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It's Over
By: Chris Tell at: http://capitalistexploits.at/
At a "pitch fest" a few nights ago, while sitting listening to the companies present their stories, and questioning the founders, one particular company struck me as a glaring outcast.
I'll tell you why they were an outcast, but first...
After just a few pointed questions I discovered that this company was struggling to achieve revenue growth, and they were a long ways off from profitability. Here are a couple of reasons why:
- High staff count all located in the developed world.
- Huge OPEX relative to many of the companies which operate in their space, which was almost entirely driven by point 1 above.
Later the same day I called my insurance company and got through to a call desk. I spoke with "Jacindra". After prying a bit I find she's in Manila. The reason the company I mentioned above is struggling to compete and become profitable is because they are providing a service not distinctly different than their competitors, yet they are paying multiples for things like labor. They are shouting from the rooftops that they're "local", but you know what, that's not scalable, and further more I don't care.
Do I care if Joey, a "local" in some developed world country loses his job to Jacindra in Manila? No. I congratulate Jacindra on dragging herself out of poverty with the aid of technology, and I thank her for the fact that the product I'm receiving is likely cheaper than it would otherwise be.
I hope "Joey" adapts to this change and finds a way to produce more value than he's currently worth, possibly in a completely different field. Change, especially if you're on the rough end of it is tough, but remember we'd all be still sitting in caves if it weren't for innovation and technological change.
General Electric, Caterpillar, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Chevron, Cisco, Intel, Stanley Works, Merck, United Technologies, and Oracle cut their workforces by 2.9 million people over the last decade while hiring 2.4 million people overseas.
I see it every day... people losing jobs, having to retrain, change strategies and find ways to create value. "Cubicle jobs" are over. Sure there are still large swathes of "cubicle dwellers", but it's over, done, finished... I'm telling you.
Every day more and more people realise it. It's unfortunate for those who refuse to acknowledge it, even though its been staring them in the face for over a decade they've somehow managed to remain blind to it.
I've had angry people pop out of the woodwork when I've written about why education is broken. I suggested that the large educational institutions revenue models are fatally flawed and will see a sea change in the coming years, causing many in the industry to be forced to adjust.
I can understand the anger. Nasty surprises threatening the status-quo always get people angry when they're benefiting from the setup.
If you're sitting in a job which can be outsourced your clock is ticking. First cheaper labour, then better technology together with cheap labour, and shortly robots. You will be replaced, it's just a matter of time. This is a good thing.
Don't cling to the past, or the present too hard. Things you cling to tend to disappoint. The world is dynamic not linear, yet humans love to think in a linear fashion. This is how bubbles are created. This is how WhatsApp sells for more than the entire market cap of one of the world's fastest growing economies. Humans love certainty and certainty only exists in a linear framework in textbooks, it never exists in nature and it never exists in economics for long.
You've probably read about the massive protests across major EU cities by local taxi drivers. Why are they so angry? Because their ability to charge hapless pedestrians 2 blocks for $10 is coming to an end. GOOD! Once again an inferior product or service is being eroded by technology. Uber is single-handedly destroying them by providing greater efficiency and productivity at a lower cost.
Regulating and legislating who can give me a ride and act as a taxi impresses me as ludicrous, but that's the way much of the world operates when Government gets involved. It destroys entrepreneurship, it destroys productivity and as a result it does the very opposite of its stated purpose. Ultimately it causes a build up of waste and excess which would not exist without it.
When Mark and I were in Mongolia a couple of years ago we noticed quickly that every vehicle was a taxi. If you stood on the road and held out your hand someone would stop. Why? Because they can make a few bucks by picking up a "fare". Regular folks, on their way wherever. Why not? All Uber has done is to make that exact premise more efficient and add a little "flare" to it.
This is an illustration from an old newspaper. Those are British weavers destroying textile machines in the early nineteenth century. Like the taxi drivers of today, and the cubicle workers, they were angry at technology. Should government have legislated against textile machines so that today we would still be struggling to find decent clothing? Think of the colossal waste of resources, of all the men and women who would be weaving clothing for the world's population, of the poor quality fabrics and massive losses in efficiency.
I humbly suggest their time would have been better spent figuring out how to leverage the technology to provide a better service or product. The same people exist today. Humans don't change. Circumstances change, technology changes but human nature never changes.
