Joe Biden's Presidency

[surrept33 + 609]

3 hours ago, SUZNV said:

 

Tesla with current revenue, it took 1600 year for stock investor to get back investment. In the unhealthy economy, stock market is more about speculation than investing on R&D productivity and dividends or long future.

Any Tesla investors know that more and more competitor are joining: NIO, even Apple with Hyundai. The key competition in the EV future is with AI. All are bound with the limitation of lithium battery unless one can get out of that obstacle. So it just like tulips mania. Even I like Musk more than many other billionaires. 

It creates GDP and job but mostly without real competition with transparence pricing, so even when they keep the cost down , they still won't make the price cheaper. Healthcare industry in any country if it is not carefully controlled and more transparency would in the definition in crony capitalism which are unhealthy and will grow like cancer. Do you think that 17% will go up or down in the future? The problem is not how to improve it but who will.

ACA IMO, instead of regulate healthcare sector for more transparency, it regulated people and business and throwing subsidies, which is feeding the cancer to grow and currently we have a bigger mess. If truly for the people, government would regulate healthcare providers and when there was no more fat, then they will put there money in something else more profitable. 

More details on specific provisions of the ACA ELI5'd:

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/vb8vs/eli5_what_exactly_is_obamacare_and_what_did_it/c530lfx/

Of course it has room for reform. "nuking" is like the trump administration was at least publically saying, was a non starter. 

[Boat + 1,324]

Another huge cost in healthcare is billing. Seems like every medical office requires several staff and extensive knowledge to get paid. 
Kind of like paying taxes. It takes an expert in the field to keep up deductions and laws. All this is self imposed inefficiency. 
Private and Government insurance would benefit from some streamling.

[El Nikko + 2,145]

A little levity 

and to be fair you can add a few other governments to that 

 

[SUZNV + 1,197]

1 hour ago, surrept33 said:

More details on specific provisions of the ACA ELI5'd:

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/vb8vs/eli5_what_exactly_is_obamacare_and_what_did_it/c530lfx/

Of course it has room for reform. "nuking" is like the trump administration was at least publically saying, was a non starter. 

Thanks for the link.

First, please assume that we don't trust anyone promise us anything but their actions, even Trump. You should focus on what Biden promised and are doing from now on. Unless you have TDS.

I just stated that the regulation in Obama Care is not efficient for sure as the consequence of all of these improvement are in the more spending in  tax, employees and employer all pay more for our premium and deductible and tax to have that coverage improvement. I do realize the cap on insurance profit percentage but their market now growth so the profit in USD increases. Yes, No? 

The graph I show that Trump did a good job in keeping the pharmaceuticals down until before Covid19, Yes No? Biden stopped that Yes, No?

A better approach is to keep the bill down first, which including regulating the insurances like a few in ACA before having something like ACA so less wasting other tax, premium and deductible. Yes, No? Less wasting can liberate lots of resources for the one in needed.

Unless we want to have a conversation one side singing for pros of ACA and other complaining for cons of ACA. Is that pointless to no end? Are we talking about how to improve US healthcare or how many politicians are lying? 
 

Edited January 28, 2021 by SUZNV

[El Nikko + 2,145]

Why is US health care so expensive?

I got a quote from BUPA which is a very good private healthcare company and it was £230 (around $310) per month.

[Tomasz + 1,608]

 

In my opinion, Biden is doing America a great disservice with his new oil and gas policy.

Except as I support higher oil and NG prices for many reasons, I am personally happy about it.

There will be less oil and gas exports from America and others will benefit.

Just as I consider this to be a stupid act of the new administration, I am not going to protest.

[Boat + 1,324]

As permits dry up on Government lands will this make private lands with oil more valuable? If vaccinations work and demand recovers won’t this make private land more valuable. Conclusion. I bet the smart money is already snapping up land as we speak.

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

Biden says 'unity' but he really means 'conformity' – here's what the real deal would look like

The Administration talks the talk, but they sure as heck don't walk the walk.  The President preaches unity and immediately upon entering the White House, issues some 17 Executive Orders that some 75,000,000 people are strongly opposed to.  Is Joe Biden the Great Unifier?

