redcairo

I'm pretty sure that the reason approval of foreign sales in that category exists is because 'technology' to foreign agents is always in question as possible threat to national security. But Boing is in the USA far as I know so there are jobs/taxes here for what it builds even if it is selling overseas (which it does).

 

When I worked at Lockheed Martin (contractor) for awhile, the UAE was visiting. Their leader (who is both religious and political leader) was trying to talk everybody into letting him buy jet fighters AND engineering plans for them. He brought several young men who were the top pilots/engineers/soldiers in his very tiny army. For an offbeat reason a few of them ended up spending actual time with my tiny (totally non-airplane non-tech non-mil) team. They were very interesting young men. Impressive.

 

Anyway. Sales to outside the country of things we make inside the country are good.

 

But it would be nice if we could have some more sales of things inside the country that we make inside the country.

 

As a feeble attempt to pretend we're still on topic, I'll mention that I saw another bit by Bernie last night I think it was, with him rambling on about stuff so nuts I seriously wondered why I had never seen how nuts he was before the election, because aside from socialist (I knew that already) he had seemed like an ok guy. Now I'm thinking he was more an unknown than it seemed.

 

RC

Hmn. Well Brian I find myself ambivalent because I agree with what you say in principle -- our market's not been free since so long before my birth it seems impossible to do at this point, but ideally it would be as much as possible (which means 'way more than now'). But, given we are only looking at it now and not 100+ years ago when we should have, I am unclear how we can implement the ideal principle now and have it work at all.

Because something needs to work... even if not ideally...

 

Tariffs are artificial market distortions. We currently have about 15 thousand in place. If they worked as promised, we should have 15,000 production industries (not companies but entire segments) booming in the US.

Seems to me that aside from automotion-etc. (and simply changing culture and technologies), the primary loss of jobs is from offshoring, and not just 'regular' jobs but the jobs at every level, from raw materials (e.g. steel) up through all the widgets and such, up through manufacturing, and all the 'associated' jobs for that. But corporations exist to make money and will always be driven by that. They make more money using chinese or pakistani labor and factories than ours; and they make more money contracting out to groups that use child labor in third world countries; and so on. (There are other things like toxic waste disposal I won't get into that can have a very big cost diff.)

But it seems to me we simply cannot compete in a 'world market' when the competition is age six and makes an amount per day that even at 10x would not let us survive even if our economy were far better.

But we have a huge country -- a huge market. I don't see why to a great degree we cannot be our own market on a lot of things. I'm not saying prevent everything else. I'm not sure what I am saying -- I've never thought much about this so I don't have a list of ideas -- merely that we're this huge country, with a huge market, and instead of making stuff and buying it from each other, the normal course of life, we don't make it so we're on welfare or unemployed or flipping burgers, and then we buy it from someone else. Surely there's got to be at least a partial improvement, if not solution. ?

 

the loss of competition and the shelter provided by this sort of protectionism stifles innovation and creativity, which is not to the benefit of the citizen or, in the long-term, the protected industry. The latter effect may not be obvious but, even if the distortion is never removed, the industry tends to lag its global competition in foreign markets, as an example.

I guess I can see that -- perhaps the auto industry is an example.

I do think that our country has not reached for the higher-end mfg that some other countries (e.g. Germany) did. (The big post I made on the 100 days 1.2 thread, on jobs that ref'd a mfg industry report on that market from '00 to now, talked of that.)

We're in the situation that, as I was saying in comments on Mish's econ blog recently, have killed the middle level of jobs the way the middle class has gone -- you can flip burgers, or, aside from management or medical, you need a four year degree, not because the job does but because the schooling/corporate collusion was completed long ago.

People say you're not supposed to expect to be able to live on full time minimum wage, you're supposed to work your way up. But there's nowhere to go, to some degree, if management is not your interest/skill/whatever (and for most people it is not). Most the "jobs in the middle" have vanished. And economists say with a shrug, "Yes, but some were replaced by the service industry." But the service industry is mostly minimum wage or not far from it.

 

but, more importantly, tend to trigger tariff wars which have serious negative impact on the economy as a whole. If politicians were less hubristic and more strategic, or if the population were more aware of history, we would learn from the mistakes of Fordney-McCumber & Smoot-Hawley. Alas...

