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posted by janrinok on Monday October 17 2016, @09:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the where's-the-good-news? dept.

The technology revolution has delivered Google searches, Facebook friends, iPhone apps, Twitter rants and shopping for almost anything on Amazon, all in the past decade and a half.

What it hasn't delivered are many jobs. Google's Alphabet Inc. and Facebook Inc. had at the end of last year a total of 74,505 employees, about one-third fewer than Microsoft Corp. even though their combined stock-market value is twice as big. Photo-sharing service Instagram had 13 employees when it was acquired for $1 billion by Facebook in 2012.

Hiring in the computer and chip sectors dove after companies shifted hardware production outside the U.S., and the newest tech giants needed relatively few workers. The number of technology startups fizzled. Growth in productivity and wages slowed, and income inequality rose as machines replaced routine, low- and middle-income, human-powered work.

This outcome is a far cry from what many political leaders, tech entrepreneurs and economists predicted about a generation ago. In 2000, President Bill Clinton said in his last State of the Union address: "America will lead the world toward shared peace and prosperity and the far frontiers of science and technology." His economic team trumpeted "the ferment of rapid technological change" as one of the U.S. economy's "principal engines" of growth.

The gap between what the tech boom promised and then delivered is another source of the rumbling national discontent that powered the rise this year of political outsiders Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

[...]

Eventually there'll be only decent jobs for maybe 20% of the population:  What economic system is needed for that??


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Monday October 17 2016, @01:41PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 17 2016, @01:41PM (#415188)

    Already done, Dickens, Tale of Two Cities.

    The more stuff changes, the more it stays the same.

    The "funniest" part about the French Revolution is on a small enough scale and short enough time period everyone involved was basically rational, regardless of how irrational the whole thing turned out to be on a large scale.

    Euro history from the french revolution up to 1945 boils down to "we had a stable-ish middle ages purely agricultural society, then capitalism and industrialization meant we had to repaint every geographic border with gallons of blood because that's the only way to transition to new borders based on mass media, capitalism, industrialization."

    Now they got the hyperconservative (in terms of lack of flexibility and change) EU which idiotically thinks they're gonna replicate the French aristocracy thing of never changing nothin and let them eat cake. After an aggressive attempt at delaying the inevitable, a couple million pissed off Greeks (and everyone else) are gonna roll guillotines into Belgium and the streets are gonna run red. You can only grind the greek people under the german bank jackboots for so long until the bullet start flying. Then mix in a couple million all young male invader / refugees, its gonna be a party in euroland in the 20s, that's for sure.

    A pessimist (realist?) would claim all major cultural transitions are bathed in blood across all cultures.

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  • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday October 17 2016, @02:06PM

    by isostatic (365) on Monday October 17 2016, @02:06PM (#415197) Journal


    its gonna be a party in euroland in the 20s, that's for sure.

    Ahh yes:

    WOMAN: You're lucky. We had to cancel our trip to the Alps this year because of the student protests in France.
    CHRIS: I thought the Neo-Trotskyists were going to put a stop to that.
    WOMAN: They're not having any more luck that the Gaullists did.
    MAN: Europe is falling apart.
    WOMAN: Well, at least we don't have to worry about that kind of thing here.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @03:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @03:53PM (#415228)

    So let me get this straight ...

    To create the Euro, and get Germany on board, they had to offer a guarantee against bailouts. Otherwise there would have been a Euro (maybe), which would have been a very weak currency, and a Pound and a Deutschmark separately.

    Greece joins this scheme, and discovering that their government can now borrow money very cheaply, proceeds to do so and buy off the populace with all these fresh goodies.

    Then when lenders get suspicious of Greece's ability to pay, they demand bailouts from (among others) Germany - contrary to the entire principle of the deal - and you say it's the german bankers' fault?

    Please, do offer detailed and precise explanations of how the german bankers were at fault for a situation created, with open eyes, by the government of Greece.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Monday October 17 2016, @05:17PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 17 2016, @05:17PM (#415272)

      and you say it's the german bankers' fault?

      Well there's two answers AC.

