Archive for May, 2007

The policy makers at the Bank of Canada will not suffer the consequences of their actions.

The workers of Canada will.

As reported in Relentlessly Progressive Economics: Bank of Canada sends wrong signal, labour says

“The high dollar reflects some factors beyond our control, such as high energy and mineral prices, and a weak US dollar. However, the Bank of Canada can and does influence the exchange rate by setting our interest rates.

“Today’s clear signal that interest rates will be increased in the “near term” sends exactly the wrong signal to financial markets, and will stabilize or even increase the current exchange rate at an intolerably high level.

“Instead, the Bank of Canada should have said that the Canadian dollar is trading at too high a level and that interest rates will be cut if it does not fall.

“The Bank of Canada points to inflation slightly above the 2% target as a cause of concern, but this is mainly driven by booming housing prices in Alberta.

“Over the past year, real wages for hourly-paid workers have been flat, union wage settlements are barely matching inflation, and new job creation has been tilted to temporary and low-paid jobs in the lowest-paid parts of the private services sector.

“The Bank of Canada sees an economy at risk of over-heating. But the reality is a major ongoing loss of good jobs, poor quality new jobs, and stagnant wages. This is the reality which should have been addressed in today’s announcement.”

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Democracy +/vs. Capitalism

Who’s Afraid of Democracy? — In These Times:

But this argument puts Caplan in a precarious position. The consensus economic model that he subscribes to—and that forms the worldview of the economists that he cites as definitive—is grounded on the assumption that people are rational. Pull out that Jenga block and the edifice of Caplan’s economic worldview tumbles down with it: If people aren’t rational, there’s no reason to assume that they’ll respond predictably to incentives or market signals.

A very interesting article that talks about economists and their concern that the voting public will at almost every opportunity vote for proposals that the economists believe to be in direct opposition to the voters’ best interests. This raises the interesting conclusion that the market is the voters and if the voters don’t vote rationally then they won’t act rationally in the market and the market requires rational actors.
Interesting indeed. Market capitalism relies on rational thought and enlightened self-interest. Neither exists and therefor market capitalism must fail.

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links for 2007-05-26

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links for 2007-05-23

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links for 2007-05-21

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Shameful and ignorant

Google says that gbombing has been fixed, but any attempt to link shameful and ignorant to the ongoing vitriol that spews from the mouths of the US Republican presidential candidates is fine by me.

Torture doesn’t work. Torture is wrong. Even if it is Jack Bauer doing the deed.

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links for 2007-05-20

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How can I remember something for next year when I have already forgotten what I did yesterday?

Chris Roberson’s Celestial Empire stories promise to amuse me – but they will not be available for some time and have no entry in Amazon’s catalogue so I can’t add them to my various wish lists. I keep a text file on my desktop to note down songs that I hear on galaxie or the odd internet radio station but I am not convinced that this is a generalizable solution – if I see a piece of fabric that I would like to tag as an appropriate colour for drapes, perhaps, or a trinket that would make someone a nice birthday present or a review of a wine I would like to try. I want an add-on for Firefox that interacts with a multimedia database in which I can store references and tag them. Thing is, I don’t want to tag this particular blog page of Chris Roberson. If I like the one book that is available (The Voyage of Night Shining White) I might add it to my list o’ feeds. What I want is to extract the author name and the book titles and add them to my list, along with a tentative date of Q1 2008 to revisit their availability. Certainly this post will be tagged and categorized but a blog, and a public one at that, is not the place for it.

How do you all externalize your failing memories?

This is being posted via the FirefoxDeepest Sender” add-on and as a primarily LJ-oriented product it wants me to tell you what I am listening to as I write this. Strangely enough, 2 Front Line Assembly songs: Victim of a Criminal and The Blade. I say strangely because my current song list is 156 songs long and on random shuffle. And I am not using an antiquated copy of Winamp whose concept of random was less than perfect. I am using Quodlibet on Ubuntu Feisty. It has 2 flaws: an inability to sort songs by the file creation/modification date and an obscure preference for Union of Knives – 11 songs of 156 that are played far more often than 7% of the time.

OK, it probably is 7%, but I have the whole *album* in the list and frankly albums contain much more weak music than strong. It’s the whole white-van-on-the-corner thing. Fine. Fine. I will remove everything except “Evil Has Never” and “I Decline”. Happy now? Sheesh.

Chatty today aren’t I?

kthxbai

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links for 2007-05-19

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links for 2007-05-14

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