Lurker > red sox 777

Yes, Friedman is probably the most important person in the Chicago school. And it's been the dominant economic school since Reagan, actually- Keynesianism was out of vogue for a long time until the past few years.

I'm saying that it's not surprising that these economists haven't heard of Austrian theory because it is a joke theory that is not economics in the modern sense of the word. And it's a joke theory because it doesn't rely on math. I suspect this speaker did not tell them that, or they would have lost all interest immediately or thought it was some kind of joke.

We can agree to differ though! You and many others probably don't want economics to be a science.

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It is true that the Chicago school probably bears much of the blame for the 2008 crash. But it was also responsible for the incredible success we enjoyed from 1980 to 2007.

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Chicago school of economics = Free market ideas backed up by math.

You should look into it.

And the reason the Austrian school isn't taken seriously is simple: it lacks math. A theory of physics without math would similarly be laughed out of the room.

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Nintendo is feeling the panic, it seems.

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Muffin is right on this one. Licensing systems are government enforced restrictions on competition.

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It is pretty funny how bullish investors are now cheering for signs the economy is doing badly, like more unemployment and lower housing prices, so that the Fed is more likely to give us QE3.

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Stock down a bit over 1% in the US today. Meh. Not much movement.

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Well, Wii U won't be released until around Christmas, so it's only got a few months in this fiscal year. Nintendo may also be playing down their forecasts so they won't miss them again, as happened a lot this past year.

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300 million for the next console generation should be attainable. We may wind up fairly close to that this generation before it's over, as the 360 and PS3 are still selling pretty well. In that case a console would only need 50% market share to match the PS2.

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Oh I agree that gaming was better in the past. But growth in the number of systems and games sold is the reality. PS2 beat Wii because it had an absurdly huge slice of the pie, but this coming generation, a system may only need to reach the Wii's current market share to beat the PS2.

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Of course we will, probably this coming generation. The market just grows every generation.

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DS looks to be in striking range then.

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What's the total sales numbers for the PS2? With only 95 million sold now, it seems that Wii is unlikely to surpass it.

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Well, obviously the superior game sold more. I mean, the inferior game there is the worst abomination in the history of video games, so it's not difficult to be superior to it.

*Looks at Wii Sports* Well.......

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It won't. Inflation is a shell game, it can't either create or destroy wealth.

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Looks like they beat analysts expectations by a bit too- about 10% less in losses than the analyst consensus. But it doesn't necessarily mean much; for example we just saw Netflix stock plunge 14% after beating analyst expectations.

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Nintendo reported losses of 43.2 billion yen, or 532.3 million dollars. Back in January, they had predicted losses of 65 billion yen, so they did a good bit better than predicted back then, mainly because the yen has weakened somewhat since then.

Not sure how these earnings compare to analyst forecasts, or more importantly, what the market was thinking.

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What on earth........well, I suppose Mitt doesn't really care about that issue, so he was just pandering.

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Revenues were down pretty far, due to weak 3DS sales and because the other systems are old and past their prime sales-wise. Strong yen hurts too.

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Oh whoops, I forgot to account for daylight savings time. It's actually at 3 AM EDT.

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The other big thing isn't their fault, but the yen has been really strong the past year, hurting their revenue from outside Japan.

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It's their most important earnings release of the year!

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Bernanke: We will take action if necessary.

Oh yes, bring it on, QE3. Another trillion dollars equals $3,000 dollars in the pocket of every American. Only this time, can we give the money to individuals instead of banks? That's the kind of stimulus we can believe in.

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In all likelihood, it's going to be the first loss they've had for a full year in around 30 years. Let's hope the loss is less than expected so the stock goes up.

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Geico's commercials are pretty good.

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The Supreme Court never ruled on secession prior to the Civil War. Though it's actually not clear whether the Supreme Court would have jurisdiction over the question- or rather it wasn't clear prior to the Civil War.

It's one area in which the founders messed up by making the text of the Constitution ambiguous.

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Nope, but......don't lose sanity/sleep because forex is tradeable 24 hours a day.

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Are you for real right now?

So because Buchanan's goal wasn't to preserve the union (which is in the f***ing OATH OF OFFICE), he was not a bad president? When I become president I am going to state that my goal is to sink the military and then order my generals to nuke the Pentagon. That way I will become the greatest president ever in your mind because I succeeded in my goals.

To uphold the Constitution of the United States. In 1860, it was an open question whether that allowed for secession or not.

Yeah, no kidding. But the time to set a precedent was immediately after the war when the North had all the power.

Which makes Johnson an ineffective president, but doesn't make a strong argument for worst ever.