Socialists vs Capitalists
I previously wrote an article about these two distinctly different mindsets, in which I said:
The first is a group who believe that the world, its peoples, resources, skills and wealth are one giant pie. They essentially believe that individuals don’t have a right to their own bodies, efforts and thoughts. In their vision the pie does NOT increase or decrease in size, but what happens to the pie is that the slices get shifted around between various groups of people within the world. Their major concern is with how much of the pie they personally get relative to others. The aggregate amount is not as important as the relative amount.
What is preferable for them is getting less pie, provided others are getting twice as little. They will opt for this rather than receiving twice as much, where others are receiving four times as much. They couch this view of the world, and distribution of aforementioned skills, wealth and resources etcetera in platitudes such as “equality”, “fairness” and “justice”.
This group of people will typically support “free healthcare”, “free education” and any other “freebies” that they will not directly have to pay for. They will be ardent supporters of bigger, more intrusive government, as this is the only avenue they see available for the execution of their perfect world. Articulating it as such would be difficult for many of them, as it exposes their view of the world as one completely lacking in freedom of the individual.
The second group of people realizes that there is an existing pie, but are not overly concerned with its size or distribution, since their thoughts typically revolve around building their own pie and adding to the size of the existing pie. They don’t see the pie as a stagnant concept, but rather something that they themselves can participate in forming and shaping.
This second group believes they have the right to their own bodies, efforts and thoughts. They accept that there are others in the world that will have a greater slice of pie than they do, but since they obtain their value and self-worth from building the pie, this concerns them little. They understand that the journey and not the destination are what matters.
Since they have courage and a belief in their own abilities they find the idea of relying on others to support them through “free” anything to be immoral, and although not all will articulate it, they are distrustful of anyone purporting to “help” them, especially when it comes at no cost. They choose to slog their way through the world on their own merits, and give back by creating wealth and opportunity for themselves and others.
The robots are coming... invest in what's coming tomorrow, because it's likely better than any of us can imagine.
- Chris
"Do what you can do best and outsource the rest." - Tom Peters
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...and what are we going to do with all these people sitting around twiddling their thumbs?
Idle hands breed mischief.
"...and what are we going to do with all these people sitting around twiddling their thumbs?
Idle hands breed mischief."
Brush up your shooting skills and try out for S.W.A.T. Or get an associates degree in prison management from the local community college and and get your name out there when the next wave of prison buildouts happens.
I'm not thinking that the Bathists are going to win this one, in which case it might not be such good advice.
The mortgage market with 30 year loans and the "insurance" industry, whether healthcare or other, all will fail as well with the current globally fascist 'business' model. Trade policy, too bad 20 years of concerted propaganda has brainwashed so many.
Oh jeez.....yet ANOTHER techno-utopian Randian. Exactly what we need in this ever increasing world of diminishing supplies of cheap commodities, ever increasing amounts of corruption and ineptitude, and ever increasing amounts of excess, arrogance and selfishness.
But HEEEYyyyy.....the Technology God will come and save us !!
This jerk weed would be the FIRST one to caution us to read the fine print of EVERY propesctus where it states...
"Past performance is no guarentee of future results"
Yet this douche nozzle believes that since the Technology gods have saved us in the past they will save us in the future. This is as funny as it is sad.
And this guy is supposed to be one of the so called "experts" ?
Consulting was among the most Outsourced of all US industries, both SW product implimentation and Management Consulting.
That industry is moving much of their high end work back to senior US resources who know US business.
Clients have realized that some kid 2 months out of some Indian college who knows the SW Product but does not know anything about "Best Practices" is not saving you money.
Not sure if it wil continue, but I just want to make enough money to retire and then get out of Dodge....
If given the chance, I would love to stomp the shit out of this weasel writer on the way out of Dodge, but I assume this POS will be hiding in the closet.
General Electric, Caterpillar, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Chevron, Cisco, Intel, Stanley Works, Merck, United Technologies, and Oracle cut their workforces by 2.9 million people over the last decade while hiring 2.4 million people overseas.
Yet all those companies probably try to out do each other via flying the biggest Stars & Stripes possible outside their offices and plants.
Yeah,so patriotic they'd sell American jobs or a $1.....
PS. Same with the polticians, put the flag on your lapel and behind your desk because the mugs (voters) love it.
The German economy is built on the manufacture of very expensive, highly specialized industrial machinery for export. No German executive is going to have his $50 million dollar product hammered together by Indians making $2 an hour. He is going to assemble a highly-trained and experienced factory team of people who know what they are doing and he expects to pay them appropriately. Hence the highly successful German trades programs to go with the equally respected German engineering universities.
Work until it doesn't...
