Second, you've mistake my post for a rant. Alright, fine. I wasn't particularly emotional when I wrote the first post, nor was I attacking anyone, but I can see how it falls into the definition of rant. Set your sights on another point.
Ah/., where it's normal to not know the difference between argument and insult, or at least fassionable to pretend that's the case (see, I can do it too - this must make me cool!).
The implication here that individuals (reinforced in the next paragraph) invest credit into businesses is generally false.
It's false today. From my (limited, I admit) contact with history and with those that were alive 70-80 years ago I don't believe this has always been the case.
Haven't you heard of individuals starting their own businesses on credit? The stock market isn't the only type of investment in existence. Home improvements are an investment which you cash in on by selling the house at a proffit. So is higher education which (hopefully) leads to higher future income. I'll generalize it for anyone that hasn't caught on yet: using money in some way that earns or improves your capacity to earn money could be called an investment. Granted it's not "investment" if you're the kind that believes that investing equals buying shares, period - so let me rephrase what I said. Change "funnelled into investment" to "funnelled into productive activities" and read it again. See if it makes sense.
It's the businesses themselves that obtain credit and invest as capital historically.
In a society that's bases its values on working hard and producing value for the individual's (and that individual's family's) future the difference between said individual and his work is somewhat less defined than it is today. In such a society individuals pour their efforts and assets into productive business-like activities. Also refer to the concept of a proprietorship or to simple partnerships - often the precursor to corporations.
Not really. But not everyone subscribes to all of Keynesian economics. The last paragraph even says as much:
Non-Keynesian economists criticize this theory on two grounds. First, if demand slackens and prices fall, the resulting lower price will stimulate demand, which tends to limit the decline in demand. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, "savings" represent loanable funds; an increase in the supply of loanable funds tends to lower interest rates and stimulate borrowing, so a decline in consumable goods with a short time horizon is offset by an increase in production in sectors with longer time horizons. For example, the demand for personal electronics might decline, but the demand for such things as real estate would be stimulated by favorable borrowing conditions.
And before someone argues that today's cheap credit must be due to excessive saving in the past (this leaving the banks with large heaps of money to loan out) it might be a good idea to take a look at the Fed's (this is probably true of most western central banks - especially those belonging to nations that have gone to war recently) inflationary policies. There's nothing wrong with credit that's backed by work that's already been done. There's a lot wrong with credit that's created by central banks printing obscene amounts of money and handing it to business and consumer banks who then loan it into circulation. Historically that's what the US (and western nations in general, I suppose) have been doing in recent years.
I should however point out that massive outsourcing is a modern phenomena - and thus cannot be part of a 'repeating cycle'. (I.E. another false premise.)
I'm glad you caught that, but also saddened that you didn't then immediately realize outsoursing is just one of imperialism's (which in terms of economics is the subjugation of foreign lands for the purpose of stimulating the domestic economy) various incarnations. In the past stron
We pretty much bend over and do whatever your government says because A) we have no military to protect ourselves, B) our economy is chained to yours, and C) our Prime Minister seems pretty into the whole NAFTA/SPP thing - so there may not be much of a distinction in the near future.
Maybe try the EU, or Australia. Oh, wait, they have problems too...
I, too, am the only one I know who writes decent code. I used to think that way. And then this one time I ran across some really beautiful code out on the net that I (eventually) had to admit I hadn't written.
Coming to that realization was the hardest thing I've ever had to do.
That reminds me of a random friend from high school that got pissed at me because I wouldn't help him fix a bug. In his defense, I did owe him money (and he was willing to take help in exchange for the debt) but after seeing this at the top of his "common.h" file I figured I'd just give him the cash and save myself some pain.
#define begin { #define end } #define and & #define or | #define not ! //etc
In retrospect I should probably have just stripped out the system includes and run his code through a preprocessor before trying to read it, but that didn't occur to me at the time (probably because I was too busy being horrified).
How do you sanely react to a group of people who believe they will gain exaltation if they die in the act of killing as many of you as possible? If they're locals you find them, arrest them, and commit them to mental health institutions (or kill them, if that's what the courts decide). If they're foreigners, well, how about simply securing your borders? If someone's trying to smuggle a nuke into your country so they can blow one of your cities up, wouldn't you want to put your soldiers in their path, as opposed to the place they just left to come where you are?
