Finished drilling the mount holes on some already painted Narns that I bought from hiffano months ago. 1 Bin'Tak and 3 G'Quans. I hope to use them in an upcoming game with my Brakiri.
All posts by James O'Keefe
German laws supporting workers helps their economy plus Utah Phillips on natural resources
Paul Krugman writes about how Germany is hasn't seen as high an increase in unemployment as the US has and that this is due to the laws Germany has to support employment and the subsidies to employers who reduce the hours of their workers rather than lay them off.
He goes on to suggest that the government cannot use monetary policy to get us out of the recession, and for 90% we STILL are in a recession, and the government leadership may not be willing to borrow enough to counter the demand short fall that resulted from the recession. He suggests creating a new W.P.A. to hire people and reduce unemployment (worked for one of my grandfathers, who helped build the Quabbin reservoir). He argues against the standard objections:
But these aren’t normal times. Right now, workers who lose their
jobs aren’t moving to the jobs of the future; they’re entering the
ranks of the unemployed and staying there. Long-term unemployment is
already at its highest levels since the 1930s, and it’s still on the
rise.And long-term unemployment inflicts long-term damage.
Workers who have been out of a job for too long often find it hard to
get back into the labor market even when conditions improve. And there
are hidden costs, too — not least for children, who suffer physically
and emotionally when their parents spend months or years unemployed.
Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism adds a bunch of points including:
Krugman does Germany an injustice by failing to contest US prejudices
about European (particularly German) labor practices. If German labor
practices are so terrible, then how was Germany an export powerhouse,
able to punch above its weight versus Japan and China, while the US,
with our supposedly great advantage of more flexible (and therefore
cheaper) labor, has run chronic and large current account deficits? And
why is Germany a hotbed of successful entrepreneurial companies, its
famed Mittelstand? If Germany was such a terrible place to do business,
wouldn’t they have hollowed out manufacturing just as the US has done?
Might it be that there are unrecognized pluses of not being able to
fire workers at will, that the company and the employees recognize that
they are in the same boat, and the company has more reason to invest in
its employees (ignore the US nonsense “employees are our asset,”
another line from the corporate Ministry of Truth).A different example. A US colleague was sent to Paris to turn around a
medical database business (spanning 11 timezones). She succeeded. Now
American managers don’t know how to turn around businesses without
firing people, which was not an option for her. I submit that no one is
willing to consider that the vaunted US labor market flexibility has
produced lower skilled managers, one who resort to the simple expedient
of expanding or contracting the workforce (which is actually pretty
disruptive and results in the loss of skills and know-how) rather than
learning how to manage a business with more foresight and in a more
organic fashion because the business is defined to a large degree
around its employees.
Both are useful articles and the discussion on the Naked Capitalism article is very interesting.
One last thing, the "employees are our asset" nonsense always reminds me of this Utah Philips story (called "Natural Resources") which appears the album "The Past Didn't Go Anywhere" that he did with Ani DeFranco:
I
was invited to the State Young Writers' Conference out at Cheney, which
was at Eastern Washington university. And I didn't want to embarrass my
son, you know, and I was gonna behave myself cause I had to live there
then – it was a chore. But I got on the stage – it was an enormous
auditorium; there were twenty-seven hundred young faces out there, none
of them with any prospects anybody could detect – and off to the side
of the stage was the suit-and-tie crowd of people from the school
district and the principals, and the, the main speaker following me was
from the Chamber of Commerce.Well something inside of me snapped.
And I got to the microphone, and I looked out over that multitude of faces and I said something to the effect of:
"You're about to be told one more time that you're America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources? Have you seen them strip mine? Have you seen a clear-cut in a forest? Have
you seen a polluted river? Don't ever let them call you a valuable
natural resource! They're gonna strip mine your soul! They're gonna
clear-cut your best thoughts for the sake of profit, unless you learn
to resist, cause the profit system follows the path of least
resistance, and following the path of least resistance is what makes
the river crooked! Hmph!"Well there was great gnashing of teeth
and rending of garments – mine. I was borne to the door, screaming
epithets over my shoulder, something to the effect of: "Make a break
for it, kids!" "Flee to the wilderness!" The one within, if you can
find it.
There is a bit more. The whole album as well as the others he did are most worth it. He is still sorely missed.
Started work on Brakiri ships
I started work on the Brakiri ships. Base is done for all three of them. Just need to do a bit of detailing. Then I have to finish up some painted Narn G'Quans I picked up a while ago.
