What is wrong with this world...

PS I "liked" Fraggle's post 160 as it is seldom stated sad facts, (I do not like those facts). I'll just add a minor correction: Many of the good (higher pay than Big Mac jobs most young have) factory jobs their parents had went to Mexico, etc. as well as China. TPTB, make more profit that way, and don't care much about the health of the US economy, especially the 1% ers who get half the national income.

To get an accurate (but complex to read) understanding of how sick the US economy is - held up by 3/4 of a trillion dollars of "window dressing" on 31Dec2015 See: http://news.yahoo.com/-475-billion-y...1085.html?nf=1

You may need to read it more than once - I did. The essence is that many banks and some other big lenders now have a lot of low quality assets (probably in large part loans made to "oil frackers" who can not pay them back with the current low oil prices). So every day they send them to the Fed before CoB and get high quality US Treasury notes from the Fed in exchange, which they hold on their books at the end of the business day. During the night this swap is reversed. - It is now a giant 3/4 trillion dollar daily swap game - hiding the fact that many of these lenders are insolvent - swapped with trash loans, they park at the FED for a few hours to make their books look good at CoB each day.

If you want more details about how this "Reverse Re-Purchase agreements" RRPs game is played see:
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015...on-reverse-repo-program-when-liftoff-arrives/
This article tells how and why the Fed reluctantly boosted the max they could swap with banks each day from 300 billion to the current 2 TRILLION daily limit. The US economy is in "Deep Yogurt" but Fed is hiding that fact with a daily RRP swap of nearly a trillion dollars of good assets for the trash held by insolvent banks and a few other big lenders.

As Lincoln said:
You can fool all the people, some of the time; some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all the people all of the time.
I. e. SHTFan day is not far away now.
 
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On September 10, 2008, five days before filling for bankruptcy, Lehman announced a loss of $3.9 billion. Instructive to see how that compares to the 475 billion the Fed did on 31Dec 2105 in RRPs (Swaps giving US Treasuries to inolvent banks and firms in exchange for their deeply under water loans with buy-back contract reversing the exchange in a few hours*)

* The firms and banks needed to be holding good paper, not their trash, at Close of Business, each day - hid their insolvency from appearing on the books. (Much of the "trash" was loans to "oil frackers" who could not repay the loans with current low oil prices.)

475 /3.9 = 121.8 so in some sense US economy is more than 100 times worse off now than when Lehman almost crashed it all!

A huge amount of trash (non-performing loans) is being "papered over" daily by Fed's RRPs. More details in prior post.
 
Arrogance ; unawareness ; stupidity; Ignorance ; unknowledgeable ; lack of true investigation; tradition; and laziness; religion.
 
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river said:
Arrogance ; unawareness ; stupidity; Ignorance ; unknowledgeable ; lack of true investigation; tradition; and laziness.
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A good description of yourself, evident from the nonsense you post: I would add also naivety, and gullibility along with delusions of grandeur.
A grand picture!
 
This planet is mostly garbage in my opinion. Life is completely pointless and meaningless.

We are all here to suffer and then die.

I wish I could live in a fantasy world where we are all young, eternal and happy and where there is no severe pain and extreme suffering but stuff just doesn't work that way, doesn't it?

This whole world is nothing but a cruel joke.

I wish that this whole world (this whole reality I mean) would just off itself into the lowest, darkest abyss in the whole multiverse where it obviously belongs and rot there for fucking eternity.
 
Billy T said:
PS I "liked" Fraggle's post 160 as it is seldom stated sad facts, (I do not like those facts). I'll just add a minor correction: Many of the good (higher pay than Big Mac jobs most young have) factory jobs their parents had went to Mexico, etc. as well as China. TPTB, make more profit that way. . . .
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This was predicted many years ago, when Mexico surprised the shit out of the entire world by turning itself into a middle-class country in a single generation. The country now has the resources, the infrastructure, the educational system (which of course they always had along with a fantastic medical system--both of which surely contributed to that rapid economic improvement) and the human capital to build their own factories and compete with the Chinese.

But there are major differences between off-shore manufacturing in China and across-the-border manufacturing in Mexico. The most important (in the short run) is, of course, the cost of shipping. This makes it feasible to manufacture more components here. The average made-in-China product contains about 5% components made in the USA; whereas the average made-in-China product is 40%! This will put a large segment of our blue-collar workers back to work! In addition, American managers can be stationed in Mexico to oversee operations, and take a short roundtrip home on weekends--that's simply impossible in China.

