Your text, @Prinz_Brexteer, sounds beautifully in my ears.
We all descend from Eastern Africa too.
Okay, if youāre saying you didnāt mean it that wayā¦wellā¦you knowā¦Iām glad to hear itā¦
But it is a warning sign when people start with these snide remarks about rich Jewish people. Thereās no shortage of people (especially on the modern British left, it must be said) who are virulently anti-Semitic.
(As for āmy racismā, you could say I have some very bigoted views on the inherent superiority of poor Welsh hill farmers - as established elsewhere on this threadā¦)
You are also hostile to any and every possible differing perspective, and only respond to such reactions with childish name calling.
Also Steve, a key point you bring up is āregulationā. I think the problem is unregulated Financial banking, not the banks themselves.
One of the biggest financial mistakes in modern politics was Bill Clintonās passing of the Gramm leach bliley act which completely freed banks from all regulations that required them to keep public and investment banking separate. GrammāLeachāBliley Act - Wikipedia
I donāt follow American banking regulations. I suspect, however, that the decline of the manufacturing sector, or at least the reduction in the number of jobs in the manufacturing sector in the US has very little to do with banks. it has much more to do with changing technology.
Banks are absolutely necessary. There is almost .no business however small that doesnāt use banks. From the corner store to farms to factories to international trading companies, banks are necessary. Bankers maybe stupid, conservative, risk averse, inclined to a herd mentality, and much more. However I am not aware of any banks forcing their loans or any other services on people. As an industry they are no better or no worse than any other sector. All of this anti-banker mentality is simply childish.
As for people who think they would rather live without modern conveniences, I suggest they move up to northern Alberta, and area Iām quite familiar with. Thereās lots of space in the forest, the natives used to live without any modern conveniences up until very recently. I am sure there are people there who could teach you survival skills. you may find it though, a real challenge to survive without making use of any modern conveniences.
"However I am not aware of any banks forcing their loans or any other services on people. As an industry they are no better or no worse than any other sector. All of this anti-banker mentality is simply childish. "
Spot on. Almost no one blames those people who were living way over their means pre-2008.
No, foreign outsourcing and automation is the main culprit.
I think in general, we tend to pin our problems on one person, one group of people, or one industry as opposed the flaws with the whole system (note I said flaws, meaning there are ways to improve on, not that the system needs be abandoned).
I think human nature gives us the need to have a human face on which to blame our problems for whatever reasons. Itās why humans have so easily fallen for the āitās the immigrants, the jews, the other religionā, and in this instance itās the greedy bankers.
I used to watch baseball games with my dad, and he would constantly get so angry over his teams losses and I never once watched where where he did NOT blame the manager for screwing something up. It was always the managers fault, every time. He never could accept the fact that his team might just have been outplayed. Not once.
My point is that there isnāt a political party working to come up with any answers for the people falling downwards into the growing divide between the haves and the have nots here in the U.S.
Trump was the only one that gave them an answer, even though it was a terrible answer from an obvious fraud.
Automation is now estimated to replace most of the low skill jobs in the future. There has to be a large scale rethinking of how people are educated, employed, and to make a living as these problems are only going to get worse in the meantime.
Something has to give. It either has to be a significant investment in education reform and skilled job training, or even a mandatory minimum wage which Elon musk recently hinted will eventually be forced upon us,
I totally agree that Bernie sanders did over simply the problems by solely blaming it on wall street and billionaires and merely taxing rich people was not going to solve all our problemsā¦ but he was the only one fighting for some legitimate policies that America desperately needs: Mainly public healthcare, affordable public college, investment in both infrastructure and solar energy, and a reinstatement of regulations to separate public and investment banking.
