Eh...

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http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/05/politics/ ... index.html

Good God, get this guy out of here. He's an embarrassment on so many levels, I can't keep track.

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DBOTW Results Show the Nas Bump is a myth.


Darkside 56% 56% [ 23 ] x
Jason Heyward 7% 7% [ 3 ]
Julian Assange 17% 17% [ 7 ]
Super Bitch Message From Norton 17% 17% [ 7 ]
Morgan Freeman 2% 2% [ 1 ]
Total votes : 41

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Since I provided Trade Data earlier in this thread, I thought it only fair to post some counter data. Here is an Economist article mainly about Britain, but noting a study done about China's impact on U.S. Trade. It counters the productivity stuff I posted already. My position remains that U.S. manufacturing output is higher than ever, while employment is much lower. That means more output with less workers, pointing to efficiency improvements as the main driver of job loss. But here is another view. Underlined area applies to the U.S.

"The impact of free trade
Collateral damage
Britain is unusually open to trade but unusually bad at mitigating its impact
Jul 30th 2016 | BLACKBURN | From the print edition

“LANCASHIRE invented the world,” Iain Trickett’s grandfather told him. The old man was half right. During the industrial revolution the county in north-west England pioneered machinery that churned out manufactured goods by the ton; other countries copied it. Traces of that past glory linger on. In a factory in Blackburn highly skilled workers produce top-of-the-range jackets and jeans for companies including Community Clothing, of which Mr Trickett is general manager. Boxes destined for London’s fanciest shops are stacked up by the door.

There are other local success stories, including an old maker of wallpaper-printing equipment down the road in Accrington whose machines now print electrical devices (see article). But they are the exception. Manufacturing employment in the Blackburn area has dropped by one-third in the past decade. The town centre seems to have more pawnbrokers and betting shops than restaurants or bars. “There’s nothing for young people around here,” says Maureen, a local resident, over a lunchtime game of bingo in a giant gambling complex near the train station.

The travails of Blackburn and places like it have led many to ask whether globalisation does more harm than good. Britain is hardly alone in this. Yet the debate in Britain is overwhelmingly focused on the effects of immigration, particularly from the EU. Usually overlooked—unlike in other rich countries, notably America—is the effect of trade. As Britain embarks on a round of trade negotiations ahead of Brexit, the issue is likely to become central.

Economists agree that foreign trade has afforded big benefits to Britain overall. Trade with the EU since joining it in 1973, for instance, has increased Britain’s GDP by 8-10%, according to Nick Crafts of Warwick University. More recently, as countries like Vietnam and China have become manufacturing giants, consumers have enjoyed cheap imported goods. Philip Hammond, the chancellor, was in Beijing this week to suss out a post-Brexit trade deal.

However, mounting evidence suggests that the gains from free trade are not shared equally. A body of research on the American economy shows that import competition from poor countries can depress the incomes of the low skilled, at least in the short run, says John Van Reenen of the London School of Economics (LSE). One paper concluded that competition from Chinese imports explains 44% of the decline in employment in manufacturing in America between 1990 and 2007.

Britain’s economy is about twice as exposed to foreign trade as America’s. After averaging around 1% of GDP for half a century, Britain’s trade deficit in goods soared from the year 2000 and is now about 7% of GDP. China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation in 2001 played an important part in this. Britain’s growing appetite for imported goods coincided with a collapse in manufacturing employment.

Formal studies back up the circumstantial evidence. João Paulo Pessoa of the LSE looked at the period 2000-07 and found that British workers in industries that suffered from high levels of import exposure to Chinese products earned less and spent more time out of employment than those in other industries. As people fare badly in the labour market, social problems arise: another study found that a one standard-deviation increase in import competition worsened rates of mental illness by 1.2 percentage points.

Open argument

Unfortunately, the pain tends to be concentrated geographically. An index compiled by Italo Colantone and Piero Stanig of Bocconi University shows that almost no part of the country is more vulnerable to competition from Chinese imports than Blackburn (see map). Northampton, with its shoe industry, is similarly exposed; cheap steel imports have left places such as Port Talbot vulnerable. In the past decade the number of over-25s unemployed for more than one year has increased much faster in areas where manufacturing makes up more than 20% of the local economy than in areas where it makes up less. It has coincided with a rise in regional inequality: during the same period the ratio between output per person in Britain’s three richest sub-regions and the three poorest increased by a quarter.

