Posts by Ossi

"Because no other government ignores international courts when it feels like, naturally..."

So it's OK for Russia to do it? What's your point?

Re: That's not nice, but...

Erm, no. Russia, in fact denies that is was a 9M314M1 warhead (not '9M38M1 as you state - that's the missile type, and that's not the source of the dispute) that was used:

https://www.rt.com/news/318653-buk-manufacturer-outdated-warhead/

You know, starting from your conclusion and working backwards - the favoured method of all conspiracy theorists - is not a good way to find the truth.

Re: Socialists think they do know

Not quite the same thing, is it? This is research funding, not industrial policy.

Re: there is no means-tested element whatsoever

@Sooty

Surely you mean 'I think the BBC's a great thing. I get a decent salary and I watch it a lot. It's only fair that I chip in a bit more.'?

Some things for you to think about while you're telling the poor that they can't have a TV:

The cheapest TV in Argos is £90. A single year of Licence Fee is £145.50

Wonga offers loans as low as £50. The default loan on its website tool is £111.

You can't drive a car without using the road. You can watch TV without watching the BBC.

...or perhaps I'm just missing the joke.

Re: Am I the only person...

It's terrible value if you don't use it.

Re: @hplasm: Just remember, in the 1980s

The number of mines and mining employment (with the odd blip) had been falling in the UK since 1938.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/

historical-coal-data-coal-production-availability-and-consumption-1853-to-2011

Re: nice one tim....

@Phil

Well whether the ultimate burden of business taxes falls on workers, businesses or customers is rather complex and depends on the type of tax. Suffice to say that all or a combination of those groups could end up ultimately paying the tax.

So you won't be surprised to hear that the same logic applies to taxes on wages. In fact, employers would end up with a proportion of the burden, possibly the majority of it. To understand why, think about what happens when an income tax is applied. Workers suddenly get less pay. That means that fewer will be willing or able to work for you for any given salary. Thus, you have to raise wages to compensate at least partially.

But, I hear you say, if they get paid less, they'll get paid less everywhere. There's no more reason to change jobs now than before the income tax. One answer is that lower effective wages make employment a less enticing option. Some people will simply leave the workforce - think about those who are near retirement, for example. At the other end, some will stay in education. Others will leave the country. They'll be a shuffling effect as people move around. How much they can and want to shuffle out of your business determines how much of the income tax burden you'll have to stump up yourself.

But ultimately all the burden falls on humans, because humans ultmately own all the businesses.

Re: nice one tim....

Phil,

"The mechanism of capitalism fails when there is essentially nothing to stop it destroying the system of one part of the planet to benefit another as they cross boundaries and distort the system. And I don't even mean oil, to pick an obvious example. I mean business can cross borders where *MANY* people cannot."

I'd like to respond, but I'm not sure what you mean. This is a very broad statement. Could you be more specific? What do you mean by 'destroying the system'? What 'system' are you referring to? How does it destroy it?

As for your tax point, there's a difference between costs and consumption. If you buy some flour for 80p, and sell your bread for £1, your income is 20p. You don't expect to get taxed on the cost of the flour (which the seller would have already paid tax on), but it seems reasonable to tax the income. If you then spend 10p of that income on a bus fare to the cinema, that's consumption - it's how you've chosen to spend your income. Now you might be able to persuade Mrs taxperson that it's a cost of business if the bus fare was to work and back, and she might go for it, but the distinction between costs and consumption seems a reasonable one to me.

Re: To put it simply....

@Red Bren

Well the simple evidence of centuries of increasing productivity and simultaneously increasing wages and employment should be enough to answer your point. But just to explain a bit more, yes I am assuming that demand is not fixed - but I'm talking about aggregate demand in the economy.

You saw the logical impossibility of the cycle that you described, so you'll be pleased to know that it doesn't work like that. Even if we assume the (unlikely but possible) scenario where the quantity demanded of a product is completely unresponsive to price, then increased productivity will force down the price of that good (initially decreased cost of production would mean more profits - which is why you'd invest - but eventually competitors would be tempted by those profits and would invest and prices would be forced down until profits are at a level that doesn't tempt in new competitors but doesn't drive current competitors out - think what's happened to telecom prices, for example). That makes consumers richer, and they go and spend their money elsewhere. The laid off workers would then go off to the resulting new jobs.

Re: nice one tim....

@Phil Dude

"Corporations live to maximise profit at any cost."

You say that likes it's a bad thing; like with that statement you've ended the argument. That's the starting assumption of the argument (although 'at any cost' is hyperbole - do you really think Tim Cook would order the murder of Satya Nadella?). Their desire for profit leads to investment, employment, competition, rising productivity and rising wages, given free markets. If you really want to make the world a better place, take the time to understand how and why.

