Talk-Polywell.org

This is in response to a post in Baen books' Baen's Bar forum. We top post in the bar so the post I am responding to is on the bottom:
I have been reading up on the Great Depression lately and one of the most consistent reasons that business stayed out fo the market was well, inconsistency. In order to want to hire people business needs to be able to plan how the market and business is going to operate. In the '30's Hoover's and FDR's programs kept messing up any attempt to have a business plan. Now we have Pelosi, Reid and Obama combining to raise the government to new heights of taxation and incompetency. Would you expand your business in this environment?

The substitute for Rush suggested today that Obama needs to get some old Dems that know how to run things. The problem that I see is that that kind of Dem has been run out of the party a long time ago. The Dem executive pool is limited to Clinton retreads, which hardly would inspire confidence in their massive executive ability during in a crisis. The fact is that we have had the same class of people in both parties running things for too long.

The problem as I see it is that both parties have been relying on the Ivy Covered Snob Factory talent pool since the beginning of the last century. At the turn of the last century business, Wall street and government all turned to the Ivy league for talent that was more professional, more scientific, to replace old school entrepreneur. This worked well in the beginning. But there was a big problem. This approach credited credentials and training over experience. It was assumed that if you graduated from one of the ivy Covered Snob Factories that you didn't need to have experience to be in charge. this has been very costly for us.

More and the wealth and ideas they come up with involve rent seeking of one kind or another. Ergo Al Gore and climate change. They take our money because they are entitled to it because they, in light of having a sheet of paper form the "right" Places are naturally better than us. The problem is that the money for rents has run out. the tax wells are all dry and without tyranny they are not gong to get any more. But there is no limit to their greed.

Big business, Wall Street and government have become too inbred. Genereation after generation of the same kind of thinking has left it's mark. This talent pool all went to the same schools and has the same outlook, good or bad. Increasingly new ideas are not coming from the old ivy covered halls of establishment. That is why the nominally conservative Chris Buckley could vote for Obama over Mccain and Palin. There is a desperate need for new blood in government that is willing to take on the oncoming train wreck and deal with it.

The current government isn't listening:
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysi ... ?id=514131

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/ ... uce_j.html

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysi ... ?id=514109

http://blog.heritage.org/2009/12/03/why ... lus-fails/

The problem is that better ideas from people disconnected from reality did not save us during the Depression and the same kind of thinking will not save us now. the irony is that the US is producing a ton of world shaking new technologies and ideas right now that would real breakouts if the the government and establishment would just get out of the way instead of sucking more and more rents from the economy.


On Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:41:24 GMT johnraines wrote:

I was listening to the speech President Obama gave today and maybe I'm wrong but it seemed to me he said the reason umemployment is so high is because:

1. employers have not hired people
2. employers are trying to keep all the profit from the business they can
3. employers have found ways to get more productivity from workers and thus don't want to hire more people (see 1 & 2)
4. employers are trying to make him look bad even though the government has tried offering rewards for hiring people

I'm sure the speech will be carried on tv tonight so you can listen for yourself. Anyway these are just my impressions and I don't know if anyone else will see it the same or not.

While I am not sure what Obama is doing right now is ideal in any way, I would like to point out that the current crisis came about in 8 years under a right wing conservative government...
That did not go to well either, as we all know and can feel now.
It took Bush 8 years to ruin the economy, dont expect Obama to fix it in a singe year. I think that is quite unfair.
Oh and I stick with my previous statement about Palin and McCain come over as being really stupid. Anyone who says "planetariums" should go back to highschool, especially if he has been around for that long.

Skipjack wrote:While I am not sure what Obama is doing right now is ideal in any way, I would like to point out that the current crisis came about in 8 years under a right wing conservative government...
That did not go to well either, as we all know and can feel now.
It took Bush 8 years to ruin the economy, dont expect Obama to fix it in a singe year. I think that is quite unfair.
Oh and I stick with my previous statement about Palin and McCain come over as being really stupid. Anyone who says "planetariums" should go back to highschool, especially if he has been around for that long.

Actually it is Congress that does most of the Economic Dirty deeds. Fannie Mae. Freddie Mac. To recycle toxic loans. CRA to insist that banks make them.

All those programs got a boost from the current Congress.

And of course new entrants to the market drive up prices at all levels. Everyone gets to move up. While the music still plays.

The Fannies get the toxic mortgages. So the government gets to hold the liabilities for its stupid CRA policies. Seems fair to me. Other than wrecking the economy.

Anyone who says "planetariums" should go back to highschool,

Yeah. I just hate the hicks who can't speak well. What we need in government are people who lived in the proper neighborhoods and went to the right schools to rule us. You can tell who has the correct policies by their diction.

Did I just prove Jccarlton's point? I think I did.

Sorry, but if you are 70 years old, you should have had the time to read enough books to know these things, ESPECIALLY, if you are attacking them (quite pointlessly, IMHO) in your campaign.
And, to make this clear, I want - NO I REQUIRE- the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, actually anyone who wants to have authority over me, to be better educated and more intelligent than me.
A person that is not, does not deserve to rule over me, period!
Of course I cant always have my will (with the "beerheads" here in Austria, I never will), but I can at least voice my opinion about these people in a land of free speech and that is what I happily do.

If they want to create a nice employment bubble, they'll need to strike a fear across the land: The Fear of opportunity lost.

