Balzac89
Undercover Mod
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jan/28/jp-morgan-employee-fell-to-death-named-gabriel-magee
VP of technology investment division
VP of technology investment division
Mechanization and the Future
- Thread starter Balzac89
- Start date
In a world of fiat currency, there is no difference between credit and money. So in essence, when a bank extends you credit, it is creating money. It all spends exactly the same. When was the last time you purchased a new car or a home with cash?
ChesusRice
Well-Known Member
2013 super low last June
heckler73
Well-Known Member
If that were true, banks would not need to find reserves to buffer their underwriting activities (even though the reserve ratio is an arbitrary number, it is not zero).
However, that is an irrelevant point in regards to the theme of the thread, so I'm leaving it there.
At the end of the day, the requirement of employment is moot; we don't need as many people today as we did 30 years ago to produce the same amount of "stuff" to satisfy demands. This means there is going to either be a lot of consumer waste in the future to sustain the capitalist "growth" model, or policies such as "Negative Income Taxes" or "Guaranteed Incomes" will need to be introduced. Considering the finite nature of resources, and the expense of recycling, I don't see the former being a viable solution in the long run. Or perhaps more useless service sector jobs will arise? Professional Internet Eyeballs, and 15Mn "solitaire" app programmers (gawd knows we need yet another solitaire app for our dumbphones and tablets).
We are all heading towards some manner of obsolescence...except artists, oddly enough. Anything that requires creative thought (i.e. processes that can't be reduced to algorithms) will have a more secure future. It is possible Public and Private Sectors will deliberately choose inefficiency for the sake of maintaining the idea of "honest work for honest pay", but I doubt that, merely because of the corporate mentality regarding "the bottom line".
...Purpose vs Profit...
That's what it's going to come down to in the extreme.
Doer
Well-Known Member
Can it be that bad? I guess it was....for him.
Balzac89
Undercover Mod
Two suspected banker suicides in London.
Gabriel Magee, a vice president in J.P. Morgan's technology department in London, fell to his death from the company's skyscraper in Canary Wharf on Tuesday. Police are treating the death as a suicide. The same day, William Broeksmit, until last year a top executive at Deutsche Bank, died at his London home, apparently also by his own hand. Though the reasons are not clear in either case, the coincident deaths will feed the discussion of excessive stress levels in the financial industry, not just for the young interns working 100-hour weeks but also for accomplished executives. Stress-related resignations, heart attacks and suicides may be par for the course in a high-octane, risky businesses, but the public does not really want finance to be one of these: Its money is at stake.
Gabriel Magee, a vice president in J.P. Morgan's technology department in London, fell to his death from the company's skyscraper in Canary Wharf on Tuesday. Police are treating the death as a suicide. The same day, William Broeksmit, until last year a top executive at Deutsche Bank, died at his London home, apparently also by his own hand. Though the reasons are not clear in either case, the coincident deaths will feed the discussion of excessive stress levels in the financial industry, not just for the young interns working 100-hour weeks but also for accomplished executives. Stress-related resignations, heart attacks and suicides may be par for the course in a high-octane, risky businesses, but the public does not really want finance to be one of these: Its money is at stake.
No one cares about the mobile home you got for $20 from the neighborhood drunk.
So, are you under the belief that Banks only lend out what they have in deposits?
Fractional reserve banking is not being used?
What do you base this belief on?
heckler73
Well-Known Member
No, and how you extrapolate that from my comments is a mystery or an attempt at diversion.
Here's some interesting notes from the book I'm reading.
Innovation is not going to come from large leaps in technology. Rather it is going to come from the amalgamation of seemingly dissimilar processes or concepts.
Take the following websites, for example:
http://www.innocentive.com/
http://www.kaggle.com/
Companies, or other organizations (public or private), can post problems on those sites and through the magic of "billions of eyeballs" solutions are found, with remunerative rewards even!
People solving problems and bringing "progress" without even being specialists in those particular fields is the way of the future.
[HR][/HR]The innovation scholars Lars Bo Jeppesen and Karim Lakhani studied 166 scientific problems posted to Innocentive, all of which had stumped their home organizations. They found that the crowd assembled around Innocentive was able to solve forty-nine of them, for a success rate of 30 percent.
They also found that people whose expertise was far away from the apparent domain of the problem were more likely to submit winning solutions. In other words, it seemed to actually help a solver to be 'marginal'--to have education, training, and experience that were not obviously relevant for the problem.
[HR][/HR]--The Second Machine Age pgs.82-3
The two great "one time events" which will change the world, in the manner that Watt's steam engine did, will be "real, useful Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the connection of most of the people on the planet via a common digital network."