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No, Buchanan sat on his hands instead of trying to mollify what almost destroyed our country. And Johnson completely f***ed up Lincoln's plan for Reconstruction, which essentially allowed racial discrimination, lynching, and injustice to reign there until the 1960's

If Buchanan's goal was keeping the Union together, then he did a terrible job, yes. But if he was content to let the South walk away if it so chose, then his actions fit his goal pretty well too. When Lincoln became president, he could have kept the Upper South states in the Union and averted a war simply by not going to war. Instead he decided on war, and ordered those states to provide soldiers for the Union, at which point they seceded too. I'm not going to categorize either of them as worst president ever or close to it based on those decisions.

Johnson's plan seemed closer to Lincoln's than that of the Radical Republicans. Only he didn't have Lincoln's political capital, so he couldn't get anything done well. And the blame for civil rights making no progress in the South from 1876 to the 1960s cannot be put on Johnson or the Radical Republicans or even the 1870s Democrats alone. A transition from slavery to full equality in just a few years was not very realistic. There was almost a century after Reconstruction when further changes should have been made, and were not.

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So basically, Buchanan and Johnson were too nice to the South? And Buchanan didn't make the Civil War a certainty, Lincoln did. As for Harding, sure he was corrupt, but presidents can do a lot more damage to the country than that kind of corruption.

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That reminds me of a trip my family took to Sichuan province in China. We were traveling with a couple other families, and some people requested that the restaurant serve non-spicy food. The restaurant agreed, and every dish was loaded with large quantities of peppers. The restaurant people said that it was non-spicy food, and to them, it was. I thoroughly enjoyed that meal, however.

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A real shortage in fast food workers is easily remedied, also. MCD will simply raise their wages. Shortage solved. A shortage in computer engineering isn't so easy, because while tech companies can raise salaries, it will still take years for people to develop the skills that qualifies them for those jobs.

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Wilson can't be the worst president. We still have Warren G. Harding, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, and all of the Whig presidents.

I'm not seeing what was so bad about those presidents. They didn't do very much. So they can't have done very much that was bad.

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No, it just means we have a revolving pool of workers. There's no more shortage than there is a shortage of say, 8th graders, because they all leave at the end of the school year.

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A big reason McDonald's is always hiring is not that there is a shortage, but that people don't work at MCD for very long. People work a few months and move on.

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*Waits for Smuffin to arrive and denounce Woodrow Wilson as the worst president*

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You brought up the example of a highly paid person getting laid off and therefore it wouldn't be beneficial to take a minimum wage job. My point is, generally, if a highly paid person is in a field where there is also a lack of qualified applicants, they will find a new job rather quickly.


The thing is that highly qualified jobs often have long hiring processes. For example, to join a big law firm out of law school, the timeline is that you interview with them at the beginning of your 2nd year of law school, you work for them the summer after your 2nd year of law school, you take the bar exam the July after your 3rd and final year of law school, the bar exam results come out around November of that year, and you finally start working in your full time job the next January. That's a full 29 months after you initially interviewed with them.

Not the best example, because I'm sure the hiring process for current attorneys is much shorter, because they don't have 2 more years of law school to finish, but it may still be pretty long. It's in society's interest to make sure highly skilled people are not shaken out of their professions by a gap between jobs.


But you cannot deny that in this current economy, there are a lot of "overqualified" people who are getting laid off and cannot find anything other than minimum wage jobs, so they stay unemployed (or go to grad school).

True, the job market is horrible right now. But I don't think it's a problem that they nonetheless choose not to work in minimum wage jobs. Where's the problem exactly with that choice? Having these people work minimum wage jobs isn't going to fix things, because there is only so much minimum wage work to be done in the country.

If the situation were like Spain, where employers don't hire anyone because the government's laws and regulations make it unprofitable to hire all but the most highly qualified people- because you have to give any employee a raft of benefits and you essentially cannot fire them- that would be different.

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We have a shortage of people who are qualified to be engineers and an excess of people who are qualified to be fry cooks, yes.

However, we may very well have more engineers than are necessary due to current consumer demand, and fewer fry cooks than are necessary.

Would you suggest that the job with the biggest shortage in America is CEOs? Or Major League Baseball players?

Using shortage in the way you are using it, there can never be a shortage in a free market system, which is what America for the most part is. Because the amount supplied by a free market is always the exact amount demanded. The price of things will adjust until demand matches supply.

When we say shortage, what we generally mean is there are fewer people qualified for a position than the market demands.* And in that sense, yes, we have a shortage of engineers. There's a reason why it's so easy for CS majors to find jobs right now, and so hard for most recent college grads.

