On Oct 12, 3:00=A0pm, Del Cecchi <delcecchinospamoftheno...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
> Robert Myers wrote:
>
> Why do you think belief in free markets is religious? =A0Couldn't it be
> emperical, like belief in the "laws" of thermodynamics?
>
Most beliefs about human behavior are prejudice, superstition,
religion, or something similar. No one understands why humans behave
as they do and thus no one can possibly understand markets, which
involve humans making sometimes apparently irrational decisions.
No one understands economics, no one understands markets, no one
understands money. Nobel prizes (which aren't really Nobel prizes)
are being handed out for pure voodoo.
This is all kind of the human condition. We never know enough to
behave rationally because we never have all the information and
couldn't process it if we did. You would never know that to sit in a
business school classroom.
It's true, science had things like Boyle's law before it understood
the kinetic theory of gases, but such things can be tested with
controlled experiments. There is no such thing in economics. Markets
are entirely about belief. This belief has reached a level in the US
with neocons that is frightening. That they are delusional about what
can and cannot be understood or proven is bad enough. That I have to
listen to their abusive certainty makes me compare them to the street
evangelists who would harangue me if I let them. Not *only* that,
they will go off on tangents about "logic," about which they know
nothing. This is how religious zealots behave. None of it is
empirical and none of it can be proven. It works when it works and
(as we are seeing) it doesn't work when it doesn't work.
Your explanation for the current crisis is plausible, but it has the
fatal flaw that if the one "if only" hadn't happened (overconfidence
in rising housing prices), there would have been another. Markets
break. That's *my* empirical conclusion. Markets break because, in
the end, they depend on humans. Even if humans are smart in the
aggregate most of the time, there will always be times when the
collective wisdom fails disastrously, as we are now seeing.
Pseudo-economics has come to dominate the conversation here. You have
contributed to it. Up to a point, it's okay. I've been harangued and
abused by people whose chief credential is their self-certainty. The
future of democracy and free markets does not depend on AMD and x86,
and it's way past boring.
>
> >> As for " you need to put your IBM stuff away", I don't understand
what
> >> you are getting at. =A0Could you explain?
>
> > Sure. =A0The Intel jealousy among the IBM'er's here is just too plain.
> > IBM has sup****ted AMD in every way that it possibly can without
> > running afoul of the DOJ. =A0It's all pretty transparent. =A0Why do
you
> > need me to explain it to you?
>
> Actually over years of watching IBM and Intel I would come to the
> opposite conclusion. =A0IBM was very late in selling systems with AMD
> processors, even when it was clear they had some advantages over Intel.
> =A0 =A0 IBM built a considerable business in Intel based servers, and
> invested much more than they did on AMD systems.
>
As you pointed out yourself, IBM wisely sold customers what they
wanted to buy. I've talked at length here about why there is a big-
business bias toward Intel, just as there is a big business bias
toward IBM.
> > I admire IBM, otherwise I would have been excoriating in my criticism
> > of their behavior. =A0IBM protected Power by propping up AMD.
=A0That's
> > the IBM we all know and love. =A0Had IBM not done so very much to
atone
> > for those sins, I would be loathing IBM right along with AMD.
>
> Fantasy. =A0IBM helped AMD with fab projects and SOI, for which IBM
> received considerable money.
>
Forty-five million dollars. Chicken feed for the biggest coup in the
the microprocessor revolution. Without it, AMD was dead in its tracks
and Power was a dead duck right along with it.
<snip>
>
> Sorry for your pain.
>
I have no desire to inflict my discomfort on others. Lots of people
go through tough times. I just wanted let the haranguers know not to
bother wasting the bandwidth, because I just don't care.
Robert.
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