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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (750782)	11/1/2013 5:01:32 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575790

Mindmeld, thanks for the article. It was a wonderful trip down memory lane. Here's a nice quote from it: A Keynesian approach in 1983 might have the government buy all those E.T. copies with borrowed money, cheapened by an early appearance of Greenspanism, to "step in" for the demand "shock." How about the more simple solution, which would have been to bailout Atari? Think about how many jobs that would have "created or saved." Think about how that would have saved the American video game industry and kept us competitive with the Japanese competition from Nintendo? By the way, I remember visiting Atari HQ around 1995. That was when they were trying to market their now-failed "64-bit" Jaguar game system. I visited there because I grew up programming on my Atari 800XL home computer. I also subscribed to Antic magazine, which was based in San Francisco, and it became the center of my uber-geek childhood. Now I go back to the same street in Sunnyvale, and there is absolutely no hint that Atari ever existed there. Pretty sad. Tenchusatsu

To: RetiredNow who wrote (750782)	11/2/2013 2:17:21 AM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575790

>> Primarily, we are looking at a near perfect example of how supply leads to demand, and not the other way around. The creation of new technology creates demand; there is no mechanism for the opposite. This is the central theme of the economic disagreement between left and right. It feeds the entire Keynesian concept and the idea that "unemployment benefits are the best form of stimulus", which ranks just below "blowing a trillion dollars will create economic growth out of thin air", which of course, is a rehash of Bastiat's "The Broken Window".

To: RetiredNow who wrote (750782)	11/2/2013 10:36:30 AM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 1575790

What if Paul Volcker had decided the video game industry was too valuable, too much in our national interests, to let fail as it did? You are kidding, right? From the article, the video game industry is $67 billion a year. 30 years ago, that would have been a bit over 1% of GDP. But the market was nowhere near $67 billion then, I doubt if it was $1 billion. So no, it wasn't too valuable to fail. It wasn't even a rounding error on the economy. Gadgets don't drive an economy, even for the Japanese. Companies like Apple are a benefit to the economy, but they aren't what drives it. Things like manufacturing, retail and wholesale trade are the heavy hitters. Granted, gadgets can and do fall under those headings, but so do planes, trains and automobiles. Not to mention clothing, food and lots of other things. upload.wikimedia.org Talk about the tail wagging the dog... Think about it. What percentage of your income goes into gadgets? If you are like most, only a small percentage, a lot less than, say, for food. If you have one or more automobiles, think of how many I things that would represent. This is a nitwit view of economics.