represent money staying in the local economy (more on that below).One feature in both pandemic stimulus packages, Trump's and then Biden's, was aid to keep small businesses afloat.So what happened with Trump's? Very few small businesses ever saw any of that money, because most of that "small business" money was immediately gobbled up by the large corporations.Gee, who was it who took that money away from small businesses? Socialists? No, it was capitalists.BTW, for Trump's stimulus package Pelosi insisted on transparency and accountability to make sure that every dollar was accounted for and went to where it belonged. And Trump said, "Nope!" And millions of dollars just disappeared.Yet another investigation that we need to conduct. Here's an economics question. How does money move and stay in neighborhoods?On a talk show several months ago, they were talking about a small town in New Hampshire which had lost its main industry based on lumbering. However, they still had their local bank and they were able to keep their local money circulating in the community and so were able to get by. They were even able to support a local family run diner.But then a fast food place (Burger King, I think) opened. Not only did it compete with the family diner, but it caused money to flow out of the community impoverishing everybody. As long as they went to eat at the diner, the money they spent stayed in the community and continued to circulate. For example, the diner would buy its food locally. But the money they spent at the Burger King left town as it went to corporate headquarters, plus they bought their food from corporate's suppliers so the local farmers were no longer making money. The entire town suffered economically.We usually hear that story as Walmart moving into town and putting everybody out of business. A friend using to live in Burlington, Vermont, where she owned a clothing boutique, but then Walmart arrived and put her out of business. I saw the same thing with South Coast Plaza, our first big mall, opened in the mid-60's. Before then, Downtown Santa Ana was the main area for shopping but as soon as the mall opened all that business went away and it has taken downtown decades to start to revitalize, but it's still not like it used to be. The latest season of "Stranger Things" on Netflix depicts the same thing happening. In our case, to make matters worse the mall opened in the next town over, just across the street that forms the border, so our city also lost all the business tax and license revenue.A similar situation was described to a call-in on the radio. In poor black neighborhoods they suffer from too little money circulating. Most of the businesses are opened by immigrants who have the initial capital to open a shop, whereas the local families don't have that capital to do likewise. As a result, the money that those businesses do make don't circulate back into the community, but rather the community's money is basically being sucked out through those businesses.We normally hear about such money circulation issues when discussing trade balances between countries, so I found it interesting that it also happens on such smaller scales. Since we both live in metropolitan areas we don't normally see that because money tends to flow back and forth between adjacent communities, but when communities are more isolated it becomes more apparent.Also, look at the first stimulus package in the pandemic under Trump.

Especially valuable for building space lasers! (referring to the 1971 Bond film)Though from what I caught from MTG (AKA "QAnon-Betty" to distinguish her from "QAnon-Veronica", Boebert) talking about those "secret Jewish space lasers", she was actually talking about masers.

So that's a Texasism like my father's favorite?: I'll have to set you down and explain to you how the cow ate the cabbage. (that one would confuse my older son immensely)I like a variation on beating a dead horse which went something like "Beating a patch of ground where there once laid a dead horse decades ago." Which describes what it's like to deal with creationist claims. This forum's term for that, PRATT, is much more succinct. Yes, they do happen, repeatedly. And economic models largely ignore them. And, yes, they are cause for concern. Weeeell ... concern for us poor working slobs. The rich not only ride out those downturns, but even grow even richer because of them.For example, a similar situation though not quite the same thing. During WWI, German industrialists were making tons of Marks hand-over-fist with war production for which they were not taxed. Then after the war, those same industrialists were still not taxed, not even when the Weimar Republic suffered that infamous period of hyper-inflation (tons more on that as explained to me one evening by a graduate student of history).Watch Terry Jones' documentary, Boom Bust Boom (Wikipedia has practically nothing on it). You can view it for free on TUBI, VUDU, and Crackle (according to my Roku's search function). Very informative and also fun to watch. Among other things, he covers Tulip Mania (an investment bubble where tulip bulbs fetched enormous prices in the 1600's until one big sellers' convention where not a single buyer showed up), a South American trade scheme which proved very lucrative even though hostilities with Spain prohibited any trade with South America, investment in Great Britain's new railroads in which entire families lost all their savings, etc, etc, etc. We just sold the last of our father's investment properties, basically single lots in the middle of deserts, which were sparked by rumors of an airport being built there (a woman at a recent atheists' breakfast meeting talked about her aunt having done the same thing) -- BTW, we sold all those properties at a loss just to keep from saddling our kids with that burden.Here's the trailer: Watch it. It is rather good as well as informative. 
Also watch The Big Short -- I loved that movie so much that it was the first to become a permanent resident on my DVR. The collapse of the housing market in 2008. The movie frequently has the cast members break down the fourth wall and talk directly to the audience, plus celebrities would appear to explain economics to us (eg, Margot Robbie in a bubble bath explaining subprime mortgages to us ("So every time you hear 'subprime', just think 'shit'.")).Or this classic Las Vegas appearance of Selena Gomez demonstrating how most investment consists of gambling and tons of side bets, none of which does anything at all for the actual economy, you know, the one that we both live in and depend on. Not only side bets on the actual play, but even side bets on other side bets. I think I was one of the few in the audience to catch this in the next scene. It's Jared Vennett's pitch that explains CDOs and how they are loaded with "dog shit wrapped in cat shit" and given AAA ratings because they're "diversified." Let's see if you can spot it too. Did you spot it? At about the five minute mark. He explains what a CDO is and a woman asks him to repeat that. What woman? Read the room. Nothing but men there. IOW, breaking the fourth wall suddenly became bi-directional. That woman was us, the audience, asking WTF was going on. I thought it was brilliant.BTW, I had never heard that word, "tranche" (a piece of something), before, but I've heard it used several times since this movie came out. And always in a different context. 
A point that both films make is that not only do we not learn from our financial mistakes, but (as per BBB) we even go into the next repeat of our previous mistake thinking that we don't need any safeguards because we know better now. Even though we clearly do not!Part of what brought on the bank failures of the Great Depression was the banks mixing commercial and investment banking, so the Glass–Steagall legislation of 1932 kept that from happening. Then in the 1990's we got rid of Glass-Steagall thinking that "we know better now". Then 2008 happened and to keep that from happening again we got Dodd-Frank in 2010. Then under Trump they got rid of Dodd-Frank.It's like me buying another bottle of tequila: "This time I'll be able to manage it. I'm smarter now, so I can do it." It never works! We just keep making the same mistakes over and over again! 
But seriously, both films are great! And very informative.

