Moonbox

The comments are well-deserved and the CAW has no credibility. Very few tears were shed when the CAW workers, earning $30/labour hour more than their well-paid Toyota counterparts, started losing jobs. The wages were completely unjustifiable, especially considering how lousy the cars were that they made. Saying things like the quality of the cars is management's responsibility shows, once again, how ignorant you are on the subject of running a business. Here you are again, however, flapping your mouth and gabbing about things you don't understand. Let's do some simple math okay? Suppose you have two companies making nearly identical cars. Suppose also the equation for the cost of making a car is: Labour + Raw Materials = Cost One company's costs are $1000 (for labour) + 1000 (for raw materials) = $2000 The other company's are: $2000 (for labour) + 1000 (for raw materials) = $3000 When both of these cars end up in dealerships, which do you think is going to do better? The first company can sell the same car for $2700 and earn a $700 profit and a 35% margin. The second company would have to sell for $3700 to earn the same profit but only realize a 23% margin. The second company is in a position that makes it IMPOSSIBLE for them to compete in terms of value. Part of this IS management's fault for allowing it to go on as long as it did and not recognizing the market was getting fed up with their overpriced cars and overpaid employees, but the militant CAW forced them into the corner and refused to make concessions when their greed came back and bit them in the ass. Lucky for them that the government came in to help, because I would have let their pension plans vanish. The hundreds of millions the UAW spent on Obama's campaign really paid off for them, and the CAW rode that wave.

It's also possible to load your garbage into rockets and send them into the sun. Problem is it's kind of expensive. I'll leave you on the point and maybe you can follow the logic through.

I'm not sure what's going on here. I was agreeing with Argus' point, but it seems like we're all agreeing now or something...

Like he said, you attack in places of strength if you don't like winning. If you REALLY don't like winning, you attack a place of strength (fortified beach) from a position of weakness with (amphibious assault) with a tiny token force that had no chance to succeed in the first place. That was Dieppe. Churchill himself stated in his memoirs that the raid was meant to appease Allied generals and to show Stalin that they were 'trying'. Allied command refused to even start planning the inevitable D-Day invasion until they knew how a modern amphibious assault would work, and lucky for Canada we got to be the guinea pigs.

okay that's just funny. Nuclear plasma borers...just wow. I'm trying to think of a more cost-prohibitive way of doing this...but I can't.

Oh good. It's alright guys login doesn't 'think' Bernardo is dangerous. Nevermind the serial killing and the fact that he's diabolically smart. login 'thinks' he's actually an alright and misunderstood guy... For someone guilty of Bernardo's crime, he'd have to be monitored 24/7. If ever released (he shouldn't be), a re-offense would mean the person who let him out would be fried by the judicial system, the media and the public. It isn't going to happen and it shouldn't. I think this guy falls into 'tinfoil hat' category. We didn't see the video ourselves so we can't be sure. We weren't there with Neil Armstrong so we can't know if the lunar landings were real. The Sun isn't actually the centre of the solar system...

Derek why is this news? Dropping a bomb from a plane might have been news 100 years ago, but not today.

You know how dumb that sounds? Here, let me try to get down to your level: No you go back and read what I wrote about what you wrote about what I wrote about what you wrote. There's really no point in discussing this with you further. I'll leave you on that note, but I'm sure everyone's eagerly awaiting your clever grade 3 school yard response.

Misquote you? That's no misquote buddy. This is just you back peddling now. *sigh*. Go back to my last quotation of you. What on earth does consumer confidence have to do with calculating GDP? (Hint: Nothing).

That doesn't even make sense. Your problem wasn't a matter of which method you use or which way you add, it was a completely false statement about GDP in general. Saying things like: "It (GDP) is just a number that represents how much money changed hands in that country." is so fundamentally wrong in the context of GDP that if you had a proper understanding of the term you wouldn't have said it. If we're to take your definition, ie, how much money changes hands, for a manufactured good let's say, you'd be looking at simplified example like this: Money spent on raw materials, money spent on building parts, money spent to assemble the final product. The price to assemble the final product includes the cost of buying the parts, which in itself includes the cost of buying raw materials. You don't add these all up. Doing so gives you a heavily inflated value of what was produced. The only number that counts is the cost of the final product. Okay. Go back to your original statement: Please tell me how consumer confidence is factored into the measurement...

You're absolutely right about that part, and in terms of your argument with CPC FTW and WWWTT you certainly held the higher ground. My original criticism on THAT part of the discussion was quoting a boneheaded post by WWWTT explaining what he thought GDP was: "GDP is mainly generated by consumers and consumer confidence." For some reason, when I told he had no clue, you quoted me back and said, "GDP is all the spending that takes place in a nation." which is also false, and it still doesn't look like you understand why. GDP is not simply national spending, as you stated. Only spending on end-user goods and services within the country are part of the equation. Linking how the expenditure approach is calculated does not equate to an understanding of the subject either.

The power of collective bargaining was neutered with NAFTA and the opening of trade with Asia. Unless we want to put trade restrictions on goods from abroad, which is the only thing that will make Canadian menial labour competitive, all collective bargaining is going to do is put companies out of business and, in the case of public sector unions, create negative publicity. Personally, I'm not all that upset about it. I'm quite happy that I'm able to buy a decent car that will reliably last me 10-15 years, because that was impossible before Toyota and Honda got a foothold in the market. All those awesome wages and benefits the employees of the Big Three got were great for them, I'm sure, but the protectionism that allowed this also left the average consumer with the choice of buying a shitty, unreliable car from one of three inefficient manufacturers with overpaid employees. When people are talking about how aweful it is that the middle class is shrinking, they forget that foreign competition has made goods cheaper, more competitive and all around better for everyone . I'll admit that I think the government could do a little bit more to ensure more fair trading arrangements with our Asian partners, and perhaps higher minium wages etc, but unions are certainly not the answer to these problems. There's a reason they're only doing well in public sector monopolies and protected industries. They take advantage of it.