Given the grow-or-die paradigm (exponential function) all those exports will have to increase. Where is the market? (get ready to hold hands with Russia and China) When the USD tanks and pulls the rug out from under world oil prices where is the money going to be to buy all that "highly specialized" stuff? Keep in mind that Germany's manufacturing costs will increase as energy costs increase.
Nothing lasts forever. Best to think ahead for when the change occurs (happens slowly and then all at once).
Germany learned something about maintaining a healthy domestic economy and, as much as possible, sound monetary policy from the events before and after WWII ... it all goes hand in hand. Check out the VAT tax policies Germany (and some other european countries) employ to protect themselves from slave wage labor markets monetary/trade encroachment. Some countries are actually quite a bit smarter than what we see in the US.
This person should run like hell if unrest ever breaks out because the masses will stone him.
Selfish son of a bitch could give a shit about his fellow countrymen. Only cares that the iGadget is cheaper. An unrealistic ideologue, full of Kool-Aide, that thinks that pure capitalism is the answer and that competing with labor in Somalia is somehow good for all of us.
Or at least for him and his bottom line As far as you? Well, a great big Fuck you to you. You're the reason he can't get a new iPhone for 9 bucks less than what they retail for right now, you selfish bastard you. You are not a PERSON. you are a HUMAN RESOURCE, just like oil, zinc, manganese, and water are also resources. Do you have pity for a pile of iron ore because its extraction price is too high? Hmmm? You're the reason that he's struggling with a low 7 figure salary, unable to get A-listed in Palm Beach Society.
Because we're clinging to the past, his dream of returning to the even more distant past - the days of Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan, are being impeded. And for that we all suck.
Hey Chris. Fuck you.
I second and third that hearty "Fuck You" to this piece of shit, selfish, Randian.
I guess that means I "fourth" his sentiment.
Sparing the anger, humanity and compassion of his rant, the same argument can be made of the math.
We seem to have forgotten the advent of Reagan era "job creating" & "supply side" tax loopholes and tax breaks given to the holders of increasingly massive percentages of our capital, that they have not reciprocated the promised lower consumer prices & jobs those lowered taxes promised.
The same for free trade agreements, NONE of these things have benefitted anyone but the buyers of elections.
And now, according to the SCOTUS bribery is free speech.
My question to you is what the fuck are people supposed to do to justify their existence in this world other than hunt down conceded assholes like you with a guillotine?
+1 and a few million others. Going hunting soon!
IF there are only 35 million jobs open for 100 million workers here in the USA, no amount of "retraining" or creative job hunting will help ANYBODY.....jobs get outsourced....and pay very little outside the US.....chasing your old job to India is not the answer
America is the only country in the world that doesn't offer some form of socialized healthcare & college education.
Regardless of your stance on "Socialism", that's a reality we're now dealing with as our wages factor the costs of those two into globalizzed labor demand, and corporations do what they do, seek the most cost efficient labor they can find.
I don't blame corporations for that, I DO blame them for manipulating the rule of law via their D.C. lobby to allow it.
Things just keep getting better!!!
ONWARD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
FORWARD!
No, wait. REVERSE!
Oh, hell, which is it? I can't figure it out. Pleeze, government, tell me.
there is one different thing though between EU and US, Europiens don't gorge on debt, they can't afford it. Most Europiens dont have two three credit cards and they drive their cars to the ground before they buy a new one.
So why the deterioration in EU? inflation and no real jobs! Inflation led to 0 in savings no jobs led to 0 purchasing power. Bummm! Next Japan then USA!
"So why the deterioration in EU? inflation and no real jobs!"
Cheap energy is disappearing. "Energy" is what makes REAL work possible.
The economic buffer of "tourism" is eroding. This is a good description of the problem (Greece being the subject): http://www.greekdefaultwatch.com/2013/04/greek-tourism-mostly-disappoint...
Nearly 1/4 of US population is poor enough they don't have a bank, the debt they do have to the likes of pawn shops and payday lender is small, even tho brutal to them . Most of the debt of the US middle class is in student loans and housing. Such debt isn't a character flaw but attempts of kids to keep relevant in this tech economy with an education and attempt to hedge against raising rent inflation by owning a house. Most of US personal bankruptcy occur because someone has health crisis, then only parent can work or the only parent working goes down, and suddenly the fix costs of our debts, our mortgages and student loans are too much, and even with health insurance the deductibles and copays pile up., or if you are poor, can't make rent and end up in homeless shelter, in many red states in US, if make $10k as an individual, you make too much to qualify for govt provided health insurance Medicaid, and too little to get govt subsidized insurance on private market.
