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livinincali
ParticipantI’ve used android phones and iPhones. I think both are good products and both have some strengths and weakness. It really depends on how you want to use the device. If you’re a casual user who wants to fit in with the crowd and not really worry about your phone, iPhone is probably the way to go. If you want a lot of customization and want to use your phone as a mobile computer you’re probably better off with an Android like Galaxy S3. The biggest thing for me is probably the screen size. iPhone feels really small when you go back to it from your typical android device.
I think the biggest direction in phones/manufactures is the tightly integrated environments their trying to lock you into. Based on the direction Apple is going with iOS6 you might not want to go with Apple if you love Google. I don’t think Apple with replace Google search anytime soon but they did replace Google maps with their own mapping solution that isn’t quite as refined. Full control of the eco-system means everything will probably work together right but it will probably slow down innovation.
August 20, 2012 at 7:16 AM in reply to: Good fact based WSJ article on who pays taxes in America #750561Participant[quote=SK in CV]First, I don’t think davelj said anything like all deficits are stimulus. Stimulus (at least in the keynesian sense) is an increase in overall and targeted spending, irrespective of the budget. Increasing of an annual budget deficit is NOT stimulative all by itself. (It can be solely the result of lower revenues, and nothing to do with increased spending.) There can be a shrinking deficit AND stimulus at the same time (though it’s unlikely that would fit into any Keynesian model).
And I would have to agree with davelj, with minor exception, spending has increased significantly almost every year for the last 30. Much of that increase has been stimulative. (Sorry, I have to repeat something here. Spending is NOT stimulative. Increases in spending are stimulative.)[/quote]
I might be inclined to agree to a somewhat more limited definition of stimulus spending. The problem becomes what do we call an increase in spending under the premise of stimulus that become permanent. We increased deficit spending massively about 3-4 years ago and it has remained at those very elevated levels. The tax base has remained roughly the same over that time period and now we’re just about at that point where the 1.2 trillion deficit isn’t stimulus spending anymore and we need a new stimulus program. We never really ended the previous one so what do we call the 1.2 trillion of deficit spending we have now if it’s not stimulus. It started that way, when did it stop being stimulus and what do we call it now?
ParticipantI’m not sure I see the point in high deductible earthquake insurance in So Cal. In a strong earthquake most woodframe houses will be fine with minor damage such as broken windows, cracks in the plaster, etc. Al stuff that wouldn’t make it worth the deductible. If we truly did get the big one that causes hundreds on billions of dollars of damage in SoCal the insurance companies wouldn’t have the reserves to pay the claims anyways. Take the $1000 and put it in house maintenance fund. If an earthquake breaks a few windows you’ll have the money to pay for it.
ParticipantI don’t see anything in GMs balance sheet or earnings statements that suggest on coming bankruptcy right now, but things can change pretty quickly. Of course even if they do go bankrupt again, government will bail them out.
August 16, 2012 at 2:41 PM in reply to: Good fact based WSJ article on who pays taxes in America #750396Participant[quote=harvey]
Why use government debt as the only measure of economic success? The US has seen very healthy economic growth in the past 30 years. There has been lots of wealth created. Many don’t see it, because we are generally bad at remembering the past (we’re talking 1982 here, the peak of the “rust-belt” industrial collapse), and most of of the wealth that was created has been accumulating at the top.[/quote]Total debt including private debt has exploded as well during the same period. If we include that it makes it even worse (53 trillion in total debt versus a GDP of about 14 trillion) Think about what debt is to the other side of the balance sheet. Promises for future productivity are indeed somebody’s asset. So for everybody that goes into debt there’s somebody holding that debt as an asset. As debt expanded the other side of the balance sheet expands as well, so obviously there has to be somebody very rich holding those assets.
Forget about money for a second and realize the economy is the total goods and services available. We want to grow the total goods and services available and the government approach has typically been to take those goods and services, promise future payback, and give them to people that would otherwise be unable to afford them (manufacture demand that wouldn’t otherwise exist). Maybe we should try an approach that encourages those that cannot afford them to produce more goods and services so that they can afford them.