Dammit Brian I always end up having to go read a bunch of boring crap when you post stuff like that. I don't know how I'm supposed to stay uneducated when I have to read in order to have conversations without looking like a moron. Much. Story of my life. I did however get a brief flash of a Ferris Bueller video out of it LOL! Which was just as boring as the rest of the ref -- but did lead to the far more entertaining woke-me-up-better music vid here :-)

 

There are two approaches to success in business -- as in other forms of competition. I can work to make "my team" better, stronger, etc., or I can work to make the other team worse, weaker, etc.

I cannot see ANY competition to SLAVERY that is anything other than either
a> also slavery, or
b> technology that makes even pennies-a-day-poor-kids unneeded,

Neither of which employs our people.

 

the financial impact of abandoning a nearly finished factory would almost certainly be greater than the benefit

Finding someone else to take some of that on might have helped, we really don't know the details.

 

This suggests strong-arm tactics by the President-Elect to bully a business and I find that particularly mephitic.

Why would you assume that he went and did something negative and brutal for this? How bizarre. I don't.

I figure maybe he went and told them what he wanted, and that he wanted to use them as an "example" (massive free advertising too). Told them what he had planned for taxes though that'll take a little time to kick in; and probably worked out some negotiations with sources and resources he knows of around the world and here and in Mexico that could on the whole make it worth it to them. They are still going to Mexico in a small way, just only ~30% of it, and they had planned for 10x this many people going in the future to Mexico, in a few years, that they say they might keep here -- that factory stuff probably isn't built yet down there.

Bottom line is the guy has many decades of experience and top world-level contacts so I'm sure he could say, "I will personally find a way to make this work for you, if what the government can offer isn't enough, because having a company to make an example of for this PR is so important."

Why do people tend to assume another person is going to behave like some corrupt monster?

He wants the PR, he wants "a real example" of intent, he needed a place to start, it happens to be in his VP's state, which is also a swing state, so it all makes sense to me. I don't see it as anything bad.

He does not have a political history of being bad and half his platform is about the attempt to make things UN bad and get rid of situations that allow corruption so why assume the worst?

 

Add to that the fact that the President doesn't have the constitutional authority to insert himself into the affairs of an individual business or industry in any fashion

1. He isn't the president yet. He is almost certainly using his non-presidential connections, contacts, resources or sources, to contribute to this.

2. I'd like to point out the massive, massive interference, repeated, in the past here, and none of those people are in jail. However that is not any argument for doing it now especially when his platform is rule of law/constitutionalism. Just sayin.

 

or to make tariff decisions

No, but of course as Chief Exec he can direct those who do make laws or regs toward his vision -- I am sure whatever is required to do it properly will be pursued. Why assume anything else.

 

or to announce that corporations will not be allowed to leave (regardless of whether he truly intends to follow through, this is problematic).

He didn't say that. He said there would be consequences if they did -- I think there SHOULD BE some "advantage to operating within this country, compared to operating from without it." (Added later: looks like he thinks public shaming will be useful. Sigh.)

However that is done. I refuse to agree that it should be just as advantageous to a company to operate in china and sell here, than to operate here where they're putting in salary and taxes etc. and sell here.

 

I've spent the last number of years warning advocates on one side of the illusory fence to be very careful about championing overreach by "your guy" because the power grab is cumulative and they won't like it when "the other side" gains access to the dangerously "souped-up" levers of power.

I agree that
a> nothing is right only for one side and
b> precedent and reducing balances and limits, can be terrifying.

RC
 

He doesn't have to do it. He might not even be able to do it. Merely uttering publicly that he thinks it should be done will have certain effects that by the time he even gets to more directly addressing the subject, might have been useful.

 

I think there should be very significant import taxes period, and that if there is an "advantage" to importing if you are a US company instead of from somewhere else, that those advantages should get a very hard ding (reduction) if all the labor wages and labor taxes are going to another country instead of ours. To me this is what the government should have been doing all along.

 

Making it so businesses do NOT have the advantage by acting like vampires instead of contributors, is a good thing.

 

As far as punishment, IMO this could only be done in a way that was what I said above -tariffs apply to everything, and 'benefits' from being local are 'reduced' under certain circumstance. I don't think there is any constitutional way to reach into a business.

 

Of course, that didn't stop the government from slithering into the auto industry, putting out for the banks, and more.