Biden says 'unity' but he really means 'conformity' – here's what the real deal would look like

In his first week, Biden continued to talk about unity but delivered purely partisan actions

(Excerpt)

Of course, Biden campaigned on killing Keystone XL (when he was talking to his environmentalist constituents) and was less aggressive in attacking fossil fuels (when he was talking to people in oil and natural gas states).

Now, ironically, some of the biggest unions which supported Biden in the election are going to lose the biggest number of jobs from him killing Keystone XL. The North American Building Trades Unions, the Laborers' International Union of North America, and the United Association of Union Plumbers and Pipefitters have all come out criticizing President Biden’s move because it will render thousands of Americans unemployed – during a pandemic to boot.

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

This is an excellent piece regarding "immigration" and what that entails on our southern land border, a border that separates the U.S. from Mexico and the greater central and south american countries below.

AG Brnovich Wants Arizona to Cancel Biden’s 100-Day Freeze on Deportations

AG Brnovich Wants Arizona to Cancel Biden’s 100-Day Freeze on Deportations

(Excerpt)

The DHS signed similar deals with other states and localities, including with Texas. On Tuesday, federal Judge Drew Tipton issued a temporary restraining order after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the Biden administration over the moratorium, marking the first suit against immigration policy changes made by the new president.

“Within 6 days of Biden’s inauguration, Texas has HALTED his illegal deportation freeze,” Paxton wrote in a tweet after the order. “*This* was a seditious left-wing insurrection. And my team and I stopped it.”

[Hotone + 412]

On 1/29/2021 at 3:35 AM, El Nikko said:

Why is US health care so expensive?

I got a quote from BUPA which is a very good private healthcare company and it was £230 (around $310) per month.

☝️ British public react to cost of American healthcare.

👇 Australian reaction.

World class healthcare at the cheapest price 👇

 

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

Now Arizona agrees to forensic audit.  And the latest on the Oil & Gas situation as it applies to Texas.

 

[Eyes Wide Open + 3,555]

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bail-fund-kamala-harris-thomas-moseley

Bail fund backed by Kamala Harris freed same rioter twice – now he's been charged again

revealed that the organization bailed out individuals including Darnika Floyd, who was charged with second-degree murder after allegedly stabbing a friend to death, and Christopher Boswell, who is facing charges of sexual assault and kidnapping. The group put up $100,000 on behalf of Floyd and $350,000 on behalf of Boswell.

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

1 hour ago, Eyes Wide Open said:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bail-fund-kamala-harris-thomas-moseley

Bail fund backed by Kamala Harris freed same rioter twice – now he's been charged again

revealed that the organization bailed out individuals including Darnika Floyd, who was charged with second-degree murder after allegedly stabbing a friend to death, and Christopher Boswell, who is facing charges of sexual assault and kidnapping. The group put up $100,000 on behalf of Floyd and $350,000 on behalf of Boswell.

Some things the Left espouses I just don't understand.

[Eyes Wide Open + 3,555]

14 hours ago, Dan Warnick said:

Some things the Left espouses I just don't understand.

Personally I attribute that to very poor parenting values/skill sets. I cannot help to go back and see all this discord evolving around a few examples of very bad decision making.

Resisting arrest is extremely bad decision making, it can lead to death as we all have seen so vividly.

How any individual can contemplate doing such a thing is beyond me. During the early 70's I had a few friends/aquintances who actually engaged in such practices and had there lower antimony handed to them quite abruptly. 

I ended my friendship with them at that time, they simply drew to much heat/trouble. Now it seems to be encouraged and anarchy are the results.

Portland Oregon is about to pay a extreme price for there stupidity. To say Portland wil be a ghetto in 2 yrs is not a stretch by any means. That would be a entire city surrounded by suburbs where the citizens will not enter the core city.

[Ward Smith + 6,615]

On 1/28/2021 at 11:26 AM, SUZNV said:

Thanks for the link.

First, please assume that we don't trust anyone promise us anything but their actions, even Trump. You should focus on what Biden promised and are doing from now on. Unless you have TDS.

I just stated that the regulation in Obama Care is not efficient for sure as the consequence of all of these improvement are in the more spending in  tax, employees and employer all pay more for our premium and deductible and tax to have that coverage improvement. I do realize the cap on insurance profit percentage but their market now growth so the profit in USD increases. Yes, No? 

The graph I show that Trump did a good job in keeping the pharmaceuticals down until before Covid19, Yes No? Biden stopped that Yes, No?

