discipline posted:
I used to live in a city where it was basically impossible to get around without a car and it was so miserable. now I live in london and I have no idea why people drive cars here lol

gd, i really wish i was going to school there but now i apparently might have to go to LA of all places.

Myfanwy posted:
Is this the right thread for this article

yep. my guess is that China gets more dollars to buy US assets abroad and get access to oil. roads are a pretty good way to do it. there seem to be plans to do the same in the US too: http://blogs.reuters.com/muniland/2011/09/10/the-infrastructure-privatization-bank/

shennong posted:

cleanhands posted:

shennong posted:
learning to be a bicycle mechanic was probably the most useful thing i ever spent time & money on

thats boss as hell + i wanna do it too

its not very hard if you're working mostly on old steel frame bikes, you basically need to learn how to service a cup & cone bearing, adjust brakes and drivetrain and you're most of the way there! i learned from an old indian engineer who teaches mechanics to fix up abandoned american bikes in the carribean for sale there. there might be a similar community learning program where you're at. otherwise you could do worse than getting a bookwarez copy of barnett's repair manual and working through it as problems come up on whatever you're riding

that sounds like a really good idea. it might sound like a treacherous anarchist plot or something since it doesn't involve immediately seizing state power, but i've been wondering if stuff teaching practical skills like that that could be organized on a large scale. when a program works, word spreads and it gets replicated elsewhere, etc.

maoism is a practical skill

babyfinland posted:

State prosecutors probe alleged plot to kill Greek prime minister

http://intelnews.org/2012/03/16/01-949/

wtf

Edited by dm (March 21, 2012 21:53:00)

girdles_gone_wild posted:
yall didn't learn bike maintenance when yall were kids?!

where do you live that they do this

Some economists are arguing that Dying for Growth, jointly edited by Dr Kim and published in 2000, puts too great a focus on health policy over broader economic growth.

“Dr Kim would be the first World Bank president ever who seems to be anti-growth,” said William Easterly, professor of economics at New York University. “Even the severest of World Bank critics like me think that economic growth is what we want.”

Dr Kim, who is president of Dartmouth College and a former head of the HIV/Aids programme at the World Health Organisation, was a surprise pick for the top job at the World Bank, which traditionally goes to a US citizen.

Little is known about his views on economic policy because his background is in health. But if he cannot set out a strong vision for how the World Bank will fuel growth, it may boost the campaigns of heavyweight rivals such as Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Nigerian finance minister and former World Bank managing director.

Dr Kim’s book contains several inflammatory lines. For example, the introduction, which he and two other academics co-authored, says: “The studies in this book present evidence that the quest for growth in GDP and corporate profits has in fact worsened the lives of millions of women and men.”

But colleagues of Dr Kim and officials at the US Treasury said that when taken in context he was simply arguing that the distribution of gains from economic growth decides whether it makes life better for the poorest. They pointed out that such criticisms were widespread in the late 1990s and the World Bank had since changed its practices to take account of them.

“My general thought about the mandate is if insurance is affordable and accessible, most people will buy it anyway,” said David Cutler, an economist at Harvard and longtime collaborator of Mr. Gruber’s.

Others, like Paul Starr, a Princeton sociologist, say they believe Mr. Gruber’s work does not account for how hard it will be to enforce the mandate.

“There is this groupthink about how important the mandate is,” Mr. Starr says. “Most people don’t understand or won’t acknowledge how weak the enforcement mechanism is.”

Mr. Starr said he thought Mr. Gruber in particular was overstating the effectiveness of the mandate because “it’s his baby.”

That said, it is difficult for too many other experts to categorically refute Mr. Gruber’s work, since he has nearly cornered the market on the technical science behind these sorts of predictions. Other models exist — built by nonprofits like the RAND Corporation or private consultancies like the Lewin Group — but they all use Mr. Gruber’s work as a benchmark, according to Jean Abraham, a health economist at the University of Minnesota and former senior economist in both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations.

“He’s brought a level of science to an issue that would otherwise be just opinion,” Mr. Cutler says. “He’s really the only person who has been doing all this careful modeling for so long. He’s the only person you can go to for that kind of thing, which is why the White House reached out to him in the first place.”

Mr. Obama had made health care reform a cornerstone of his campaign, and wanted to announce a credible proposal quickly after taking office. But members of the Obama administration’s transition team said they had inherited an executive branch that had vastly underinvested in modeling research on health care, especially compared to the technical modeling that had been done in areas like tax policy.