 

RC

150 British troops are going to deter the entire Russian Army?  Right.  Yes, that is funny.

 

Russia may be a lot smaller now but yes, that's a Godzilla vs. Bambi scenario.

 

Given we can only have so many enemies at once before going under, and given our determination to make the entire middle east more overtly our enemy, I think more peace with the rest of the east would be groovy.

 

And I like Putin. Dammit. Much as I keep trying not to.

 

RC

What'd Norway ever do wrong??

 

RC

It is my opinion that the federal government should set minimal standards for qualifying to vote.  But then in recent years there has been a push to remove all qualifications.  I'm pretty sure Putin voted for Trump.

 

LOL!

 

I've always had to showed a *certified* *birth certificate* to get a license. But my friend who was an illegal walked into the DMV and got a license. I was so shocked! And insurance. And registered a car. And got an apartment. Most things she needed an ID for, but in CA at least, getting the ID was easy.

 

In the end, we should bottleneck everything through the ID process IMO, and make that one the review point. Then nothing else is affected except "must show legal state ID."

Note: it differs in each state

Well there's also that they made it "automatic" that anybody registering for obamacare was registered to vote, at least in some places...

There's been public notes on illegals voting for years now. He might be wrong on quantity (not yet known) but I don't think the issue is false.

 

I care zero about popular vote. The whole campaign approach would have been different if that were how it worked. And this country wouldn't have founded without electoral to compensate.

 

Also there is no reason for any winner to expect a recount and he'd be perfectly justified in seeing it as political and not merely civil if someone ONLY wants to recount in states that, as an amazing coincidence, IF they could come up with a better number might unseat him. There were several much closer races nobody addressed.

 

It is truly disingenious to pretend that all this is nothing more than a desperate attempt to not-lose from the other side.

 

And to continually press publicly and privately on electorals to see the election as somehow injust, and to keep dissent in public.

 

All this has done is contributed to my belief that the new left is literally at this point an outright danger to national security and a menace to our nation as a whole. I would not say this about the ordinary and former left, but the New Left -- like their version of a tea party but louder and pinker -- it is simply way too much at this point.

 

And this after a whole campaign that seemed to me to be insanely weighted in favor of that side.

 

It's ironic it should come with the first female final candidate because it's almost like every horrible stereotype about women, embodied in a presidential campaign.

 

Anything worth doing is worth overdoing, I guess.

 

RC

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/inside-the-gatlinburg-fires-apocalyptic-wasteland/ar-AAkZC7z

 

 

"It was like an apocalyptic wasteland," Reese recalled, his throat still sore from inhaling smoke.

Seven people died in fires across Sevier County this week, authorities confirmed Wednesday, and early assessments indicate more than 700 homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed. Fire officials said that number includes about 300 buildings inside the Gatlinburg city limits.

The blaze erupted as flames stoked by 90-mph winds raged through town Monday night into Tuesday morning, displacing more than 14,000 residents and consuming more than 15,000 acres.

 

That will teach me to believe the numerous people constantly commenting in Twitter that their news source X still had nothing on the topic -- apparently this was wrong. Hazard of indirect news in my case.

 

Quite a disaster. Really feel for the people in those areas.

 

Although fires always make me feel so horrible for animals. So many perish.

 

RC

You understand he's a party apparatchik, right? Did you wonder why he didn't seem disturbed when it was revealed that the media and the DNC colluded with the Clinton campaign in the primary race?

 

He carries water for Soros & the Alinskyites.

 

Since I only get indirect news for the most part, and he just wasn't big enough to be on my radar until this election, I don't know anything about him. But it makes sense, since he's a far socialist, he'd be in the Soros (may-he-rot) camp. Sigh.

 

I don't know how I could be disillusioned.

 

RC

What happened to Bernie?

 

I had high hopes for him. But y'all know how it went with him losing at the DNC and HRC getting the nomination.

 

It was a bit odd that just after he was stumping for her, but I thought perhaps she had implied he might be her VP or something if he did. No idea but that obviously didn't happen.

The election is over now and I'm surprised that he is still going on 'against Trump' since I actually suspect many of his voters ended up Trump voters. But, that's all well and fine.