A better approach is to keep the bill down first, which including regulating the insurances like a few in ACA before having something like ACA so less wasting other tax, premium and deductible. Yes, No? Less wasting can liberate lots of resources for the one in needed.

Unless we want to have a conversation one side singing for pros of ACA and other complaining for cons of ACA. Is that pointless to no end? Are we talking about how to improve US healthcare or how many politicians are lying? 
 

Why would Trump want to keep pharma down? I mean one of the very first executive orders Biden signed was one to allow pharma to charge whatever they want for life saving epipen, and insulin. Because why shouldn't they be able to gouge the public on treatments that don't even have patent protection? It's not like they're evil or anything

 

[Strangelovesurfing + 737]

I blocked a few license plate letters, you know what it says. 

Taken west side of Oahu on Saturday.

You're Welcome.

Edited February 4, 2021 by Strangelovesurfing

[surrept33 + 609]

On 1/30/2021 at 7:58 PM, Dan Warnick said:

Biden says 'unity' but he really means 'conformity' – here's what the real deal would look like

The Administration talks the talk, but they sure as heck don't walk the walk.  The President preaches unity and immediately upon entering the White House, issues some 17 Executive Orders that some 75,000,000 people are strongly opposed to.  Is Joe Biden the Great Unifier?

Biden says 'unity' but he really means 'conformity' – here's what the real deal would look like

In his first week, Biden continued to talk about unity but delivered purely partisan actions

(Excerpt)

Of course, Biden campaigned on killing Keystone XL (when he was talking to his environmentalist constituents) and was less aggressive in attacking fossil fuels (when he was talking to people in oil and natural gas states).

Now, ironically, some of the biggest unions which supported Biden in the election are going to lose the biggest number of jobs from him killing Keystone XL. The North American Building Trades Unions, the Laborers' International Union of North America, and the United Association of Union Plumbers and Pipefitters have all come out criticizing President Biden’s move because it will render thousands of Americans unemployed – during a pandemic to boot.

 

How do you know 75,000,000 people are strongly opposed to those policies? That's the funny thing about polling. Individual policy changes often get large amounts of support (when they are asked about by pollsters), when people talk about omnibus bills, they don't. 

Unfortunately, our two party system has its flaws, especially with the removal of the "RINOs and DINOs". Us vs them politics is cancerous, imho, having coalitions of parties makes sense to me that have to agree to compromise before they form a government makes sense to me. Then just make it hard(er) than most countries that adopt such-styles of governance to do no-confidence votes to prevent too much unstability (see the number of governments in Italy, after WW2). 

 

Edited February 4, 2021 by surrept33

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

3 hours ago, Strangelovesurfing said:

I blocked a few license plate letters, you know what it says. 

Taken west side of Oahu on Saturday.

You're Welcome.

There's only one thing about that photo that I don't like: That it's apparently you in Hawaii taking the photo, and not me!  LOL!

[Strangelovesurfing + 737]

7 hours ago, Dan Warnick said:

There's only one thing about that photo that I don't like: That it's apparently you in Hawaii taking the photo, and not me!  LOL!

The Braveheart bit on the right side cracks me up 

[epchkm + 6]

On 1/22/2021 at 5:55 PM, Gerry Maddoux said:

This is such a stupid statement that I had to point it out. 

You may be from Texas, but you certainly don't know much about oil and gas. 

And I suspect you're a total fraud: very few Americans would spell Joe Biden without the e (Jo). 

Well, there are quite a few frauds on this site so settle in and make yourself to home, as they say in Texas. 

I visit the site often for investment tips and I am from Texas been in the industry for 20 years.  Dont preach to me.  You are another frustrated Trump loser.  I WILL REPEAT.  Biden is the president and will be for 4 or more years.  There is no simply no way Trump will come back, if he runs for reelection it will be a landslide for Biden.  I work for an oil major and we dont mind the Biden regulations, we just dont want these small producers ruining for everyone with lack of fiscal discipline.  

Under Obama every one including oil industry prospered.  Under Trump only some prospered, but not oil industry or agriculture industry (hit with tariff shock).  I dont care about some of the environmental regulations much either, and dont agree with Biden on some things, but overall he is far better than that buffoon we had masquerading as president for 4 years.  