Another sane thought: since this is a time of conflict it makes sense to get the economy as stable and productive as possible - not only to fund the new security measures but also so that you can stockpile supplies in case of a future crisis. Compromising your intelligence agencies by putting them under the burden of a massive new beurocracy and then randomly outing their agents is insane. As is pissing off a big chunk of your working class by spying on them to compensate for your mismanagement of national security.
Starting a war that kills thousands and leaves millions with even less than the nothing they had before would be the insane course of action. Doing that just replaces a few dozen fanatics with something to gain with a few hundred fanatics with something to gain and a few million angry (but otherwise ordinary) people that will hate you, and teach their children to hate you - all of whom have very little to lose by trying to see you dead. And if things get bad enough and anger turns into despair then you have a few million people turning, naturally, to the most extreme sects within their religion (because those are usually the ones that promise good things to come in the afterlife).
The thing I really don't like about your question is that it implies that sane people cannot deal with lunatics without becoming insane in the process, which simply isn't the case - though if we take that premise to be true then doing the stupendously irrational thing makes sense, in a nonsensical sort of way.
You've got a point there, but it doesn't justify the idiotic overreaction we've seen.
Some guys with box cutters hijack some planes and smash them into buildings, killing thousands. Terrible tragedy, I agree, very much unlike random highway accidents. But that doesn't mean that the proper reaction to this is a direct attack on what's left of the values that made this a great culture instead of, say, securing the cockpit with a sturdy, lockable door.
From that perspective it makes sense to compare it to accidents. We usually react sanely to accidents by simply developing better safety mechanisms that directly address the actual things we've seen go wrong. That's quite unlike having some central authority prevent us from ever doing (or thinking or speaking speaking about) anything that might be unsafe (like, say, existing) ever again just because someone slipped on an icy sidewalk and died.
And you could argue that I don't know what I'm talking about because we're moving towards an overly safety-obsessed culture anyway, but that's the result of being a society that sues too much. If you and your buddies want to go out and do dangerous things in the middle of a field where you can't hurt anyone but yourselves, the police aren't going to rush over to stop you. Not at all the same as being constantly spied on and arrested if the watchers see something they don't like, and then being denied due process.
Ignoring your inability to write, you (badly) make some points I'd like to address:
Those who have no debt have no interest payments, meaning they have more money to spend on the actual things they want to buy.
When you've paid off your mortgage you'll still be paying your property taxes. And when the ceiling leaks you're going to have to get off your ass and fix it yourself.
If you sell your house before you've paid your mortgage you'll pay the bank a huge early repayment fee, in addition to the fee you paid the real estate broker. Also, you can't sell a house and make a proffit unless you A) live in a smaller house until the market comes down, B) buy a crappy house and fix it up (thus putting in all the money you'll be "making" on the sale), C) have connections that can get you a new house at cost, or something along those lines.
If you rent out your house and the renters decide they don't like you and move out then you'll have to work to pay the mortgage on your rental property, and the mortgage on wherever you happen to be living. If the bank's computers mess up and start taking double-payments on your mortgage, or they don't recognize the insurance company you'd like to insure your house with, or if the bank starts being a pain in general you can't just buy a new house, and sell the old one, and move, and say "to hell with you - I'm a consumer and I have a choice here"...it's a little more complicated than that when you have a mortgage.
And in most places I've lived, local laws protect tennants against idiot landlords - except when the landlord is a bank and the rental agreement is called a mortgage.
If there's a recession the rental rates will go down, but your mortgage payments will go up because interest rates usually rise during a recession. Payment locked down for five years? Well, you still have to worry because recessions can last a decade or more.
And please don't give me the "I'm free to do as I will with my house that I own whereas you can't have X or Y on the premises" bullshit. The market's as good at providing rental units that permit X and Y as the government is at requiring (often expensive) permits for W and Z.
The only place the above really breaks down is in areas where the real estate market is under such high demand that renting is more expensive than buying - but that's ridiculously rare and in any case it's still a bad time to buy a house because its value is at a peak.
Socialism's principal idea is that all men are equal...Thin the herd of the 'successful' and encourage the low end of the curve to increase until everyone is more 'equal.' Having been born in the old Soviet Bloc I don't particularly agree with that statement. The communist (and communism is about as socialist as you can get, IMHO) revolution directly hurt the useless, corrupt people that had power before the revolution (yes, Stalin was evil, but let's not go calling the Tzar a saint - that's just stupid) and only temporarily hurt the "successful", as you call them. In fact, after the initial chaos, they focused quite heavily on finding, educating, and harnessing the potential of anyone that was smart/strong/fast/good in some way. Exceptional people did quite well (relative to the norm) because they got the nicer homes, the better jobs, and prestige second only to the actual leaders of the Communist Party (who's prestige wasn't worth very much on the street) - all of which make for a better chance of reproducing.
