

The Great Reset: Why tomorrow may not be better than today - Garbage
http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/07/the-great-reset.html

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bediger
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?

~~~
vonSeckendorff
That word already exists: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malapropism>

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Astrohacker
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.

~~~
jtannenbaum
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.

~~~
turbojerry
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.

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carsongross
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.

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

~~~
carsongross
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.

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jellicle
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.

~~~
hallmark
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.