      The first is the rational one. There's this weird (usually American) belief that all contracts are slave labor and eternal and inviolable. In the real world the reason they got over prime rate interest was risk, and the risk is they're not getting paid, and contracts aren't even valid unless they have an "out" as in this is what happens if things don't go right. Hey, you made a loan. The purpose of paying interest is to balance the risk. The whole point of having a balance is sometimes you don't win. Guess what you lost this time. You can flip the table or pout or be professional businessmen and eat the loss. That's the whole freaking point of having a contract and paying interest. It is not and never was selling eternal soul to devil (even I don't say the german bankers are that bad) nor is it a contract of involuntary servitude. Banks are not supposed to get paid on their riskiest loans. What kind of idiots loan that kind of money to people they know can't replay it? I know, parasites, thats who. Parasites who should lose their bank if necessary out of the stupidity of their actions.

      The second is irrational yet practical. I would assume much like the USA the corruption is mostly at the top and all rewards of the corruption went to a couple above the law billionaires. Its not like the Greek people are now rich, LOL! Now the problem is the infantrymen and tank crews and attack helicopter pilots are watching grannie slowly starved to death so the German bankers are made whole after giving all that money to some billionaire crooks. Now you can do that for awhile and pay off the military blah blah but eventually enough grannies are going to starve and enough kids are going to starve that the tanks roll and the day of the rope in the capital and machine guns on the border and all that. The tanks and machine guns are gonna get some action. And wasn't the whole purpose of the UN and EU and all that bullshit to prevent WWIII not start it? I mean, you can't seriously be asking some greek grannie or grandchild to literally suicide so that some german banker can make some greek crook rich? Maybe the Greek army wouldn't last long against the Wehrmacht, the best they can hope for is some kind of battle of Thermopylae re-enactment when the Germans send in the tanks to annex Greece but given a choice of fighting and probably failing or watching their country starved to death with 100% certainty, they'll fight and they'll be right to do it. Asking a country to suicide for the benefit of some billionaires is asking a lot more than most people will tolerate.

      What you're claiming is bankers should never experience the punishments for their actions while the general public should experience punishments for other peoples failures. Its a fundamentally immoral double standard. Apparently, some people are more equal than others...

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @05:43PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @05:43PM (#415283)

        I'll just leave this here. Mark Blyth: "Austerity - The History of a Dangerous Idea"

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQuHSQXxsjM [youtube.com]

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @08:40PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @08:40PM (#415386)

        The first is the rational one. There's this weird (usually American) belief that all contracts are slave labor and eternal and inviolable. In the real world the reason they got over prime rate interest was risk, and the risk is they're not getting paid, and contracts aren't even valid unless they have an "out" as in this is what happens if things don't go right. Hey, you made a loan. The purpose of paying interest is to balance the risk. The whole point of having a balance is sometimes you don't win. Guess what you lost this time. You can flip the table or pout or be professional businessmen and eat the loss. That's the whole freaking point of having a contract and paying interest. It is not and never was selling eternal soul to devil (even I don't say the german bankers are that bad) nor is it a contract of involuntary servitude. Banks are not supposed to get paid on their riskiest loans. What kind of idiots loan that kind of money to people they know can't replay it? I know, parasites, thats who. Parasites who should lose their bank if necessary out of the stupidity of their actions.

        You're missing the whole point.

        The bankers weren't happy about losing out on their loans; that's normal. But it wasn't the bankers who were most involved in the whole bailout discussion; it was Greece. Do you remember why? No? Let me refresh your memory.

        The eurozone has rules about its members, and their fiscal and monetary probity. You can quibble about how consistently those rules have been applied, but the basic idea is that if Greece were to default on a major level, they would have to leave the Euro. Like, ASAP. At that point the banks would get to pick them apart, based on those default clauses, to recover what they could on those contracts, and do it in euro terms because the loans were euro denominated. For a point of reference, check how comprehensively Argentina screwed itself in an analogous situation; except that Argentina wasn't part of a currency union. Bear in mind, the contracts were absolutely not silent on the point of default. Greece would not just be able to walk away, consequence-free.

        The wailing and gnashing of teeth resulted from a few factors:

        * Greece would have an immediate budget crunch based on all the above, plus suddenly having a junk bond rating and no prospects of any loans to bridge the gap

        * The bankers wouldn't be made whole, and would lose a lot of money

        * The terms of the eurozone's creation meant no bailouts, so that was off the table

        * The people who would lose the most would probably be the little people, especially in Greece, because ...

        * With their holdings suddenly converted back to worthless drachmas (or whatever), with banks shutting down to prevent bank runs, with government transfers stopped in their tracks, they'd be pretty much robbed

        * A major related risk would be the coherence of the whole monetary union

        I don't know how much you read (or remember) about the resulting debates, but there were speculations (still not resolved!) about doing things like kicking the PIIGS countries out of the euro, splitting the union into a north eurozone and a south eurozone, and just dumping Greece as a warning to others.