[Eyes Wide Open + 3,555]

On 2/8/2021 at 1:20 PM, epchkm said:

I visit the site often for investment tips and I am from Texas been in the industry for 20 years.  Dont preach to me.  You are another frustrated Trump loser.  I WILL REPEAT.  Biden is the president and will be for 4 or more years.  There is no simply no way Trump will come back, if he runs for reelection it will be a landslide for Biden.  I work for an oil major and we dont mind the Biden regulations, we just dont want these small producers ruining for everyone with lack of fiscal discipline.  

Under Obama every one including oil industry prospered.  Under Trump only some prospered, but not oil industry or agriculture industry (hit with tariff shock).  I dont care about some of the environmental regulations much either, and dont agree with Biden on some things, but overall he is far better than that buffoon we had masquerading as president for 4 years.  

I just cant fight this impression, it is just me?

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-00p8ct_hYkI/UpdENbp5nCI/AAAAAAAAFEU/MC6mEqgMGi8/s1600/fat-obese-man-guy-dancing-proud-living-like-boss-troll-face-stomach.gif

Edited February 26, 2021 by Eyes Wide Open

[Eyes Wide Open + 3,555]

speaking of bad optics....Im quite sure it is time to fill this thread up with OPTICS.

Edited February 26, 2021 by Eyes Wide Open

[surrept33 + 609]

On 2/3/2021 at 1:32 PM, Eyes Wide Open said:

Personally I attribute that to very poor parenting values/skill sets. I cannot help to go back and see all this discord evolving around a few examples of very bad decision making.

Resisting arrest is extremely bad decision making, it can lead to death as we all have seen so vividly.

How any individual can contemplate doing such a thing is beyond me. During the early 70's I had a few friends/aquintances who actually engaged in such practices and had there lower antimony handed to them quite abruptly. 

I ended my friendship with them at that time, they simply drew to much heat/trouble. Now it seems to be encouraged and anarchy are the results.

Portland Oregon is about to pay a extreme price for there stupidity. To say Portland wil be a ghetto in 2 yrs is not a stretch by any means. That would be a entire city surrounded by suburbs where the citizens will not enter the core city.

Who knows. At least especially the last recession, but before that in some cities, ghettos tended turn into very high price/sq areas because the lower price tends to lead to higher reinvestment in an era with explosion of commute times. Almost every urban core in the country has benefited at least since the last recession. The crime rate peaked in the early 1990s. 

I think this will be an era with more advanced automaty, but of what? Real estate speculation? Legal services? Manufacturing? Why do I think this way? Access to the bleeding age is often very capital efficient (free), because the monetization scheme is all about 'architecture where everything can plug and play, aka servicification', and kids (and adults who are open minded to trying new stuff) seem to acclimate very well: https://www.ros.org/ +  https://moveit.ros.org/documentation/concepts/

It's interesting to see how much plumbers make these days. Though I'm not sure it will be like that forever! Tacit knowledge, once it's communicated, can be mimicked. 

From Paul Krugman in 1995 about global economics, I agree with most of his opinions. I think with innovation (in all the things), we can lift all boats rather than see it as some silly "game". I think Trump's isolationism was from another era before pervasive communication and universal translation (which technology is fully capable of now).  Could you automate Trump's job? Real estate investment or entertainment personality? Ya betcha on both. https://thisxdoesnotexist.com/

I bolded some points I thought were 'interesting'. 

Quote

 

Chapter 12:

Technology's Revenge

At the basic level, this conventional view suggests that capital and technology are in fixed supply, and that growth in new countries necessarily comes at the expense of the more established countries. The reality is that the diffusion of technology, while it increases competition faced by the leaders' exports, also expands their markets and reduces the price of their imports. For example, the United States must buy virtually all of its laptop computers from foreign producers, but the growth of overseas production has enlarged markets for U.S. made microprocessors and cut the price of laptops. In principle, the net result of the diffusion of technology could be either to raise or to lower First World income. In practice, there is little discernible effect.

The newly industrializing countries of the Pacific Rim have received a reward for their extraordinary mobilization of resources that is no more than what the most boringly conventional economic theory would lead us to expect. If there is a secret to Asian growth, it is simply deferred gratification, the willingness to sacrifice current satisfaction for future gain.

