Posted on 09/21/2002 2:56:37 PM PDT by USA21
Edited on 07/09/2004 12:50:47 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Despite more than a half-century free of nuclear war, a majority of experts assembled at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on Thursday concluded a nuclear or radiological attack is inevitable over the next 50 years, if not this decade.
"The consequence will be worldwide horror that will result in less reliance on nuclear weapons," suggested former National Security Council senior director Jane Wales, president of the World Affairs Council in San Francisco.
(Excerpt) Read more at trivalleyherald.com ...
I have friends like this. They tend to be girls though.
Can't agree with you about Nintendo, however; I prefer the raw realism of my PC games: why, my IntelliMouse almost feels like a real M-16 in my hands. You'll never get that with some stupid game console. Particularly fun are games like Ghost Recon and Medal of Honor. It's there the lesson is driven home that you don't want to be holding the sniper rifle when the sh!t hits the fan. But no real American needs to be told that.
The freedom of information act reflects a major paradigm shift in military policy. I believe the Clinton regime is trying to excorsize some of the Darth Vader demons living in the psyche of young men. Instead we get porn spam. Yet another affirmation of eternal undeclared war. It wasn't a good idea to open military science to the public scrutiny. But politicians, presidents especially have to make everyone happy, despite the military; or: Just keep the military happy, do that and everyone else will be persuaded to accept it, whatever it is. President Clinton pissed off many people in the american military. At the begining of the last presidential election, many of your top military intelligence people took an early retirement. Clinton military policy has made those jobs obsolete.
In its place come 180,000 deadhead rookies, who barely know what their doing, because the experts are retired. Clinton pissed them off.
Clinton was a pimp and a porn star. If it wasn't for the Berlin wall coming down there's no way he would have been able to do that job. I grew so tired of listening to him screaming. It was like being angry with a woman
I'm sure you understand clearly. It's not provocative, it's true.
Ummm... The US gets more oil from Africa than the Middle East. In fact, the US hardly gets any oil from the Middle East, and very little from outside the Western Hemisphere for that matter. You should at least have a solid grasp of the facts before you start throwing accusations around so freely.
I don't suppose this has anything to do with why Europe is now dumping their much vaunted GSM technology for the vastly superior (and thoroughly American) CDMA technology? The Europeans were so proud of their GSM networks that they really hated admitting that CDMA was better, right up until the point where their GSM networks started to breakdown. Now all the European wireless phone companies are licensing CDMA technology from the American companies. Japan is in the same boat, incidentally.
You must be a glutton for punishment, asserting Euro-chauvinistic mantras without actually checking the facts.
Please tell me in what ways the European finance/economics is superior to that of the Americans? Europe is a second-rate economy in virtually every aspect compared to the US, and the gap gets larger every day. Apparently you don't follow financial and economic data, because only a fool would actually believe that Europe has shown any type of superior performance in this regard.
These are few reasons.
Oh,I'm just a poor man,at my parents home I got just a 256kbps connection for 12.95 € a month. Luckily at my home I got 10Mbps broadband via fiber optics, for 75 € a month ,voice traffic and cable TV included. I recently read that internet conncetion in the US are actually decreasing . After having lost the mobile communication race,are you losing the broadband race too??
I'm not a stock trader either, nor is my main line of business related to it, but I've done just under 50% for public securities this year and actually pulled off a (not typical) ten-bagger in private securities this year (where most of my money is these days regardless). Ironically, while I've never been a securities trader by profession, I've actually been interviewed by European language investment magazines and way too many people think my opinion on such things matter. But most of my insight comes from actually working in multiple industries and having a really good idea of how they really work; I don't religiously follow economic news on a day-to-day basis. I know where the money is flowing and what people are thinking largely from very well qualified first- and second-hand information. This doesn't mean much; either way it is essentially an appeal to improper authority. But you can rightly assume I am not idiot when it comes to economics and finance either.
Well, I can start citing the enronite/worldcomite.
No you can't; it would be a logical fallacy to make any claim derived from that. Do you know what percentage of the total companies and physical economy the handful of highly publicized companies represent? Negligible. Perception aside, after putting all the publicly traded companies under the lamp, less than a dozen came up shady out of thousands. Don't think for a second that you won't find similar problems in Europe and Japan. I know for first-hand fact that this has gone on inside some of the biggest companies in Europe. The difference was that the government in Europe usually sweeps these types of problems under the rug so as to not upset the public confidence.