You think of Americans as entitled debt gorgers. when in fact, we have many, may very poor people land and a middle class being shook down by parasites and rentiers everywhere we turn: two-year colleges that hardly graduate anyone, "public colleges" that only get 5 percent of their funding from state coffers and cost $25k a year or private colleges that are far more costly, a bloated fee-for-service healthcare sector that charges often double or triple for things as what they cost even in high cost places like Switzerland, bloated investment class that eats up what little personal retirement savings we have in fees and scams. And real estate that is increasing in the hands of private investment groups, with rents rising to 50 percent of many worker families incomes.
Instead of looking for character flaws in the regular people struggling to make a life for themselves around the world, how about looking a processes, political/economic systems and how we can forge a better future for all of us.
First up, let's get rid of parasites - sure tech allows us to provide something's more efficiently to consumers, so be it...but are rents getting more efficient? I'm thinking in US, most people's outlay for housing, education, healthcare, swipe fees, overpriced fuels etc are far more of a concern to their budget than the taxi cab guild. If we are going to start with wasteful people who are getting money for something that is replaceable for far less, let's prioritize.
"You think of Americans as entitled debt gorgers. when in fact, we have many, may very poor people land and a middle class being shook down by parasites and rentiers everywhere we turn: two-year colleges that hardly graduate anyone, "public colleges" that only get 5 percent of their funding from state coffers and cost $25k a year or private colleges that are far more costly, a bloated fee-for-service healthcare sector that charges often double or triple for things as what they cost even in high cost places like Switzerland, bloated investment class that eats up what little personal retirement savings we have in fees and scams. And real estate that is increasing in the hands of private investment groups, with rents rising to 50 percent of many worker families incomes.
Instead of looking for character flaws in the regular people struggling to make a life for themselves around the world, how about looking a processes, political/economic systems and how we can forge a better future for all of us."
Amen brother.....preach it !
And another thing. This guy's flippant attitude about Joe losing his job, so he just needs to get over it and learn another. We have NO trade unions, NO real re-education to speak of and if we did it's would not be high quality. It takes a SHIT TON of time to learn anything in the high tech hell in order to be marketable. And then....like asshole said.....you're job will get outsourced to an overseas wage slave or a robot. So what's the point ?
Here's a trade. Learn to grow food. Start small so you can learn and manage the ups and downs. Then build a clientele base. Then take some of that profit, if not all if its a hobby business, and expand your garden/small farm. Find local resterurants who like to serve something different that they kind find enough of....or at a price they are looking for. Find resterurants that are looking at serving local fare and/or organic. Look to farmer's markets and local grocery stores.
Here's an idea.....grow all the ingrediants you need to make a salsa or pizza sauce or marinara or hot sauce. Now YOU control the raw goods AND the finished value added product.
High tech comes and goes. And someday it will decrease due to the decrease of cheap energy. But people still gotta eat.
High tech doesn't mean shit.....if you can't eat. And life ain't worth living if you can't eat well. Provide people with that.....and there's little one can do to outsource that. And if worse comes to worse with the business.....then you can always feed yourself.
Have you tried growing things, and compared costs to buying at store or farmers market...it's about as cost saving as weaving your won cloth and sewing your own clothes. Seeds, fertilizer, compost,water, protection from pests and elements etc, it's not cheap on individual scale, nice hobby but practical ion competitive on most places.
Nothing wrong with tech, if we actually see savings, but what good is cheaper computers, food clothes, if rent on land keeps going up, or student debt triples. Nothin wrong with things getting easy to service, mass produce, just hat too often that then impoverishes regular working fols rather than them seeing life get easier.m
Didn't Pol Pot try that with his "Super Great Leap Forward" scheme?
Does the fact that their tax rates are also confiscatory have anything to do with it?
And this, my friends, is why Marx´s theory of surplus value is still a potent critique of laissez faire capitalism. If everyone with capital is permitted to forever search for the cheapest labor, who will have the money to buy all these mass-produced goods? Does Captain Chris Capital Tell really believe that Jacindra in Manila can afford to purchase the latest Iphone? If not Jacindra, then who? What you get is called (for all those who failed economic history 101) over-production. The workers simply cannot afford to buy the goods that they produce, so businesses collapse, mass-production ceases, and you get a depression. How many Iphones does Chris Tell need? How many will he buy? Enough to support an entire factory and hundreds of robots?