The problem wasn't the ellimination of the "successful", it was the fact that no matter how good your genes are there's only so much you can do in a society as utterly demoralizing and depressing as old communism.
I don't think it's a conspiracy against exceptional people - it's just the rule of the ignorant. It's the fact that 80+% of the western world's wealth is in the hands of people that were born multi-billionairs who really don't understand the mechanisms by which that wealth was created except in a theoretical, "I read about it in Running the World - For Dummies" sort of way.
At the first sign of domestic turmoil (which does impact the bottom line) they outsource everything to cut costs. And when people lose their jobs, become poor, start hating them, and generally not being as productive as they should be, they panic.
But they don't connect laying off the locals to all the locals suddenly being poor (they've been rich for as long as they've lived - what do they know about working for a living, as opposed to having others work to make you a proffit?) so they act in the only way they understand - as if the nation is just another corporation. They run to government and set up a benefits package (socialist programs) and some random quotas (government regulation) and think "disaster averted, well done me". Except that the benefits package doesn't come out of people's proffits, it gets taxed out of their grocery budget so nothing is fixed at all. And to make matters worse the administrators of their shiny new government institutions find they have all sorts of power - and playing with power is just so much fun...how could anyone resist using it to better the world in their own little way?
What's the next thing you do to save a failing business? You get a loan and use the extra cash to stimulate it back into proffitability. So they go to their buddies at the central bank and get them to print up a bunch of new money which they loan into the economy. Inflation then rapidly exceeds the rate at which wages increase and guess what, nothing gets fixed that way either.
After this come the creative accounting tricks. Speaking of which, since when were food and energy a bad way to measure inflation? You'd think that the two most essential items in any economy would sort of be at the core of that little equation.
And finally, if things get really bad, they say "screw it", take everyon's pension, and fly off to a warmer locale.
Eventually the idiotic management pervades everything to the point where dysfunctional is status quo - and this is the scarry bit because that's the perfect environment for geting an idiot at the helm (the later French monarchy, Russia's last Tzar, etc), or a revolution and a nasty revolutionary leader (Stalin, mob rule, etc), or both in that order.
Interesting article. The only thing that worries me is that if we hit a major recession and your investments crumble you end up a slave to your debt.
Taking the scenario in the article you linked: if the stock market collapses at (say) the 14 year mark and Phil and Fred both lose their jobs, Fred only has to make enough extra money to pay his property taxes to keep his house, whereas Phil absolutely must find a job that can pay his mortgage as well (which may be quite difficult, depending on the industry). And if neither can find work then Fred can still sell his house (granted it will likely be at a loss), move into a much smaller one, and live off of the extra cash for a while.
The other thing to worry about is a situation where some unscrupulous banker decides that your property is worth more than the mortgage...in that case your debt to them can be used against you. And before anyone hides behind the "they wouldn't do that, it would hurt their business" argument go look at the general contempt corporations have for the consumer these days - banks are corporations too. And while the courts might, eventually, back you up that's small consolation during the months or years you spend evicted from your own home.
Not saying you shouldn't invest (wasting money rather than investing it is largely the problem these days), just be sure your investments don't end up in companies that loan huge sums to people that can't repay, and keep an eye on the market so you can bail out if it looks like the sheeple are about to destroy your savings.
Might as well face up to it. The US "manufacturing base" isn't going to exist soon and everything will be made in countries where the labor cost is lower. Whether it is Mexico, China, or Indonesia the stuff is going to be made there and shipped here. True. But don't stop there. Ask yourself how the US (well, the west in general) is going to pay to import these things when it eventually stops producing things that others want in return. Paying them dollars doesn't work if they can't then spend those dollars on things they want to buy. Right now the only answer I can think of (short of actually manufacturing things locally) is threat of war. As if a war with China (or India - both are nuclear powers) would go well...
As for the EU, they're getting their cheap labour from eastern europe, or at least that's what I hear from family and friends in that region. For all I know they and their friends may be the only ones getting downsized and then offered jobs in Germany for a fraction of what the locals would earn.
And then we have that wonderfully open border with Mexico and talk of amnesty...