 

Except it seems like he has kind of gone off the deep end. To wit:
 

 

Tuesday on TBS's "Conan," former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said President-elect Donald Trump’s "delusional" and "totally insane" tweets have "hidden" his messages. Discussing Trump’s tweet about illegal voters, Sanders said, "When he says that, he is really sending a signal to Republicans all over this country, Republican leaders. What he is saying is we have got to suppress the vote. We have got to make it harder for poor people, people of color, immigrants, elderly people to participate because they may be voting against us. And that is scary stuff."

 

That's incredibly irrational, hyperbolic, and projectively paranoid. What happened to him??

 

RC

glorify the bull---

That's all the media and

its spectators do

 

its spectators do

cover with glory the red

blood moon of eclipse

Gatlinburg, Tennessee, has a huge tourism footprint.

 

A good deal of territory, homes, businesses, spent this week burning down...

 

...the mainstream media said close to jack about it. Today I saw a ref on FOX news.

 

Until today, what I've mostly seen is tons of tweets from people, day after day, asking how this huge disaster could be happening and the news channels not be covering it.

 

Sadly, some seemed to feel that it was so surreal and hence seemed "intentional" that maybe it was just a statement from the MSM (mainstream media) that "flyover territory didn't matter."

 

 

This area has like a billion dollar annual tourism footprint -- maybe more, that was just for one county I saw a web page on. So it's not a small thing.

 

Kinda strange the news wouldn't cover it (they might finally be now). I can't figure out why.

 

In any case, the photographs and some videos online have been incredible. It's the smoky mountains -- lots of stuff to burn in that region for sure.

 

I hope if we have any forum members from that area of the country that they are safe.

 

RC

 

a moonlit night

is always less pleasant when

politics appear

 

a moonlit night

inspires dreams of a future

maybe! could be! oh!

 

 

.

Where's CNN in all this? Wait do I hear a pin dropping?

A lovely meditational video for a few minutes of throat chakra happiness

 

 

If part of this was directed as a response to my statement; http://www.thedaobums.com/topic/42358-standing-rock/page-6#entry721930, I was urging Stosh to provide evidence, but it was no way a naive statement on my part.

 

No, I was working today, and so by the time I had time to respond, I was sorta responding to everything and everyone and "the topic at large." I actually think my first line was in response to Stosh, but I forget now, and the rest was just rambling on. :-)

 

RC

Were they different? Yes. Was that part of the antagonism between peoples? Yes. Was that all of it? Well of course not...

 

The English and Scottish had the same problem and they were the same skin color. (An entire island of people who desperately need a tan. I'm joking. Sorry, California-girl humor.) And the reason Scotland is Scotland instead of a corner of England is because they fought back over someone wanting their land and their rule, and they got to keep some of it. Of course, they got to keep it because it was at the far edge of a bloody miserable climate -- had their territory literally been "in the middle of" the competitors land it probably would have been different.

 

In those cases it's either genocide, integration, or a stand-off of sorts where everyone warily agrees that this your area and this is ours. In this case we did some of the former, tiny bit of the middle, and a bunch of the latter, followed in some cases by things like the Trail of Tears -- so some tribes ended up 'with land to call their own' but it wasn't the land they began with at all.

 

Native land is sovereign for the same kind of reason any country or territory is sovereign. Not because the people living there look different and we used to fight over that although I do agree it contributed!... but because there were people "already here" when others arrived, they fought about who got to live where, and ended up with "borders."

 

As another example, lots of different groups of people were 'founders' on this continent. Nearly every european country had a good chunk of people, often together, that built competitive military forts and more. As recently as a couple decades ago I remember hearing about a few small towns here and there that still spoke a lot of Russian for example. When I was a kid we used to go to a small city that was still so heavily Dutch there was a lot of the language and most the buildings looked like something from Holland. (They eventually capitalized on this, see Solvang - omg they have the most awesome breakfasts!.)

 

Some of the settlements from various countries (now 'naturalized north americans' but prior to those territories being part of the growing USA from the east) fought (with weapons) against each other. In the end, their "sovereignty" was lesser, but still somewhat existent: they maintained settlements and forts that became towns, even things as big as nation-states, including what became Quebec.

 

People into history of this region might like that huge book series where each one has a state name exclamation mark like "OREGON!" -- they are fiction, but they're based on fact, tons of historical fiction woven into each.