Sure thing. Everything italicized there is wrong. You said you're referring to the expenditure approach, which is fine, but you're still completely wrong about how it's calculated. Pick whatever method you want, but you still only calculate the cost of final goods and services produced. If you add all of the spending, like you suggested, you're double counting everything, or worse. When you calculate the GDP value for Bombardier jet for example, you're only counting how much it finally cost for Bombardier to assemble and build the jet. You're not adding the original raw material cost, the cost to produce parts AND the final cost of the jet, because that's already all factored in to the final cost. Saying: shows you don't really understand the term. That's fine. Most people don't. Just acknowledge it and move on though. Don't go google the definition and come back like you did here: because you're still misinterpreting it and it looks silly.

First off, you didn't know what GDP meant, nor did punked. You made this VERY clear by your previous posts. What you might find funny, however, is that CPC FTW doesn't understand it very well either, which is really funny because he's sniping at you for it.

That's something that you and I have agreed on for a long time. When I follow American election campaigns, I lose more and more faith in the human race. You only need to watch an American election campaign to see passionately people defend the right to be sodomized by the upper class.

You're getting confused. I said that the REAL unemployment numbers ended up being higher than the estimated unemployment based on ZERO stimulus. To be clear, they estimated what unemployment would look like assuming they spent NOTHING on stimulus. As it turned out, that worst-case unemployment scenario was nowhere near as bad as the actual unemployment numbers ended up being, which makes it next to impossible to evaluate how effective the spending was. punked that REALLY not what GDP is. You're right that private/public doesn't really matter, but please look up the definition of GDP for future arguments' sake. It's silly to argue to use terms you don't even have a basic understanding of.

lol. You have no clue what GDP is.

Wait...MY Conservative government? I have no love for Harper or the Conservatives and have very little faith in them. You'll notice the only praise I've offered in this thread has been for Paul Martin (a Liberal). Right now, however, I'm more confident in the Conservatives than our goofball opposition, which is sad. At any rate, the estimates for stimulus results are less than accurate. In fact, they're completely unreliable. Take the US for example. The economists predicted a certain number of jobs would be lost without stimulus, and what unemployment would look like WITH stimulus. As it turns out, unemployment WITH stimulus ended up being far higher than their original predictions WITHOUT stimulus. With no baseline number to work with, it's next to impossible to estimate how many jobs were created by all that money. Certainly some, but the numbers are wild guesses. As far as we or the economists know, the stimulus could have been a huge waste or a huge success. At least with infrastructure spending, however, we know that this money would have had to be spent at SOME point. Spending it during a recession is better optics though.

The financial collapse snowballed into a system-wide recession. One was the catalyst for the other and continued to drag the entire economy down with it. The auto bailout was necessary and was Obama's baby. Canada merely followed suit and even the Marijuana Party would have followed Obama's lead there. As for the stimulus spending, most of the spending was on infrastructure and the recovery in Canada started before shovels were even in the ground for a lot of the projects. The mere suggestion that our heroic Opposition saved us from economic collapse, however, is pretty rich. I'm not saying that Harper/Flaherty did either either. Paul Martin's conservatism and insistance on financial regulation saved us from European/American style recession. A monkey could have been steering the ship in 2008 and we would have come out about as well as we did.

punked you obviously don't have a sweet f'n clue what saved us during the recession. That strong opposition you're referring to was about as neutered as an opposition can be. The Liberals were so paralyzed by fear and the NDP too small to be relevant. The only thing that saved us from a banking collapse was Chretien and Martin's resistance to financial mergers and deregulation in the 1990's. The Conservatives certainly can't take credit for that, but neither can the practically non-existant opposition, who the Conservatives pretty much had their way with prior to the last election.

punked that's a whole other problem altogether. Protecting private industries from competition while at the same time allowing them to rip off consumers (like our telecoms) is one of the worst possible ways of doing things.

The nice thing about corporations, especially in a competitive environment, is that long term incompetence is unsustainable. Privately, it most certainly is and we see it regularly. A lot of the time, however, this is not due to any inefficiencies in the private model vs the public model, but rather due to the fact that the corporation isn't going to endlessly underwrite huge losses year after year, like Ontario Hydro did. 7-10% of your energy bill here is spent paying back the debt the public company accumulated over 14 years ago prior to privitization.... I think that's more fact than anything. These countries, however, are small, homogenized (by race, climate, background etc) and are far from the paradises that they're popularly made out to be.

Given Enbridge's track record I'd be very wary of taking risks with minimal economic benefit myself as well. I'd be nice to see oil being refined in Canada but I think BC'ers need to make the decision themselves.

please delete

Not just for the military. This is true for everything the government does. It might look great on paper balancing the budget, but sometimes this comes at the cost of crumbling infrastructure which ends up being even more expensive when it finally can't wait any longer. Flaherty's brilliant magic selling off the 407 is a good example of this type of thinking. Chretien with the Canadian military in the 1990's is another.