*I'm aware this definition isn't very good at all, because demand is a function of price, but I think you should get what I am aiming at here without requiring a more precise definition.

The tell-tale sign of a shortage is that it is easy for qualified people to find high-paying work in that field. This is true for technology now, it is also true for doctors. Not for most fields.

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What I don't get is spicy food in 100 degree heat without air conditioning. It may taste good, but it makes you miserable.

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How much you chew it actually makes a big difference. Also, grain products like rice, pasta, and bread are better at defusing the burning feeling in your mouth than water.

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It tastes really good.....I don't know how else to explain it. If it's too hot for you, you could try something less spicy, or try chewing it less.

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Individual engineers may get laid off even when there is a shortage of engineers in the economy. For example, if a particular tech company goes bust. And naturally, the more complex the job, the longer the hiring process for that job is

And if you don't believe that we indeed have a shortage of engineers and not of fry cooks, consider why engineers are paid so much more.

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But exactly the opposite is the reality. We have a shortage of engineers and an excess of fry cooks.

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Does it really? I didn't know that- though it probably doesn't matter all that much. You're still going to be motivated to get a new job that pays as much or nearly as much as your old job, and unemployment won't do that. I guess the argument is that if you are, say, an engineer who was laid off, it's better for the country for you to be searching for a new engineering job full time rather than wasting time working at McDonald's.

Under my proposed system, it would depend on your expected earning potential at the time you enter into the contract, and your voluntary choice of how much in premiums to pay. The higher a percentage of your future income you agree to pay, the higher your benefits will be if you wind up not working or working in a low-paying job.

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We already have this, except the government does it. Are you not familiar with the thousands of accounts of people who won't apply for minimum wage jobs because it would make them ineligible for unemployment?

We don't, because people don't get to choose to be subject to taxes in exchange for being eligible for welfare.

And I'm not familiar with the people who don't apply for jobs so they can receive unemployment instead. I think that's a very small group relative to the whole population. It's not like unemployment pays more than what a minimum wage job does, so there's no incentive problem here.

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Nintendo Entertainment System 6 would be a good name also.

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Right, the outrage should be directed at the taking, then at big spending, and only at the very end at small spending.

But personally I'm fine with welfare, even welfare on a massive scale, in the future. Ideally it would be privatized. People can enter into a contract where they pay the company a percentage of their income above a certain threshold, and receive welfare payments from the company if their income is below a certain threshold.

I think this may be necessary in the future, because as technology gets better and better and barriers to world trade continue to erode, I don't think it will be efficient for the US to have full employment or close to it. The idea that everyone should work may be becoming outdated for the most advanced country in the world. Indeed, a higher percentage of Americans work now than in past decades because women have entered the workforce, even while technology has dramatically improved productivity. So it's natural if the job market for 99% of us has gotten worse since the 70s- the underlying economic conditions have pushed it along.

And when faced with changing underlying economic conditions, you don't try to fight them. You adapt. The idea that everyone should work, and if you don't work you are lazy or undeserving might (a big might mind you) make sense in an economy where few people have highly specialized skills and thus anyone who wants to work can find at least generalized work. But as jobs become more and more specialized, while we need fewer and fewer people for generalized work because of better technology and increased global trade, matching people to jobs becomes a more difficult process for the economy. Specialization is good for the economy in the aggregate as Adam Smith observed, but there is a lot of risk introduced on an individual level.

So we create a welfare system, to mitigate that risk. You buy a welfare policy (with your possible future earnings) to protect yourself from possible unemployment in the future.

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Even Nintendo Cafe would be better I think- I really liked the name Nintendo Revolution.

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Wii U sounds like Wii University to me. I really think they can do better than this for a name.

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These are the people who complain very loudly about welfare "abuse." They dream up all sorts of indignities we should impose on the poor in the name of stopping welfare fraud, which are almost certain to cost a lot more money in paying government employees than savings from stopping fraud.

You can tell a lot about a Republican candidate by imagining his honest response on this issue.

Rick Santorum: There are so many undeserving welfare queens milking the system and we need to stop them from exploiting law abiding, hardworking, blue collar workers!

Mitt Romney: Really? This is a huge waste of my time; there can't be very much money being exploited from welfare, it doesn't even pay out very much total.

Ron Paul: Maybe, but the real problem, the problem that is about a million times bigger than welfare fraud, is the Federal Reserve!

What shall we conclude from these responses? That Rick Santorum, and any politician who gives a similar answer, is not a real capitalist, no matter how much they claim to be.

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