Given the millennia-old inevitably of people (why stop at 'corporations'?) trying to make profits, that seems like a jolly sensible place to start from. If you find that immoral, then feel free to invest your pension fund in profit-free enterprises. But, come to think about it, what's actually immoral about profit?

Re: To put it simply....

@Aitor 1

"Wages don't go up with increased productivity: they go down, as you need less workers, and there is more offer of workers than need."

Only if you assume that output is fixed and, well, it isn't. What actually happens is each worker produces more and output increases. As I say, the simple point is that if you want to have more stuff (i.e. increase wages across an economy) you have to make more stuff.

"You have to increase the company productivity in order to be able to pay more, and that is different from paying more. Completely different."

I'm not quite sure what you mean here, but if one company doesn't keep up with the productivity increases of its competitors then it will go bust. The economy will discard it and march on.

"You just pay as little as possible, and sell for as much as you can, that is the basics of a good deal.. there is no reason to pay more if you can pay less. Not only you have no reason, but it is bad management to do so."

Yep. Absolutely right. It's competition in the labour market that drives up wages. The more investment you have, the greater the ability (through increased productivity) to pay higher salaries and the greater the competition for labour forcing you to pay higher salaries. That's the transmission mechanism.

And where would the nationalised monopoly get the funds to invest?

Re: True poverty still exists in the UK

"All economists have 20-20 vision with hindsight. They are fuck all use at fixing problems."

Ironic, then, that your judgement that economists are useless depends on you having no hindsight whatsoever.

Economists can never reach the stage of perfection that would seem to be good enough for you because they're dealing with a dynamic and ever-changing system. But so used to rising prosperity do you appear to have become that a relative blip (our level of prosperity went back to what it had been a few years before) appears to you to be good enough reason to damn the whole field of economics. It's interesting that the rising prosperity is not credited to the economists (or simply ignored because it's just seen as normal now) whilst they're blamed for the blips.

Would you really prefer to live in a world without an understanding of economics? Do you really think economics has contributed nothing? I invite you to develop hindsight.

Re: noise and mathematics...

@Phil Dude

"The problem is $Y is a complex function as it depends a great deal on the technology to extract as well as the location of the resources. Especially d$X/dT"

You've mixed up your 2 functions. "Y" does not depend on dX/dT. You've already clearly defined them as independent of each other. In fact, your Y function, the cost of production, can be known with some accuracy, especially after you start pumping...

"The reality of global energy, is that it is just that - global demand for a non-linear resource. But very few people get to choose the price they pay at the pump."

What is a "non-linear resource"? Do you mean a product whose price changes? That seems to more or less cover everything.

"Economics is as close to voodoo as you can get with a straight face and without a billowing cape."

Even ignoring my comments above, you've said nothing to justify this conclusion.

"The necessary descriptive differential equations rarely make it onto the Grauniad pages...."

The equations to describe what exactly? You talk as if something's being kept secret. Tim's argument only depends on the discount rate being applied. Feel free to Google the equation for 'Net Present Value'.

Re: Oh look...

Companies are valued according to expected returns. It's important to note that buying a company's stock does not change the balance sheet of that company nor it's profit and loss, so they'll still make the same profits. Therefore, if a large enough group of investors decide not to invest in a business so that its stock value falls, that raises the rate of return (since you would have to invest less to get the same dividend). Should there be enough 'ethical' investors around to actually affect the market, they'll face lower returns than the rest of the market. The bottom limit to those returns would only be what the ethical investors' would/could tolerate.

Now that level of toleration might turn out to be not very low at all, thus placing a limit on the amount of ethical investment that could be done - in all probability the limit would be one that would put no pressure on any of these companies at all, and even causing those small changes would require enormous financial firepower. You're basically talking about trying to 'outvote' all the invested assets in the world.

Of course, these are the technical economic aspects. The ethical investors might also find themselves pretty uncomfortable when they realise that they're increasing returns for people they possible aren't too keen on.

Invest ethically by all means - there are, well, ethical reasons to do so. But do it in the knowledge that it won't be able to change the world, and even if it was it might be simply reinforcing the position of those who you might not consider ethical.

Re: Define vast majority

I read that as meaning 'the vast majority of people with health insurance' rather than 'the vast majority of the population', so in my reading it's a true statement. It's ambiguous though, I'll grant you.

Re: Just a thought

@AC: What makes you think that the indices are 'clearly massaged'? Do you have any basis for saying this?

And why is Tim being downvoted for stating a fact? Condemning people for simply telling the truth is not a healthy precedent to be setting. If you have any evidence that he's wrong then please post it: we'll all benefit.

Why is that rigging, unless you define the inclusion of any items that fall in price as 'rigging'? The TVs or whatever are there because we, you know, sometimes buy TVs. Their weighting in the index is appropriate to how much of our income we spend on TVs.