And so what happens when the reverse hits a culture, and easy credit replaces thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work? At first the easy credit is funnelled into investment (because investment is already a habbit of the old savings-based society). Businesses do amazingly well with all of the new capital and a bunch of new products appear on the market.
Then, people realize that there's even more credit to be had and start spending it on a few luxuries here and there. Seeing that a few luxuries didn't lead to immediate bankrupcy, people go out and buy more and more things on credit. At some point, the loans come due and since people aren't usually willing to get rid of their stuff they pull their investments out of businesses and use them to pay the loans that have come due. Businesses suffer, wages don't go up and prices don't go down as fast as they should, people go get more loans to support their new spending habbits.
The spiral continues until many of the jobs have been outsourced to cheap foreign labour (since the locals are demanding higher wages which businesses can't/won't provide - especially when they face the threat of having their share price go down). Desperate politicians resort to pork-barrel spending and random wars to prop up the economy, but the inflation these actions cause hurts the middle and lower classes more than it helps the businesses that sustain them, forcing them further into debt. The random wars make foreign suppliers leery of said nation (they're afraid said nation might spend all its money on bombs and end up unable to pay for the last shipment of cheap stuff, let alone the next one) and the price of imports starts to go up - forcing people even further into debt yet again.
At some point the banks realize that nobody's going to be able to repay their loans because nobody actually owns anything of value and the cheap credit dries up. This breaks the consumption cycle and plunges the nation into a depression. Small banks go out of business. Big banks, naturally, forclose on everything and find that they now own the place. They sit tight and wait for the economy to pick up again so they can sell (well, loan, really) all the stuff they just acquired for free back to the people they took it from.
This lasts until people figure out that being able to produce goods is actually important and shouldn't be neglected in favor of rampant consumerism. The banks regain their confidence in the economy and start mortgaging all the assets they foreclosed on back out again, and businesses start working hard to earn a proffit and repay those loans. At this point we come back to a thrifty, productive, society that saves its money and invests in its own enterprises.
A few generations go by. People forget all about the crash of 'whenever. The cycle repeats.
Politics are just a distraction. While they're busy entertaining everyone with their constant bickering over bullshit issues big business is free to do as it pleases - bribing regulators, exporting not just the jobs but also the technology that made the west the world's industrial powerhouse to China, and generally pissing on people's freedom just because they can. It doesn't matter who's elected because, with very few exceptions, they'll be bought within minutes of taking office. Just think of how many millions of dollars worth of donations all the candidates are bragging about right now - you think they're likely to forget where that money came from?
People are fighting the wrong monster. Don't donate to the other candidate just because his hands aren't quite as bloody as the current puppet's - protest the moneyed idiocy that likes the status quo so much. The government can't make Chinese imports safe, but tens of millions of people refusing to waste their money on them might. Assuming those people act before there's nothing but the toxic toothpaste left, that is.
Go to Newfoundland? What? People still live there? Judging by the number of random people here that speak in that incomprehensible east-coast accent of yours I was convinced you'd all already moved to Alberta years ago...
You should read "What's Expected of Us" by Ted Chiang. It's about a future where this device has not only been built but has also been mass-marketed and sold as a toy - and a good half of humanity just shuts down and dies because the idea that they can't freely act against the universe is too depressing to live with. Very good read, and only 3-4 pages long.
if I were told that I were deterministically predetermined to sit in a certain chair, I would probably sit in a different one just to spite you; some use this as a defense of the vagueness of fortune tellers.
Probably, but if your fortune teller's worth anything then all the other chairs will probably be occupied by the time you get there. Or maybe you'll suddenly start believing that not sitting in the proscribed chair would offend some mysterious power, somewhere. Maybe you'll be told you'll sit in the sixth chair from the left so you decide to sit in the sixth from the right instead, only to realize that there are 11 chairs in that row.
If it were possible to deterministically predict that you will sit in that chair then you'll sit in the chair - otherwise it wasn't really a valid prediction. Either that or you're not really deterministic and are thus impossible to predict.
If you get the chance I highly recommend reading "What's Expected of Us" by Ted Chiang (I read it in "Year's Best SF11" but I'm sure it's been published elsewhere as well). It's an interesting take on the "assuming we're deterministic" case (and damn good reading).