And finally, ironic as it seems since the average American regards the average Mexican as a pest, the Mexicans love us. They've felt this way ever since we sent our own army to help them overthrow the French occupation more than a century ago. (Read up on the origin of Cinco de Mayo.) You can be 100% sure that there's not a single Mexican worker who would knowingly ship us poisonous dog food, or building materials that exude poisonous gas, unlike the Chinese.

So although NAFTA was originally a kick in the balls to Mexico (their tortilla factories began buying American corn because our mechanized farms produced it so much cheaper than Mexico's hand-labor farms), now that the dust has settled, it will be a boon for both countries.

Yes folks, our people will go back to work in the next 5-10 years, and in the bargain we'll find much higher-quality products on the shelves in WalMart.
. . . . and don't care much about the health of the US economy, especially the 1% ers who get half the national income.
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Unfortunately our tax laws have been rewritten by members of Congress who expect to be "consultants" for those plutocrats when their term is over, and don't care about the people who elected them.

History warns us that a situation like this cannot last forever. Let's hope it comes to a head before our only choice is an armed revolution.

Nonetheless, it's worth pointing out that the subprime mortgage fiasco, which kicked off the recession that isn't quite over yet, was the work of plutocrats who were so dumb that it didn't occur to them that selling mortgages to people who would never be able to pay them back might not be the best way to assure a glorious future for their banks.

We've got a national IQ problem.
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
We've got a national IQ problem.
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We have a Bullshit problem!

Too much of our IQ has to be used up sorting out bullshit.

We are bombarded with way more crap today than when I was a kid. I had 5 TV channels on a B/W TV. I could not the the redshirts were Redshirts. I don't even know how many channels there are now. But there is way more BS to be sorted out.

I will give you an example since I know it from personal experience from the source of the BS. And this was more then 30 years ago.

IBM introduced a computer called a Datamaster 23. It replaced the 5100. I could test both machines on a quiet night on the night shift. I used a Bubble sort and a Prime numbers program. The old machine was almost twice as fast as the new one. It became obvious why benchmarks were never mentioned.

Now think of all of the different products that people do not know enough about or have enough information to evaluate. But we are bombarded with commercials constantly. I find the Volkswagen incident with the software controlled pollution enable hysterically funny.

I am at a high school now dealing with their wi-fi. My high school education was better without computers.

psik
 
Wow! The dramafication!

I really dont think the world is as bad as some of you try to paint the picture of.

Most of us find football more entertaining than science. Thats not a bad thing, and it shouldn't be a surprise.

Most of us have to work hard to make a living and therefore like to spend our downtime doing things that we find enjoyable. Just because you find science and learning it enjoyable doesn't mean it is inherently better than my love for video games. This entire thread is like a huge dramafication of perceived problems. There world is not in any worse position than it used to be in regards to education and science.

I mean look at some of the accusations here. TV is our problem? LOL. Why dont we all just give our hard earned cash to the advancement of science instead of using it for ourselves and our entertainment, no more TV, only books...and only books about science, none of that entertainment bs that clogs up our brains.

Yes, there are problems. But it's not as bad as some of you make it out to be.
 
pluto2 said:
This planet is mostly garbage in my opinion. Life is completely pointless and meaningless.

We are all here to suffer and then die.

I wish I could live in a fantasy world where we are all young, eternal and happy and where there is no severe pain and extreme suffering but stuff just doesn't work that way, doesn't it?

This whole world is nothing but a cruel joke.

I wish that this whole world (this whole reality I mean) would just off itself into the lowest, darkest abyss in the whole multiverse where it obviously belongs and rot there for fucking eternity.
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Life is whatever you want it to be about. You are pessimistic
 
Religion is still a much greater threat to the survival of civilization than any of our technologies.

In other words, a collection of utterly preposterous fairytales from the Paleolithic Era still has humanity in its thrall.
 
Crcata said:
Life is whatever you want it to be about. You are pessimistic
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This is exactly what I was about to post. You beat me to it.

pluto exhibits traits of privilege and expectation, and appears embittered when life does not hand him an oyster.

pluto, the one quality of life that (most of us) have is opportunity. You can be whatever you want - do whatever you want - if you try hard enough. While not true for some portions of the world, the fact that you have internet access means that you are part of the free world. It is full of unlimited possibilities.

Every day in every way, despite how evil the world seems to be, you are empowered - you are free - to act and think according to your desire. That, IMO, is one of the primary indicators of an increasing quality of life for the human race.
 
The control of thought of , new thinking , new ideas , corporate control , doctrine, mindset .

Sociopaths in control of us .
 
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