Do unspeakable things with a spoon to Zero Hedge

[gnosticheresy_2]

They post some interesting financial information about things that you won't find much in the mainstream financial press. However, the tone is that of the crayon scribblings of a deranged libertarian child. Vis:

All gummint is bad. All of it. Every single intsy-wintsy tiny bit of gummint is a parasitical socialist cancer on the face of good ol hard working financiers who would easily be able to sort out our current mess if the dead socialist hand of socialist gummint regulation was lifted from every sector of society. That nice old lady in the post office who weighs your parcels for you? Fucking socialist bloodsucker who kills babies for fun. The lollipop man?* A festering pustule of socialist ineptitude kept in pies and gravy by OUR TAXES.

All welfare is bad. All of it. All unemployment could instantly be solved by prising the socialist lips of the lazy socialist parasite poor from the teat of big gummint and letting them "sink" or "swim" on their own. Benefits to help young mothers and babies? It's a slippery slope I tell you! Giving money to babies only encourages a "culture of dependency" where people elect to stay poor and die early as they're too fat and lazy to get one of the millions of jobs that are out there. And also babies tend to just eat the money that you give them so we must end this horrific socialist hangover from the socialist days of most of the last socialist century and stop subsidising the lazy smelly socialist poor with OUR TAXES.

Workers rights are bad. All of them. Giving rights to workers is the unaccaptable face of big socialist gummint intrusion into the pristine workings of free market capitalism. Things like health and safety legislation and the right to strike only hinder the creation of wealth that benefits us all. Only once the dead socialist hand of socialist gummint regulation is lifted can we be free to grind another half percentage point of productivity out of the workforce for the greater good! I mean for the good of the ownership class! Who will spend their profits on, er...things.....investment...er...TAXES...<collapses in a heap drooling>

I mean really, this is subtext to virtually every single article that they post. It's annoying because the underlying info is interesting and very relevent at the moment. Things like HFT and capital outflows from the stock market I wasn't previously aware of, but to get there I have to wade through acres of childish bullshit. For example, they get the regulatory capture of the institutions who are supposedly there to regulate the financial industry, but there's zero awareness that the free market capitalism they think is so great is the thing that leads to that situation. Regulatory capture, high level corruption, market rigging, they aren't bugs, they're features.

And again, when the talk turns to gummint spending and taxation, apparently spending cuts are necessary because the gummint has been splashing cash around like there's no tomorrow and not because the tax base of the economy has been totally skewed so the rich and the corporations pay next to nothing. There just doesn't seem to be any joined up thinking going on and it's a pity because the news they focus on is good and needs a wider audience.

(Also their comments are approaching Youtube levels of retard. Plus also anyone who takes the name "Tyler Durden" as an internet nom de plume you just know is some weedy nerd with delusions of macho grandeur).


*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lollipop_man

edited to remove naughty word from title

[barracuda]

gnostic, please change your subject line to reflect the posting guidelines.

Also, could you cite some examples?

[vanlose kid]

@ gnostic

in a way i think "Tyler Durden" and at least two other ZH readers would agree with you.

i know i do.

cheers.

*

[JackRiddler]

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How was I going to resist assimilating this into the Wall Street thread? O miraculous quote function!

vk: In what way do you think TD and Co. would agree with the original proposition, Fuck Zero Hedge, and the accompanying argument by gh?

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[Luther Blissett]

I thought it was a grand satire?

I have respect for Zero Hedge.

[vanlose kid]

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How was I going to resist assimilating this into the Wall Street thread? O miraculous quote function!

vk: In what way do you think TD and Co. would agree with the original proposition, Fuck Zero Hedge, and the accompanying argument by gh?