The interesting part to me is there seems to be a bit of Heisenberg in the whole thing;
Yeah, the answer isn't necessarily a binary we are/aren't deterministic. It could be that on a "small" scale we have a lot of (real) choice but on a "larger" scale (say, someone's killing me and my will to live is very much intact) there isn't really any choice (though we might say that there was in order to take credit for the outcome). Hrm...I wonder if electrons have this sort of dillema? Of course, once you make that comparison, have you not essentially turned all that we call "choice" into simple randomness?
Oh and one more thing, given the current state of the universe, there is absolutely no possibility of you sending me a large sum of money in the near future:)
if ethics is a product of evolution why does it make it useless or trivial?
It doesn't. I'm not trivializing ethics, your finger, the beauty of a forest, or anything else. I'm just saying that if you're going to assume that humans are deterministic then you can't start talking about humans doing non-deterministic things (like choosing - really choosing - something). That's just logic.
If we're non-deterministic (based on soul, consciousness, whatever) then the things you mention have a very real (for lack of a better word) spiritual significance.
If we're machines then consciousness and everything that goes with it is an integral part of the processing architecture, and is still significant and non-trivial.
What I was attacking is the parent post's use of the word "choice":
Let us assume the brain is deterministic, but that it has no way of knowing whether it is. However, society chooses to believe that it is. Based on the belief that it is non-deterministic, will it not make different decisions?
because in the context of deterministic beings moving about a (we think) non-deterministic universe the only way a bunch of humans (society) could "choose" to believe anything is if they somehow happened to start believing it (say one of them got hit on the head - or reacted to some other outside force), and it happened to be beneficial - which evolution would then select for.
Is that what you meant to say? Because if it is then we're in complete agreement, and I'm sorry for attacking the badly chosen word "chooses" with the badly chosen word "quirk". But if you really did mean to say that society actually chooses - as in the thing that "spiritual" free-will-posessing people may or may not actually be doing - despite the assumption that people are deterministic, then you'll have to explain what you mean by "society" more clearly (are you talking about some super-being where we assume the role of neurons or something?).
Let us assume the brain is deterministic, but that it has no way of knowing whether it is. However, society chooses to believe that it is. Tricky word, chooses. If humans are deterministic, then a group of humans is also going to be deterministic - which kind of means that society isn't really choosing anything - it's just responding to outside stimulus. So if you want to go down that route then the perception of "choice" and everything that goes with it (right, wrong, credit, responsibility, etc) is nothing more than an evolutionary quirk.
would require an entirely new video driver (possibly new graphics hardware) to output a "color" signal, rather than an RGB signal Nah. Converting RGB to HSV or other color spaces is fairly straight-forward and can easily be done in real-time at 60 Hz. I have no idea how cheap a chip that can do that is - but it can be done right in the monitor.
This way, you have a color and a brightness, everything you need for a pixel. Not exactly. Adding white LEDs whould give you color and saturation, which isn't the same as brightness. Turning up the white light would just wash out the colors (which is an ability you'd want - just not for the reason you gave). What you need is control over how much colored light gets reflected back - which means you'd have to either get control over how much light comes in, or have the ability to turn a given percentage of a pixel black in order darken the final color - in reality you'd probably need to use some combination of both.
Not sure what's on their coins but as far as most Aussies (at least those I've talked to recently) are concerned their government has pretty much sold them out to the US. Much like the UK. Much like Canada./sigh
> It seems the RIAA-pists won't be happy until there's an income tax component for "expected music/media consumption."
Meh. Canada's already got a tax on CDRs for exactly that reason and as far as we know the RIAA still hates us. I imagine most music execs have to be medicated to feel happiness; sanity, common sense, and decency are just words in the dictionary to these guys.
I think the thing most people on this thread are unaware of (maybe purposefully, because a rant feels good every now ant then) is the difference in how the videos are viewed here as opposed to in Thailand.
Example: take any public figure you respect. Make one up if you don't respect any public figures. Let's callthis person X. If I post something along the lines of "I disagree with X's policy of Y" that's considered a healthy level of dissent. I might also phrase it as "X is an idiot for supporting Y" and most people would take it the same way. If I, however, just said "X sucks, the man's a total retard, he should be [insert something unpleasant here]" and left it at that then that's just defamation and shouldn't be tolerated by anyone beause it adds nothing to the discussion - *unless there was enough context to unambiguously link my statement to whatever Y is* - and I could, quite rightfully, be sued for making that statement.
