Igor Delovski Board

[Ike]

Slashdot: After 10,000 Years, Farming No Longer Dominates

"As reported widely in business and mainstream press, the ILO recently
released world market employment statistics. Most outlets focused on US
economic competitiveness vs. China and Europe.

Few noticed the gem hidden away in the ILO report: for the first time since
the invention of agriculture, farming is not the biggest sector of the global
economy — services is. (Aggregate employment numbers often divide the
economy into agriculture, industry, and services.) Workers are now moving
directly from agriculture to services, bypassing the traditional route of
manufacturing."

[delovski]

dailykos.com - America's Imperial Crisis

Todd argues that the disintegration of American hegemony already is in full
swing, and he predicts that the Bush American Administration and its neocon
theorists "will go down in history as the gravediggers of the American empire."

[delovski]

WSJ: Greenspan Book Criticizes Bush And Republicans

"In a withering critique of his fellow Republicans, former Federal Reserve Chairman
Alan Greenspan says in his memoir that the party to which he has belonged all his
life deserved to lose power last year for forsaking its small-government principles."

[Ike]

The Truth Comes Out About Offshoring

"On January 6, 2004, Senator Charles Schumer (D, NY) and I scandalized
the economics profession and Washington policymakers with our New York
Times article, “Second Thoughts on Free Trade.” We noted that the two con-
ditions on which the case for free trade rests no longer exist in the present-
day world and that there was no basis for the assumption that offshoring of
US jobs was beneficial overall to Americans."

[delovski]

JoS: Electronic stuff is too inexpensive to make sense

"> I bought a 2Gig flash drive recently for $12.

The world is flat."

[delovski]

GlobalEurope Anticipation Bulletin: Global systemic crisis / September 2008,
Phase of collapse of US real economy

"A « decoupling » is indeed taking place between the US economy and the other
large regions of the world. But “decoupling” does not mean “independence”
and it is clear that, as anticipated by LEAP/E2020 for many months, Asia and
Europe will be affected by the crisis. But « decoupling » entails that the evolution
of the US economy and of the other large regions of the world are no longer
synchronised, that Asia and Europe are now moving along courses no longer
determined by the US economy."

[delovski]

1927-1933 Chart of Pompous Prognosticators

"We will not have any more crashes in our time."
- John Maynard Keynes in 1927

[delovski]

CNBC - Pickens: Oil Going to $150, So Move to Gas

"The only way I see that oil doesn't continue to rise [is] if we had a global
recession." he said. "That will happen at some point, but I don't see the
Chinese stumbling until after the Olympics.

[XNote]

encarta - Great Depression in the United States

"Causes of the Depression, Economic Collapse (1929-1933), Initial Response
to the Depression, International Effects of the Depression, Roosevelt and the
New Deal, Life During the Depression, End of the Depression & Legacy of the
Depression."

[XNote]

An Explanation of the Asian Financial Crisis

The Story of Rapid Economic Development Through Globalization

"However, the "growth curve" must ultimately level off. If the country has
open financial markets, this leveling off is likely to be accompanied by a
stock market crash, a currency crunch, a depressed property market, and
a recession."

[Ike]

reddit - How bad is it?

"Histogram of one year stock returns 1825-2008. 2008 returns to date is the
dark block in the far left tail"

[delovski]

barelyablog.com - The Myth That Laissez Faire Is Responsible For Our Financial Crisis

"Beyond all this is the further fact that the actual responsibility for our fi-
nancial crisis lies precisely with massive government intervention, above
all the intervention of the Federal Reserve System in attempting to create
capital out of thin air, in the belief that the mere creation of money and its
being made available in the loan market is a substitute for capital created
by producing and saving."

[Ike]

theburningplatform.com - Turning Japanese - The Audacity Of Reality

"Hope will not get the United States out of our current predicament. It took
decades to get to this point and it will take decades to extract ourselves from
this debt induced disaster. A few charts will hammer home the reality of the
U.S. situation."

[delovski]

Slashdot: Foxconn's Founder Opens Up About Making iPhones

"Bloomberg Businessweek has an article of interest resulting from a three-
hour interview with Foxconn founder Terry Gou (single page), whose com-
pany manufactures 137,000 iPhones a day. The article profiles Gou's rise
to Foxconn but also offers some interesting tidbits you might not know. On
why he is not opening factories in the United States, Gou frankly states, 'If
I can automate in the US and ship to China, cost-wise it can still be com-
petitive. But I worry America has too many lawyers. I don't want to spend
time having people sue me every day.'