.

well. i think they'd agree with the characteristic in the OP, maybe not the wording, though i don't think it'd bother them any, seeing the kind of stick they get in their comments. i think they are "liberatairians" in the capitalist mode, not that they're hiding this.

i've seen TD junked for being too soft on the poor and mortgage frauded, and naive re what the people brought to Tahrir, and worse.

re the org prop, TD'd probably say: you don't agree, fair enough.

what one should remember is that TD and some of the more sympathetic voices on there like CogDis have been on a learning curve. you can see it if you go back to their blogspot days.

you can even see it here among us. i'm all for learning curves.

another thing ZH is not some monolithic thing or movement, and they certainly aren't the solution. nor do they pretend to be.

*

[gnosticheresy_2]

gnostic, please change your subject line to reflect the posting guidelines.

Also, could you cite some examples?

My apologies, title amended.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/cuts-kill

The President’s budget is a joke. If we follow that path of trillion dollar deficits we won’t make it another five years without an explosion. A big one.

There is no way we can avoid that fate unless Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the military come on the table.

Oh really? "No way" at all?

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/we-can ... cy-are-hel

...The state of emergency we've been living under for the past 10 years has interfered with the free markets. Political decisions determine who gets bailed out and who doesn't, who stays afloat and who goes under, who gets rewarded and who gets prosecuted (and if prosecuted, who gets hit hard and who gets off with a slap on the wrist ... or a slap on the back)

...Therefore, if enough of us speak out against the ongoing lies, we may have some chance of helping the economy and reinstating some semblance of a free market ... which would help increase the value of our money, and make investing simpler

A free market pill for every ill.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/who-re ... tics-claim

For example, wouldn't it make more sense to decreases taxes on "the poor" so they would be able to keep more of their $ rather than giving it to the Government to waste on a grossly-inefficient bureaucracy with a questionable (if not downright poor) track-record of allocating capital efficiently?

Yes it probably would, it might also make sense to stop reflexively referring to "government bureaucracy" as inefficient.

Here's what's certain: Over the past 20 years (well, '86-'07), GDP has increased 3.02%/year and has been positive for every year except once, in 1991, and even then, it was only -0.23%. Meanwhile, average tax rates for the top 1%, 10%, and 25% have gone down on average 1.64%, 0.79%, and 0.67% respectively over this period.

Chew on that: When we cut taxes, we experienced significant economic growth, +87% GDP from 1986-2007. Many have argued that this # would be even higher if "The Rich" (usually arbitrarily defined as those who make more than $200,000 or $250,000) were taxed more heavily based on comparisons to prior periods when taxes and GDP growth were higher. Most of these comparisons are false, in that they ignore fundamental shifts in reality. Our economy, population, and relative standing in the world today (to say nothing of any # of other variables) is NOTHING like it was generations ago, so any fair comparison would have to somehow adjust for this, and I'm not entirely sure that's even possible (or how one would go about doing so if it were).

And who got the lions share of this lovely GDP increase? Maybe we should tax the shit out of them and give it to the poor. Oh wait we can't because in magic fairy ZH land there have been some "fundamental shifts in reality" and you can't even imagine whether it would be possible to tax the rich.

Comment from this:

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/guest- ... radictions

This is government capture of a democracy. There are so many people entirely dependent on and beholden to government largesse, that this single block of people vote always for the (or one of the) "government party(/ies)," whatever they happen to call themselves. In a parliamentary system, this yields a permanent majority for left of center and leftoide parties to such a degree that the moderate right ends up looking extreme.

The conservatives aren't any such thing in most such places on the planet, and even the "extreme right" parties are actually just statist, socialist parties with a nationalistic or xenophobic flair. Those fringe views exclude the moderate right from making coalitions with them, and it is probably just as well because the so called far right parties are also just big government parties.

This phenomenon is of course not limited to Europe. California is already there. It is run by the government for the government, so large and so coddled have become the mass of state employees and their objective allies the permanent welfare class.

California is like Europe apparently and all state employees (I'M LOOKING AT YOU LOLLIPOP PEOPLE) are coddled, very very coddled.

This is just 20 minutes work searching for one word ("welfare") on ZH. It's not like I'm having to try very hard to get material to make a case that the editorial policy is totally skewed towards a libertarian "free markets are always good" philosophy.