From where we sit the videos are a display of dissatisfaction with the king/the lese majeste laws/whatever and we get angry that it's being suppressed. We go off about free speech and we equate it to the first (maybe second) statement. However, due to either the king actually being a good ruler or the people being indoctrinated from birth (which is a separate issue), Thais see nothing but insult, defamation, and they respond as any of us would to such a claim. It doesn't matter if they're right or wrong (again, a different issue) that's how they see it, and it's a whole other level of insult to them.
So to everyone on the whole "learn to take a joke/deal with the insult/you're insecure" rant: it's one thing for you to claim tolerance when the angry people are half the world away. But I bet a good majority of you would break my nose (and probably do more) if I randomly walked up to you and said "your mom [or whoever it is you respect] is a dirty [etc] whore" - whether it's true or not. I would.
I'm not really defending the Thais, but our time might be better spent discussing something like "if group X thinks a statement is defamatory but Y doesn't - who's right and should the statement be suppressed?" instead of spewing mindless rhetoric (and basically acting like the people we're trying to attack).
Slashdot Mirror
The implication here that individuals (reinforced in the next paragraph) invest credit into businesses is generally false.
It's false today. From my (limited, I admit) contact with history and with those that were alive 70-80 years ago I don't believe this has always been the case.
Haven't you heard of individuals starting their own businesses on credit? The stock market isn't the only type of investment in existence. Home improvements are an investment which you cash in on by selling the house at a proffit. So is higher education which (hopefully) leads to higher future income. I'll generalize it for anyone that hasn't caught on yet: using money in some way that earns or improves your capacity to earn money could be called an investment. Granted it's not "investment" if you're the kind that believes that investing equals buying shares, period - so let me rephrase what I said. Change "funnelled into investment" to "funnelled into productive activities" and read it again. See if it makes sense.
It's the businesses themselves that obtain credit and invest as capital historically.
In a society that's bases its values on working hard and producing value for the individual's (and that individual's family's) future the difference between said individual and his work is somewhat less defined than it is today. In such a society individuals pour their efforts and assets into productive business-like activities. Also refer to the concept of a proprietorship or to simple partnerships - often the precursor to corporations.
And the author also seem to be ignorant of the paradox of thrift.
Not really. But not everyone subscribes to all of Keynesian economics. The last paragraph even says as much:
Non-Keynesian economists criticize this theory on two grounds. First, if demand slackens and prices fall, the resulting lower price will stimulate demand, which tends to limit the decline in demand. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, "savings" represent loanable funds; an increase in the supply of loanable funds tends to lower interest rates and stimulate borrowing, so a decline in consumable goods with a short time horizon is offset by an increase in production in sectors with longer time horizons. For example, the demand for personal electronics might decline, but the demand for such things as real estate would be stimulated by favorable borrowing conditions.
And before someone argues that today's cheap credit must be due to excessive saving in the past (this leaving the banks with large heaps of money to loan out) it might be a good idea to take a look at the Fed's (this is probably true of most western central banks - especially those belonging to nations that have gone to war recently) inflationary policies. There's nothing wrong with credit that's backed by work that's already been done. There's a lot wrong with credit that's created by central banks printing obscene amounts of money and handing it to business and consumer banks who then loan it into circulation. Historically that's what the US (and western nations in general, I suppose) have been doing in recent years.
I should however point out that massive outsourcing is a modern phenomena - and thus cannot be part of a 'repeating cycle'. (I.E. another false premise.)
I'm glad you caught that, but also saddened that you didn't then immediately realize outsoursing is just one of imperialism's (which in terms of economics is the subjugation of foreign lands for the purpose of stimulating the domestic economy) various incarnations. In the past stron
You might want to go a bit further than Canada.
We pretty much bend over and do whatever your government says because A) we have no military to protect ourselves, B) our economy is chained to yours, and C) our Prime Minister seems pretty into the whole NAFTA/SPP thing - so there may not be much of a distinction in the near future.
Maybe try the EU, or Australia. Oh, wait, they have problems too...
Coming to that realization was the hardest thing I've ever had to do.
</kidding>
Another sane thought: since this is a time of conflict it makes sense to get the economy as stable and productive as possible - not only to fund the new security measures but also so that you can stockpile supplies in case of a future crisis. Compromising your intelligence agencies by putting them under the burden of a massive new beurocracy and then randomly outing their agents is insane. As is pissing off a big chunk of your working class by spying on them to compensate for your mismanagement of national security.
