Robert0713

The Puzzles of U.S. Political Economy Today

It's The Distribution, Stupid. The Right Wingnuts also complain: "where's the consumer, we must have revenue growth in companies", and blah, blah, blah. What such folks happily ignore is that starting with Reagan the Right Wingnuts (Gramm-Leach-Bliley are especially culpable) aided and directed a massive transfer of income and wealth from the many to the few: top 1% = 8% of income 1980, 23% in 2007.

Along the way, the disappearing Middle Class spent the equity (unearned, of course) in housing to maintain consumption, since median income fell (slightly) from 1980 to 2007 (it rose a bit during Clinton, then fell back under Bush; surprise, surprise).

The will be no real recovery unless and until there is a Middle Class which sucks up most of national income. As it stands now, the US is a Banana Republic where, rather than some extractive industry, financial services sucks up national income. Britain, by the way, is worse.

Like it or not: the Right Wingnuts have poisoned the well of capitalism by destroying the consumer. They'll never admit it, of course.

The SEC Surrenders to the Oil Industry

Just to clarify: since Reagan, there only a few of those years (and during which agencies such as FEMA actually *worked*) when the Government wasn't at least 2/3 Right Wingnut, it was the avowed intent of those Governments to *not* govern. Always remember that Government incompetence has historically been on purpose. Remember that.


On Nov 20 05:29 PM tripleblack wrote:

> As Ronald Reagan so famously said: "Government is not a solution
> to our problem, government is the problem."
>
> Until we start to acknowledge that government is just making things
> worse, and is in all probability involved in much of the idiocy,
> it will keep cycling around and around.

Still the Worst Deflation in U.S. History

This Depression, as every predecessor Depression or Panic since the Civil War, has been preceded and engineered by a vast shift in income from the many to the few. Pre-Reagan the top 1% took 8%, now they took 23%. The problem with the Recovery is that the best it can do is return to status quo ante, but that is what caused the problem in the first place. Reagan and his Right Wingnut followers decided that the middle class was evil, and set out to destroy it. They have. This is what you get. I hope you're happy. A capitalist system can't continue without a broad based middle class getting most of the income; otherwise, there is no one to buy the output. This is why BRIC exported here; they couldn't support output domestically.

An emasculated middle class won't fix the problem, i.e. turning America into India. BRIC export to us, rather than grow domestically, just because they adhere to a Social Darwinist policy, and the US (and Europe, to a lesser extent) was/is the only country which had/has a middle class of sufficient breadth to absorb output. The Chinese have recognized this, and are aggressively redistributing income to create a middle class; they start from just a sliver of their society, so in percentage terms it has grown a lot.

As Florida and Nevada have found (and so to, to a lesser extent the whole country), basing growth on naked growth in the form of construction of housing, is fatal. Economists for decades have warned that putting monetary capital into housing as physical capital was a waste. Now we have glaring proof.

Reagan took his mandate to shift income from the many to the few, on ostensibly moral grounds (unions are evil, and capitalist titans are good). Gingrich, the Bushes followed. The end of Glass-Steagall was engineered by three acolytes, Gramm, Leach, Bliley.

Unless and until Obama (or a successor) takes the mandate to reverse this shift, this Depression will continue. There is no one to buy the output. Write that on the chalk board until it is burned into your brain.

Microsoft and SAP vs. Oracle - A Very Big Deal

MSFT would screw SAP like there's no tomorrow. Much of SAP runs on IBM mainframes and *nix. The notion that MSFT could either support those clients or move them to Windoze is ludicrous.

10 Years After Glass-Steagall

SeekingTruth:
thank you
thank you
thank you
thank you
thank you
thank you

I've been saying and writing these facts whenever it gets spewed out by fools and liars. It is heartwarming to know that at least one other human is also aware of the facts.

Algae Biofuels Have a Promising Future

rebaron restates the laws of thermodynamics. You can't even break even. The reason fossil fuels work is that the process doesn't produce the energy bearing compound in real time, only moves it from point A to point B, which is generally a fraction of the energy density moved. Biofuels are producing an energy density in real-time (nearly), and in real-time, the laws of thermodynamics rule.

Oracle: EC Has 'Profound Misunderstanding' of Database Market

Fact: MySql is *not* Open Source, it is dual license, always was from day one. The original MySql developers used the commercial license funds to pay for the Open Source code as well. Oracle bought the InnoDB company, which provides an engine for the MySql wrapper which closely imitates Oracle syntax. There is an arm's length relationship between Oracle and MySql pre-merger; with merger, there is nothing to prevent Oracle from suspending both using commercial license fees to support the Open Source MySql and halting further development and support for InnoDB. Doing either would force existing commercial users of MySql into Oracle database. That's what the EU wants to prevent.