I know that the latest fad, especially in Austrian economics, is to blame every depression on the fed and monetary policy, but this is just another silly lie- simplistic reduction of complex phenomena to a pre-conceived monetary (and political) theory. I know that this is blasphemy to Zerohedge readers, but the fed is not responsible for all the expansion of debt. As real wages fall and those who own the means of production grow fatter and richer on the backs of cheap labor, people borrow (as in all of Greece borrowed, all of the U.S. borrows- whether it is private credit, school loans to pay day-to-day expenses or government debt to pay unemployment and welfare benefits, all of Italy , and so forth) to maintain their lives and continue purchasing goods. Without this massive expansion of credit, Chris Tell´s little robots and slaves would not have any work either.
The age of simple answers to complex problems must come to end, especially economic problems. Austrian economics and laissez faire capitalism do not provide all the answers: only more more simplistic reductions. That these simplistic theories support and are supported by the already rich, I am sure is only a coincidence.
And Marx and ALL other "accepted" economists miss THE elephant in the room: the pursuit of perpetual growth on a finite planet.
There's one key/extremely important word burried in all that you wrote, a word that contains the linkage to the growth issue: "expansion." Try and state ANY economic policy without this word and see how far you can get.
Again, people ought to read up on FULL history to see that our various ideologies are meaningless in their abilities to stave off collapse (because NONE ever identify growth as an issue). Read Sir John Glubb's paper: http://www.rexresearch.com/glubb/glubb-empire.pdf
Seer, I liked Glubb's essay.
My favourite passage was:
"Men can scarcely be blamed for not learning from the history they are taught. There is nothing to learn from it, because it is not true."
My basic view of the rise and fall of empires is that the organized lies operating robberies that originally made them later become the same mechanisms which are their downfall. The shorter term successes of deceits lead to their longer term destructions. The fact that people are taught versions of history full of bias and prejudice, i.e., extolling the established systems of lies, is an aspect of that overall process.
Yeah, Seer, it appears to me that the majority of people whose writings appear on Zero Hedge continue to deliberately ignore that problem, which is STRANGE, because it is "THE elephant in the room: the pursuit of perpetual growth on a finite planet."
Of course, the masses of mainstream morons ignore that even more than the less ignorant Zero Hedge readers. In my view the fundamental reasons are that our political economy is based on enforced frauds, whereby "money" is made out of nothing and returns to nothing, at relative rates which cause the see-saw problems of inflation vs. deflation.
ALL significant schools of economics that I am aware of deliberate ignore the ecological environment. The more dominant the school of economics is, the more it tends to ignore the facts about the natural world, because making "money" out of nothing as debts contradicts the most basic laws of nature at face value. Our economic system can ONLY be understood as being basically systems of enforced frauds, which disguise themselves through obfuscation of that fact, which become more socially successful the more they are to get away with operating those enforced frauds, by denying & disregarding that the foundation of the whole system is fraudulent. It is NOT possible to reconcile fraudulent financial accounting systems with the natural world, without understanding that the established systems ARE organized lies, operating robberies.
The fraudulent financial accounting systems ARE part of nature, but deliberately do not recognize nor admit that, because they are proportionately more socially successful the more that most people do NOT understand that. The more that most people do not have common sense physics, the more that they can be bamboozled to believe in bullshit, which benefits the biggest bullies who promote that kind of bullshit to benefit them in the short-term, despite how terrible the consequences will eventually become for everyone, due to having being controlled by systems of legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, driving them to behave in ways which demonstrate attitudes of criminal insanities towards the natural world.
Since those established social pyramid systems are based on being able to back up lies with violence, they are also able to deliberately ignore "THE elephant in the room: the pursuit of perpetual growth on a finite planet." To stop ignoring that requires we stop ignoring that the public "money" supply is being made out of nothing as debts, which system was "paying" for strip-mining the planet's natural resources, in ways which were able to do so through attitudes of evil deliberate ignorance towards the consequences of continuing to do that!
THERE ARE NO SOLUTIONS TO THAT PROBLEM OTHER THAN BEING DRIVEN THROUGH REVOLUTIONS.
you completely miss the point.
Austrian economics is not saying the Fed is the cause of all busts and booms.
Austrian economics says busts and booms are inevitable, but that you should be decentralized so a boom in one sector or a bust in another sector, doesn't spread like a cancer to all sectors.
You want a lot of mini booms and busts, instead of one large motherfker that takes the entire country down.
Also, 'Austrian economists' are not saying the Fed is solely responsible for the credit expansion. Have you even read Von Mises, Hayek or Rothbard? Clearly you haven't. In fact the current state of finance is exactly because the Fed CANNOT expand credit (the banks keep all the reserves at the Fed), yet they keep printing up reserves to try and get it moving.
