Wednesday, July 07, 2004

Krugman

Today's Krugman piece is pretty good. While it is his opinion of course, there are facts presented to support his(Krugman's) position.

I have held that this 'recovery' has largely passed the vast majority of Americans by. My measure of the robustness of any recovery after a contraction is how does wage growth compare against inflation?

As is likely to become the norm, while corporate profits boom, wages for working people have lost ground to inflation. This is, in no small part due to neo-liberal trade policies. This is commonly referred to as globalization.

No matter who is elected in November, this issue is going to prove to be amongst the toughest economic challenges.

Of course, regular readers of pure bs know that everything is temporal except for the damn environment! This is the one issue that needs to take center stage and stay there until we reach a global environmental homeostasis...Or all die trying. Damn it! Why can't anybody in either of the major political even begin to talk about the one issue that may cause the extinction of the human race if left unchecked? Is this not an important enough issue?

Sorry for the digression.

The best series I have heard on how the money really works, is Smithy's Wizards of Money. It is terrific. The website is new, so it doesn't have all the information about all the episodes. There are 22 episodes, each one indispensable, and often drawing on the subsequent episodes..So, it makes sense to listen to them in order. The old website's URL is: http://www.wizardsofmoney.org/indexold.html, and all the episodes are available for download from the A-infos page here. The A-infos project has a tremendous amount of 'not on CNN' news and programming, but the site is a bit awkward to navigate.

The series starts out with basic money tidbits about how money is created, and progresses all the way to how money interplays with environmental issues such as oil, and why the Hell we haven't signed on to Kyoto, to the future use of our national public lands and how Disney is looking at getting in on the 'eco-tainment' industry.

It's intelligent programming that everyone should be required to have exposure to..Try it. If you don't think it's the best economic series you've ever experienced, I'll give you a full refund!

Important tip: As A-infos is a bit bandwidth choked, it helps the download process tremendously if you use a download manger that splits the files into segments, and then combines them. Justin, at a developer's tale recommends the excellent Internet Download Manager. You'll want this utility even if you have broadband. Pure bs is on a 3mb/sec. connection, and the IDM really helps.

Now, before an astute reader informs me that even the Earth itself is temporal on a 'deep time' scale, I am aware of this fact :)

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