LOL: and who guaranteed all these bad loans? Who guaranteed all the mortgages by the Law? The US Government and the FED. Are you really surprised that banks were approving nearly all mortgages when Government GUARANTEED they if house owner stops paying, the Government will buy the mortgage?! That's the very purpose for which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created. To guarantee risky mortgages so even people who shouldn't get a house (lazy) would still get one. With the Government guarantee. The unintended consequence was (of course!) that banks started giving out loans to everyone.
Look for Peter Schiff videos on youtube from 2005/06/07 when he talks about it and everybody laughs at him.
The lesson is that you can't just ignore politics. You can't just leave politics to the politicians.
The same people who bitch about the government typically refuse to take control of the government. Democracy is bullshit and it's time for technical and scientific people to create a Platonic state.
The price good men pay for indifference to politics is having their businesses destroyed by evil men.
What mystifies me is how all of these smart technologists and scientists refuse to use their intelligence to take over the state.
People should have to pass science and math exams if they want to vote. It's that simple.
And will you apply science to an angry mob burning US flags and killing because of a movie?
You have so called "social sciences", but they are pretty much useless otherwise there would be someone paying them a lots of money to figure out what will happen next for example in the Middle East.
Sciences are very limited once you get a human being with free will into the equation. And then you multiple that by culture than by genes then by experiences and then by 6 billion.
I love history. And the main reason for my love of history is love of science fiction. If Nazi Germany never happened, don't you think that the whole story would make amazing science-fiction? How you apply scientific method to history? You can analyze, but as soon as you do your results/opinions will be different than anybody else's at least at some level. It's not like we all know 2+2=4. Now try Why people voted for Hitler? Good luck with your fixed narrow-minded analytical mindset to figure this one out. You can have debates for years about it and still you won't know for sure anything. Science is for people who want the right answer right away. Life is more complex than that simplistic view.
> Science is for people who want the right answer right away. Life is more complex than that simplistic view.
A simplistic view is assuming that scientists (and for that matter geeks/math guys/programmers) see things in 0-s and 1-s, strictly defined terms, etc. Math and science are much better equipped to handle fuzziness and lack of precision than any kind of "common sense" or soft whatever. It's just the other way around - handwaving at things because they are fuzzy and complex is a simplistic thing. Approaching them with combined might of all the advances in understanding and technology is what scientists do (or at least should do).
These "sciences" are limited because they don't follow the scientific method. In the scientific method, only conclusions are accepted if they can be reproduced infinitely. The lines get blurred often because experiments cannot be conducted indefinitely. The media (or organizations) tend to skew the retest of experiments for their own agendas.
Hence why, for example, Economics is also not a science.
Did it happen? What does it mean? Our history is far more embarrassing/surprising/extraordinary than we like to admit. Which may be why we like to speak so much of science and so little of history. But history holds its own. Often it's not the happening of an event in history that we have difficulty with, but its meaning. Consider the historical accounts of Christ ("the King"). He happened, in history. We read the letters written by those who persecuted him, believed him, walked with him, saw him do the things he did, those who loved him and those who hated him. Did it happen? To the historian, of course. But to the common man, what does it mean? And there we grind to a halt... mistaking naturalism for science, unfamiliar with the nature of historical evidence, textual criticism, the death of form criticism, practicing historical revisionism, historical denial, conflating possibility with frequentism etc. But did it happen? If it happened, what does it mean?
The social sciences are to business as the hard sciences are to engineering. The theories of persuasion that came out of communications and social psychology departments revolutionized marketing. The Likert scale was developed by a psychologist, and is one of the foundations of all surveys.
Much of what we think about "big data" and applied statistics were pioneered in Sociology departments.
Anthropolology informed how businesses do intercultural communication. I know a professor who did a side project for a multinational about connotations based on color and imagery in their products and how a particular culture would relate.
And I know for a fact that the CIA hires out of regional studies departments. So yes, the government is paying people trained in the social sciences a lot of money to figure out what will "happen next" in the Middle East..
> You have so called "social sciences", but they are pretty much useless otherwise there would be someone paying them a lots of money to figure out what will happen next for example in the Middle East.
It doesn't follow from "nobody pays social scientists" that "social science is useless", if it were true there could be many reasons why nobody paid for research in the social sciences.
But in fact someone is paying them a lot of money for them to figure out what will happen next for example in the middle east, e.g.
> Sciences are very limited once you get a human being with free will into the equation. And then you multiple that by culture than by genes then by experiences and then by 6 billion.
Free will, if it exists, isn't the problem that the scientific method has when dealing with people. Any system as complex as a person has too many variables to be able to control in an experiment.
Europeans won't really have their pensions too. The same is about broken American SS system. But it is just so much easier to notice problems somewhere else. At least Chinese werent promised any pension so they save. Do Americans think what will happen if their politicians break the promise? Or pay them wii heavly inflated dollars for their benefits? Have they saved? Oh, no they trust the Government. You see how Americans are stupid and Chinese wise? How can you not save trusting that the Government will pay you pension in an old society?
Pensions made sense in young societies. They are temperorily phenomenon. Have existed for 60 years. Like communism. Gone!
Social insurance in Germany has been around since the 1880s. Social Security has been around since 1935, or nearly 80 years.
Social insurance may change in the future, but so long as the elderly still have a vote, they will vote very heavily in favor of maintaining a social insurance program.
And if the elderly don't have a vote, the socioeconomic system will have changed so much that merely having "saved" won't fix anything. Likewise, if the dollar has experienced hyperinflation and benefits are worthless, any private savings will be as well.
Social insurance in Germany was Bismarck's invention. Everybody paid. One in ten lived long enough to collect any benefits. Now you will have 30% of the society to cover living cost of the other 70%. They can vote for financial pyramids in their beloved democracy as much as they want. Guess what, the ponzie schemes will still not work.
Unless you're going to send elderly people back to work, if 70% of the population is elderly then the other 30% is still going to have to work to support them--that or let them starve. It doesn't really matter how you do the accounting.
Yeah, I'd much rather have the 12.4% a year of salary that the US government takes from my paycheck (and from my employer on my behalf). We are already getting cheated on our returns, and the Social Security program is still going off the rails in the next decade. It is going to get much much worse.
The majority have no fucking idea how to invest their money for retirement, or not to take out 100k of student loans for some no-name private university. Credit card debt is $14.5k/head, student loans will be screwing gen x/y for many years to come. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
In 1980s hundreds of banksters went to jail in loans&savings scandal. US went to the dogs:
1. Militarily: terrorism as tactics is just effective (especially cost-effective). US looks like it is trying to kill a fly using a machine gun. Good luck!
2. Politically: corrupt to the core. As weak as never before.
3. Economically: capitalism is really not about being in debt. It is about capital accumulation via savings. Currently, the US is the biggest debtor in the History of the World. 600% gdp - that's our total debt.
A company without an idea sounds as bad as mortgage without a downpayment.
I think that this will be quoted in the future to indicate when bubble became obvious. I mean, come on, how much money must be flying around there for free, if they are willing to fund a band of 18 year olds who don't even know what they want.
Look for Peter Schiff videos on youtube from 2005/06/07 when he talks about it and everybody laughs at him.