Nor is the world supply of capital a fixed quantity. As countries grow, they also save in the case of rapidly growing Asian nations, they save at astonishing rates. Third World growth may thus add to the world supply of capital as fast as or faster than it increases the demand. Moreover, the amount of imports arriving from newly industrializing countries and the size of capital flows going to them fall far short of what is suggested in alarmist rhetoric. If there is a single piece of knowledge that separates serious international economists from fashionable popularizers, it is a sense of how big the world economy really is. We have all heard enough stories of particular factories that have moved to Mexico or Indonesia to form the impression that a massive global trend is underway. But even a billion-dollar investment is insignificant amid the sheer immensity of the economies of the industrialized nations. Their combined gross domestic products in 1990 exceeded $19 trillion, and their combined domestic investment exceeded $4 trillion. 

Growing international competition, especially from low-wage countries, is destroying the good manufacturing jobs that used to be the backbone of the working class. Unfortunately, what these people "know" happens to be flatly untrue. The real reason for rising wage inequality is subtler: Technological change since 1970 has increased the premium paid to highly skilled workers, from data processing specialists to physicians. The big question, of course, is whether this trend will continue.

Before we can get to that question, however, it is necessary to clear away some of the underbrush. Much public discussion of jobs even among people who consider themselves sophisticated and well informed has been marked by basic misunderstandings of the facts. Consider this statement: "Modern technologies of transportation and communication make it possible to produce anything anywhere. This technological shrinking of the world has only been reinforced by the fall of communism, which has made the Third World safe for multinational corporations.

It is easy to understand why the Industrial Revolution was capital using and labor saving. Just think of a factory full of power looms replacing thousands of hand weavers the development that gave rise to the Luddite rebellion in early-19th century Britain. Can we come up with comparable images that relate recent technological change in the economist's sense to its more normal usage? That is, what is changing in the way that we produce goods and service that has apparently devalued less-skilled workers?

But isn't this kind of reversal always going to be the exception rather than the rule? Not necessarily. In fact, I would make a speculative argument that in the long run technology will tend to devalue the work of "symbolic analysts" and favor the talents that are common to all human beings. After all, even the most brilliant specialists are actually rather poor at formal reasoning, while even the most ordinary person can carry out feats of informal information processing that remain far beyond the reach of the most powerful computers.

So here is a speculation: The time may come when most tax lawyers are replaced by expert systems software, but human beings are still needed and well paid for such truly difficult occupations as gardening, house cleaning, and the thousands of other services that will receive an ever-growing share of our expenditure as mere consumer goods become steadily cheaper. The high-skill professions whose members have done so well during the last 20 years may turn out to be the modern counterpart of early 19th-century weavers, whose incomes soared after the mechanization of spinning, only to crash when the technological revolution reached their own craft.

I suspect, then, that the current era of growing inequality and the devaluation of ordinary work will turn out to be only a temporary phase. In some sufficiently long run the tables will be turned: Those uncommon skills that are rare because they are so unnatural will be largely taken over or made easy by computers, while machines will still be unable to do what every person can. In other words, I predict that the current age of inequality will give way to a golden age of equality. In the very long run, of course, the machines will be able to do everything we can. By that time, however, it will be their responsibility to take care of the problem.

Politics Kills

Incidentally, if this was true, why do we imagine that the global market is something new? Because politics killed that first global economy. Between 1914 and 1945 wars and protectionism tore up the dense web of trade, investment and often family ties that linked old Chicago to the rest of the world. In some ways the world has never recovered. It is a little-known but startling fact that world trade as a share of world production did not return to its 1913 level until about 1970.

Consider, for example, the most basic question about a city: Where is it, and why is it in that location? Look at a railway map of the United States a century ago, and you will have no trouble understanding why Chicago was a great metropolis.

Well, Carl Sandburg summed it up for old Chicago: "hogbutcher to the world." And also, of course, lumber merchant, wheat trader, manufacturer of farm machinery, oil refiner, steelmaker. Chicago 1894 was a city that made or transported things, and all you had to do was walk around the city to get a pretty good idea of its role in the national and world economy.

By contrast, why put America's Second City in the Los Angeles Basin? There was once oil there, but it's gone now. It was once a good place to make movies, because of the clear air and good weather; but nowadays movies are made indoors or on location, and anyway the air is smoggy.