The latter can already be seen as manifesting via the internet, but AI?
Remember Watson, the computer that kicked the shit out of those Jeopardy champs? It is now being "trained to sit on top of all of the world's high-quality published medical information; match it against patients' symptoms, medical histories, and test results; and formulate both a diagnosis and a treatment plan."
"IBM estimates that it would take a human doctor 160 hours of reading each and every week just to keep up with the relevant new literature."
And that's just one heavy example. This is why white-collar workers have more to fear than blue-collars. There are "news articles" circulating about written by computers! You wouldn't even realize it, although, they are limited to writing drole, mundane pieces, mostly for stories about finance, etc. As far as I know, there are no great op-eds written by robots...yet.
Anyway, that's an essential summary of a couple chapters. I'll finish this with a couple interesting quotes, one of which I found surprising. See if you can figure out which one it is.
[HR][/HR]"Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another."
--Milton Friedman
"The Gross National Product does not include the beauty of our poetry or the intelligence of our public debate. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."
--Robert F. Kennedy
[HR][/HR]
heckler73
Well-Known Member
Meanwhile, that great bastion of the Canadian identity, CP Rail, has just posted a record annual profit with estimated revenues of $6.5Bn and its new CEO, Hunter Harrison, finishing his first full year at the helm.
Wow...one may be inclined to think this is some marvel of capitalism at its finest; a fantastic story of how a company mired in stagnation can suddenly rise from the swamp to become a great force of commerce once again.
Since taking over, he has cut staff by 4,550 and pulled 400 locomotives and 11,000 rail cars off the tracks. The companys $800-million pension deficit has been eliminated and its operating ratio, which measures the operating costs as a proportion of revenue, has fallen to 69.9 per cent from 77 per cent, excluding unusual items. The stock has more than doubled in the past two years.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/canadian-pacific-posts-record-quarterly-annual-profit/article16567059/
Considering their workforce is down to ~15000, those are some deep cuts. A savings of 7.1% from $6.5Bn ($461.5Mn) is worth 25% of the staff...
I wonder what kinds of workers were fired? Office? Yard? And were they let go because of cost? Or was it something else...?
This brings up something regarding inequality and how technology has fomented it. Before the GFC it was difficult for employers to exchange labour for capital in the face of rising profits and revenues. But as soon as Lehman went bust, everything changed. The door for technology was blown open, and the crest of the wave in the Second Machine Age made its real entrance. With the fall in business, it became easier for those with intent to make that substitution.
Ponder the fate of the photography sector.
"More photos are now taken every two minutes than in all of the nineteenth century"--SMA pg.125
This is a result of digitization. There is a side-effect in production and distribution, however. Fifteen people created Instagram and Facebook has 4600 employees (~1000 engineers). These are the avenues by which most photography reaches the masses (throw Flickr in there etc.)
Compare this with Kodak; at one time boasting 145300 people employed. Now? Gone...a 132 year empire laid bare when Instagram was sold to Facebook for $1Bn in 2012.
What was once accomplished by ~150k people, is reduced to 3%. THIS is the main driver of income inequality in the Second Machine Age.
Nonetheless, Facebook has a market value several times greater than Kodak ever did and has created at least seven billionaires so far, each of whom has a net worth ten times greater than George Eastman did.
So with the consumers' bounty comes a tradeoff in spread. That is, these offspring of technology serve to concentrate potential wealth. In essence, as the analog world is replaced, the digital world redistributes the wealth of legacy in a counter-intuitive manner. After all, was the promise of technology not to ease the burdens of labour?
Perhaps that easing of labour was really from the perspective of capital costs...
Wow...one may be inclined to think this is some marvel of capitalism at its finest; a fantastic story of how a company mired in stagnation can suddenly rise from the swamp to become a great force of commerce once again.
Since taking over, he has cut staff by 4,550 and pulled 400 locomotives and 11,000 rail cars off the tracks. The companys $800-million pension deficit has been eliminated and its operating ratio, which measures the operating costs as a proportion of revenue, has fallen to 69.9 per cent from 77 per cent, excluding unusual items. The stock has more than doubled in the past two years.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/canadian-pacific-posts-record-quarterly-annual-profit/article16567059/
Considering their workforce is down to ~15000, those are some deep cuts. A savings of 7.1% from $6.5Bn ($461.5Mn) is worth 25% of the staff...
I wonder what kinds of workers were fired? Office? Yard? And were they let go because of cost? Or was it something else...?
