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Federal officials have labeled Boston a major target of Chinese spies who are looking to steal trade and technology secrets from the US.
US Assistant Attorney General John Demers, who leads a federal force against Chinese espionage in America, said Massachusetts had become a focus of his team's work, the Associated Press reported.
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Massachusetts is home to top-ranked universities including Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It also hosts military contractors such as weapon maker Raytheon and defense system provider Mercury Systems.As part of the China Initiative, officials said they had met with local companies and colleges last week to encourage them to bring suspected instances of espionage to the attention of federal investigators.
Lelling said the large number of Chinese nationals living in Boston also made the city a potential espionage target, but officials added that most were in the US for legitimate reasons, such as study.
Technology workers should keep a close eye on Wang?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday April 16 2019, @05:56AM (7 children)
So we are at what Nobby Nobbs persists in referring to as an imp arse, then. We have historical examples of things like the Civilian Conservation Corps working. The municipal highway system is another. You are drinking clean water and not suffering explosive diarrhea (at least, not from the anus...) because of municipal water supplies; the "free market" solution would be along the lines of Nestle selling you bottled water at $10 an ounce.
You are, in the most basic and most dictionary-accurate sense, a bigot. You have ingrained dogma ("gubbamint BAD!") which is not even slightly amenable to reason and external evidence. It sounds to me like you don't *want* the problems solved, because of some misguided and utterly ahistorical purity principle concerning what you believe the "free market" to be.
Get it through your titanium cranium, Hallow: demands for different goods have differing elasticities, infinite growth is a physical impossibility, stable market minima are not the same thing as an actual most efficient solution, private entities are not guaranteed to find either, and humans are *not* rational actors. Your entire worldview is built on a foundation of sewage, and it smells that way.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 16 2019, @01:34PM (6 children)
Define "working". Sure, the CCC was better than not having it like having a band aid over a wound is better than not. But we wouldn't have been in the situation to need the CCC, if FDR hadn't massively screwed up the economy (for example, massive creation of cartels, and handing way too much power to labor unions, thus screwing up new employment). There have been three slow job recovery recessions since 1900. All three involve heavy interference by a sitting president (FDR in 1933-1939, G. W. Bush in 2001-2008, and Barack Obama in 2009-2016).
Unless, of course, I figured out how to get drinking water cheaper. It might be structured differently than current municipal systems, but the water isn't going to cost that much because barrier to entry is low.
Let's also consider historical examples like ice. The US had a thriving economy in ice production prior to refrigerators. It didn't get dominated by one company providing one expensive product.
You have yet to employ reason and external evidence. Just look at this section.
And none of that is relevant to our discussion - your entire post to be honest. Markets handle it all quite well. Inelastic goods? Higher prices due to inelastic demand encourage more production. Nobody has a clue what an actual "most efficient solution" looks like. Markets do better than some ignorant top-down fools trying to guess it. One doesn't need infinite growth (and as I have noted in the past, we'll need to grow for some time even if the growth never will be infinite, just due to our needs). And one doesn't need rational actors.
So what brought up this sudden surge in straw men? There is no real problem with drinking water or electricity the way they're currently priced. And really, a bunch of providers already do some sort of post-scarcity pricing, fixed rate for small users and per unit for large users without a lot of high drama. Nor have I bellyached that much about public infrastructure building, even though at this point, it's pretty inefficiently distributed (emphasis on building new stuff over maintaining the old, and an obsession with virtue/status signaling like building poorly used high speed rails or bike paths over building stuff that people would use).