Most goods and services have a pretty short shelf life so it’s pretty difficult to store excess productivity in assets. You can store some but since most has to be consumed rather quickly or quickly depreciate you look for something else to store those assets in. A warehouse of walkmans isn’t very valuable today. We’ve gravitated to debt in the past 30-40 years.
How does a retired consumer get the productivity they need from a producer in the economy. The producer can voluntarily give it away (kids supporting parents). The consumer can trade some asset of value to the producer (I’ll sell my house and downsize) and either take payment right away or settle for a long term debt. The government can take it from the producer by force and give it to the consumer. Remember that the producer will likely put themselves first in any situation. They’ll provide for themselves and their family before anybody else. There’s only so much excess productivity available that consumers must compete for. Taking more from the producers by government force leaves less available for the sale of assets and as this has happened we’ve made increasing promises for our future productivity.
August 16, 2012 at 2:13 PM in reply to: Good fact based WSJ article on who pays taxes in America #750393Participant[quote]
I’m just saying that right now might not be the best time to suddenly cut spending and taxes.
[/quote]There’s never going to be a good time to cut spending. We’ve had plenty of opportunities during booms over the past 30 years like the late 1990’s and during the housing bubble of 2004-2006 and we didn’t do it. We had the opportunity to balance the budget in 2002 with a 10% cut in government spending, we had the opportunity again in 2008 with a 20% cut in government spending and now we’ve gotten ourselves to a 40% cut in government spending. Obviously cutting government spending and balancing the budget will produce a short severe recession in the best case and a long depression in the worst. I won’t argue that cutting spending isn’t going to cause an awful lot of hardship because it will.
The point in doing it now or very soon is as the debt and deficit grow the fallout becomes worse and worse. You have the real possibility of government/economic collapse the longer you wait. A 10% cut back in 2002 would have sucked but certainly would have been survivable. Right now we can’t rewind what already happened but we do have the choice of facing the music and attempting to resolve debt in an organized way or we can wait until the Greece day of reckoning shows up here.
If you’re running a failing small business there comes a point in which you must cut your loses. Another month in business another 2 months in business isn’t going to fix things, why lose your house over it. We keep thinking well just one more economic growth spurt and then we can fix it. I don’t think we’re going to get that opportunity. We already wasted our chances, time to accept it.
August 16, 2012 at 12:19 PM in reply to: Good fact based WSJ article on who pays taxes in America #750383Participant[quote]
This is where most of the “anti-debt” arguments are flawed. I’ve said it before, in this thread and actually many times on this forum:– Government debt and consumer debt are not the same.
– Debt used for investment can be a wise choice.
The often-used comparisons between government and personal debt are fundamentally flawed. There are essential differences.
[/quote]If they are so different then actually explain why. I hear that they are different but when actually faced with explaining what makes them different nobody seems to have any answers other than it is. If government debt is good and different than why do we have Greece, why do we have Japan, why do we have Argentina? Name one country that actually successfully implemented the Keynes solution and stimulated their way out of too much debt.
Really think about what government spends most of it’s money on. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Welfare, Interest and Military. Of those things tell me which one is an actual investment that can produce a positive rate of return. The answer is none of them are with maybe some stuff in Military being an actual investment. Everything in that list is consumption. So in reality it’s exactly like consumer debt because it’s being used to consume goods and services.
Every dollar the government borrows from pension funds, banks, citizens, and companies is a dollar those entities can’t invest in something else.
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We haven’t been doing stimulus spending for the past 30 years – we’ve barely, and half-heatedly, been doing it for about 3 years. And there is some evidence that it has helped.
[/quote]I’d argue that all deficit spending is some form of stimulus. It should be because government spending is a component of GDP. The government has attempted to stimulate the economy every time we’ve been in a recession and we’ve had quite a few recessions other the past 30 years. Of course once we started the stimulus (spending more than we’re taking in) we never stop the additional spending. 1982 had stimulus, 1991 had stimulus, 2002 had stimulus and yet even when the economy got good again our deficit and debt continued to increase.