Lastly, you point about Jacindra owning an iPhone is moot. 30 years only the rich could afford a mobile phone. Now very poor people in Africa and India use cellphones for banking and communication on a daily basis. It doesn't have to be an iPhone, a lot of them are using cheap Nokia or Huawei etc. phones. Now I know you don't like progress and feel those poor people should still be using carrier pigeon, but I'm sure a lot of them would disagree.
I guess we should just all move back to subsistence farming, 100% employment for everyone!
clearly never read any austrian economics. good job completely ignoring the biggest increase in productivity and output in the history of the world, the industrial revolution, during which "everyone with capital WAS permitted to forever search for cheapest labor". only led to the biggest, wealthiest middle class in history. households that used to have to send their children to work were suddenly able to subsist with only the father working. how, sir, do americans currently afford all the shit they buy? was it minimum wage laws? good christ shut the fuck up.
your nonsense on "simple answers and complex problems" is a complete non-sequitur that does nothing to address reality in any way shape or form. not going to waste time addressing the rest of your nonsense because my blood pressure is already way up.
kindly go fuck yourself, and find another site to troll.
....and no mention of the effect of super concentrated liquid energy ( cheap oil).
I simply say , " put a gallon of gas in your car, drive until it stops, and push it back to the starting point".
Cheap oil, I've heard it said, is like giving every man a hundred slaves. The downslope of the peak oil curve has to be a factor in all this. As much as the upslope allowed industrial revolution.
Without some series of technological and political miracles, then the "downslope" is probably going to be a lot steeper, whereby more genocidal wars, along with democidal martial law, and everything else like that, results in the majority of the human population being miserably murdered.
The technological miracles are more possible than the political miracles, since the political miracles would require enough people being able to agree upon enough better death controls, or else there must be death insanities as the default. Right now, the runaway debt slavery systems generating numbers which are debt insanities are driving us towards death insanities.
Inside the current systems, no alternative technologies could be scaled up without going even more deeply into debt, because we have a Money-As-Debt, MAD, economic system. Furthermore, the ways that is backed up is by the force of governments, which can murder people who resist being defrauded by the bankster dominated governments. Since we are already drowning in debt, more debts to to pay for scaling up alternatives technologically is economically impossible within the currently established systems.
In that context, the "downslope" to having built the industrial revolution on social debt engines, financing physical steam engines, requires BOTH political miracles, AND technological miracles, for that "downslope" to not become very steep, and almost omnicidal.
Most mainstream economics was built upon enforced frauds, which got away with deliberately ignoring the fundamentals of those enforced frauds, or the ways that the debt controls were backed by the death controls. In the foreseeable future, on the "downslope" those realities will become harder and harder to continue to ignore. However, at present, almost everyone continues to appear to do their best to maintain attitudes of evil deliberate ignorance towards the most important social and biological facts.
Even on Zero Hedge, it still seems to be a relative minority that point out the basic problems of exponential growth on a finite planet. In the mainstream, that package of problems is never looked at directly, as a whole, at least never in any ways that look directly at the realities of the actual debt controls backed by death controls. That is why it would take a series of "miracles" for any better solutions to emerge, since the mainstream morons blithely continue to be able to deliberately ignore that their basic problems even exist, and instead, talk about "returning to growth."
THE ONLY "RECOVERY" IS THROUGH REVOLUTION, WHICH SHOULD PRIMARILY BE INTELLECTUAL SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS.
nice point.
during this industrial revolution were jobs outsourced or were they in UK, Germany or USA ?
what difference does some imaginary line make to all this? jobs at the time were given to immigrants or even children who were willing to work for less. we're talking about switching out labor for the cheapest labor, not labor moving across some arbitrary line. my point is that laissez faire economics, which is what austrian economics preaches, was the cause of the largest increase in production and productivity in history, not credit expansion. our development happened in spite of credit expansion, not because of it. the argument that outsourcing jobs to poorer nations means that everyone is worse off shows that the above poster fundamentally doesnt understand basic austrian economics, and yet is making an attempt to criticize it without presenting any proof whatsoever.
Yes, yes laissez faire capitalism in imperial Japan, Germany, and England was "the" cause of the industrial revolution. You simply repeat the same absurd reduction ad nauseum and then devolve into an absurd profanity- laced tirade. I can do this too. The scientific revolution and its dissemination in new "national" school systems of the industrializing nations was "the" cause of the industrial revolution. Go read Newton.. you are an idiot.. go f yourself. Oh look at my blood pressure.
that line tells you what nation you are in ... you do know the difference between a market and a nation? People will die to protect their nation, people could care less about what market they are in. Your 'one world nations dont matter' premise drives your argument, but ignores human nature.
