Trump's China Strategy: Death By a Thousand Paper Cuts

[Zhong Lu + 845]

Oh, if you're talking about Greta Thuneberg I think she's a very smart and courageous young lady.

Edited December 7, 2019 by Zhong Lu

[Ward Smith + 6,615]

28 minutes ago, Papillon said:

I will quote you again sir if you wish? Please look upwards. Forgive me for assuming you use them as reference when you say yourself they serve as reference. How silly of me. I am afraid sir I was using the English language. What you think you were using, who knows?

How odd that you made this suggestion before sir? Is this what your famous programming tells you to do at this point?, when you have no argument whatsoever, which is clearly the vast majority of the time, as everybody here knows.

Perhaps you're right sir, I will start a thread entitled ''monkey slamming away on a keyboard''. Also the fact that you have quoted ''respectfully, Papillon'' and the definition of irony with a reference to things that 'concern' me, and so we should start a new thread, makes precisely no sense sir. Oddly, I am not surprised. May I suggest you get a quick fix and try again later? Currently the output is nonsensical and verging on utter garbage sir. 

Remake it is a bot. Occasionally its human chimes in to add some verisimilitude. I poke it now and then to see who/what replies. The "non sequitur" responses are certainly the bot. 

[Papillon + 485]

11 minutes ago, Ward Smith said:

Occasionally its human chimes in to add some verisimilitude.

Yes I am slowly realising this now sir. I have even discussed this with Mr Plant as I too, like Marcin, was a little confused by the AI references and thought I would give 'it' the benefit of the doubt and attempt to converse. 'His' username is somewhat ironic as I feel it is what the programmers need to do every night. I feel they rather have their work cut out sir.

11 minutes ago, Ward Smith said:

The "non sequitur" responses are certainly the bot. 

Agreed, it was rather a peculiar one yes. Like this was ...

17 minutes ago, remake it said:

so go to the Swedish tabloids

'He' has an obsession with tabloids it seems, and teenage social media, and still 'references' them constantly, despite his standard nonsensical protests. Honestly I think it is so faulty now that my monkey on keyboard analogy is worryingly accurate. I'm not even sure the handlers know what they are doing any longer, they seem desperate and have given it maybe twenty standard replies, along with the social references of a child. And not a particularly bright child I'm afraid to say.

'It' rather reminds me of Hal sir in 2001 - A Space Odyssey, when they switch him off and he sings at a low, slow pace. Hopefully you know the scene.

Edited December 7, 2019 by Papillon

[remake it + 288]

9 minutes ago, Papillon said:

'He' has an obsession with tabloids it seems

Swedish newspapers are nowadays "tabloids" but the real issue is that you have presented nothing to support your beliefs while there is a preponderance of information discrediting them from the actual people who you accuse.

[Papillon + 485]

I will stick with monkey, and dare I say return to buffoon sir. I believe 'you have presented nothing' is line seven out of your possible twenty, if my memory of your manual serves me correctly. Suggesting starting a new thread is line fourteen. You desperately need some new material, much like Status Quo.

Good day sir / madam / HAL.

PS - I am half expecting 'well now you are just attacking the poster rather than the issue ...' - this is line 3 I believe. If it is not, then if I were you I would ask myself why people respond how they do to you sir. You have very clearly never considered it. 

Edited December 7, 2019 by Papillon

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

2 hours ago, Marcin said:

I was also called bot or Chinese a few times.

I think at this point you have established your credentials as a Polish attorney. At least, you have convinced me  (OK, so I'm gullible...). 

If somebody called you a Bot then I apologize on his behalf.  Besides, Poland is a fabulous place with nice people.  Cheers.

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

1 hour ago, Zhong Lu said:

Has anyone here invaded Mexico yet? 

"There are places in New York, Major, that I would advise you not to try to invade."   [Humphrey Bogart]

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

58 minutes ago, Zhong Lu said:

Speaking of which: What music do people here listen to? 

Chopin, of course!  

[Zhong Lu + 845]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM63Z7Yx-hE

[Papillon + 485]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7-z4Dz5ZU4

This is more applicable sir, trust me. A dire need for new material ... 

