23 October 2008 @ 10:33 am
Doesn't grow on trees  
New Lunargyros page went up on Tuesday. Check it out, if you do desire!

Yesterday I also updated my art website.

Thinking about the economy, here's a little something I found enlightening:

A few days ago we had Florian come and visit us for the night. Florian is a foreign exchange student we had when I was...eleven, I think? He's German, and a sweet, very smart guy. Anyways, I'm sure he and my parents got to talking about the election and the economy. And Florian basically said, "America is so concerned about how the government will ruin the economy. But in Europe, we have all kinds of governments...places that are really conservative, countries that are more democratic, and ones that are socialist. But their economies are all doing poorly. It doesn't matter whether you're living in a purely democratic or a socialist nation...the economy's the same across all of them right now."

The moral of the story? It's Not All About America. There is no Promised Land where the economy works all the time, and there is no one government that can solve a global economic slump. Whether or not we have money to send our kids to college or buy that new Plasma TV is not based on how high our taxes are. It's based on what resources we have. That's all every economy has come down to, since someone invented the idea of money in the first place.

Urf. I feel like talking more about politics more now, except I also don't wanna drag the whole blog down with my kind-of-strong opinions. D: It's sort of nice leaving that stuff out and just keeping things about art and geekery? But at the same time...yeah, it's KIIIIINDA important. Maybe I will.


Back at the geekery...I'm on Day Seven in TWEWY (Shiki's week). Poor Shiki! ;o; Nice to see Neku finally coming out of his shell and realizing that it's important to reach out to Shiki, too.
Also, KILLER PENGUINS?!

Drawing: Finished an LG page, and I need to work a bit on Imaginative Landscapes stuff again.

Writing: Epic thread for the U.S.S. Intrepid! /o/
 
 
Current Music: The World Ends With You - Transformation
Current Mood: thoughtful
 
 
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[identity profile] piratetheskies.livejournal.com on October 23rd, 2008 06:56 pm (UTC)
Raina, on an RP journal, but yes, this is so very true.

This recession isn't just America, and right now, I read that the values of other currencies are taking a sharp plummet. Enough to make our dollar look strong.
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[identity profile] tafkae.livejournal.com on October 23rd, 2008 10:04 pm (UTC)
Wait'll you see the elephants.
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[identity profile] pinkchan.livejournal.com on October 24th, 2008 03:06 am (UTC)
Sorry to play the devil's advocate here, but yes, actually, it is all about America. The lack of government regulation in America's financial market has allowed the banks here to inflate the world's economy with imaginary money, and we are now experiencing the biggest market in the world crashing, which has led to mass panic around the globe in investors, who are liquidating their other assets for more traditionally strong assets (US currency and gold). I feel it's incorrect to say, after our government has let everything spin out of control, that now that it is out of the control of any government, that means no government had any power to stop this at all.

Economy is based on what resources we have. Which is precisely why the government needs to ensure how those resources are valued is accurate, and that no few people can artificially inflate the value of those resources for the sake of short-term profit at the cost of long-term economic stability. Which is precisely what happened- regulation on real estate and mortgage finance dropped, allowing for people to pay more money (that they will have in the future) for homes, driving home prices up, allowing more people to buy homes by putting the future value of that (worth a lot of money in the future because people in the future will pay more money with money they have from the future) as collateral, meaning there was a lot of money that did not exist because the government did not step in to say "hey stop basing the value of everything on money that doesn't even exist yet".

So I think the idea that "well everything is bad everywhere so that means no one place had anything to do with it" is slightly ridiculous. There is always a cause to every effect, and I think almost any economist would put the blame for this effect squarely on America's government deregulation.
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