The Politics Thread

You can blame that on the USA as the main fence-sitter.

China is engaging on an attempted massive VLSI
fab plant effort. A potential consequence of that is that
an extreme increase in fab capacity could lead to China
dumping masses of cheap silicon onto the marketplace.

Note the USA saying well in advance that ain't gonna
be allowed to happen, because unlike with steel their
economy depends on the silicon marketplace.


"Even the land of the free has imposed a 220% tariff on Bombardier's exports to them! So when the EU sell more to us than we do to them, one option apparently not on the table is that we put a tariff on EU goods coming to this country, whilst leaving the single market effectively means that we are accepting a tariff put on our goods going to them."

Tariffs should always be reciprocal, if only to ensure
neither side gain a nett advantage in production costs.

 

The BBC is so impartial in their coverage that Laura Kuntessberg was invited to speak at a talk during the Tory conference next week...

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Of course, if anyone does talk about it that means they're intolerant and/or misogynistic so their opinions should be ignored.

 

Next time you shop take note of stuff made abroad against stuff made in GB or the USA. Scary isn't it? Oh those naughty sweat shops.....do the politicians care? I fear not.They've got their perks.....

 

“The day before the election, one paper devoted 14 pages to attacking the Labour party. And our vote went up nearly 10%. Never have so many trees died in vain. The British people saw right through it. So this is a message to the Daily Mail’s editor: next time, please could you make it 28 pages?” - Jeremy Corbyn

Funny how today is the first day this week where the Mail isn't devoting their front page to yet more anti-Corbyn smears...

 

Nevertheless I'm hearing a lot today about how Corbyn wants to abandon capitalism. I write in italics because the clip they played on the BBC of his speech was him attacking neo-liberalism. Now I haven't heard the whole speech so I will cannot be completely sure here (unlike the BBC and papers it seems), but capitalism and neo-liberalism are not the same - neo-liberal economics just seems to be the current fad way of redistributing wealth to the richest the fastest. So did Corbyn specifically say capitalism?

Apparently capitalism is nothing but an agent of good according to the Dire Leader's speech today - made at the Bank of England where presumably many of the audience were saved from their whacky financial schemes by being baled out by the public, most of whom are much poorer than them. You see capitalism has been the greatest agent of change in increasing the the incomes of the masses - which kind of ignores the fact that the masses have always done best under a mixed economy and not in recent times when unregulated neo-liberalism has reversed much of the good that people have experienced since the war. What safeguards have been put in place to prevent another financial meltdown?

 

Be specific in your types of "meltdown" .

1. Share price bubbles ??

2. The credit market "crunch" caused by abominations such as the CDO ??

Some types are sadly at the whim of moron herd mentality.
Others can be made safer by introducing engineering mentality
rather than continuing with politnik and/or financial market moron
mentality.

 

Two neo-Nazi groups have been added to the banned list, as offshoots of National Action.
They are Scottish Dawn, which is presumably named after their favourite shade of Dulux, and NS131, which is probably their password.

 

Thought I dated her some years back

 

You're on a list.

 

One of many, my friend - one of many!!

 

Fun fact, if you type "Corbyn wants to abandon capitalism" into Google the first page of search results include a two year-old article from the New Statesman, a two year-old article from the Torygraph, and an Express article from last December.

It's like they're repeating the same material...

 

Not sure you understand how the Google search engine
works with its default settings.

 

Not sure you understand that you've missed a quite obvious point.

 

The "obvious" point is that the Google search engine in its
default setting does not highly weight time of publication in the
search ranking, and nothing posted on the web in the past 24
hrs is exciting the PageRank algorithm enough to rank differently.

 

Since you clearly haven't bothered to check for yourself, instead preferring to obfuscate for the sake of it, let's list those search results in order...