On the ground, the result is clear to see: swathes of the country feel left out of Britain’s generally healthy economic growth. Areas highly affected by Chinese import competition (which is probably a decent proxy for import competition from anywhere) were particularly prone to vote for Brexit, according to Messrs Colantone and Stanig’s calculations. Houses with fluttering St George’s flags pepper the landscape around Blackburn.

It does not have to be this way. The large overall gains from free trade mean it should be possible to compensate its losers. That means upgrading the skills of the workforce in places like Blackburn—as is the norm in Germany, which has a sophisticated system of apprenticeships. America’s “trade adjustment assistance” programme funds training and support for workers displaced by foreign competition. The EU’s “globalisation adjustment fund” does something similar. Britain can (for now at least) apply for its funds.

But it hasn’t. Officially the government has “concerns about whether it is an appropriate use of money”; a member state drawing on the fund is also supposed to stump up some of its own cash. But the government’s preferred programme, its so-called “rapid response service”, is feeble. It is supposed to provide training and support when there are mass redundancies. But it is a murky operation: there are almost no data on what it does. According to a House of Commons report, it “does not appear to be being monitored.” In 2008 its budget was a pitiful £6m ($8m). Nor does its response seem very rapid: your correspondent sent an e-mail requesting assistance for a fictitious Blackburn firm a week ago and has received no follow-up.

Data from the OECD, a club mostly of rich countries, suggest that even after accounting for Britain’s low unemployment rate, for years it has been a stingy spender on “active” labour-market policies (ie, those that seek to improve the skills of the unemployed, not just let them languish). One paper estimated that British spending on active policies, adjusted for GDP, was about one-fifth that of Germany. Only about 15% of those on unemployment benefit receive any sort of training. Those displaced by free trade thus get little help towards becoming the model employees of tomorrow. Firms in Blackburn looking for good workers often turn to eastern Europeans, Mr Trickett sighs.

Britain has benefited enormously from its embrace of free trade. But its failure to share the proceeds means that in too many places, such as Blackburn, the effect has been underwhelming. Until this is corrected, don’t expect arguments about globalisation to go away any time soon, Brexit or no Brexit."

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Hawaii (fuck) You

10 years from now, all that crap they make in China and ship to the US to sell at Wal-Mart will be 3-D printed right in your local area. Why centralize manufacturing and then have the overhead of shipping/distribution/warehousing costs?

Make the crap as close as possible [in space and time] to the consumer's demand for it; reduces shipping/distribution/storage costs--at least for end products; still have to get the input materials distributed; but that's a simpler supply-chain issue; as you will be able to make many products out of the same inputs.

Indeed, MANY believe 3D printing is the next big wave. It allows for local, rapid sourcing, and mass customization. And yet there are others who think it is all over hyped.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

This all makes sense to me. The only difference right now is the labor cost savings of producing something in China (ahem) trump the costs of shipping something halfway around the world. I can envision a place where things get more automated (cheaper) where it becomes more cost effective to produce something much closer to the point you will be eventually selling it.

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Not sure I follow.

Current supply chain for, say, a dinnerware set:

China imports the raw materials/precursors needed to produce them--transportation and warehousing costs for those inputs.

China produces large quantites of many products in different colors/configurations based on best guesstimates of consumer demand and what the product design folks in new york tell them to make.

These huge quantities of final product first sit in warehouses in China.

They then get put on ships and sent to Long Beach. Where they are unloaded and stored temporarily.

Truckers roll up to the docks and pick up the finished quantities of product to distribute across the country to retail/wholesalers who don't even know if anyone will buy them and if so how many of each color/etc.

Wal-Mart stocks these potentially saleable items. Consumers go into wal-mart and end up having to pick between piss-green and puke-yellow when they'd really rather have prince purple, or something else.

Wal Mart sells as many as they can at full retail, and then ends up deeply discounting the unpopular colors/configurations. Eventually, Wal-Mart has to either land-fill or recycle the truly unsaleable product.