        So no, this isn't about table-flipping banksters doing the mo' money dance while greek orphans cried long, salty tears. This is about Greece having gone deliberately into the hole, and then wanting to change the rules at the last minute, to get bailed out of a catastrophe of their own making. If anyone was holding a gun to anyone's head, it was Greece saying: "Bail us out, suckers, or the little people get it." This is why Merkel had to find a way to create a bailout-that-wasn't-a-bailout, a fact which still rankles her voters and was one of the major reasons for the progressive weakening of her governing coalition.

        The second is irrational yet practical. I would assume much like the USA the corruption is mostly at the top and all rewards of the corruption went to a couple above the law billionaires. Its not like the Greek people are now rich, LOL! Now the problem is the infantrymen and tank crews and attack helicopter pilots are watching grannie slowly starved to death so the German bankers are made whole after giving all that money to some billionaire crooks. Now you can do that for awhile and pay off the military blah blah but eventually enough grannies are going to starve and enough kids are going to starve that the tanks roll and the day of the rope in the capital and machine guns on the border and all that. The tanks and machine guns are gonna get some action. And wasn't the whole purpose of the UN and EU and all that bullshit to prevent WWIII not start it? I mean, you can't seriously be asking some greek grannie or grandchild to literally suicide so that some german banker can make some greek crook rich? Maybe the Greek army wouldn't last long against the Wehrmacht, the best they can hope for is some kind of battle of Thermopylae re-enactment when the Germans send in the tanks to annex Greece but given a choice of fighting and probably failing or watching their country starved to death with 100% certainty, they'll fight and they'll be right to do it. Asking a country to suicide for the benefit of some billionaires is asking a lot more than most people will tolerate. What you're claiming is bankers should never experience the punishments for their actions while the general public should experience punishments for other peoples failures. Its a fundamentally immoral double standard. Apparently, some people are more equal than others...

        Again, totally missing the point. They were pretty darned willing to let the banks take it in the shorts, except for the little people who would suffer as a consequence. Even if you ignore (hah!) the greek banks and all the misery that came down on the greeks, what with the shutdowns to forestall bank runs and so on, killing german banks to, in effect, punish the german people (and dutch, and finnish, and danish, and ... and ...) for the choices of the greek government makes even less sense.

        As for your suggestion that the claim is that the bankers should never experience punishments, that was never in the cards. Let them suffer; the problem is that unless you do some bailing out, the little people get shafted as well. And guess what a deal behind the eurozone was? No bailouts. Hence, the greek government was holding a gun to the little people's heads, and the gun just happened to look like a banker. Now, the smart thing to do may very well have been to call the loans, refuse any rollovers, and tell Greece that they fucked it up and needed to re-apply for membership to the eurozone, once they got their fiscal house in order, but this had less to do with greek plutocrats than it did with those plutocrats buying the loyalty of voters with stupid transfers.

        So what do we have now? The bankers' hands are tied, because they have to pass huge stress tests, on top of a lot of non-performing loans. The greeks can't get loans worth a damn anyway because nobody wants to lend them anything without a clause stating that in the case of default, they get to bend greece over the back of a chair, and the greek government stubbornly refuses to fix the worst parts of the greek economy for fear of annoying their own voters. That's the problem: Greece has successfully turned itself into the deadbeat, couch-surfing cousin who's permanently in debt and thinks he's too good to pick up a janitorial job. Trying to blame the credit card companies for extending him a line of credit is like blaming a municipal pool for letting a drunk idiot break in at night and need rescuing.

        No demonic bankster malice needed, and no bankster kneebreakers asking for anything that wasn't in the default terms anyhow.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @03:17AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @03:17AM (#415522)

      I blame Goldman Sachs and the Greek Government:

      http://business.financialpost.com/news/goldmans-secret-greece-loan-a-sexy-story-between-two-sinners [financialpost.com]

      Greece’s secret loan from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. was a costly mistake from the start.

      On the day the 2001 deal was struck, the government owed the bank about €600-million ($793-million) more than the €2.8-billion it borrowed, said Spyros Papanicolaou, who took over the country’s debt-management agency in 2005. By then, the price of the transaction, a derivative that disguised the loan and that Goldman Sachs persuaded Greece not to test with competitors, had almost doubled to €5.1-billion euros, he said.