I hope you can accept the fact that US corporations are much more leveraged that Europeans.
This is actually apples and oranges; a really valid comparison cannot be made. European companies are implicitly or explicitly government backed. They are just as leveraged, but in a different accounting sense that doesn't apply to American companies, which are not backed by the government.
Tha same is for consumer spen ding: the practice of monetizing virtual plusvalences from increases in house pricing it's typical American - and typical foolish, since house prices can fluctuate alot.
I agree that it is foolish from an economic standpoint to leverage equity in the way many people do, but your other premise is incorrect. Housing prices in the US do not fluctuate very much at all on any type of long-term basis, other than a general upward trend. Price stability is why US real estate has often been sought as a hedge against inflation by both foreign and domestic entities. The general lack of scarcity for all things real estate related in the US continues to heavily buffer any periodic fluctuations. Many real estate investors from both Asia and Europe have been burned in the US by trying to apply their local models of the real estate market behavior to the US, which simply isn't valid.
Second , the myth of American productivity: it's true that American workers are more productive that any others (except the Luxembougese), but that's because they work more hours
Strawman -- that is not how economic productivity is measured. Economic productivity is measured as the average economic output per hour of labor i.e. it is invariant of the amount of hours worked. Whether normalized for expenses or not, Americans are much more productive than Europeans. However, the differences in productivity alone only account for maybe half the rather enormous differences in per capita GDP. The rest likely does result from more work hours. The average American gross output is around 50% higher than the average European.
Third , p/e ratios: actually around 22 in the US, 16 in Europe
There is a reason for this. You can't extract meaningful data from P/Es without knowing what the long-term discount rate is. What you'll find is that higher American average PEGs justify higher P/Es than for European companies, so investing in relatively high P/E US companies may offer better returns than the low P/E European companies. A company with a P/E of 40 and a PEG of 1.5 is a much better investment than a company with a P/E of 10 and a PEG of 1.05. Since a lot of new companies and growth companies are American, you see a lot more American companies correctly valued with high P/Es. Quite frankly, with the average European PEG being what it is, the P/E of 16 for European companies is less justified than the P/E of 22 for American companies if you do the math.
Conclusion:the US stock market is still overvalued, despite it performed 10th of 19 among the world biggest stock markets in 2002: see the for detailed statistics.
Conclusion: you are not too adept at evaluating companies or markets. The US market was overvalued, but it isn't today and will outperform the rest of those markets in the coming years. Judging a market by one year is contrived, and a pretty egregious contrivance at that.
Fourth the unsanable trade deficit:the US feel rich because tha rest of the world let them consume (much) more than what they produce
Apparently you don't understand what the trade deficit really means either. The trade deficit measures material goods only, not the huge raft of other economic activities which do not fall in that category. All modern economies rely less and less on the export of material goods, and it is not surprising that this has been true of the US as well. The US exports are mostly in the form of finance/capital, media, skilled services, and technical/engineering/science knowledge. These make up the backbone of the US economy. Unfortunately for "trade deficit" calculations, none of these show up in harbors transported in cargo containers. If this was not the case, it would be hard to explain how a US company makes millions or billions of dollars from foreign markets if they don't "export" anything that counts against the "trade deficit".
Trade deficits mean something in an industrial age economy, but next to nothing in an information age economy. Quite frankly, the only industrial age economic factor the US really dominates any more is agriculture, so it isn't surprising that we have a "trade deficit". What this ignores is that the information age economy that a large portion of the US now works in, which is head and shoulders above anyone else, doesn't export material goods in cargo containers per se. You don't actually think our major export is dollar bills do you? For obvious reasons, this would violate basic economics. The whole concept of "trade" means we are getting equal or better economic value in exchange for giving economic value. Economic value doesn't materialize out of thin air.
You tried, but you don't provide a convincing argument. However, it does seem that you only have a cursory understanding of some important aspects of economics and finance.
That doesn't address my point that the US doesn't even need their oil, and that we get almost no oil from the middle east at all. The majority of US oil comes from its own backyard: Canada, US, and Mexico, with significant quantities coming from various other places around the world, a small percentage of which comes from the Middle East. The Europeans are far more dependent on it than the US is.
In other words, we don't really care about the Middle East oil, and all the pretending in the world won't make that any different. It makes for a good conspiracy theory, but it isn't grounded in reality.
Jeff Goldblum to Will Smith, "Independance Day".
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