===================================================================================

3-D printing flips the supply chain around so that product isn't produced until the consumer demands it. And it's produced either from a wide variety of template options, or to the end consumer's exact specifications.

bye-bye huge warehouses of unsold/unsaleable dinner plates.

bye bye needing truckers to haul shit from long beach to chicago to sit on some store's shelf til someone maybe buys it

bye bye needing ships to haul end products from china.

bye bye neeedings ships to haul inputs to china (would still need to distribute inputs to the local 3-D print "factories")

bye bye huge brick and mortar stores displaying a bunch of generic crap no one in their right mind would ever "demand"

log on to a web-site for the 3-D printer, pick out exactly what you want, submit your order and then either the 3-D printer will have a drone deliver it to you or you can go pick it up yourself. no unsold inventory. no need to pay to ship the plates from china and the inputs to. etc

He's bad, but not handing $400M over to support terrorism against our country bad. If the weimar republic had provided $400M to the United States in the 1920's, you think we would have handed that back to the Third Reich? No shot in hell....

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GOB: "My God, what is this feeling?"
Michael: "Could it be love?"
GOB: "I know what an erection feels like, Michael. No, it's the opposite. It's... it's like my heart is getting hard."

Once China can't use its industry as a forced employment mechanism to keep the masses occupied it's bye-bye PRC!

Dunno anything about this source, not saying I endorse/agree with it, but his numbers look kosher for the +/- in primary voters thing.

If nothing else, it's an exhaustive run-down of the pro-Trump wagering factors.

Oh, for the love of god, pick it up yourself. We'd have so many drones, they'd block out the sun.

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Trump's newly announced economic team of advisors is a joke. John Paulson and Steve Feinberg? It's like he's trying to give Hillary the easiest targets to attack. He may as well have chosen Martin Shkreli. Not to mention they're all white males.

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Should've gone with:

https://twitter.com/Wu_Tang_Finance/

Clinton leads in 16 of the last 16--and 17 of the last 20--polls tracked on realclearpolitics.com

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Be well

GO BEARS!!!

This guy might end up making the ballot in like two states.

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True. They can write his name in. If you are a conspiracy theorist you have to believe that we're going through an awful lot of trouble to make Hillary president.

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Be well

GO BEARS!!!

But, Jimmy told us that the gateway pundit has Drumpf up by 10%.

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Good people drink good beer - Hunter S. Thompson

<º)))><

Waiting for the time when I can finally say
That this has all been wonderful, but now I'm on my way

Yeah, you know something is amiss when an ex-CIA guy starts criticizing a political candidate for being too authoritarian.

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Speaking live at the Detroit Economic Club....Seems like his camp got him on point, staying calm in the midst of a screaming protester that interrupts every 3 minutes....

http://video.foxnews.com/v/2553565088001/donald-trump-economic-policy-speech-in-detroit-michigan/?#sp=watch-live

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GOB: "My God, what is this feeling?"
Michael: "Could it be love?"
GOB: "I know what an erection feels like, Michael. No, it's the opposite. It's... it's like my heart is getting hard."

He was trying really hard but he doesn'thave self control. He eventually took shots at the "low energy" protesters.

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Be well

GO BEARS!!!

Over a century catching fish.



#_______

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Obama's Legacy is Trump.
And dead cops.

"One guy lays the pipe, the other guy smokes it"--Clint Eastwood

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Good people drink good beer - Hunter S. Thompson

<º)))><

Waiting for the time when I can finally say
That this has all been wonderful, but now I'm on my way

President Dukakis regularly points to his double-digit lead in the polls over Vice-President Bush in August of '88 as the first sign of inevitable victory.

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GOB: "My God, what is this feeling?"
Michael: "Could it be love?"
GOB: "I know what an erection feels like, Michael. No, it's the opposite. It's... it's like my heart is getting hard."

Before the conventions

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Be well

GO BEARS!!!

ignore

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GOB: "My God, what is this feeling?"
Michael: "Could it be love?"
GOB: "I know what an erection feels like, Michael. No, it's the opposite. It's... it's like my heart is getting hard."

Your point could be taken seriously if Trump appeared to be running any sort of campaign. The polls won't change unless he does something to change them.

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