What they'll do instead is tax and meter out tax receipts to do specific thinks such as insulating ramshackle homes and buildings, constructing fast railways to nowhere, build worthless energy systems, repave some streets, fork cash to the politically well connected for more worthless projects, and squander the rest, even worse.

What they should do instead, is brainstorm on how fear of opportunity lost may be stoked.

Skipjack wrote:Sorry, but if you are 70 years old, you should have had the time to read enough books to know these things, ESPECIALLY, if you are attacking them (quite pointlessly, IMHO) in your campaign.
And, to make this clear, I want - NO I REQUIRE- the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, actually anyone who wants to have authority over me, to be better educated and more intelligent than me.
A person that is not, does not deserve to rule over me, period!
Of course I cant always have my will (with the "beerheads" here in Austria, I never will), but I can at least voice my opinion about these people in a land of free speech and that is what I happily do.

I read LOTS of books. LOTS and LOTS of books. I have read words wrong for decades. And my pronunciation? Worse.

I guess I'm not qualified to speak on Polywell (or anything else) any more.

Of course no one deserves to rule over you. Yet that is what happens. It is one of the reasons for elections. Read what Lincoln had to say on the matter when discussing the vote in military camps for the 1864 election. I believe you can find the details in a book by Grant's adjutant

Campaigning With Grant

to be better educated and more intelligent than me.

Steven Hawking. But his pronunciation is terrible.

Helius wrote:If they want to create a nice employment bubble, they'll need to strike a fear across the land: The Fear of opportunity lost.

What they'll do instead is tax and meter out tax receipts to do specific thinks such as insulating ramshackle homes and buildings, constructing fast railways to nowhere, build worthless energy systems, repave some streets, fork cash to the politically well connected for more worthless projects, and squander the rest, even worse.

What they should do instead, is brainstorm on how fear of opportunity lost may be stoked.

It is rather simple really. What government needs to do is to promise to confiscate all the wealth generated from new ideas or more profitable ways to exploit old ideas. That will help with the fear factor.

Steven Hawking. But his pronunciation is terrible.

I am not necessarily clinging to spelling and pronunciation. That is just a symptom of the problem. The problem was, that he attacked something that he clearly did not know anything about and that he had clearly not informed himself about. Had he really done that, he would have known the plural of planetarium.

Oh and Steven Hawking for president!

Skipjack wrote:

Steven Hawking. But his pronunciation is terrible.

I am not necessarily clinging to spelling and pronunciation. That is just a symptom of the problem. The problem was, that he attacked something that he clearly did not know anything about and that he had clearly not informed himself about. Had he really done that, he would have known the plural of planetarium.

Oh and Steven Hawking for president!

I have studied planetariums and I have no idea what the plural is. I solve the problem the American way. Add an "S".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_planetariums

Them wiki folks seem to have got it wrong. How is that possible? Better send them a nastygram ASAP. Before the infection spreads and all Americans become ignorant fools.

It is planetaria of course. It is a word of latin origin, like many words in the english language.
Just like it is pizz(a)e and not pizzas and just like it is cacti and not cactuses.
But I am sure that hick would have gotten those cacti right, but then, maybe not.

Definitely no hope for Palin though.

MSimon wrote: I solve the problem the American way. Add an "S".

I really hate it when people do that. Look, if you hate the english language so darn much, get on the reformist train of thought and campaign for standardization and simplification. Get rid of synonyms, all plurals could be handled in the same way, remove capitalization because, frankly, that's a whole lot of alphabet for very little information, make everything phonetic and so on. Might as well just throw it all out and call it American.

What a non issue..
You hear a word you've never heard before. You need to reply to whatever the person was saying by using that same new word in the plural. Simplest way to get the point (that you're meaning plural) is to put an S at the end. Otherwise there's just no end to the anal nit picking and word pedantery. I know french pretty well and don't bother correcting mistakes (pretty much every single french word english speakers use) when there's a good debate happening because it's beside the point. The point is to understand what's meant and correspondingly get a response across.
If someone says they put an S at the end of something "as a way to solve a problem the US way", it's to cut across a lot of the useless semantics gordian knot. IE the "American" quick & dirty solution to that kinda problem, not americanized grammar.

Skipjack wrote:Sorry, but if you are 70 years old, you should have had the time to read enough books to know these things, ESPECIALLY, if you are attacking them (quite pointlessly, IMHO) in your campaign.
And, to make this clear, I want - NO I REQUIRE- the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, actually anyone who wants to have authority over me, to be better educated and more intelligent than me.
A person that is not, does not deserve to rule over me, period!
Of course I cant always have my will (with the "beerheads" here in Austria, I never will), but I can at least voice my opinion about these people in a land of free speech and that is what I happily do.

First of all you live in Austria, so you have no knowledge of what Bush did or what Obama is doing. You are just spouting cliches with no substance.
Second of all, read this for starters:
http://jim.com/econ/contents.html
and this:
http://books.google.com/books?id=ax6dsq ... q=&f=false
also this:
Google Book
That should get you started. According to Karl Rove, President Bush reads more books than I do, which is very impressive as I usually top 60-70 new books a year.:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123025595706634689.html
Bush's problem was not that he was stupid. His problem was that he was, in the end stuck in the same mold as the rest of the "establishment." Plus the fact that he had to use most of his political capitol fighting a major war against both an unscrupulous enemy and the opposition in his own country. The Dems took advantage of the necessities of war and exploited them for their own shallow ends. Meanwhile President Bush did not have the political capitol to fight the economic battles that needed to be fought and constrain the spending of the progressive culture of Congress.