[JackRiddler]

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Yeah, of all libertarian arguments advanced about the capitalist system, by which state and all other institutions of power redistribute wealth to the rich, the one that really pisses me off the most is this bit about how the government has learned to coddle its voters, the workers! A $2.6 trillion Social Security tax surplus was taken out of them over the last 30 years and thrown into wars for empire and welfare for the corporate rich, but now they expect to see their own money collected for social security actually be paid back into social security! The noive of these entitled, coddled worker-bees!

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[gnosticheresy_2]

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How was I going to resist assimilating this into the Wall Street thread? O miraculous quote function!

vk: In what way do you think TD and Co. would agree with the original proposition, Fuck Zero Hedge, and the accompanying argument by gh?

.

well. i think they'd agree with the characteristic in the OP, maybe not the wording, though i don't think it'd bother them any, seeing the kind of stick they get in their comments. i think they are "liberatairians" in the capitalist mode, not that they're hiding this.

i've seen TD junked for being too soft on the poor and mortgage frauded, and naive re what the people brought to Tahrir, and worse.

re the org prop, TD'd probably say: you don't agree, fair enough.

what one should remember is that TD and some of the more sympathetic voices on there like CogDis have been on a learning curve. you can see it if you go back to their blogspot days.

you can even see it here among us. i'm all for learning curves.

another thing ZH is not some monolithic thing or movement, and they certainly aren't the solution. nor do they pretend to be.

*

The entire thrust of the site is free markets are the solution but the reason they aren't working is because they've never been implemented properly. It's the exact same argument that socialists use about socialism.

I wouldn't be that arsed except that ZH is so ubiquitous now, quoted and cited here there and everywhere especially on alt/underground/whatever-you-want-to-call-it sites like RI (it was even cited by the Guardian recently so it's got some readership clout). Yes it's just one point of view as you rightly point out, but it seems to be the only point of view that anyone cites and it's getting annoying.

[nathan28]

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How was I going to resist assimilating this into the Wall Street thread? O miraculous quote function!

vk: In what way do you think TD and Co. would agree with the original proposition, Fuck Zero Hedge, and the accompanying argument by gh?

.

well. i think they'd agree with the characteristic in the OP, maybe not the wording, though i don't think it'd bother them any, seeing the kind of stick they get in their comments. i think they are "liberatairians" in the capitalist mode, not that they're hiding this.

i've seen TD junked for being too soft on the poor and mortgage frauded, and naive re what the people brought to Tahrir, and worse.

re the org prop, TD'd probably say: you don't agree, fair enough.

what one should remember is that TD and some of the more sympathetic voices on there like CogDis have been on a learning curve. you can see it if you go back to their blogspot days.

you can even see it here among us. i'm all for learning curves.

another thing ZH is not some monolithic thing or movement, and they certainly aren't the solution. nor do they pretend to be.

*

The entire thrust of the site is free markets are the solution but the reason they aren't working is because they've never been implemented properly. It's the exact same argument that socialists use about socialism.

I wouldn't be that arsed except that ZH is so ubiquitous now, quoted and cited here there and everywhere especially on alt/underground/whatever-you-want-to-call-it sites like RI (it was even cited by the Guardian recently so it's got some readership clout). Yes it's just one point of view as you rightly point out, but it seems to be the only point of view that anyone cites and it's getting annoying.

When I used to follow finance/business news closely most of the sources I used were libertarians, gold bugs and Austrian school types. They are some of the only mainstream contrarian market observers, unfortunately. Part of it seems to be that the libertarians' obsession with the Fed leads to them actually reading the Fed releases and notes, which are helpful for understanding how volatile the markets are going to be allowed to be in the next week or so, as well as real inflation. Left-liberals like Stiglitz and Reich (and Krugman, if he counts) are usually too busy make big-picture points to get into finer topical details, and Marxist sources tend to look at a fairly small set of more sociological data, like employment, wages and productivity, which are interesting and really more important but as far as being "news" for getting a grasp on the current moment in business and finance usually not too helpful.

