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To: AC Flyer who wrote (13861)	1/29/2002 4:32:27 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

<I humbly suggest that both you and Jay are making the mistake of looking at the nominal return on your 500K rather than the real return. We are in a period of sustained downward pressure on pricing for tangible goods. What matters is the purchasing power of your 500K a year from now versus today.> ACF, I take the point, but my theory is that Uncle Al can print a LOT faster than cost improvements can cut prices. He intends to do so because the aim is to keep a small inflation rate and so he should since he's the owner of the money tree and might as well print the USA government a big swag of profits while prices are under pressure. Therefore, I don't think the purchasing power of $500K will improve [other than for certain products where there are huge gains in productivity such as CDMA devices]. < No-one has aid that the USD measures the value of human life. That is between you and your family, or you and your God. What it does measure is economic potential - the ability of an individual to produce goods and services. The reason that the Indian life that you refer to appears to have so little value in monetary terms is because that (hypothetical average) individual has virtually zero ability to produce goods and services.> I know what you mean, but in my book, our lives can be converted to dollars. People like to use the cliche that we can't put a value on human life, but we can and do, every day, and it's a surprisingly low value for most people. To decide what roading to build, road planners have values established for human life. There is no other sensible way to decide where to allocate effort and expenditure than to put a USD value on human life. Life using metres, kilograms and litres, it's simply a more accurate way of measuring something rather than just waving our arms around and arguing how big or valuable something or somebody is. The average Indian life doesn't just appear to have less value, they actually do have less value than the average American. Which isn't to say that they are qualitatively inferior, nor that that situation is likely to stay as it is [it is NOT likely to stay as it is]. But they are not worth much right now [on average]. If I could buy Indian or American children, I'd buy a bunch of Indians at a dime a dozen, educate them, then split the profits with them [which of course would require I get access to economic systems which could use their abilities, which is quite a problem right now]. A young Jay Chen in a chicken coop in Mao's mayhem wasn't worth much. But if I could have gone shopping and bought him and shipped him here [or to Hong Kong] I'd have got a good deal. I bet I could have got the whole family at a bargain price at one stage. A few decades later and he's got nausages by the thousands and the purchase price is out of my league. That's how fast India can change and they could do it for the whole country. Each child born is just a decade away from being as good as anyone anywhere. Heck, even those barbarian Aztecs and Incas and Mayas could have the bones pulled out of their noses, get a haircut and do something more useful than wooping at sacrificial virgins being murdered. Look at CB and Marcos - they can spell and everything. Damn near human!!! CB gets bamboozled by how the photovoltaics keep the satellites in orbit though; I think that's probably more due to defective chromosomes than anything [missing Y chromosome]. But, "Hey!" as they say, some of my best friends have got missing chromosomes, missing melanin, missing teeth and missing hair [not to mention a few missing neurons - hmmm, come to think of it, there's a lot gone missing over the decades]. But I think they should be treated as human. Mqurice

To: AC Flyer who wrote (13861)	1/29/2002 4:45:32 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

>>Foreigners supply the USA with goods and services in vast quantities and Americans supply USD in exchange, but don't actually work to produce something the foreigners want.<< <With the minor exceptions (in no particular order) of two thirds of the world's commercial aircraft, electrical power generating equipment, machine tools, diesel engines, heavy equipment, a vast array of value-added electrical and electromechanical products, communications and networking equipment, telecommunications switches, mountains of software, a dizzying variety of financial services products and expertise, most of the world's new therapeutic drugs, vat quantities of wonderful, high quality ;-) movies and tv shows, enough agricultural products to feed a billion people, satellite launch services, the opportunity to sit at the table at the Nasdaq casino, the trifling matter of global security (purchased with copious quantities of American blood) and the global positioning system (no charge). Oh yes, and the world's preferred medium for storing the value of human labor.> I've invested in the productive capability [I thought hiring Americans to make CDMA for me was a good idea, since they'd got it well underway]. I fully appreciate the enormous productive capacity of the USA. I was really meaning just the currency export. It's a great export. But from the receiver's point of view, it has some risks which could be avoided by using the world's productive capacity [or even just the USA's if focus on USA political stability is desired, which is what the US$ represents]. >>But what happens if everyone decides that the USD isn't worth 1 million Indian years of labour [or software programming etc] and they start trying to get rid of the hot potatoes so they aren't left getting their fingers burned?<< <So that they can invest in Indonesian government bonds?> No, Nasdaq, Hang Seng, Nikkei, Dow, London and other share markets and use those as currencies. >>But, the game has been going on for decades, so maybe it'll carry on for quite a long time yet. I'm not betting on it.<< <I'm not betting against it. In the 20th century America defeated the forces of European fascism (twice), spent the Soviet bloc into self-destruction in the Cold War, led dozens of countries to a system of representative democracy and began the conquest of China with free market capitalism and McDonalds french fries. There's more where that came from. > Who is colonizing whom is a good question these days. I own QUALCOMM. Hutchison Whampoa is buying Global Crossing from the bankrupt USA shareholders. Uncle Al is providing the ammunition. I think it's a mutual global occupation of each other. Globalization, in a word. I think you are over-rating the effect of the USA in the rest of the world [one would think that the USA singlehandedly defeated the Nazis and that Chinese don't have a say in how they run their country]. It's a bit amusing really. Americans cowered behind the ocean until the Japanese forced them in by direct attack at Pearl Harbour. Russia did most damage to Germany. It was an allied effort. Of course, without the USA, it would have been a continuing disaster for Europe. I don't think the USA defeated the USSR. It politically self-destructed and the USA spending a fortune on nukes and stuff was somewhat irrelevant. Sure, there was an effect as the Russians argued with each other about what to do and how to meet threat and expand the empire or whether to shrink it and who should be the boss and should Glasnost and Perestroika continue anyway. But just as the USA civil war was more to do with internal strife than external pressure, the USSR civil confrontations were about internal power politics. Yes, Afghanistan was a quagmire and defeat for the USSR, but as with Vietnam's defeat of the USA, it wasn't really a show stopper. Overweening Poms were a pain during the 20th century. Let's not have overweening Yanks now. It's not a good look. Mqurice