[Zhong Lu + 845]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHhrZgojY1Q

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

Please, gentlemen.  For true excellence, you need fine music and a fine performer. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzHI32aHz_M&list=RDlzHI32aHz_M&start_radio=1

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

And if that does not stir your soul, then try this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhcidIUkCbk&list=RDlzHI32aHz_M&index=4

[Marcin + 519]

9 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

I think at this point you have established your credentials as a Polish attorney. At least, you have convinced me  (OK, so I'm gullible...). 

If somebody called you a Bot then I apologize on his behalf.  Besides, Poland is a fabulous place with nice people.  Cheers.

I am Polish economist by education. No hard feelings about names calling. Seriously the topics are sometimes very difficult and I am combative/patronizing at times so I expect some backlash, I learned a lot from this reactions.

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

On 12/6/2019 at 3:37 PM, Jan van Eck said:

Kathleen Wynne spent 17 years as premier of Ontario doing exactly that, and she ended up totally wrecking the manufacturing sector of the province.  

Finally, in the last election, the Wynne Liberals went down to a stupendous, crashing defeat, from a majority party of 124 seats to only 5, a disaster enough to wipe the Liberals off the map as even a third-party, and now without official standing in the Opposition.   Has it sunk in with the Liberals that theirs was a failed path?  Nope.  The Trudeau Liberals at the Federal level simply continue on the same catastrophic path, and the result is there for all to see:  a collapsed business sector. 

For Canadians, that seems to be OK.  They collectively seem to want to get out of all manufacturing, even food processing, in favour of "services."   The result: even the Campbell Soup cannery in SW Ontario has closed down, even the soup guys couldn't hack it, so Canada's tomato crop is history, left to rot in the fields, no market for the stuff.  Just brilliant. 

"Legislate what business can do?"  There is not much of that business left to go legislate.  OK, Suncor is still around, and that Husky refinery in Edmonton. Get past that, and what do you have?  The CN?

Hey Trudeau, your carbon tax / Socialist tax and redistribute money policies suck.  That's not just my opinion, it is becoming glaringly evident.

 

Trudeau’s Throne Speech Already Overshadowed By Nightmare Jobs Report

... Bad news across the board.

This will now be what gets the most attention, and rightfully so. As I wrote earlier, Canada is facing serious problems:

“Canada’s economy is clearly in serious trouble, and even the establishment press is losing the ability to hide it from the Canadian People. Debt worries are surging, job numbers are terrible, investment is fleeing, and a rising tax burden takes more and more money out of people’s pockets.”

Now, with the jobs report showing such a big drop in employment – the unemployment rate surged from 5.5 to 5.9% – the Trudeau Liberals are forced to face the consequences of their policies. Canada’s economy is weakening, and no amount of flowery language or ruminations on the space-time continuum can change that.

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

1 hour ago, Tom Kirkman said:

the Trudeau Liberals are forced to face the consequences of their policies. Canada’s economy is weakening,

The on-going problem for Canada is the Canada-US exchange rate, and its corollary, the CDN-Euro exchange rate.  If you go back to the 1960's, the US-CDN exchange rate was about par, within a few pennies, sometimes over par, sometimes below.  That put the two economies on an even footing and led to the great Canadian economic expansion, together with the first waves of immigrants (and quite a few from the USA itself) to supply the labour force needed to sustain that economic expansion.  

Now fast-forward to about year 2000 and the Canadian leftists had manged to so screw it up that the CDN dollar has collapsed down to 68 cents.  Why?  Only with a collapsed currency could Canada export anything, its internal costs had risen so for, so fast, that its goods were no longer even remotely competitive within its largest trading partner, the USA.  And a big chunk of that was composed of two things:  Canadina labour costs, and Canadian electricity costs.  For a society with vast resources of hydropower, the Liberals had still managed to make the stuff massively expensive, to the point that energy-intensive industries shuddered under the load.

Now the other problem, still there today, is that in Canada if the plant employees decide to unionize (and that is typical), then if management and labour cannot agree on a contract, the provincial government (especially in Ontario, the manufacturing heart of Canada) will step in and draw up a contract, including job classifications and labour costs for each classification, and shove it down your throat:  here's your contract, and that is the way it is going to be. Management (the plant owners) no longer have anything to say.  Now you can argue that this is a good thing, it might well be, as it takes the energies of all away from the haggling and back to actual work, but it leaves a foul taste in the mouths of the plant owners and then they start thinking in terms of pulling up stakes and moving to the USA - where that is largely unknown. 