This brings up something regarding inequality and how technology has fomented it. Before the GFC it was difficult for employers to exchange labour for capital in the face of rising profits and revenues. But as soon as Lehman went bust, everything changed. The door for technology was blown open, and the crest of the wave in the Second Machine Age made its real entrance. With the fall in business, it became easier for those with intent to make that substitution.
Ponder the fate of the photography sector.
"More photos are now taken every two minutes than in all of the nineteenth century"--SMA pg.125
This is a result of digitization. There is a side-effect in production and distribution, however. Fifteen people created Instagram and Facebook has 4600 employees (~1000 engineers). These are the avenues by which most photography reaches the masses (throw Flickr in there etc.)
Compare this with Kodak; at one time boasting 145300 people employed. Now? Gone...a 132 year empire laid bare when Instagram was sold to Facebook for $1Bn in 2012.
What was once accomplished by ~150k people, is reduced to 3%. THIS is the main driver of income inequality in the Second Machine Age.
Nonetheless, Facebook has a market value several times greater than Kodak ever did and has created at least seven billionaires so far, each of whom has a net worth ten times greater than George Eastman did.
So with the consumers' bounty comes a tradeoff in spread. That is, these offspring of technology serve to concentrate potential wealth. In essence, as the analog world is replaced, the digital world redistributes the wealth of legacy in a counter-intuitive manner. After all, was the promise of technology not to ease the burdens of labour?
Perhaps that easing of labour was really from the perspective of capital costs...
Whats with all this TLDR? NONE of it speaks to your assumption that banks do not create money. Why did you post it? It must be a mystery or an attempt at diversion.
heckler73
Well-Known Member
Note the title of the thread, champ.
If you want to discuss the topic of Money vs Credit, start a new thread.
Lay down a solid hypothesis with adequate support, and I will gladly entertain a deeper discussion on the matter with you there (along with others, I am sure).
Otherwise, have a squat on the cosmic utensil. Your input here is equivalent to the curl of a conservative vector field.
Doer
Well-Known Member
tl:dr ?
Isn't what illiterates say, if they can't comprehend. I hear it, all the time (spelled that way of course.) Tillder, Tillder!
The chant of the won't bother to read.
Speaking of chants. Have you heard the Muslim Brotherhood Chant? It should chill you.
Islamea, Islamea! it means, in the vernacular....NO Secular. Literately, Islam is the only answer.
Sunni Jihad is not yet, a religion, like Christian or Jew. It is still a vicious war cult, and they want our secular lives taken from us.
They want 1/2 our brains in Burrka, and all men who will fight, to be left dead in a ditch.
So, this is the REAL enemy that has created our Politics and challenged our Freedoms, since the beginning. Jefferson was a student of the Koran but a fervent enemy of Sunni Jihad, as we all are.
Jefferson knew, in his day, there were 2 islams, and there still is, the war cult and the religion.
Isn't what illiterates say, if they can't comprehend. I hear it, all the time (spelled that way of course.) Tillder, Tillder!
The chant of the won't bother to read.
Speaking of chants. Have you heard the Muslim Brotherhood Chant? It should chill you.
Islamea, Islamea! it means, in the vernacular....NO Secular. Literately, Islam is the only answer.
Sunni Jihad is not yet, a religion, like Christian or Jew. It is still a vicious war cult, and they want our secular lives taken from us.
They want 1/2 our brains in Burrka, and all men who will fight, to be left dead in a ditch.
So, this is the REAL enemy that has created our Politics and challenged our Freedoms, since the beginning. Jefferson was a student of the Koran but a fervent enemy of Sunni Jihad, as we all are.
Jefferson knew, in his day, there were 2 islams, and there still is, the war cult and the religion.
bigbuddin84
Well-Known Member
Even if that was true, at least he has a job. You are on rollitup all day. Im sure you are a welfare baby. Uncle sam pays for your fat ass to argue with people all day(and I do mean ALL DAY).
heckler73
Well-Known Member
For someone in the twilight of their sunset years, it may be "bah".
Someone with 40 yrs of "career" left in them should not dismiss the matter so flippantly.
As if we don't have a bunch of useless humans already?
heckler73
Well-Known Member
Watch that vid I posted. We can add another 25% of the population to the heap of "useless" in less than a generation. What are we to do with that much involuntary unemployment?
Outside of a Carrington event, this juggernaut is not going to stop.
That's what war is for, if that isn't good enough, some engineered virus can kill some, but mostly what is needed is a bunch more tyrants who aren't too timid to kill 75% of their citizens. Eventually it will come to that.
I wouldn't worry too much, at some point all the poisons we keep dumping into the environment will eventually kill us all, until then be a good consumer and spend everything you have, then get some credit cards and spend some more.
This message brought to you by your overlords, have a nice day.