Jeremy Corbyn declares capitalism is failing and insists June’s election shows Britain wants a socialist government (The Sun, 27th September 2017)
The opponents of Jeremy Corbyn are running out of road (The New Statesman, 28th September 2015)
Jeremy Corbyn Argues The Labour Party Should Be More Left-Wing To Fight The Far-Right (Huffington Post, forgetting that you can type words without hitting the shift key, 3rd December 2016)
Theresa May defends free market capitalism after Jeremy Corbyn's criticism (Business Insider, 28th September 2017)
The False Promise That is Jeremy Corbyn (Socialist Party of Great Britain, December 2015)
Theresa May’s speech in defence of capitalism proves that she fears Jeremy Corbyn’s ideas are popular (The Independent, 28th September 2017)
'We want Corbyn and socialism' Senior trade unionist pledges to 'OVERTHROW capitalism' (The Express, 24th December 2016)
Jeremy Corbyn says his £500bn investment pledge was an 'approximation' (The Mirror, 25th September 2016)
Jeremy Corbyn is wrong: the UK public backs capitalism (The Torygraph, 28th September 2015)
Corbyn and McDonnell's dark vision of a Venezuelan Britain (City AM, 6th June 2017)

I couldn't help but notice the first, fourth and sixth entries are all from the past 24 hours - just as I couldn't help but notice they were regurgitating the sentiment of headlined from up to two years ago, which was the remarkably obvious point that you're content to either miss or ignore.

 

The PageRank algorithm does not rank web content based on a
plagiarism / repetition / "sentiment" checker. It does however
tell me that #1 in the list must have had a far large number of
VIEWS and LINKS in the past 24 hrs to have ranked higher
than the content you claim #1 is regurgitating.

 

I was referring to all types of meltdown really, including the ones based on putting a lot of worthless stuff into a big pot, calling it by a name nobody has used before (CDO, SIV etc) and rating it AAA, in pursuit of bigger bonuses etc. But also the automatic share trading programs that if they go wrong can cause a stock market crash based on nothing.

 

That have never happened and nobody has ever envisaged ??
Only an omniprescient entity can do that.


"based on putting a lot of worthless stuff into a big pot, calling it by a name nobody has used before (CDO, SIV etc) and rating it AAA, in pursuit of bigger bonuses etc."

The non-impartiality of those product raters was near criminal.
So IMHO criminal punishment should be the fate of such
people in the future.

The "big pot" stuff is easy to deal with.
Engineering offers two basic concepts used in (safety) critical
systems engineering : reliability engineering and "bill of materials" audit.

The probability maths of the first is not that dissimilar to that used to
calculate the probability that a financial product can go pear-shaped.
The second means that any product can be openly decomposed into its
constituent parts recursively (basis and degree of risk therein) .

It may have averted the "credit crunch" as financial entities would have
been able to accurately quantify the degree of exposure (direct or
indirect) that their investments had to the USA subprime mortgage market
(AFAIK a decade later - the financial sector still cannot say whether they
caused the crisis by unwarranted moron herd knee-jerk reactions) .


"But also the automatic share trading programs that if they go wrong can cause a stock market crash based on nothing."

Actually, the trading system algorithms are quite robust nowadays
(you may be aware that some of the 1987 market crash severity was
blamed on the algorithms of the time - primitive and knee-jerk in their
event processing) .

 

Obviously maths can be abused in order to get the results intended, but I'm sure I read that "it was calculated" that the elements of the financial crisis happening were so unlikely as to happen once in the lifetime of the universe (or something equally ludicrous), whilst there is the "Black Swan" theory that (I believe) says that some events are impossible to predict (I'm obviously not an expert so not completely certain they are describing exactly the same thing). Nevertheless it does not give me much confidence if calculations are to be relied upon where the consequences are catastrophic.

 

I tried to get some understanding of what happened, as to
my shame some of my peers were to blame (software developers
that implemented the maths models on computer - who if they
were CS grads - must have realised some of the folly) .

It all seemed to come down to the fact that for all the CDOs etc
that the financial sector had invested in, none of them could
even vaguely quantify the nett exposure they had to the USA
subprime mortgage market.

So they took the knee-jerk reaction : assume the exposure was
near-total, withdraw funds en masse from the credit markets
to cover your expected liabilities.

Blaming the subprime stuff itself was shameful b*llocks.
If you had invested DIRECTLY in that market, the main risks
were known (and therefore the trigger events to immediately
sell your holdings) .

Similarly for the "lifetime of the universe" rubbish.
If the structural transparency of the CDO (or whatever its successors
are) remains the same, I can swap the subprime market with
any other investment market that could incur similarly large losses,
and reproduce the crash again.