All of which are now being slashed by the trump administration or were brushed off as infeasible by Clinton saying that Dodd Frank and Obamacare were just fine they way they wereā¦
This all coming from someone who just happened to take tremendous amounts of campaign donations from the health insurance industry, pharmaceutical corporations, and from major wall street investment banks such as goldman sachsā¦ a company that had actual fraud as a business model prior to 2008. Goldman Sachs Finally Admits it Defrauded Investors In 2008 Crisis | Fortune
So i do think there are some legitimate gripes to be had with wall street bankers.
Steve, you should make a video about this, and do more political commentary videos. I always love getting your perspective as you provide a broad, historical take on a current topic that I would often miss.
Yup, banking - an industry just exactly like any other.
(Those small business owners who were tricked and cheated by RBS are just darned well CHILDISH to feel aggrievedā¦)
āIām not ārightā wing. Iām not any wing. I donāt believe in politics full stop.ā
Why start a thread on the French President then???
Iām enjoying this debate here! So much fun!
But Steve, I think you are committing a bit of a bait-and-switch here, where you first highlight the necessity of banks, a sentiment that Iām inclined to degree with and conflate it with criticism of bankers. Banks are probably the most efficient way of allocating capital in the form of loans that exist, but that is all they are- a legal construct that allows people to store money, then lend that money out again for a profit (interest rates) amongst other things.
Consider that much of the criticism focussed on bankers after the 2008 financial crash revolved around their wildly excessive salaries + a lack of prosecutions for the obviously fraudulent behaviour of many high level players in the banking industry.
In other words, banks are simply an institution amongst the many others that make up the modern world. On the other hand, bankers are a group of glorified accountants who are all too often greedy, short-sighted pigs that will do whatever they have to make a profit, unless they have a firm regulatory structure placed around them circumscribing what they can and cannot do. The desire to make money at all costs is their right of capitalists of course, but letās not try and put lipstick on the pig here.
Combine this with the fact that when banks fail the effects are often catastrophic and add to this the public perception that they are essentially too big to fail and you can begin to see where a lot of āAnti-bankā sentiment comes from.
Feel free to criticize.
āā¦bankers are a group of glorified accountants who are all too often greedy, short-sighted pigs who will do whatever they have to make a profitā¦ā
Yeah - and we all know how Aussies handle pigs! 
Tbh, I actually have been out on a pig hunting trip like this once (they wernāt my dogs and I didnāt kill the pig we caught though.) That is pretty much exactly how it is done.
People wonāt use a gun out of fear of killing one of their dogs in the confusion.
I donāt understand the term bait and switch in this context. Although we now live in a post fact, post truth, post knowledge era as exemplified by Trump, I still believe that truth and knowledge matter. Yes there are wicked bankers, and Volkswagen cheated on their environment data, and there are wicked doctors and lawyers and teachers and Englishmen and Frenchman and Canadians. This doesnāt mean they all are.
Here we have an Englishman who believes that Britain or England didnāt participate in European wars for most of the last thousand years when a quick visit to Wikipedia under the heading Britainās wars and Englandās wars will show that almost the only European war the English missed was the 30 years war because they were having a Civil War at the time. The history of England is the history of war. These historical facts matter more than peopleās beliefs.
It really doesnāt matter what people believe about the prehistoric period. What matters is what we know from archaeology, from historical records, and that is that people lived short brutish lives, with at least half the children dying in childbirth, people were regularly wiped out by disease and war and famine. You may fantasize about living at that time. You may believe that the sabertooth tiger was a gentle pet, but that doesnāt change the facts just as when that luminary Dr. Ben Carson says that although archeologist say that the Egyptian pyramids were burial tombs based on data found there, he believes they were granaries, his ābeliefā is irrelevant to most thinking people.
In the real world people are given to selfish and destructive behavior. That is why society usually has regulations governing what we are allowed to do, including traffic regulations. No, bankers are not angels, but they are part of the world we live in, and the modern world, as proven by the number of people on this planet, the average life longevity and living standards of people today is in my view the greatest time to be alive. Besides we have no choice.
Last night I Skyped with w friend in Korea, then streamed the latest Harry Potter movie, produced with high tech special effects, in glorious HD pictureā¦ all from my laptop at home.