“Creating a good model from scratch would have taken months, maybe years,” said Lawrence H. Summers, who was the director of President Obama’s National Economic Council and had advised Mr. Gruber on his dissertation when they were at Harvard.

....

When Mr. Romney succeeded Ms. Swift in 2003, he proposed using an individual mandate to help the state achieve universal health care coverage. Mr. Gruber was again brought in to analyze the idea, which he had not formally modeled before.

“Romney saw it as a traditional Republican moral issue of personal responsibility, getting rid of the free riders in the system, not as much of an economic issue,” Mr. Gruber said. “Not only were the Republicans for it, the liberals hated it. People forget that.”

Mr. Obama had vehemently opposed an individual mandate before his election in 2008.

After the Massachusetts plan passed in 2006, Arnold Schwarzenegger, then the Republican governor of California, invited Mr. Gruber to Sacramento to help model a similar proposal.

“That was awesome,” Mr. Gruber says, his eyes widening at the memory. “I got to see the sword from Conan the Barbarian.”

so yeah, like the mandate is just for the insurance companies that has been turned into a campaign thing. a serious way to deal with it would still be single-payer and shit is really dysfunctional either way.

e: oh, then there is the CBO/OMB bullshit

Along with these credentials, Mr. Gruber’s position as an adviser to the influential Congressional Budget Office also left him perfectly positioned to advise the White House on health reform.

“The most important arbiter of everything was the C.B.O.,” said Neera Tanden, who was a senior adviser for health reform at the Department of Health and Human Services.

The C.B.O.’s assessment of a bill’s efficacy and costs strongly influences political debate, but the office does not publicly reveal how it calculates those numbers.

“We knew the numbers he gave us would be close to where the C.B.O. was likely to come out,” Ms. Tanden said. She was right.

After Mr. Gruber helped the administration put together the basic principles of the proposal, the White House lent him to Capitol Hill to help Congressional staff members draft the specifics of the legislation.

http://www.ombwatch.org/

Edited by dm (April 1, 2012 07:51:15)

dm posted:
oh, AND... i found out what the recovery thing is all about. it's something i've been suspecting for a while and we talked about earlier in this thread (notably in relation to a paper that khamsek linked). the national accounting systems have completely broken down. the growth that was reported was just income imputed to rising prices of financial assets (fictitious capital).

lmao

dm posted:
oh, AND... i found out what the recovery thing is all about. it's something i've been suspecting for a while and we talked about earlier in this thread (notably in relation to a paper that khamsek linked). the national accounting systems have completely broken down. the growth that was reported was just income imputed to rising prices of financial assets (fictitious capital).

i dont read, think about, or know anything and i still assumed this was the case

dm posted:
actually there is some stuff to decipher but it's mostly based on arcane knowledge (statistics and methodology, national accounting, Walter Lippman). like this seems very scientific and authoritative and everything, but you would have a really hard time finding anyone to provide a rationale for dis shit: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/31/floodgates/

then there's also the stuff related to Bourdieu that i was talking about:

http://www.creditwritedowns.com/2012/03/on-bank-lending-creating-deposits-and-paul-krugmans-response.html
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/banking-mysticism-continued/


and khamsek, check this out: http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/?docid=1512

notice the emphasis on the institutional transformation, reference to Hilferding, etc. the post-Keynesians/Kaleckians are worth taking a look at once in a while. the post-Keynesian short-run and classical (Marxian) long-run can be merged into a consistent approach: http://www.jourdan.ens.fr/levy/dle2012g.pdf

i got into reading lippman a while back, then took a detour because some dude told me to 'dive in' to reading baudrillard, i should go back because its was like, whoa, this guy figured out so much stuff just by himself

cleanhands posted:

i wanna know who teh greatest living novelist is/// my money is on John Norman

discipline posted:
that's beautiful, that's beautiful, that's like.. when they reconfigured the unemployment rate under clinton

yeah i have a Theory (that you can use if you like) about a slow deterioration in the integrity of the national accounts. combine with Minsky's FIH and the transformation since WWII ftw

cleanhands posted:

dm posted:
oh, AND... i found out what the recovery thing is all about. it's something i've been suspecting for a while and we talked about earlier in this thread (notably in relation to a paper that khamsek linked). the national accounting systems have completely broken down. the growth that was reported was just income imputed to rising prices of financial assets (fictitious capital).

i dont read, think about, or know anything and i still assumed this was the case

well yeah, it's obvious, but it's also possible to figure out a bit about what has been happening by looking through the errors

Edited by dm (April 2, 2012 02:29:10)