 

Anyway, I agree that "the way in which" the segregation played out has been an absolute, abysmal disaster for the native tribes for the most part. If we knew then what we knew now -- all of us, on both sides (my ancestors are literally on both sides!) -- maybe it could have been gone about differently. But, here we are.

 

At this point, the land is theirs just like Quebec is not-ours and it would be nearly as much a declaration of war for the US gov't to try and take it from them. There is some caveat to this, due to their people having automatic USA citizenship, due to their lands being "right in the middle of" the USA, and due to the complete "melting pot" effect of all the natives so there is not really a 'them' vs. 'them' anymore -- aside from the people literally "on the rez" -- there's so much blending.

 

(A very large chunk of the 'white' people in the city I live in right now are at least a fraction native, so even a conversation where I say "their" feels funny to me, because in a way I am not one of them and they'd be the first to tell me so, but in a way I am one of them because it's part of my bloodline. I look mostly-white so I grew up with no bias to me, but I grew up having been told only that I was 'indian,' and actually resented white people half my life for killing off my ancestors (and good gods the cowboy movies made me cry) (I still think 'Little Big Man' is a hilarious, horrific, wonderful movie though).)

 

RC

Wanted to post this separately: but aside from "the issue" this thread is using to start the focus, I still think the larger question of: is all of this stuff echoing around the world right now -- dealing with the same issues -- because our greater 'connection' in the information age is literally bringing us closer together?

 

Or could it just be that "global" agendas that lean on the same things in every country are finally meeting some resistance?

 

I'm not sure if it's a metaphysical thing or just a thing. :-)

 

RC

It occurs to me that perhaps the spread of instant-information globally has in fact "linked us" by more than merely the news channels. That perhaps the "energy" each country has in focus has begun to normalize, by which I don't mean it's getting normal, but rather that it's getting more similar to each other. Like the clocks that end up ticking as one.

 

On the current hot USA issue of:

 

1 - Border security

2 - Immigration

3 - Criminal immigrants

4 - Referring to comments on people from a country as 'racism'

5 - The 'establishment' pushing for influx while the people start pushing back

 

There's a guy in the Netherlands named Geert Wilders. Their issue is immigrants from Morocco in particular. (Note that Moroccon is not a race. Like Mexico, it is a nation (in North Africa); the people are dark-skinned but they and their culture are a blend of "berber, arabic and european.")

 

In my loose possibly-totally-wrong take on it, his political opponents basically "intentionally over-reacted" toward some things he said during campaigning, that essentially forced the justice lead to prosecute him -- even though what he said was not even bad, and other leaders have said far worse publicly without result -- but on the whole, the underlying issue is that it's this huge deal for many of the people there, but "nobody is allowed to talk about it" -- like everyone "official" pretends that it's not real. And if someone does talk about it (like him) they are called racists.

 

It's surreally like what we've had with issues here. Well, and in (make growing list of countries here!).

 

This link has a speech he gave -- the transcript and I think a video -- as his final self-defense during his trial for "hate speech."

 

http://www.geertwilders.nl/index.php/94-english/2021-final-statement-geert-wilders-at-his-trial-23-nov-2016

 

Now I'm his fan.

 

RC

You think the native lands exist solely because they had a different skin color?!

I think around Dec 5 is also Italy's big "bring in the army" deadline (for forcibly accepting immigrants into private properties that don't want them).

 

December could end up being a pretty happening month

 

RC

And still nothing in mainstream media?!

Thanks.

 

That bismark site should be boycotted. I'm getting so fed up with internet sites that you can barely get to they have so many ads and when they finally load, ads literally block the screen in more than one place, and they're not just for a moment you have to click to get rid of them, and half the time other junk is still popping up so sometimes you click and it's on something that just popped and now it takes you out of the page (not just to a new window) for some ad, and then you finally get back, and then the entire page is blocked while you try to figure out how to close some add that completely took over it, and then in that case I finally got to the "story" which was nothing but a series of grey lines as if someone used a grey highlighter 'over' an article. When inspected for the text that might be hidden under the grey lines, it was just dashes. Geez.

 

The other link worked ok for me. Brief but interesting: I wonder if the news will ignore this until it can be DJT's problem. Since his corps own pieces of energy projects all over, it'd probably then be His Evilness Destroying The Indians or something lol.

 

RC