Starting a war that kills thousands and leaves millions with even less than the nothing they had before would be the insane course of action. Doing that just replaces a few dozen fanatics with something to gain with a few hundred fanatics with something to gain and a few million angry (but otherwise ordinary) people that will hate you, and teach their children to hate you - all of whom have very little to lose by trying to see you dead. And if things get bad enough and anger turns into despair then you have a few million people turning, naturally, to the most extreme sects within their religion (because those are usually the ones that promise good things to come in the afterlife).
The thing I really don't like about your question is that it implies that sane people cannot deal with lunatics without becoming insane in the process, which simply isn't the case - though if we take that premise to be true then doing the stupendously irrational thing makes sense, in a nonsensical sort of way.
You've got a point there, but it doesn't justify the idiotic overreaction we've seen.
Some guys with box cutters hijack some planes and smash them into buildings, killing thousands. Terrible tragedy, I agree, very much unlike random highway accidents. But that doesn't mean that the proper reaction to this is a direct attack on what's left of the values that made this a great culture instead of, say, securing the cockpit with a sturdy, lockable door.
From that perspective it makes sense to compare it to accidents. We usually react sanely to accidents by simply developing better safety mechanisms that directly address the actual things we've seen go wrong. That's quite unlike having some central authority prevent us from ever doing (or thinking or speaking speaking about) anything that might be unsafe (like, say, existing) ever again just because someone slipped on an icy sidewalk and died.
And you could argue that I don't know what I'm talking about because we're moving towards an overly safety-obsessed culture anyway, but that's the result of being a society that sues too much. If you and your buddies want to go out and do dangerous things in the middle of a field where you can't hurt anyone but yourselves, the police aren't going to rush over to stop you. Not at all the same as being constantly spied on and arrested if the watchers see something they don't like, and then being denied due process.
Could be "Girl builds computer in online game while online boyfriend watches. Look, he has screen shots."
Ignoring your inability to write, you (badly) make some points I'd like to address:
Those who have no debt have no interest payments, meaning they have more money to spend on the actual things they want to buy.
When you've paid off your mortgage you'll still be paying your property taxes. And when the ceiling leaks you're going to have to get off your ass and fix it yourself.
If you sell your house before you've paid your mortgage you'll pay the bank a huge early repayment fee, in addition to the fee you paid the real estate broker. Also, you can't sell a house and make a proffit unless you A) live in a smaller house until the market comes down, B) buy a crappy house and fix it up (thus putting in all the money you'll be "making" on the sale), C) have connections that can get you a new house at cost, or something along those lines.
If you rent out your house and the renters decide they don't like you and move out then you'll have to work to pay the mortgage on your rental property, and the mortgage on wherever you happen to be living. If the bank's computers mess up and start taking double-payments on your mortgage, or they don't recognize the insurance company you'd like to insure your house with, or if the bank starts being a pain in general you can't just buy a new house, and sell the old one, and move, and say "to hell with you - I'm a consumer and I have a choice here"...it's a little more complicated than that when you have a mortgage.
And in most places I've lived, local laws protect tennants against idiot landlords - except when the landlord is a bank and the rental agreement is called a mortgage.
If there's a recession the rental rates will go down, but your mortgage payments will go up because interest rates usually rise during a recession. Payment locked down for five years? Well, you still have to worry because recessions can last a decade or more.
And please don't give me the "I'm free to do as I will with my house that I own whereas you can't have X or Y on the premises" bullshit. The market's as good at providing rental units that permit X and Y as the government is at requiring (often expensive) permits for W and Z.
The only place the above really breaks down is in areas where the real estate market is under such high demand that renting is more expensive than buying - but that's ridiculously rare and in any case it's still a bad time to buy a house because its value is at a peak.
The problem wasn't the ellimination of the "successful", it was the fact that no matter how good your genes are there's only so much you can do in a society as utterly demoralizing and depressing as old communism.
I don't think it's a conspiracy against exceptional people - it's just the rule of the ignorant. It's the fact that 80+% of the western world's wealth is in the hands of people that were born multi-billionairs who really don't understand the mechanisms by which that wealth was created except in a theoretical, "I read about it in Running the World - For Dummies" sort of way.
At the first sign of domestic turmoil (which does impact the bottom line) they outsource everything to cut costs. And when people lose their jobs, become poor, start hating them, and generally not being as productive as they should be, they panic.
