The Great Reset: Why tomorrow may not be better than today | Hacker News Reader

The Great Reset: Why tomorrow may not be better than today

radar.oreilly.com

19 pointsGarbage11 comments

English needs a new one, one that means "a word spelled correctly enough to pass spell checkers, but incorrect semantically".

The author of the article mentions the "assent of Islamic fundamentalism". I think he means "ascent", but who can really really tell?

That word already exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malapropism

This article makes it sound like laissez-faire capitalism is the problem, and yet simultaneously places blame on Goldman Sachs, which happens to have intimate, corrupt ties with the Federal Reserve and and the US government. I think the problem is actually not capitalism, but government, because government is corrupted by special interests (like Goldman Sachs) and thus the law is heavily abused for the good of those who have done the most corrupting at the expense of everyone else.

I believe the more fundamental problem is that there even exist central institutions with enormous amounts of power, like the Federal Reserve or the US government. Even if such institutions start out benevolent, they will inevitably be corrupted, because the temptation is so great. The only way to remove the corruption is to decentralize everything that gets corrupted, making corruption impossible. Consider that democracy is an example of decentralization. Bitcoin, the web, and the internet are further examples.

The cycle of "it's not big business, it's the government" and "it's not the government, it's big business" leads absolutely nowhere, as evidenced by hundreds of years of zero progress with problems like those brought up in this article.

The real problem is culture. It's people. It's not some subset of people that you aren't a part of and should be ashamed of themselves. It's everyone. Corruption isn't created by the "greed of capitalism" or the "power of big guvmint", it's perpetrated by people; self-centered, unskeptical, uninformed, closeminded, dirty people around the world who are just as human as you or I; you can't blame problems on a particular idea like capitalism or lobbying or this or that political party and say "yea, we just need less of that in the world and everything will get better".

We need smarter, more sensible people. That is the only, only, only solution. And it's not achieved through current public education, by the way.

Our smarts and sense are limited by our genes. What you're calling for is a whole new species.

The problem is not culture, the problem is criminality. When banks sold MBS and CDOs with AAA ratings claiming they were solid investments which they knew were not and in some cases they were shorting them, that was fraud. When rating agencies, governments, central banks and regulatory authorities helped them, that was conspiracy to defraud. When LEOs looked the other way that was conspiracy too. The whole system is rotten, there can be no reset without removing all these criminals from our societies, unfortunately historically this only happens when the victims of the crimes become angry enough to remove the criminals from power by force of arms or the system collapses in on itself like the USSR, neither of which is a good solution.

It will probably be ugly and I'm not convinced there is a next-thing that will pull America out. Demographics look bad, we've nuked or productive capacity and the culture has rapidly decayed in the last twenty years. There is graft and fraud well marbled throughout the entire corporate and government superstructure.

I realize I'm a paranoid nut job, but I think Gold, Guns and Startups is the right straddle: Gold and Guns for the obvious reasons, Startups because, hey, things could work out (they usually do) and because owning common stock or bonds puts you too far away from the value creation, introducing those troublesome layers of graft and fraud.

Productive capacity nuked? Really? http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?s[1][id]=INDPRO

Yeah, really, even conceding the inventory rebuild/weak dollar rally in that chart. I don't think that the aggregate numbers produced by the Fed are always useful when looking at the economy: the composition of the aggregates is usually so diverse as to render the aggregate meaningless. GDP is a canonical example.

The U.S. retains industrial capacity in high end and military areas, but that isn't going to help average people produce items that are valuable to one another and to people in other places, which is the core way to build wealth. We've masked this fact with debt for the last 30 years, and now it appears that that game is over.

I dislike this article because of its fatalistic tone. The opinions of the average guy on the street haven't changed. They still want a society where people get paid decently for working, where there is a social safety net, where anyone can go to the doctor without going bankrupt. NONE of these opinions have changed in the American people. Nor has the work dynamic fundamentally changed. America still produces tons of shit.

But the opinions of the American leadership elite have changed. A dysfunctional one-party system is the problem, and the result is a consensus view - among the Washington elite only - that the rich need to get richer and everyone else needs to get poorer. It doesn't have to be this way. But change isn't going to come from inside the Beltway.

This can change, and will, eventually. The question is how far will Americans let these crooks go before demanding something better.

I don't think this article is fatalistic any more than an environmentalist thinks our planet is going to hell or any other activist thinks there is a very serious issue that needs attention.

Mark Sigal provides a lot of food for thought. Though a lot of Americans feel that we're in a serious repression or depression, the complexities of the financial crisis make it difficult for many people to even begin to understand or support a proper solution. With so many of our brightest grads being sucked directly into Wall Street firms, it's not surprising that the convoluted and opaque characteristics of risky financial instruments would cause the average and even above-average citizen to have difficulty knowing how to vote for an effective fix.

We're better off for having talented writers, journalists, and filmmakers do their utmost to discuss these topics.

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