If you're interested in how a modern day Henry Ford thinks, you can read
the rest about the man steering the ship of the world's largest producer of
electronics components and China's largest exporter. This unprecedented
transparency was part of an agreement Gou made with his customers du-
ring his delayed response to an increasing number of Foxconn suicides."

[Ike]

bloomberg.com - America’s Dirty War Against Manufacturing (Part 1),
Carl Pope

“Everything else. Taxes, infrastructure, workforce training, permits, health
care. The last company that proposed a fab on Long Island went to Taiwan
because they were told that in a drought their water supply would be in the
queue after the golf courses.”

[Ike]

http://www.economist.com/blogs/blighty/2013/05/birmingham


Birmingham
How to kill a city

[Ike]

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1hqddo/should_we_fear_the_end_of_work_pbs_newshour/

[Ike]

http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1nvh0y/til_the_first_record_of_a_tomato_based_pasta/


TIL The first record of a tomato based pasta sauce was in the 1790. Italian cuisine had no tomatoes until after New World contact since tomatoes originate from the Americas.

[Ike]

wired - This Is the Man Bill Gates Thinks You Absolutely Should Be Reading

"In every society, manufacturing builds the lower middle class. If you
give up manufacturing, you end up with haves and have-nots and you
get social polarization. The whole lower middle class sinks.

Most innovation is not done by research institutes and national labo-
ratories. It comes from manufacturing—from companies that want to
extend their product reach, improve their costs, increase their returns.

What’s very important is in-house research. Innovation usually arises
from somebody taking a product already in production and making it
better: better glass, better aluminum, a better chip. Innovation always
starts with a product."

[Ike]

truthdig.com - Statistics: The Real Lost Generation

“American teens and young adults have never, since record-keeping
began, done worse in the job market than in the past decade,” writes
economist Jeff Madrick in Harper’s Magazine.

[Ike]

the guardian - Why is Thomas Piketty's 700-page book a bestseller?

"Somehow, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty has
become a conversation piece among well-read people. Its graphic red-and-
ivory cover is inescapable. Early in its launch, it hit No 1 on Amazon’s best-
seller list and the paper version – a doorstop in punishing, heavy hardcover –
sold out in major bookstores."

[Ike]

Piketty: 'The Myth Of National Sovereignty Helps Big Corporations Screw Us Over'

http://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/2rm6e8/piketty_the_myth_of_national_sovereignty_helps/

[delovski]

r - Harvard's Larry Summers

"CEOs are paid too much and shareholders are pocketing too large a share
of corporate profits. Workers should have the right to collectively bargain.
Without middle class growth, institutions lose legitimacy and the ground is
fertile for populist revolt."

[Ike]

wp - Why salaries don’t rise

"For a more plausible explanation, we must, as the great leaker Mark Felt
once told two Post reporters, follow the money. When we do, we find that
the funds corporations earmarked for their own investment, research,
technology and raises during the 20th century have been redirected to
shareholders in the 21st. Over the past decade, more than 90 percent of
Fortune 500 corporations’ net earnings have been funneled to investors."

[delovski]

Eric Beinhocker - How the Profound Changes in Economics Make Left Versus Right Debates Irrelevant

"An alternative approach is to create a portfolio of small-scale experiments
trying a variety of solutions, see which ones work, scale-up the ones that
are working, and eliminate the ones that are not. Such an evolutionary
approach recognises the complexity of social-economic systems, the
difficulty of predicting what solutions will work in advance and difficulties in
real-world implementation. Failures then happen on a small scale and
become opportunities to learn rather than hard to reverse policy disasters."

[delovski]

r - Joseph Stiglitz: Inequality is now killing middle America

"Labor income is lower than before. Capital owners get bailed out. Suicides,
drugs and alcoholism are rising. Life expectancy is going down for white
Americans. I was Chief Economist of the World Bank and it reminds me of
Russia in the 90s."

[Ike]

https://evonomics.com/nobel-prize-economist-says-american-inequality-didnt-just-happen-it-was-created/

Nobel Laureate Economist Says American Inequality Didn't Just Happen. It Was Created.

[Ike]

newrepublic.com - Transcript: Paul Krugman on How Badly Trump Voters Have Been Scammed

"There are certain occupations that are really very heavily immigrant, certain
jobs that are very heavily filled by immigrants, many of them undocumented.
Those include in particular ... top of the list would be food. Agricultural workers,
about three quarters are immigrants and probably about half of them are
undocumented. Meat packing is probably between 30 and 50 percent undocu-
mented immigrants. So the whole food supply chain is reliant on people who
are going to be rounded up and put in camps."