Posts by BenWilson
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Curiously apt moment to ask this.
Shorts pockets: Keys and smartphone. Secateurs and a handsaw.
Shirt pocket, about 35 unidentified pieces of garden debris which must have fallen in there. Various seeds, leaves, and a small spider. -
Hard News: European Horror Stories, in reply to Alex Coleman,
Agreed. It's kind of hard to imagine how a democratic global government could work, or what it might even look like.
I can see an end result but I can't see how to get there (like most Utopias). It would probably look much like the USA, a collection of formerly separated states with considerable self-rule on social matters, but far more limited on economic and military ones, and freedom to travel anywhere within to all people. But I don't want NZ to be a part of any currently existing empire myself. Australia is sitting right there, too, and it's supposedly written into their constitution to allow NZ to join their federation (I have no sources on this). But the way Australians treat Aboriginals makes me glad that we're not part of their Empire, actually. And since our borders are open to each other, and we're military allies, and culturally similar (at least Pakeha are), we've got most advantages (in both directions) of being part of such a federation, without having to actually give up our sovereignty to Canberra. We can even be dual citizens (I really wish I'd gone through with that when I lived there).
Also, their constitution is a POS. They haven't grasped the idea that a constitution isn't just more laws.
The EU is another such attempt. As James Bremner said (first time I found myself mostly agreeing with him), they never really hid that the point of the EU was to become a rival power to the USA. I even thought it was a good idea 20 years ago, and I still think it's a good idea, but it should have been done very, very differently.
I'm not sure if I was a wierdo when I actually had a celebratory dinner when the monetary union was formed - at the time I thought it was probably one of the most significant political events of my lifetime, binding a violent continent into a potential lasting peace. But I was naive, I trusted at that time that the people setting that up were people who genuinely believed that the EU was for the benefit of all Europeans, and that they knew what they were doing. I'm now no longer sure on either point. I was only right about one thing, that it was a very significant event, which barely touched the news here at the time.
Perhaps that is the world's greatest lesson from the Greek situation, and the GFC in general, that economics is not a matter to leave to specialists. It's still always going to be a highly political matter. This was Marx's greatest insight, that economic struggle is political struggle, so of course it was fantastic to see a Marxist economist getting air-time on Media7 last night, and to read him in Overland several weeks ago. This is a time when everyone has to grapple with economics, because it really is the subject about quantifying all human interactions, and for it to be presented as a science whose main tenets are basically proven is fundamentally misguided about both economics AND science. There are many competing theories.
I'm still not convinced, myself, about the best solutions, but in the last 5 months or so, I've certainly found the most compelling case coming from people who advocated ideas that haven't had currency for a very long time. Printing money and distributing it directly rather than through banks. Universal benefits to end the existence of a beneficiary underclass and the huge bureaucracies that have come into existence to manage and punish them. Massively increased financial controls, including very strict controls over issuing debt, and financial transaction taxes. In this model, capital is not attacked in favor of workers, a bloody and useless battle. And unfair/exploitative work will only be done if it's well paid, incentivizing finding better ways to do that work, rather than simply finding desperate humans. Lastly, paid work itself becomes non-essential, removing the stranglehold economics has on so many human activities of great worth - child rearing, artistic expression, charitable work, and our own projects, whatever they are. This last one is the thing I consider to be the main failing of worker oriented socialism. Workers are not the only valuable people in society, and paid work is not the measure of human value, indeed most of the time it is exactly the opposite.
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Hard News: European Horror Stories, in reply to Alex Coleman,
Or could we just have reduced levels of all three? I'm not a giant fan of national sovereignty, but there sure ain't no world government around I'd trust, and nowhere to run to if it goes to shit.
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Apes was enjoyable, but I am curious what redeeming feature in Thor you picked up on (other than the hotness of the main guy, my wife squeed shamelessly over).
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A day of first meetings for me. Gio, Jolisa, James, and the fantastic Limpet of D Moreau. And others also unanticipated when I woke this morning.
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Good show, Russell, Gio, and Rod (and the production team). Currently peaking, too much awesomeness today to do justice to.
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Hard News: European Horror Stories, in reply to kiwifarang,
With all the quants at their disposal the banks have created a financial system that is truly flawsome.
Nice word coinage. And welcome.
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Hard News: European Horror Stories, in reply to Angus Robertson,
A method that succeeded to such an extent that a combined Germany is now being hailed as the potential saviour of Europe.
I'm sure some people are hailing it, but it was not without considerable social consequences. Former East Germans are still second class citizens, even now, 20 years later.
Or
False binary, right there. There are a lot of other ways to do things. The Greeks could default and no-one pays off their debts. The banks just have to suck up that they gave out bad loans, like they're actually meant to in a functioning banking system. Or the solution could be not on the Germans at all, but in changes to the functioning of the ECB. Or the Greeks could ditch Europe altogether. Or a whole lot of other possibilities. They could actually invest in Greece, in a major round of public works, to get the economy churning again, after which the Greek economy might just pay its way out of all that debt. Or they could relocate major industries to Greece because the labour is dirt cheap. Or .. well the list goes on and on. There's no binary to this. It's a very complicated question.
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Hard News: European Horror Stories, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Silly stat. Cause and effect are not proven. You could argue equally from the data that working less causes you to earn more and be more productive.
It is a silly stat, although that conclusion isn't impossible (it just doesn't follow from the premises). It could well be that there's entirely too much work going on. I think this is very much the case with the current GFC. That the very idea of work is broken.
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Hard News: European Horror Stories, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
Even if Greece defaults on all its debt, it still can't afford to run its government and its loss of credit would mean instant bankruptcy and force it to implement staggering austerity measures.
That might happen. Or it might go a different way, that loss of credit would mean a loss of credit repayments, reducing the necessity to export, allowing them to use their own currency control to reduce austerity and get their economy working again. This has happened many times in human history, I can't think why it couldn't happen again. The evils of a debt driven society are a frequent theme in writings from the ancient world, and the massive debt write offs have often gone very well for the societies concerned.
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