It was once a good place to build airplanes, when they were assembled out of doors and test-flown on the spot, but these days aircraft are built in factories, and the air traffic controllers would not appreciate it if you took a casual spin over LAX.

Try to understand why any of LA's most characteristic industries are there now, as opposed to how they got started, and you always find a circular argument: The film studios are there because of the large pool of people with specialized skills, and the skilled people are there because it's where the jobs are. (By the way, there's nothing wrong with circular arguments in economic geography). The economy of Los Angeles, then, seems to have cut loose from its geographical moorings: Most of the things the city does for a living could, it seems, be done anywhere. The 3 million people of Chicago 1894 were there because Chicago was the gateway to the heartland; they were there because of the farms, forests, and mines in the city's hinterland. The 11 million people of modern LA are there because of each other; if one could uproot the whole city and move it 500 miles, the economic base would hardly be affected.

But what exactly does LA do? Aside from some of the people who work in dream factories, the working people of Los Angeles look pretty much like working people anywhere else; the buildings in which they work and live, indeed the whole city looks like anywhere else (or perhaps it would be better to say that these days every place looks a lot like LA). Stare at the streams of white-collar workers pouring in and out of the office buildings in the suburban malls, and you would be hard put to say how the economy of Los Angeles is different from that of any other major U.S. metropolis.

Again, the city's economy seems strangely detached from any sense of place. Why is the LA world of work so undistinctive in appearance? You might be tempted to say that it is because the city has a highly diversified economy that the Los Angeles economy "looks like America" not just in the clothes it wears but in the things it makes. But that isn't quite right a lesson the severe recession of recent years should have taught us. Regional economists like to make distinction between a region's "export base" the goods and services it sells to people in other regions, inside or outside the U. S. and the ''non-base" workers, the insurance agents, fast-food servers and dentists who sell their products to customers nearby. Well, it turns out that the export base of Los Angeles is, in fact, highly specialized. Despite the city's immensity, it is highly dependent on a few key industries: entertainment, defense, aerospace. 

If the city is so specialized, however, why isn't that more obvious to the causal observer? One answer is that workers themselves have become less distinctive. A century ago, a Chicago meatpacker wore different clothes from those of a New York garment worker, had a different physique and could be identified by sight (or other senses, if you were downwind). Today an aerospace worker in Los Angeles looks pretty much the same as a pharmaceutical worker in New Jersey. Again, it's part of the growing abstractness of the economy.

Localization:

That's not much of an increase, especially when you consider that during the 19th century the U.S. was frankly protectionist, while today it is a relatively open market. And other countries did an extraordinary amount of trade: Great Britain exported some 40 percent of its gross domestic product in the 1850s, more than it does today. And yet we read all the time about how modem transportation and communication have made it possible to "explode the value-added chain" for Taiwanese workers to take an American microprocessor, wire it up to a disk drive made in Singapore, put the whole thing in a plastic case made in China and ship it back to America.

Why doesn't all this to-ing and fro-ing lead to vastly more trade than the more prosaic manufacturing processes of the late 19th century? Because while we ship manufactured goods back and forth with unprecedented abandon, such "tradeables" constitute a steadily shrinking share of our economy. This is not an accident: It is a trend that is deeply rooted in the nature of economic and technical change. Start with a first, seemingly paradoxical principle: The kinds of jobs that grow over time are not the things we do well but the things we do badly.

But where has our economy achieved its most rapid productivity growth? One answer is that we are getting better and better at producing goods food, clothing, autos but not improving very much at providing services. An even better answer would be that we are making rapid progress in fields where the information required is relatively easy to formalize, to embody in a set of instructions to a robot or a computer; we have made much less progress in activities, from cutting hair to medical care, where the information processing is of the exceedingly subtle and extremely complex kind that we call common sense.

But many of these people seem to be worried for the wrong reasons. They worry, for example, about "deindustrialization:" Where, they ask, have all the manufacturing jobs gone? And they look at our strangely abstract economy and worry that its prosperity is somehow unsound, that (in the words of the recent World Competitiveness Report) we are "rich in consumption but not in production."

But consider Los Angeles. It is not very obviously a manufacturing city; but it is actually somewhat more manufacturing oriented than other big American cities, and if we had statistics we would probably find that it exports more manufactures than it imports. It is not a city where many people produce anything tangible; but that is precisely because its residents are so good at the tangible stuff that their energy is focused on the intangibles. You should not, in other words, fault Los Angeles 1994 for not looking like Chicago 1894.