It can be interesting to see the difference in what some countries (and even regions therein, such as individual states) choose to teach as history or to leave out. I'm not just talking about different versions of the same event (such as the winning and losing sides of a conflict), but just plain what they even choose to mention.For example, there's the Fenian Invasion of Canada (listed as "Fenian Raids") after the US Civil War. Basically, Irish veterans from both sides of the Civil War teamed together to use their combat experience to attack the British in Canada. They massed next to the border in New York and there were a few skirmishes during incursions (hence raids instead of an actual invasion) until the police in the US made arrests.My point is that we never learned about in US history class (in Southern California); I had only ever heard of it by following links in Wikipedia. But when I asked a friend at church (UU) who was from Canada, he confirmed that, oh yes indeed, they did learn about that in school.1848: what historic events happened in that year? All we ever learned about in school was the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill which triggered the California Gold Rush in 1849 (and the "Forty-Niners"). It wasn't until college US history that I ever even heard of the Mexican-American War ("From the Halls of Montezuma ... ") at the end of which we annexed the Southwest including California from Mexico. I assume that it's part of history classes in Texas, where most of the fighting had started on the border, and maybe also in Arizona and New Mexico.Of course, Mexico remembers that war very well, including monuments to the "Three Heroes", military cadets who leapt to their deaths with the Mexican flag from Carlota's Castle rather than let that flag fall into the invaders' hands. They also remember "Los Sanpatricios", the Saint Patrick's Battalion, Irish immigrant soldiers who deserted from the US Army to fight on the side of the Mexicans with whom they had much more in common. I only heard of them because a local Irish band, The Fenians, does a song about them.But if you ask a Continental European about 1848 ... ; well, that year saw waves of revolutions blaze their way across Europe. The March Revolutions as a failed attempt to create a unified Germany (eventually put down, so unification had to wait until the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871). Italy's first step towards independence from Austrian rule and unification. Hungary's failed attempt at independence from Austria (put down very decisively -- story is that since the Austrians were clinking their glasses of beer in celebration of Hungary's defeat, you do not clink beer glasses in Hungary). And of course there was the French Revolution of 1848 which ended the "July Monarchy" and started the French Second Republic (which President Napoleon III later turned into the Second Empire which was destroyed by Prussia in 1871 right before the German Second Empire was formed). And Switzerland became a federal state. And lots lots more.There is so very much more to history than gets taught in school. And it's mind-boggling what schools will choose to leave out.