You can talk all day (and sometimes do) about "reason and external evidence", but you can't even abandon the crudest sorts of reasoning fallacies. Want me to be amenable? Then actually do reason and external evidence. Don't just talk about it.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday April 16 2019, @06:19PM (5 children)
Thanks for proving my point. Bare assumptions are not an argument, and the most telling of them ("we don't need rational actors") pretty much underlies your entire worldview. You are approaching Trumpian levels of self-serving utterly divorced from reality skull squitter. If there were any justice in this world your fingers would detach themselves from your hands and run away from you for the lies and bullshit you force them to type.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 16 2019, @08:32PM (4 children)
Do you need to be perfectly rational in anything else you do? Does one need to be perfectly rational when one drives? Mows the lawn? Eats a meal? Reads a book? Why are markets supposed to be a unique exception?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday April 17 2019, @05:57AM (3 children)
When the very foundations of a theory that affects the lives of billions are under consideration? Hell to the motherfucking yes, we need to be perfectly rational, or as close to it as we can get. Economics is *predicated* on those assumptions, Mr. Hallow. You do not get to push a theory that relies on A and then continue pushing it when ~A has been shown to be the case. It just doesn't work, and with something with as wide a scope as economic policy, the failure modes are catastrophic.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 17 2019, @12:31PM (2 children)
The answer is no, you don't need perfectly rational being. We have far more than "a theory" here. We have working examples of markets which demonstrate that one doesn't need to be perfectly rational in order to use and benefit from markets.
No, it's not. This is straw man. You can see for yourself. Just answer the question "What aspect of economics requires us to be perfectly rational in order to use it?" Making choices, the fundamental economic activity don't require us to be perfectly rational. Owning resources and assets don't require us to be perfectly rational. One no more needs to be perfectly rational to use a hammer than they do an economics system. Both are merely tools, independent of the mental capabilities of the people/agents using them.
Sure there is a theory of economics that assumes agents using the system are perfectly rational. But one can similarly assume that's not true and get a different sort of theory (which just happens to be very close to the perfectly rational ideal). There is plenty of economic theory that doesn't rely on such things. And that's theory. As I noted above, we have a lot more than theory with many working examples of markets and economies to study.
Show it's a problem, don't just assert it's a problem. As to "catastrophic" failure modes, when are we going to see those?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday April 17 2019, @07:15PM (1 child)
You wanna see catastrophic failure, look back to the Depression. You know, one of the reasons Glass-Steagall was passed? And guess what got repealed during the Clinton Dynasty?
Hallow, you are the kind of person who would jump off a cliff and be completely unconcerned because, until impact, everything is going just fine and there's even a nice, cooling breeze. You're an utter historical illiterate, sitting in the lap of all those who suffered and perished in the labor movements from the 1850s to the 1940s to bring you the 40 hour workweek, disability and labor laws, workers' comp, unions, and everything else that led to you being able to sit here at your computer and smack your benefactors in the face over TCP/IP across over 150 years of space-time.
Every. Single. Privilege. You. Have. About the modern workplace. Is due to the very same "liberals" you are constantly castigating. Thank a liberal you are not slaving away in a factory somewhere 14 hours a day 7 days a week only to be thrown out on the spot when you lose a hand in the machinery.
And you sit here, either ignorant of this on a scale that approaches culpability or worse, knowing and deliberately dismissive of it, and push for economic policy that will make the Gilded Age look quaint.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 18 2019, @02:10AM
Notice what else is common then and recently with Obama, a US president who substantially messed up the US economy with business-hostile policies. And both have really slow job recoveries.
Sigh. Once again, labor power increased over that time as well. Similarly, when foreign labor started competing, labor power declined, followed by declines in labor union power and such. The workers about which you wax poetically brought a hell of a lot more than just better labor conditions. They brought modern society. Maybe you shouldn't be smacking them either?
There is this interesting pause in the decline of labor power in the decade between 1990 and 2000. At that point, Japan's economic progress had stalled while China was still building up. The US economy did quite well during that time. In my view, that indicates a strong correlation between the power of labor, and the competition for that labor.
That's why I continue to perceive these labor problems as temporary. Every country in the world, with the possible sole exception of North Korea, is moving towards a developed world economy. My take is that eventually we'll reach parity with almost every part of the world, maybe by 2060 (where Africa will be the last major hold out yet still progressing rapidly towards developed world status). At that point, what will stand in the way of US labor power will be its own laws. That so many people are more concerned about 40 hour work weeks than in an economy that can support 40 hour work weeks, indicates to me that the US might not do well by this time.