Yeah... the industrial revolution in Germany was the result of Austrian economic theory and the laissez faire capitalism of Otto von Bismarck and King Wilhelm I. The industrial boom in Japan under a series of emperors was the direct result of laissez faire capitalism and applied Austrian economic theory. Maybe you should rethink your position? The causes of the industrial revolution were multiple, and the revolution occurred in many different countries at roughly the same time. I could recite for you my lectures in Western Civilization about the Enlightenment, applied Newtonian physics, the invention of the steam engine, the changes in the education system in England and in Germany during the Prussian Reform Movement, the concept of interchangeable parts developed by the Swedish military, the invention of the assembly line, and so forth. But I guess all of this would just complicate what seems to be, in your mind, a very simple thing.
At any rate, the industrial revolution led to innumerable booms and busts... long before the Fed existed. Why? Because their were no "consumers" for many of these products after rail-lines had been extended and the bridges constructed. You also do not understand the changing definition of the term "middle-class," which in the 19th century meant factory-owners and capitalists, a very small percentage of the population (maybe 5%). The working-class and peasants had no purchasing power and saw no benefit from the industrial revolution. The worker simply replaced the peasant as agriculture mechanized. If you had ever read Dickens, you know Charles Dickens, you would know this.
When did the "consumer" middle-class of working people arise that you allude to? With Henry Ford´s $5 day. His theory: that workers should make enough to purchase the goods that they produce. No matter how much your blood pressure rises, you will still be wrong.
see above post. to continue, the booms and busts you speak of were caused by credit expansion. and the reason that there were no "consumers for many of these products" was precisely because of the misallocation of resources that comes with credit expansion. pick up some rothbard before you make an argument that has been made hundreds of times and refuted just as many. the working class had no benefit from the industrial revolution? how can you possibly argue that? people in 1900 were infinitely better off than people in 1870. people in 1920 (in spite of a bankster caused world war) were infinitely better off in they were in 1900 in terms of purchasing power and total available capital. etc etc ad nauseum. your arguments arent supported by any honest analysis of the situation.
"Without this massive expansion of credit, Chris Tell´s little robots and slaves would not have any work either."
That is the brilliant and simple nub of the matter. The rest is mere window dressing.
All this is a house of cards. Once the zombie apocalypse comes ( and it will) it will be pre 1800's over night. Outsource that.
it will be pre 1800's over night
Read this excellent fictional account of what it will be like after an EMP attack over America. Sobering.
http://www.amazon.com/One-Second-After-William-Forstchen/dp/0765356864
Try to ignore that Newt Gingrich wrote the foreward.
A natural mega solar flare could do something similar. The odds of one happening every few centuries appear to be fairly great, while there was no electric grid, or electronic gadgets, before, that would be susceptible to those kinds of natural events.
It would be one hell of a hard way to return to more diversity, to have the enforced monopolies summarily wiped out! Social pyramid systems were not good at anything, EXCEPT wiping out their competition. The paradox is that too much of that, for too long, means that so much diversity is wiped out that there is not enough left to adapt to adversities.
The masses of mainstream morons were brainwashed to think in ways which favour the monopolists. The tragedies were that there was nothing to stop that happening, and so it did ... Nature is full of examples of species which maximized their short-term advantages, and then were wiped out. Humans used to be more adaptable, and some still relatively are. However, the vast majority of people were forced to become dependent upon a political economy built upon enforced frauds, which required them to "adapt" to that in worse and worse ways.
It is not merely that we have created a globalized problem, where there ARE lots of EMP weapons, which could destroy civilization as we know it ... but also, there are lists of possible natural mega-disasters, which most people are just as unprepared for overall as we are unprepared for the man-made disasters, as well as even less prepared for how those would combine and multiply themselves, as in the Fukushima event.
Since our civilization is controlled by the short-term triumphs of those who can best back up their lies with violence, our civilization is otherwise not prepared for anything else, in any ways other than those which would make it still get worse, faster.
"Outsource that."
And when the apocalypse comes unlike every other nation on earth, we will encounter (or enjoy, depending on which side of the fence you are on) the one true and exclusive aspect of "American Exceptionalism" that is real, namely, a rifle behind every blade of grass.
So, we're all going to become hunters? (and when we rapidly exhaust the wild critters we'll turn to canabalism?)
Amen, bro. Freedom isn't free.
Unintended irony in this article!
