they're just trying to keep Assad in power

While the Russians have no love for Islamic terrorists, given their issues with the Chechnya, that is exactly Russia's long-term goal. They have been staunchly pro-status quo in the Middle East from Libya to Syria to the point where relations with the UK have been the worst for decades.

Quote from: Meta as Fuck on September 30, 2015, 08:57:54 AM

No I haven't; read what I said. I said, on the whole, it's beyond worth doing. Does it have drawbacks? Yeah, but these don't outweigh the benefits.

A bunch of people losing their jobs and going broke doesn't outwork the benefits for the already rich?

The benefits for free trade span across the board; I agree with you that the disemployment effects of outsourcing for some workers should be paid more attention to, and there should be policies to remedy this like a more effective welfare state, but we have to remember all people are consumers and not just workers (well, the number of the former outweighs the latter) and the benefit to the former is unanimously considered larger than any disemployment effects.

For acting like he's the shit when he was wrongn about a lot.

Greenspan was easily the best Fed chair the US has had prior to 2001, and while he certainly made mistakes past 2001 with the housing bubble we ought to remember that most people--like the most recent former chairman, Bernanke--also got the same things wrong, as well as the HUD and of course financial executives who led the charge in the fall in underwriting practices. 

We need better wages, fuck benefits.

Sure, but like I say that's an issue of productivity. Welfare is there to smooth the ride for those at the bottom, those who suffer frictional unemployment and those who suffer at the hands of the business cycle. If you want to raise wages, then it's a question of raising productivity. Welfare is a useful tool to help facilitate this.

I think of you as Persian.

Although I haven't heard your voice.

that isn't literally fucking owned by the companies it's supposed to regulate.

Gee, that must be why the FDA is routinely criticised for being too sluggish. . .

Does regulatory capture happen? Sure, but bureaucrats are usually more concerned with keeping their cushy government job. If you want to make the FDA better, you need to streamline the system and make it more efficient/quicker. The problems with the FDA today are, by and large, little to do with corporations pushing through their products.

Hell, the FDA doesn't even allow the reduction of the risk of cardiac arrest to be advertised on Aspirin, despite the fact that it's a well-known benefit.

With stem cells.

British surgeons have taken a “big step forward” towards curing the most common form of blindness by developing and successfully performing a ground breaking operation.

Surgeons at London’s Moorfields Eye Hospital carried out the first operation on a female patient with wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD), characterised by leaking blood vessels. They now believe that the same procedure could apply to dry AMD, which accounts for nine out of 10 of the 600,000 people affected by the condition in the UK.

AMD affects central vision which is what you see when focus straight ahead, according to NHS Choices. In AMD this vision becomes increasingly blurred, which means that reading becomes difficult, colours appear less vibrant and people’s face are difficult to recognise. By 2020, it's predicted almost 700,000 people will have late-stage AMD in the UK.

However, after performing surgery on the 60-year patient, who was classified as legally blind, surgeons are optimistic of a breakthrough, although the full impact on her sight is known. She is one of 10 people to take part in the trial. After taking a single stem cell from an embryo and growing a patch of cells in a laboratory, these were then transplanted into the patient’s eye. The cells were taken from unused embryos created during IVF treatment.

“The reason why we are so excited is that we have been able to grow a perfect copy of the eye,” Professor Lyndon Da Cruz, a surgeon at Moorfields told the Telegraph. He added that he optimistic that the patient’s sight would be restored. “Having got this far, we feel it will work,” Prof Cruz said.

“There has been a lot of research behind this and this is now looking like a route to treatment.” The surgery could be routine within five years, he said. Professor Chris Mason, a professor of regenerative medicine at University College London, described the surgery as “a big step forward to curing a major cause of blindness.”

If the trials were successful he told The Telegraph that the therapy could be “affordably manufactured at large scale,” enabling all patients to benefit.

muh souls

To be fair, you could be pretty justified in not trusting the FDA and being indifferent to the WTO.

Big Pharma, for all its flaws, still manages to get too much slack.

Get a degree, go commissioned officer in the navy.

I remember learning in my politics class that Reagan managed to win a place called Macomb County by a couple more percentage points than JFK had done due to the white working-class vote. Since LBJ, Democrats have (rightly or wrong) been seen as the party of the (black) underclass.

but at least socialism has a concrete solution to the issue

Socialism isn't concrete in any way.

How is being unemployed for months when your high paying IT job got outsourced good?

It obviously isn't for the individuals in question, which is why I say we should pay greater attention to this effect, but across the entire economy it doesn't add up to even a fraction of enough to justify some kind of protectionism.

]LMAO

Not anywhere near the rate jobs are being shipped overseas.

There's currently an insourcing boom in the US due to rising overseas costs. Can't find any evidence for how it ultimately balances out, but like I said: job creation isn't significantly impacted by international flows of capital, but policies from the central bank and the government to do with things like stable demand, employment and human capital.

Greenspan is a fucking moron.

Greenspan gets too much flak.

Higher paying jobs are being fucked with to create a job market where there's really no point striving for more than minimum wage.

But this is insanely conspiratorial; middle-income America has seen significant gains in compensation despite growing income inequality. This is a trend to do with productivity; skills don't suddenly become worth less when the rich get more greedy. Wage inequality is driven primarily by technological change which alters some workers' output more than others'. The issue to solving inequality--and poverty--isn't to call CEOs (the high-paid of which are such a small fraction of the labour market it's ridiculous that people focus on them) greedy cunts, string up financial executives and command companies to pay min-wage workers more. The solution is investment in things like education, expanding welfare like EITC, end ridiculous policies like the war on drugs which harms so many poor (black) families by splitting them up and throwing some dude in prison because he got caught with some weed.

Wages are low for a lot of jobs in a LOT of sectors. Let's not even talk about minimum wage.

We have the same issue in the UK, although it's much more pronounced; productivity is currently depressed. Workers' output simply isn't high enough to sustain the higher wages we'd like to see. It's also worth noting that wages aren't the only part of compensation; workers' also get things like benefits which contribute to total dollar compensation.

A small business in Spain is something that makes around 2,000€ profit. They can't afford to hire people.

You can afford to higher somebody != you should higher somebody.

I haven't seen any literature on Spain's minimum wage so I won't comment on that specifically, but the productivity of workers and the value of their skills doesn't change if suddenly there is a price floor. Even if you can afford to pay somebody above that floor, their overall output might only justify a wage of $5/hr instead of $8/hr or whatever.

Not to mention, setting the minimum wage has absolutely nothing to do with the cost of living; the point (presuming you don't have something like an NIT) is to set it at the equilibrium point between the positive welfare effects of higher income and the negative welfare effects of disemployment. There is precisely no guarantee that this system will yield a sufficient enough income for those at the bottom.

One solution won't fix an issue that's been compounded for decades.

We're talking specifically about low wages; this is not a structural deficiency of the market, per se, but an unfortunate side-effect of people being unskilled or skilled in the wrong area (people are mis-educated more than they are over-educated; the college premium AFAIK is growing).

This is one of the issues that only capitalism could breed.

Because workers in a socialist society could never be under- or over-paid, right?

OT: Expanded welfare (like NIT) is the best option for combating poverty.

https://libraryofbabel.info/

By Stendarr, this is no ordinary daedra! What are you doing to us, you demon-worshiping scum?

What happens with your life if you don't, in fact, become an author?