As in it's easier to just show them the film clips and recordings instead of creating presentations based on actual documentation? For example, I've been watching TimeGhost's week-by-week ("in real time") reports on The Great War (series was started in 2014) and WWII (last Saturday was 31 July 1942). While they do have film clips to include, they also put in a lot of work on animated maps that show troop positions and movement along with how the fronts were moving. For 07 Dec 1941, they also created 5 or 6 hours of special minute-by-minute coverage for Pearl Harbor.Another channel has started a week-by-week series on the Franco-Prussian War, a surprisingly important war that nobody knows (at least not in the USA) but which changed European politics and history and not only affected the end of WWI but also helped lead to WWII. I'm 69 years old and I only learned about it from an OLLI lecture right before the pandemic hit. The fall of the French Second Empire, Prussian occupation of Versailles watching Paris tear itself apart in a civil war ("Week of Blood") that led to the Second Republic which Prussia forced to pay war reparations (as well as losing territory -- eg, Elsaß-Lothringen AKA Alsace-Lorraine which the Germans had lost in 1640), plus the announcement at Versailles of the founding of the German Empire (the Second Reich). That motivated France to impose such harshly punitive actions after WWI, basically giving Germans a taste of their own medicine -- the destruction of the German Empire, taking territory away from Germany (not only taking Alsace-Lorraine back, but also creating new countries out of German lands -- I think that part of Hitler's "gathering in of the Germans" was to take that land back), war reparations which led to French occupation of German industry when payments (which led to the German gov't to call for a general strike, which led to hyperinflation when they had to pay out unemployment without any tax revenues). Like the British concentration camps in South Africa c. 1900 where tens of thousands of women and children died from malnutrition and disease? And of course there was also how the UK and France rewrote the maps of Europe and the Middle East which ended up causing futures wars and hostilities into the present (eg, Saddam Hussein's excuse to invade Kuwait was that it was actually Iraqi, Balkan nationalities all lumped together into Yugoslavia (a Yugoslavian friend remembered armed raids against her town in the early 60's), three different groups hostile to each other lumped together into Iraq). Britain's contradictory promises to both Arabs and Zionist groups for support in the Great War contributing heavily to anti-Israel sentiment in Arab countries. India and Pakistan.And the USA's hands are no less dirty. Perhaps made even worse by how drastically US foreign policy can change every four years, hampering any kind of long-term planning or commitments which has given us a bad reputation for not carrying through. Eg, Trump (and here I'm invoking the British meaning of his name).

On our Netflix is a series called "Explained", which releases a new episode each week (I still cannot make myself watch the episode on cricket).Last Friday was an episode on flags which included a Jamaican official talking about that song and a coat of arms (not the current Jamaican one). The song proclaims that Britain shall never be slaves and here her people had been brought there as slaves. And that coat of arms shows a white warrior subjugating a dark-skinned man.Still, it's good music. Just hum instead of saying the words.

You're one of the super-rich? Then why have you been pretending all this time to be a struggling working stiff? Get a kick out of slumming much, do you?The call is to get the super-rich (and their huge corporations) to pay their share of the taxes for a change, not most of the middle class or lower. As I recall, the proposed cutoff annual income would be about $200,000.At my highest while working, I was making a bit less than half of that. What was the annual income of your false identity of a middle-class working stiff supposed to be? 
Now, the actual middle class (not sure where I fall now as a retired senior, except towards the side when I stand up after sitting for a while) does stand to see our taxes increase this year. Not because of anything that the Democrats or Biden have done, except for winning the election (really!).Instead, this year's planned tax increase was designed into the Republicans' Great Tax Scam of 2017. While the super-rich and corporations got over 80% of the benefits from that massive hole that Republicans blew in the deficit (and increased the debt with the country getting virtually no return on that "investment"), they did toss some table scraps to the middle class to mollify them in the form of some small tax breaks. While the cuts for the rich were made permanent, the cuts for the middle class were made deliberately temporary, started out small, and decreased every year until finally this year those "cuts" now become tax increases.So, this appears to have been their strategy for deliberately scheduling middle-class tax increases in this year after the Presidential Election. If Trump would win, they could use it as an excuse for yet another tax scam give-away to the rich as part of their "correcting" that increase for the middle class. But if Trump were to lose, then they could blame that tax increase on the Democratic President -- for that matter, they haven't hesitated to blame Biden and Pelosi for things that Trump had screwed up (eg, "Why did Pelosi not mobilize the National Guard on 06 Jan?"; uh, because she's not authorized to do that, but rather that was Trump's duty so where was Trump?).So when your taxes go up this year, please remember whom to blame for that. Oh yeah, you're super-rich. You made out like a bandit on our backs!F**k you very much, sir. Would you like another one, please? (based on yet another movie reference: Kevin Bacon's first spoken line referenced in Steve Carell's remake of "Get Smart".)

I've heard a variation which is much more apt: "The pot calling the silverware black."IOW, accusing the other side of your own bad qualities that the other side does not in fact possess.I heard it in the context of what creationists do when you try to discuss their claims with them.