August 16, 2012 at 10:56 AM in reply to: Good fact based WSJ article on who pays taxes in America #750379Participant[quote]
Why can’t the Tea Party types have a rational conversation, why can’t they apply some very basic critical thinking to their arguments, why can’t they consider alternatives without getting their panties in such a bunch?
[/quote]First of all I’m not a tea party type at all and seriously you need to get off this silly democrat republican party line crap. Just because there’s a political fight doesn’t mean I have to be on one side or the other, of course you’re too shallow to understand that. You’re so incredibly enamored with a particle political party that you are completely blinded and have to make it an us vs them. If you aren’t on my side you must be on the other side, when more than 2 sides exist. I view myself closest to libertarian, but frankly I’m not going to narrow down all of my views to a single political view point.
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It is entirely possible that government spending has a positive influence on GDP, but that the private-sector component (which is much bigger) is pushes the numbers the other way. I’m not claiming this is the case, I am claiming that it is difficult to know (and not easy as you claim.)
[/quote]It could but even if it does that would mean that government spending is crowding out the private sector. The truth is that government deficit spending is an attempt to boost the overall economy and it’s pretty clear that government spending is as a whole not producing a positive return on investment.
The problem with the Keynes economic model is there’s no way to isolate it and prove it works an experiment. It seems to look good on paper but maybe it’s totally wrong. Maybe it never produces the intended effects because actors in the economy don’t do rational things. I do know that over the past 30 years of various stimulus spending exercises we’ve never gotten GDP to grow faster than government debt for any length of time. Look at any GDP vs debt chart and it’s rather clear.
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We aren’t talking about “confiscation,” we are talking about relatively small changes to marginal tax rates. We are talking about returning tax rates to the same or lower-than they have been in the past many times. When did we go from a tax-rate discussion to “confiscation?” Why the hyperbolic vocabulary?
[/quote]I’m fine with some minor tax increases that get us back to longer term total tax collections of 18%, but if I’m going to agree to that I want a balanced budget. No more deficit spending. I’d take some kind of 4-5 dollars in cuts to every dollar of tax increases. I’d also cut across the board. Military spending is not some kind of sacred cow, neither is medicare, medicaid, social security or anything else. If that means rationed care or wheelchairs instead of hip replacements so be it.
The reason I made the comment is because you seemed hellbent of forcing companies to invest their capital. That they must go out there and stimulate demand. Enough with the stimulating the demand side of the equation. If our economy shrinks and living standards are reduced to a sustainable level then so be it. Everybody is looking for a quick fix to our economy and I personally think a painless fix exists. No amount of stimulative spending, no amount of government regulation, or anything else is going to fix the economy. We have 30 years of overspending to unwind and the debt hangover is going to suck, let’s deal with the hangover instead of searching for a magical cure while continuing to drink.
Imagine a guy making $50K a year that lives a $100K a year lifestyle and did it by running up debt. When that guy gets to $500K in debt and gets cut off by his creditors there’s no quick fix that is going to allow him to keep his $100K a year lifestyle. He’s going to have to learn to live a <$50K lifestyle even though it might suck.
August 16, 2012 at 8:09 AM in reply to: Good fact based WSJ article on who pays taxes in America #750368Participant[quote=harvey]
Government debt can be used for investment also. (In theory, all government “spending” is really investment, but it’s hard to determine the ROI.)
[/quote]Actually it’s relatively easy but most people for government spending don’t like the answer it provides so they ignore it or claim it’s hard to determine.
GDP includes government spending so for every dollar of debt the government takes on there should be a corresponding increase in GDP, but for the last 30 years GDP growth has been less that government debt growth. This means that the ROI of government spending has been negative for most of those 30 years. Just look at last year where GDP grew by about 2% or $300 billion vs an increase of government debt of 1.2 trillion. A massive negative ROI.
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How do you increase demand? There is no absolutely proven answer, but Keynes provided us with the best one we’ve got: Start spending money on useful things.