Patents Schmatents
TechDirt has a summary of a post by Cog at The Abstract Factory about how software patents stifle innovation. TechDirt's summary / commentary and the post itself, which isn't long, are well worth reading. I'll leave a few select bits from the post:
His startup recently got sued for patent infringement by a company
that independently developed a product that performs a vaguely similar
function. This other company's product is much less sophisticated, and
their user-facing site is an ugly, user-hostile pile of crap. The term
"search arbitrage" would be a kind word to apply to this other
company's product. And there is absolutely no sense in which my
friend's work builds on any of this other company's technology.Now, my friend and his partner have consulted multiple IP lawyers
and they've said, "Yep, the law is probably on your side." They have
also said, "You're still screwed." The trial would take forever, the
legal fees would be ruinous, and in the meantime nobody will invest in
a company which has a litigation cloud hanging over it.So, this sucks for my friend and his partner. More importantly, this sucks for you,
because, having seen the product, I am 100% convinced that you, or
someone you know, would love to have this technology acquired and
integrated into a major site that you use.
Of course the point of the patent system was so that there was an incentive for patent holders to share their ideas in the knowledge that they would be able to profit from those ideas for a limited duration. However, as Cog points out:
At any software company with competent legal counsel, developers are instructed in the strongest possible terms never, ever
to look at a patent, because the tiniest amount of documented influence
could be used as ammunition in a lawsuit.
As product cycles shorten and the length of patents increase (now at 20 years, but up from 17 years), the advantage of sharing the ideas behind the patent goes to 0 for everyone.
The Supreme Court may rein in some patents, thankfully. The Swedish Pirate Party has a "constructive and reasoned proposal" for an alternative to pharmaceutical patents. For me, I think we should just kill software patents and let the software industry borrow from the fashion industry and force software companies to innovate their way ahead of the competition.
Big Box Stores!
Economist Paul Krugman wrote:
Why did [economic] productivity stagnate for 20 years, then revive? The truth is
that it probably had very little to do with anyone’s economic policies;
the best guess is that businesses spent two decades figuring out what
to do with information technology, then found the answer: big box
stores!
That really sums up the outsourcing of manufacturing, economic growth and the rise in inequality in the 1990s and beyond right there.
Unemployment & Underemployment rate hits 17.5%
The big number is that unemployment, what the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls U-3, reached 10.2%. However, it is worse than that since the broadest measure of unemployment, what the BLS calls U-6, is now at 17.5%. A year ago, the respective U-3 & U-6 rates were 6.1% & 11.1%. The BLS defines U-6 as:
Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers.
where:
- Marginally attached workers are persons who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past.
- Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not looking currently for a job.
- Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.
The previous recorded high was 17.1 percent,
in December 1982.
To reiterate a point I made about the increasing inequality of the US economy, economist Paul Krugman mentioned:
Take the United States, which wasn’t damaged in the war. Take per
capita real GDP. Give hostages by taking data from 1950 to 1980, which
means including the 1980 recession, but stopping at 2007, so that the
current slump isn’t included. Then here’s what you get:Growth in per capita real GDP from 1950 to 1980: 2.2 percent per year
Growth in per capita real GDP from 1980 to 2007: 2.0 percent per yearOh, and if we look at real median family income instead, we get:
Growth from 1950 to 1980: 2.3 percent per year
Growth from 1980 to 2007: 0.7 percent per year
So comparing the time period from 1950 to the recession of 1980 with that of the recession of 1980 to the boom of 2007, Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush2 did worse in average terms than the previous 30 years. If you look at the median family income, i.e. those people in the middle of the income distribution, things are even worse for the Reagan+ period.
Sources:
What is it about miniature game designers and poor graphic design
I just picked up a copy GHQ's post-WWII rules. What is it about miniature game designers and poor graphic design?
Is is really so hard to make your section headings in a larger font size than the body text? I know the headings are bolded, but that just isn't enough. And why don't they use a San-serif font (i.e. like Helvetica or Arial) for the section headings and a Serif font for body text? Why is the font so tiny and cramped? Hasn't anyone ever heard of white space?
It is not just GHQ's rules. Crossfire, which I like and think is incredibly imaginative approach to company and battalion scale games, does the same thing, as do others.
I know WRG used a similar style, but it is 20 years later and page layout has improved noticeably. Actually, my 25 year old WRG moderns rules were laid out better.
Come on game designers, lay out the rules so we can read them easily and find what we need!
Financial Bubble, Rich Get Richer, Economic Bust, Rich Get Bailed Out, Repeat
I haven't posted much about the economy lately owing to a time: a lack on my part and the length needed for a post on such a topic. However, a couple of people have made some interesting observations that allow me to weave them together into something that is a little bit more illuminating.