Well, if you make a lot of money, then you're going to be taxed on it. That is a simple fact of life. So your plan to become rich should have taken that into account, otherwise your ability to plan isn't worth shite.So, are you a savvy businessman or some stupid schmuck? Make up your mind. So just what does that entail? Being able to wipe your butt with paper money? (after having paid someone to crinkle that currency up to soften it -- I know a thing or two about using last year's Sears & Roebuck's catalog in the outhouse).Being wealthy is being wealthy. You have more than enough money to be able to live on. Whatever happens to all that excess money has no direct impact on you not your wellbeing.This very thing came up in our monthly Atheists breakfast. Home theaters. Why???? It's largely a status thing. Just something to show off to others. Yes the theater experience is different than just watching it on TV. But do you really
need to wave your bigger home theater in your neighbor's face? Battling penis sizes much?Most small businesses have to struggle to just barely survive. They don't want to be fabulously rich, but rather they just want to be able to survive. IOW, actual capitalism, not that fake BS that large corporations feed you. In every economic downturn the rich not only survive but they actually thrive. It's the small businesses who end up going under and causing most of the people to lose their jobs.2008, the banks that were "too large to allow to fail". Guess what they did. Small businesses live on short-term business loans. I learned that in Accounting 101. All those businessmen running for Republican positions brag about always being able to make payroll. Businesses are forever in a liquidity dance wherein they have all this money coming in under Accounts Payable, but no cash which is what they need to pay their employees. So they leverage those Accounts Payable to take out short-term business loans in order to increase their liquidity enough to pay their employees. That is what "making payroll" is all about. Constantly going into debt just to be able to pay your employees.What happened in 2008 was that those big banks got bailed out, but then when the small businesses need their customary short-term business loans the big banks were too afraid to give them out, so many small businesses had to go out of business. And a very great number of Americans lost their jobs as a consequence.Do please learn something about the real economy for once. Those bampots screeching at you on your "conservative" media have no fracking clue. And deservedly so!Do please explain to us in excruciating detail why you think that you should not be taxed for such a huge income. Do please not dally! Keep us waiting too long and we will start to demand that you also pay for our popcorn.Edited by dwise1, : minor clean-up

I was born in 1951 and grew up seeing the stereotypes on TV of people stuffing their money in their mattresses instead of depositing it in banks. Without knowing it, I was seeing the reactions of people who had lost their life's savings to the collapse of banks in the Great Depression. Similarly in "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" her mother-in-law was hiding all kinds of cash even in the walls -- as a Jewish comedienne I heard just the other day on SiriusXM said, "Jews are not stingy; we're just trying to build up enough cash for the next time that everybody wants to kill us." When you live through an economic disaster, you learn a few things. Or at least you should have learned. 
My son is going through financial difficulties in Florida (the terrible news is that I'm going to have to move to FRACKING FLORIDA in order to be near my son and my grandsons at the end of my life). He just got divorced and has moved to Winter Gardens. I asked him if they have a snow bird sanctuary in that town and he replied that the whole state is a snow bird sanctuary (still has a sense of humor despite having drunk the Trump Kool-Aid). Smart kid.In working out my will, I found that I am a millionaire. Just barely. My equity on my condo is about half of it and my IRA that I rolled over from my 401(k) makes up the other half. My one sister keeps praising me for my savvy planning ahead, but honestly I just kept pumping the maximum allowed into my 401(k) (I didn't need it anyway) and all this happened. Plus, while divorced I needed only about a third of my pay so the remaining went to paying off my mortgage (which was always a goal of my before I retired). Even now, my Social Security payments cover very nearly all my monthly expanses so I don't even have to draw from my savings.Part of my pre-retirement finances was to add to my savings, but trying to help my son depleted that. THIS IS THE LESSON I'M GIVING YOU.Liquidity. All my personal wealth is tied up in real estate and an IRA. If my son needed money to pay something off tomorrow, I would be helpless to help him despite being a millionaire. The fundamental problem is that all my wealth, such as it is, is tied up in real estate and investments (IRA).So I've been setting up a Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC). A way to provide liquidity to my real estate investment. My son is going to inherit it anyway, so why not provide it to him earlier, now, when he needs it.The point is that regardless of what you invest in, you will still need to convert it to cash at some point. You could be the richest man in the world, but if you have no liquidity, no cash, then you have absolutely no buying power. whatsoever.So sink all your money into precious metals all you want to. It's not going to make you any richer. You're just going to have to sell it anyway. At best, it might keep you from losing a lot during an economic collapse, but even then you'd have to sell it. You're basically stuffing your money into your mattress, which doesn't have any return on investment (ROI) (plus it removes your money from the actual economy and so does nobody any good).