The way Canadian industry combats this is to automate, to replace labour inputs with capital inputs.  The problems are manifold: first, there is a scarcity of capital in Canada, or to be more accurate, "risk capital," as Canadians are notoriously risk-averse.  They purchase more life insurance than anywhere else on the planet, for example.  So the firms tend to agglomerate into large corporations, and their risk capital comes from the Government.  Bombardier is a prime example of this phenomenon. Second, it becomes difficult to expand employment, as there is this counter-push to go to more automation in production, precisely to counter the effects of greater employment!  Third, you never get up tothe long or longer production runs you need to justify the usage of all that capital inputs, so the firms stay stagnant.  And fourth, the capital needed is amplified by the exchange rate, as that expensive production machinery is typically imported stuff, not made domestically, and you pay through the nose for it with a 33% devalued dollar. 

The problem for Trudeau and his Liberals is that there is no solution.  They have created this economic nightmare of stagnation resulting from currency devaluations, and there is no way out.  Canada will slide into being an economic backwater, with chronic unemployment, high unit  costs, the people having little disposable income, and high housing costs - all a function of Liberal policies past and present.  Will that change?  Nope, not in your lifetime.  An unsettling prospect for Canadians, to be sure.  Hey, you wanted it, you voted for it, now you have it, so now you get to go to bed with it.  Enjoy the coitus. 

[Guest]

Yet another pretty standard quip from Jan with little fact or detail.

Getting boring now. 

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

1 minute ago, DayTrader said:

Yet another pretty standard quip from Jan with little fact or detail.

Getting boring now. 

What, and You don't even award that boring post with a purple cup?  What kind of reader loyalty do I command here, anyway?

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

There...... much better.   My fragile ego is assuaged. 

[Guest]

There you go. You have a trophy due to pressure and your spelling of labour.

12 minutes ago, Jan van Eck said:

Canadina labour costs

It was a green arrow though for your spelling of Canadian. 

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

Note to readers:   the current US-Canada currency exchange rate has climbed just a touch, with the Canadian dollar having gone up to about 73 cents.  Still awful, but better than being in the cellar.

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

2 hours ago, Tom Kirkman said:

the unemployment rate surged from 5.5 to 5.9%

Tom Kirkman and readers may note that the actual Canadian unemployment rate is much higher.  Those statistics only measure people on the "pogey," the unemployment insurance scheme.  the long-term discouraged, who have effectively dropped out of the labour force, re not measured.  From the government bureaucrats' viewpoint, they do not exist.  they have become "non-persons."  

What is the real unemployment rate?  Hard to say.  I would put it at 16%.  It is what economists call "structural unemployment."  It is now baked in into the system, and there is no real solution, other than the development of an underground, or grey-market, economy.  That cash economy is prevalent in highly-bureaucratized societies such as you find in Africa and South Asia, and it is the Black Death to an industrial economy.  To understand how that evolves, you have to study the collapse of the British auto-building industry and the collapse of Austin-Rover.  It all stems back to the evolution of structural unemployment and a bureaucratized labour market. 

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

20 minutes ago, Jan van Eck said:

There...... much better.   My fragile ego is assuaged. 

 

19 minutes ago, DayTrader said:

There you go. You have a trophy due to pressure and your spelling of labour.

It was a green arrow though for your spelling of Canadian. 

Thank goodness the forum members here are competent assuagers.  Anarchy averted.

[Guest]

11 minutes ago, Tom Kirkman said:

forum members here are competent assuagers.  Anarchy averted.

For now yes. I am somewhat of a legend in that way.

However if Jan keeps stating 'color' and ignoring 'the Queen's' then the red arrows will be coming out. 

Edited December 8, 2019 by Guest

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

On 12/8/2019 at 11:05 AM, DayTrader said:

For now yes. I am somewhat of a legend in that way.

However if Jan keeps stating 'color' and ignoring 'the Queen's' then the red arrows will be coming out. 

Careful with those red arrows, they will certainly trigger fragile egos, sowing havoc and destruction everywhere.

By the way, what is the British spelling for "Anarchy" ?

I'm guessing the Queen's English is "Aenarque" but that might be the French Canadian version instead.