[/quote]And yet our government has not demonstrated that ability at all for the past 30 years. Your argument seems to be that if private companies won’t spend their capital then we must have the government confiscate it and spend it. Should we confiscate your retirement account and spend that too. Can’t have people saving for the future we must stimulate demand by buying more stuff we don’t need right now. We must do everything and anything to stimulate the demand side of the equation.
We’ve been trying this for years, have seen the failures and yet we keep arguing for more, more, and more spending. Trust me it will work this time, I know it didn’t work the previous 50 other times but this time it will work.
August 10, 2012 at 8:38 AM in reply to: dang those overpaid underworked wastrel firefighters again.. #749999ParticipantIn San Diego disability is self insured, meaning whatever disability claim the city gets from city workers come out of the general fund (the tax payers pocket). In a city this large it probably makes some sense to do this, why pay the overhead to an insurance company. Of course it’s just tax payer money, so nobody really cares if there’s fraud going on. A private company that is looking out for it’s bottom line would probably care a lot more if there was fraud going on and would probably spend the money to investigate it.
I did a project for RISK management about 10 years back and firefighters tended to be the worst in terms of committing these type of acts. We were importing time records from a mainframe into a new database and we’d get failures because fire fighters would have more than 24 hours booked in a day. 8 hours light duty and then 24 hours of regular pay in a day. I was young and naive at the time but if it was today I probably would have reported it.
Things might be better now, it was a long time ago, but I somehow doubt it.
August 8, 2012 at 2:27 PM in reply to: Good fact based WSJ article on who pays taxes in America #749759Participant[quote=harvey][quote]
I’m completely amazed at the idiots that believe the Dems are some sort of heroes for the people that will save us all from the evil GOP which is trying to enslave us all.[/quote]BTW, we have a new record for “weakest strawman” on this thread. Didn’t take long.[/quote]
Unfortunately the quoted comment isn’t even close to a strawman so I’ll go with weakest understanding of what a strawman is.
Because there’s a lot of people whom don’t understand what a strawman is. From wikipedia
[quote]
The straw man fallacy occurs in the following pattern of argument:Person A has position X.
Person B disregards certain key points of X and instead presents the superficially similar position Y. The position Y is a distorted version of X and can be set up in several ways, including:
Presenting a misrepresentation of the opponent’s position.
Quoting an opponent’s words out of context — i.e. choosing quotations that misrepresent the opponent’s actual intentions (see fallacy of quoting out of context).[2]
Presenting someone who defends a position poorly as the defender, then refuting that person’s arguments — thus giving the appearance that every upholder of that position (and thus the position itself) has been defeated.[1]
Inventing a fictitious persona with actions or beliefs which are then criticized, implying that the person represents a group of whom the speaker is critical.
Oversimplifying an opponent’s argument, then attacking this oversimplified version.
Person B attacks position Y, concluding that X is false/incorrect/flawed.This sort of “reasoning” is fallacious because attacking a distorted version of a position fails to constitute an attack on the actual position.
[/quote]For more information please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man.
Participant[quote=flu]web 2.0 sucks… that is all.
What is common among zynga and fb and a lot of web 2.0 is they forgot one very important piece. Mobile…
No mobile story, no growth.[/quote]
They can write apps and provide mobile stuff just fine. They just have no clue how to monetize mobile. The standard ad model doesn’t work on mobile and it never will.
ParticipantZNGA might be worth a flyer at $1 maybe $0.50/sh. They do make a little bit of money.
Participant[quote=briansd1]
I had an affair with a Samsung Android, but, out of convenience and habit, I’m back to the iPhone to stay for the time being (I like to easily save the image on my screen).I’m willing to dump the iPhone if a hotter product comes along.[/quote]
Galaxy S3 and other new Android ICS phones have the screen shot feature built in now. Galaxy s3 beats pretty much everything out there right now. The IPhone5 should offer some strong competition but if the new connector rumors are true it’s going to need to be special.
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