Have fun going back to the woodsā¦ but I think Iāll pass.
xuanfu, you also believe that Kim Jong-un is God alive? Because, it seems that you believe in everything.
@Steve
āā¦Here we have an Englishman who believes that Britain or England didnāt participate in European wars for most of the last thousand yearsā¦ā
Moi?
(This is not quite what I said - as you know.)
āā¦when a quick visit to Wikipediaā¦ā
Ah yes, Wikipedia, that fountain of truthā¦that sworn enemy of all things fakeā¦
āā¦under the heading Britainās wars and Englandās wars will show that almost the only European war the English missed was the 30 years war because they were having a Civil War at the timeā¦ā
(I kind of suspect that there was just a little more to our absence from the 30 Years War than an English Civil War, Steve, but I donāt claim to match the gold standard of Wikipedian knowledge, of course.)
āā¦The history of England is the history of war. These historical facts matter more than peopleās beliefsā¦ā
Sure. But we were almost always the ones who chose to lean over and poke our noses into a European war - if and when we did so. There is a pretty good argument that this even applied to World War 1.
For the last 900 years or more we have escaped foreign direct ground attack and territorial occupation, and hardly ever been at serious risk of invasion. A measure of this is the fact that even that naughty Mr H thought very long and hard about attempting to cross the waters post Dunkirk.
Did the all-knowing Wikipedia forget to tell you about the devastating damage done to mainland Europe in WW1 alone, Steve?
Heck, theyāre still digging up old shells today - every time they plough the freaking fields!
For the record, what I actually wrote above was:
āā¦but there was an island off the coast of Europe that was - to a degree - sheltered from this madness. Admittedly there were invasions: Romans, Vikings and Normans. But eventually we learned to build a navy (ā¦and then turn the tables by doing a spot of invading ourselves in various far flung parts of the world!)ā¦ā
The assertion that I said āā¦Britain didnāt participate in European warsā¦ā is therefore fake.
Yes fair enough.
By bait and switch, I meant criticizing anti-bank sentiment (most people donāt support their abolitiion) with criticism of the behavior of bankers themselves. Even then, your arguments were pretty solid and I had to come up with something.
In regards to Trump, I had fairly high expectations of him at first- he really did seem like he was going to shake things up. But he has backtracked on most of his campaign promises- no surprise really, the guy is a compulsive liar. Heās also shown himself to be incompetent- he doesnāt seem to have much idea what he is doing in terms of procedure and his lack of Government background is really showing showing imo.
Wrt prehistoric lifestyles- life would have been physically very difficult and dangerous, true. I will say, however, that their lifestyle was sustainable. Seriously, modern humans evolved around 200,000 years ago, and they managed to survive well enough without destroying the environment too much for the vast majority of that time.
Were at that point now where, at least I believe, we have a quite good chance of rendering the planet largely uninhabitable over the next few hundred years by some sort of means. Not to mention that we are probably living amongst a worldwide extinction event (its called the holocene extinction.)
You can say what you want about the climate change predictions, but I think there is at least some degree of truth to them and if it isnāt climate change, there is no doubt that there will be some other sort of issue that shows up in the hazy future. This isnāt my idea either, nor am I being nutty- Stephen Hawkings has said essentially the same thing, stating that humanity has around a thousand years to find a new planet.
FInally, Iāll add that although child mortality rates were high in āpre-historicā times, once people got past early childhood, their mortality rates dropped dramatically. Obviously there was no medical treatment of any kind and stuff like small infections or a broken bone could kill poeple, but they were a lot physically fitter as well- they didnāt do stuff like smoke, eat deep fried Oreos or sit in front of a TV all day- none are good for your health.
Look guys, I am also playing what is called the devilās advocate here. Iām sure Iād be much happier about banks if one of them gave me a job which pays 500k a year+ bonuses and gave me a new model BMW to drive as the company car 