Now LA has, of course, just suffered a severe recession. Economists who specialize in these things tell me that the slump was mostly just bad luck, and they expect a strong recovery. Nonetheless, it may be that the growth of Los Angeles will slow: Perhaps the technology of the 21st century will favor another kind of city, or maybe the process of abstraction will allow us to do away with cities altogether.

But if you focus neither on the very short run not on the speculative future, what you see in Los Angeles is an economy that, like that of the United States, relates to the rest of the world in a way that is sometimes hard to grasp, but basically sensible and sound; the wealth of the city and the country is far more solid than the abstractness of the economy might lead you to fear. So next time someone tries to frighten you with the fear of global competition, and tries to prove his point by telling you about closing factories and declining manufacturing, consider the contrast between old Chicago and modern LA, and remind him: "I have seen the present, and it works!"

 

 

Edited February 26, 2021 by surrept33

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

So, I hope everyone enjoyed the 4 year hiatus from war.  Biden and his ilk are just getting the team back in the game.  Might be a record.  They need a distraction so early in the game?  Just in case anyone might think this administration is soft on Iran?  Nah...

US bombs facilities in Syria used by Iran-backed militia

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States launched airstrikes in Syria on Thursday, targeting facilities near the Iraqi border used by Iranian-backed militia groups. The Pentagon said the strikes were retaliation for a rocket attack in Iraq earlier this month that killed one civilian contractor and wounded a U.S. service member and other coalition troops.

The airstrike was the first military action undertaken by the Biden administration, which in its first weeks has emphasized its intent to put more focus on the challenges posed by China, even as Mideast threats persist. Biden’s decision to attack in Syria did not appear to signal an intention to widen U.S. military involvement in the region but rather to demonstrate a will to defend U.S. troops in Iraq.

“I’m confident in the target that we went after, we know what we hit,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters flying with him from California to Washington. Speaking shortly after the airstrikes, he added, “We’re confident that that target was being used by the same Shia militants that conducted the strikes,” referring to a Feb. 15 rocket attack in northern Iraq that killed one civilian contractor and wounded a U.S. service member and other coalition personnel.

Austin said he recommended the action to Biden.

(More at the link above)

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

And you may recall that Joe's admin is going to get us back into the farcical UN powwow.  Let's rejoin the Human Rights committee again and appoint another Mugabe type to chair it.  Why not! 

Oh, and those dissidents from China?  Better report their whereabouts to the CCP so they can properly handle their "travel arrangements" and the those of their families, too, as a bonus.  No extra charge.  Have a nice trip.  Buh-bye.  

Leaked Emails Confirm UN Gave Names of Dissidents to CCP

(Excerpt)

Leaked emails prove that, contrary to United Nations denials, UN human-rights officials did in fact give the names of Chinese dissidents to the communist regime in Beijing before those activists were set to testify in Geneva against the Communist Chinese Party’s abuses.

In fact, it appears from the leaked documents that the practice of handing over names of Chinese dissidents to the dictatorship was viewed as a “usual practice” by all involved. The whistleblower told The Epoch Times that it continues to this day, despite UN denials.

Chinese communist authorities used the names received from the UN to prevent the dissidents from leaving China. At least one dissident identified by the UN and detained by the CCP before leaving for Geneva, Cao Shunli, died while in detention.

If the dissident expected to embarrass Beijing at the UN was already abroad, the CCP frequently threatened or even kidnapped and tortured the person’s family, according to UN whistleblower Emma Reilly, who first exposed the scandal.

Critics of the regime whose names were handed over by the UN included activists concerned about Tibet, Hong Kong, and the Islamic Uyghur minority in Western China—all of which are being targeted by the CCP for various reasons.

In February of 2020, The Epoch Times reported on the scandal, and on the retaliation faced by Reilly for attempting to expose and halt the practice. Reilly’s case at the UN is ongoing. She remains employed there but is under “investigation.”

Prominent human-rights organizations around the world have slammed the UN practice for endangering the lives of dissidents and their families.

In comments to The Epoch Times, Reilly described it as “criminal” and even argued that it made the UN “complicit in genocide.