Nouriel Roubini's recent op-ed (here if you don't want to register) in the Financial Times. Mr. Roubini explains that the low interest rates (~0.5%) that the US Federal Reserve is offering to financial institutions is the cause of rapid increase in asset prices (stocks, commodities, etc.) More importantly, since these interest rates have caused the fall in the dollar relative to other currencies. As a result, financial firms are now able to borrow in the US where they get negative interest rates since the dollar is falling, and buy non-US assets which bids up their price. As Gillian Tett of the Financial Times reported recently:
Earlier this month, I received a sobering e-mail from a senior,
recently-retired banker. This particular man, a veteran of the credit
world, had just chatted with ex-colleagues who are still in the markets
– and was feeling deeply shocked.“Forget about the events of the past 12 months … the punters are
back punting as aggressively as ever,” he wrote. “Highly leveraged
short-term trades are back in vogue as players … jostle to load up on
everything from Reits [real estate investment trusts] and commercial
property, commodities, emerging markets and regular stocks and bonds.“
Back to Roubini. He feels that the increase in asset prices is a new bubble over which the Fed isn't watching. Eventually, the bubble will burst when the dollar stops falling and/or interest rates go up and traders, without easy money from the Fed, find they have the sell their new assets to pay back their loans. Oh joy. Of course, without all that easy money, the financial sector would have imploded taking the rest of the economy with it. Well … more than it did at least.
All this easy money seems to have increased the bounce in the step of Wall Street fat cats such as Lord Griffiths, vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs International, who, while speaking at St Paul’s Cathedral in London about
morality in the marketplace said the British
public should “tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater
prosperity for all” (taken from The Guardian via Tony Wikrent of The Economic Populist). Of course we tried that for over thirty years and it hasn't worked.
Mr. Wikrent (which I am cribbing from) sets out a fairly detailed description of the financial sector's pillage of the rest of the economy since the early eighties that is pretty well summed up in this graph from a July 2003 paper by Economics Professor James Crotty of the UMass, Amherst, The
Neoliberal Paradox: The Impact of Destructive Product Market
Competition and Impatient Finance on Nonfinancial Corporations in the
Neoliberal Era. The graph shows the share of the cash flow of Non-Financial Corporations (NFC) that went to the financial markets in the form of interest payments, dividends, and stock buy backs:
Yes, that is correct that 75% of NFCs' cash flow in 1989 poured out of NFCs and into the financial markets. Seems suspicious that the financial sector's pillaging of the rest of the economy peaks just before the economy tanks, but I won't take correlation for causation without more information.
For those who want a history, or is it a clarity, lesson, midtowng at The Economic Populist has a pretty good summary of the causes of our latest economic crisis. For those who don't have time to read it, here is the conclusion:
So what does this all mean? It means that the reason for the
economic crisis was the asset bubble that preceded it. The "wealth
effect" was a lie.The reason for the asset bubble was monetary
inflation that got directed almost entirely to the wealthy. They
naturally used it to become wealthier, which means stocks, bonds, and
real estate. The trickle-down theory is a lie.The reason why the monetary inflation was directed to the wealthy is
because free trade agreements which gutted the income of the working
class and left the nation suffering from economic disparity. The
promises made by free trade proponents was a lie.In essence, the economic crisis that we are suffering from, and
will continue to suffer from, was caused by too much concentration of
wealth in the upper class. The country will continue to suffer from
these bubble and bust cycles until either the nation addresses the
income disparity, or the rest of the world stops offering to buy our
debt.
One thing I'll note, while I think NAFTA and other free trade agreements had an
effect on the increase in income inequality, income inequality was
rising long before NAFTA and later free trade agreements. I wouldn't
discount technological changes, the increase in the free flow of
capital and the greediness of the wealthy.
That said, the 50s & 60s era of shared advancements in income and low debt was replaced in the mid 70s with greater income inequality (50% of all income went to the top 10% in 2007) and increasing debt for the middle class and poor in order to achieve some semblance of upward mobility. After all, the rich's new found wealth needed to go someplace to gain a return.
And so I have come full circle with a new bubble on the horizon since that is the only option the "leadership" of our highly unequal economy and political system will allow us.
More sights of nature from our fair city
Today brought forth new opportunities for interesting sights of nature in the densest city in our fair state. I put them up at my Natural World photo album, but since there are only three good ones, here they are:
Hawk in Davis Square:
Sunset among streaming clouds #1:
Sunset among streaming clouds #2:
Lists make Twitter easier, more useful
I must confess that I have been tweeting less and viewing both Facebook and Twitter considerably less as well. I am not sure quite why that is, but I think I hit a point with Twitter, at least, where it became hard to pay attention to what my friends were saying on Twitter.
However, Twitter finally released a beta version of their Lists feature. After setting up a few of them, I find my Twitter feed much more manageable. Good going, Twitter!