To be honest at this point in my life I don't think Americans are going to give up any time soon on the utopian dream of ethnically-cleansed small-town petty-bourgeois capitalism, underwritten by the gold standard, parks designed to look like depopulated (see above re: ethnic cleansing) 19th century academic paintings and Protestantism in the guise of the New Age.* At the same time they're still going to tell pollsters that they prefer social security to military adventurism. So what I mean to say is that "Tyler Durden" and Catherine Fitts etc. are going to be pounding the table for paleocon populism for a while, and they're going to be the ones providing the bulk of the "alternative" news on markets.

Of course, I would be happy to be wrong about all of this.

*But maybe not, if the soon-to-be Latino majority decides they aren't into that snotty Ivy League white boy Transcendentalist crap. Next up: Max Keiser to start wearing country-western shirts and burning Santa Muerte prayer candles.

[coffin_dodger]

Whenever I visit ZH these days, my PC slows down to a crawl. I know it's a 'busy' site - not only in visitor terms but also stuff crammed on to each page. Anyhoo, there's a little widget add-on for Firefox called Ghostery, that counts and displays the tracker content on any page from the web. Very easy to install - and quite enlightening:



85 trackers on a single page at ZH.


P.S. 0 at RI

[Nordic]

What is "tracker content"?

[Wombaticus Rex]

What is "tracker content"?

Software would be a better noun than content, which after all, is rightful ruler of any domain -- a veritable King, if you will.

Ghostery is a very imformative plugin: you can basically watch who is watching you. Spoiler Alert ... 85 separate tracking scripts is far from world record material.

Edit: As per Zero Hedge's content, certainly, thinking mammals with any grounding in reality, let alone economics, will find much cause for despair there any given day. That's inevitable given the sheer traffic and demand for content - there's no room for editorial control and every incentive to pile on the posts.

More importantly, though, there are strategic considerations that need to be taken into account. You can't expect Wall Street insiders to shoot straight and make things easy to parse -- there have every incentive to do the very opposite. A wealth of ideological trash and "contrary indicators" is good camouflage, and necessary. It's also protection. All that noise in the signal prevents them from being taken seriously enough to be recognized as a threat.

Which they are. Even august institutions like Financial Times have admitted on dozens of occasions in recent years that ZH was the original source for very serious scoops.

Similar theories have been floated about Mr. Icke, of course.

It's one thing to talk about The Truth as a consumer, but until you've taken on the risks of being a distributor...

[Nordic]

So ... Does this mean that 85 places are tracking the content of zerohedge, or does it mean that 85 entities are spying on zerohedge users, or does it me that zerohedge is allowing (through a financial deal) to spy on the users of the site?

Yes I'm a digital Luddite.

[Wombaticus Rex]

So ... Does this mean that 85 places are tracking the content of zerohedge, or does it mean that 85 entities are spying on zerohedge users, or does it me that zerohedge is allowing (through a financial deal) to spy on the users of the site?

Yes I'm a digital Luddite.

As someone who runs a lot of sites (and hates it) - very few of the tracking scripts that show up associated with any given website are actually being aimed at your browser by those who administrate it. Generally, they're just using Google Analytics, that's the Urchin script, a classic and easy to spot.

Most of the scripts are from third party advertisements, which can contain up to 20 (seriously) embedded scripts, usually courtesy of fourth party sources. Which is to say, advertisers not only make money off the actual advertisements, they make additional income on the back end by letting other companies "ride" on their placements and gather demographic data. I know people who run operations that are a small-scale NSA and don't actually deal with advertisements at all; they're just paying for other access to what other contractors do.

And a lot of them are basically STD's you carried along from Amazon, Facebook, Gmail, etc. They're always watching what you do, they never got your permission, and the law says Fuck You, Little Dude. It ain't a crime; just business.