Stories in Zero Hedge keep on getting more flabbergasting every day, rapidly going on beyond how surreal the situation is when one can barely perceive the difference between satire and news. In that context, this article by Chris Tell manages to appear to me to extremely old-fashioned, while presenting itself as modern flexibility, going with the times!
My view is that it typifies the superficial, old-fashioned mind-set to be making a big deal about the differences between "Socialists vs Capitalists."
There actually is Neither anymore. Instead, the post-modernizing world is the manifestation of the runaway triumph of organized crime having successfully captured governments. There is no other "ism" but out-of-control organized crime "controlling" the world.
In that context, my macabre sense of humour was tickled by the unintentional ironies found in the assertions that: "Humans don't change. Circumstances change, technology changes but human nature never changes."
Ah, surely, individuals should embrace their opportunities, and look for new ways to utilize technology! After all, what could possibly go wrong with there being APES WITH ATOMIC BOMBS?
Technological time bombs:
"our clock IS ticking!"
Since the foundation of the entire political economy became private banks making "money" out of nothing, which fraud everyone else was forced by governments to accept, and since those systems kept on growing at an exponential rate, as they financed the strip-mining of the planet's natural resources, (without caring the slightest about running into the limits of a finite planet), the central feature of civilization has become criminal insanity.
An article like the one above presents old-fashioned opinions regarding how we should embrace that runaway criminal insanity, as technologies which are trillions of times more powerful and capable are developed, in order to increase the scope of "human nature," as manifested through social pyramid systems that were based on backing up legalized lies with legalized violence.
Exactly right! We are at the zenith of human civilization and it's all down from here. Just watch.
Government IS organized crime. Without government there would be no organized crime to speak of.
Omegaman2211, I certainly agree with your first sentence. However, the second one is tricky. Indeed, the basic problem is that the language that we use is overwhelmingly the biggest bullies' bullshit, in which there are plenty of false fundamental dichotomies, and their related impossible ideals.
It seems to me to be obvious that most social animals have pecking orders, such as in flocks of birds. Surely, primates do, and clearly, all apes do. Human beings are basically apes, with bigger brains, that enables them to develop more language, culture and tools ... BUT, then they are still basically the same animals underneath, which is why I emphasize the unprecedented problems presented by the industrial revolutions, leading to today's systems of globalized electronic frauds, backed by the force of weapons of mass destruction, i.e., APES WITH ATOMIC BOMBS!
The biggest bullies have always been dominating, long, long before the Neolithic Revolutions of agriculture, and the development of slavery as "human farming." In my view, the social pyramid systems developed by Neolithic Civilizations were expedient sets of solutions to chronic political problems which are inherent in human life.
As another reply to you before pointed out, if the biggest bullies' systems collapse into chaos, what we actually get are lower level bullies able to reassert themselves, like local warlords. If there was not the ability of the sovereign state to relatively monopolize violence, then lesser gangs of organized criminals could then advance to take advantage of their opportunities.
I basically believe that the "theory" of government, as a democratic republic operating through the rule of law is as good as it gets regarding how to cope with the fact that everyone has some power to rob, and power to kill to back that up. The problem in practice has become that the best organized gangs of criminals, the biggest gangsters, the banksters, were able to capture control over the political processes, by persistently and systematically applying the methods of organized crime, in the forms of bribery, intimidation, and assassination of those politicians who could not otherwise be bribed or intimidated. Therefore, the current REALITY is the runaway manifestation of the problem that "nobody guards the guardians." Hence, the guardians have now become in league with the worst criminals, predators upon the rest of the people, which predators are degenerating into parasites, because most of the rest of We the People have degenerated into Zombie Sheeple.
Anyway, Omegaman2211, I agree that warfare was organized crime on a larger scale, and that governments were created by their survival through the history of warfare. Similarly, that has become extremely problematic the more that the best organized criminals, the banksters and their buddies, were able to turn most politicians into puppets, performing to trick the masses of muppets!
However, I continue to believe that the deeper political problems are chronic, and will exist as long as any human beings survive.
It is difficult to have an intelligible language to describe the social situation after the best organized gangs of criminals capture almost complete control over the powers of governments, which governments, in turn, were originally created by the history of warfare, which was based on organized crime too. I agree with you, Omegaman2211, that that without the current forms of corrupted and crazy governments, then there would be very little other forms of organized crime.
HOWEVER, the chronic political problems inherent in the nature of life are still there, and unless we developed better resolutions of those problems, then we will continue to get the expedient sets of "solutions" run through the biggest bullies' bullshit, which tends to always make those problems get worse, faster ...