Three Core Biotech Holdings: Isis, Ligand and Vical

25 words or less: why is VLP tech (NVAX and possibly others) not superior to DNA? Or are DNA/VLP (technically) orthogonal? I don't know the answer, so that's a real question, not rhetorical.

Serada Half Price Sale: DepoMed's Stock Price Poised to Climb

It's not often, in fact never before, that I read some biopharma post anywhere that mentions regression to the mean. I wonder how many of SA readers know what it means, and what it means to study design. Moreover, this is the umpteenth time that placebo effect has scuttled a study. Reason enough to avoid compounds which don't measure with objective physical phenomena.

STEC's Massive Selloff: It All Hinges on EMC

STEC's problem (and for any other "enterprise" SSD supplier) is that the definition of "storage array" has changed since last January. At that point in time, the notion was that HDD arrays would be replaced by SSD arrays, so 10,000 HDD units would be replaced by 1,000 SSD units.

What's happened over the summer is that the new array is 10,000 HDD and 10 SSD front end "disk cache" (I made up the numbers for illustration; the idea is still that far fewer SSD are needed for a hybrid array).

All SSD suppliers have a drastically different demand scenario.

Google's Android vs. Apple: History Repeats Itself

The least attacked PC's run Linux (or any *nix variant). M$ isn't open. M$ systems get hosed because M$ still doesn't write an Operating System, just as DOS was a Control Program, so are all of its descendants; application access to hardware without the OS mediating is the reason for virus, etc. Games and the like, which write the processor, run faster. This is achilles heel of M$. Always has been always will be.


On Oct 29 09:46 AM MisterNL wrote:

> Open systems are a healthy environment for viruses. Viruses may
> be OK on PCs but absolutely not on phones.
>
> Google's 'open system' will have to have severely reduced functionality,
> or android phones won't be safe enough.
>
> imho
>
> N

Cel-Sci's Targets Stay on Track

UMMM. As an aid to others who might not be aware of the level of nonsense being spewed? And because it

Attempting to Understand Bankers' Pay

The problem is even more fundamental: what is the value add of financial services? The answer: the money yenta, to match make savers with borrowers, nothing more. The "innovations" have done nothing to increase the amount of savings available to borrowers, or to increase the benefit of savers. In fact, all the "profit" from financial services is extracted from the funds yenta-ed. There is no production involved; there is nothing created. Financial services is just parasitic. It creates nothing of value, only passes money from one side of the table to the other, taking an ever increasing proportion of the money. Sounds kind of corrupt, don't you think?

Pick Up Antigenics at a Bargain Price

If the "mined" data sample is "large", then conducting another study (of the same design) won't yield a different answer, within the level of statistical significance. The problem is that biostats aren't math stats. A sample is a sample is a sample. That FDA requires separate studies, well, they do. That doesn't mean the stats requires this be done.


On Oct 22 12:05 PM dreamdivers wrote:

> Robert, with all due respect, your statement that "the fact that
> the data were "mined" makes no difference." is completely inaccurate.
> It makes all the difference in the world. AGEN can mine their database
> for the next ten years, but unless they complete a positive (prospective)
> pivotal study on Oncophage in a given indication, it will never be
> approved in the US or EU.

Pfizer's People Aren't to Blame

Fact: working hard doesn't make for intellectual progress, working smart does. Making a work environment that encourages working smart goes against all that MBAs are taught (and innately believe). Brain work can be reduce to assembly line tasking, just look at India. But it doesn't produce new and better stuff, just more common stuff cheaper.

Small companies can, but not by nature either, support a smart working environment. Many of them, unfortunately, are run by the same MBAs who opt out of corporate, not because they disagree with the corporate method, but because they agree so wholeheartedly. They want *all* profit from the corporate method, not just a manager's stipend.

The other side of the working smart coin is the "superstar" method of compensation: the star gets 1,000X what everybody else does, thus encouraging social darwinism in the small. It is a difficult problem.

Marx describes the only way to structure an industrialized society which has long term stability. Rand describes one which has short term efficiency. How one gets from a Rand-ian state to a Marx-ian one is question for which I have not an answer. Well, other than Soylent Green.