08-09-2008, 02:30 PM
Quote:Pennsylvania Dutch!Right, this is how industrialism started even in Britain and the US. Child labor, unsafe conditions, open sewage waste, raping the land of resources, etc.Ok, you lost me. Wages are a factor of supply and demand, and in this case it is people skilled in the desired craft. If you have a shortage of skilled labor, the wages go up. In some countries like India, there are few curbs on population growth so in a way its like each birth is devaluing the labor pool. House prices are also a factor of supply and demand. The problem we have in the US currently is that the quasi government institution of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac pressured banks to underwrite loans that were likely to default. This made the lending market skittish, and froze the available money for lending. Voila! Can't sell the house, and can't borrow to build new ones, so the bubble pops, housing market stalls and values descend. It was a problem of liquidity, and over pricing. It goes to show that when government gets involved they can muck up just about anything.Well, countries are no longer rich compared to the citizens who live in them. Wealth is really very ethereal for those who have much of it as it is tied up in stocks, funds, holdings, and various other assets. Countries can craft policies and enact laws that encourage or discourage certain activities to be done within their borders. I guess if you nationalize (socialize) a particular business sector, then the nation could control wealth (like Mr. Chavez of Venezuela).Trust me. You will need more than wind and sun, or you will be buying power from France or Germany.Actually, the mobility of people is like another vote (with their feet). Those places have serious problems to which their city and state governments are not responding well, similar to what happened between East and West Germany after the wall fell. The poor left to go where they could be richer. Ghost towns, like Leipzig, are probably not that uncommon in the former East Germany either. Often, somebody gets a good idea and reforms the area causing people to want to live there again. Take Las Vegas, why is it the fastest growing city in the US? It's in the middle of a desert.
Mmm... open sewage... reminds me of Cleveland during the big power failure in Aug. 2003 caused by... Ohio Edison (no First Energy, an RD Shell company) failing to spend the money to clear its right-of-ways around high-tension lines.
It wasn't all Fannie and Freddie (yeah, that's not right but it looks better:P). Private lenders made their fair share of subprime loans without government assistance. I think part of this came from the booming housing market, if the customer can pay off the mortgage fine. If the customer can't, then can forclose on it and sell it for more than the loan. This seemed to be a driving force here in Naples, FL, where housing prices just got compeltely out of control (average house cost in City of Naples was appx. $1.3M U.S.) Also, I believe that some of the victims of predatory lending deserve scrutiny. One example from CNN: A person making $10/hr as a security guard got an appx. $435,000 U.S. loan for a house. Now, I'm not agreeing with the loan structure, etc. but there is one question. At $10/hr, even with no interest, that's 43,500 hours of work just for the home loan. At 2,000 hours per year, that's 22 years just for the loan. Yes, I know mortgages can go for 30 years, but even if it were a 30 year product, that's still 1,400-1,500 hours per year just for the mortgage. I do have to ask myself, what was this person thinking?
R.E. Lost Wages. There's a certain "aura" about the place. Where else in the US can you so easily lose all your money, pick up a half dozen STD's, and come back to your house feeling like slime? LV, like many bubbles was sort of self-continuing. Once rapid growth starts, potential works start flocking in to handle the growing population. Florida has seen it several times, which contributed to its boom then bust growth pattern (if you know where to look in all parts of the state, you'll find poured concrete shells from an earlier 20th century boom). The next thing that fuels growth, is rapant speculation in the housing market. Lots of homes in LV were build/sold for/to people who had no intention of ever moving there, but aquired ther property to flip. Such persons may have acquired a mortgage knowing that they couldn't pay more than 6 months of payments, but anticipated flipping the property by then. When the housing market softened, they suddenly found themselves without a means to unload the property while still facing a hefty mortgage. Result? Foreclosure.
Part of the OH issue is a mindset problem, something I ran into when looking for a patent position up there, and something that I believe is prevalent in other industries. It goes something like this: My grand-daddy was a steel worker, my daddy was a steel worker, I was a steel worker until some <Insert derogatory term for Asians here> stole my job, I can't make anything other than steel. For the patent side it was more like: The firm was founded by a mech. engineer, our partners are all mech. engineers, and by god we aren't hiring any damned non-mech. engineers.
R.E. labor, I don't believe that it's supply and demand, and here's why. There's a difference between labor and other goods/services. Nobody "needs" a Bentley Continental convertible, everybody needs a job, just liek everybody needs certain essentials for life. Anytime you have people in a need situation, you can pay them less than market price for what they do, and more than market price for what they have to buy. Executives are a bit of a different lot with the good-ole boy and you scratch my back I scratch yours mindset going strong. You can't tell me that there there is a big enough difference in "supply" of capable executives and the average worker to justify the >400 fold difference in compensation. On a one-one correlation, that would mean less than 1 person per million in the U.S. is capable of running corporation X. I don't buy that. Nor, do I buy that a CEO, CFO, COO, CIO, and any other C-level exec contributes any where near the rediculous compensation they receive. Oh golly, firm profits are down 50%, we're still gonna pay all our C-levels bonuses, they'll just be 5% smaller... um yeah, er... that's called performance pay, uh huh.
R.E. local governments, etc. When I was in Akron during an election year, there were several alleged probelms with voting in NE Ohio. One big one that received a good deal of coverage, even from non-traditional media, was how the polling locations scheduled voting. In some working class precincts, the polls did not open until after 9:00AM and closed before 5:00PM. while in the higher end areas polls opened at about 7:00AM and stayed open until about 7:00PM. There were also indications that workers were flatly denied a break to vote in the precincts where the polls started late and closed early. Effectively in those areas, workers couldn't vote at all. It also helped that box after box of uncounted ballots were stacked in a NE Ohio storage facility:P
Local govt's part 2. The City of Canton (I think it was them, or else Starke County and Jackson/Green) entered into an agreement with Sterilite the makers of really crappy plastic storage containers to keep the sterilite facility in Canton. Sterilite agreed to certain terms as consideration for hefty concessions from Canton (no tax, no this, no that, payment of certain income taxes, etc.) As of when I left in Oct. 2006, Sterilite had followed through on exactly 0% of its obligations, and was pretty much telling Canton that if the city enforced the agreement, it was going elsewhere. When are cities going to wake up and realize that the corporations will screw them in every chance they get? Canton isn't the only one... Rudy and NY with the Yankees, Baltimore and Art/Ravens, Detroit and the Big 3 (Poletown anybody?) Sometimes I really think that the city leaders are on the take, maybe that's due to the fact that my family comes from Chi-town and I've lived in NE Ohio for a bit.