But they don't connect laying off the locals to all the locals suddenly being poor (they've been rich for as long as they've lived - what do they know about working for a living, as opposed to having others work to make you a proffit?) so they act in the only way they understand - as if the nation is just another corporation. They run to government and set up a benefits package (socialist programs) and some random quotas (government regulation) and think "disaster averted, well done me". Except that the benefits package doesn't come out of people's proffits, it gets taxed out of their grocery budget so nothing is fixed at all. And to make matters worse the administrators of their shiny new government institutions find they have all sorts of power - and playing with power is just so much fun...how could anyone resist using it to better the world in their own little way?
What's the next thing you do to save a failing business? You get a loan and use the extra cash to stimulate it back into proffitability. So they go to their buddies at the central bank and get them to print up a bunch of new money which they loan into the economy. Inflation then rapidly exceeds the rate at which wages increase and guess what, nothing gets fixed that way either.
After this come the creative accounting tricks. Speaking of which, since when were food and energy a bad way to measure inflation? You'd think that the two most essential items in any economy would sort of be at the core of that little equation.
And finally, if things get really bad, they say "screw it", take everyon's pension, and fly off to a warmer locale.
Eventually the idiotic management pervades everything to the point where dysfunctional is status quo - and this is the scarry bit because that's the perfect environment for geting an idiot at the helm (the later French monarchy, Russia's last Tzar, etc), or a revolution and a nasty revolutionary leader (Stalin, mob rule, etc), or both in that order.
Interesting article. The only thing that worries me is that if we hit a major recession and your investments crumble you end up a slave to your debt.
Taking the scenario in the article you linked: if the stock market collapses at (say) the 14 year mark and Phil and Fred both lose their jobs, Fred only has to make enough extra money to pay his property taxes to keep his house, whereas Phil absolutely must find a job that can pay his mortgage as well (which may be quite difficult, depending on the industry). And if neither can find work then Fred can still sell his house (granted it will likely be at a loss), move into a much smaller one, and live off of the extra cash for a while.
The other thing to worry about is a situation where some unscrupulous banker decides that your property is worth more than the mortgage...in that case your debt to them can be used against you. And before anyone hides behind the "they wouldn't do that, it would hurt their business" argument go look at the general contempt corporations have for the consumer these days - banks are corporations too. And while the courts might, eventually, back you up that's small consolation during the months or years you spend evicted from your own home.
Not saying you shouldn't invest (wasting money rather than investing it is largely the problem these days), just be sure your investments don't end up in companies that loan huge sums to people that can't repay, and keep an eye on the market so you can bail out if it looks like the sheeple are about to destroy your savings.
As for the EU, they're getting their cheap labour from eastern europe, or at least that's what I hear from family and friends in that region. For all I know they and their friends may be the only ones getting downsized and then offered jobs in Germany for a fraction of what the locals would earn.
And then we have that wonderfully open border with Mexico and talk of amnesty...
Then, people realize that there's even more credit to be had and start spending it on a few luxuries here and there. Seeing that a few luxuries didn't lead to immediate bankrupcy, people go out and buy more and more things on credit. At some point, the loans come due and since people aren't usually willing to get rid of their stuff they pull their investments out of businesses and use them to pay the loans that have come due. Businesses suffer, wages don't go up and prices don't go down as fast as they should, people go get more loans to support their new spending habbits.
The spiral continues until many of the jobs have been outsourced to cheap foreign labour (since the locals are demanding higher wages which businesses can't/won't provide - especially when they face the threat of having their share price go down). Desperate politicians resort to pork-barrel spending and random wars to prop up the economy, but the inflation these actions cause hurts the middle and lower classes more than it helps the businesses that sustain them, forcing them further into debt. The random wars make foreign suppliers leery of said nation (they're afraid said nation might spend all its money on bombs and end up unable to pay for the last shipment of cheap stuff, let alone the next one) and the price of imports starts to go up - forcing people even further into debt yet again.
At some point the banks realize that nobody's going to be able to repay their loans because nobody actually owns anything of value and the cheap credit dries up. This breaks the consumption cycle and plunges the nation into a depression. Small banks go out of business. Big banks, naturally, forclose on everything and find that they now own the place. They sit tight and wait for the economy to pick up again so they can sell (well, loan, really) all the stuff they just acquired for free back to the people they took it from.
This lasts until people figure out that being able to produce goods is actually important and shouldn't be neglected in favor of rampant consumerism. The banks regain their confidence in the economy and start mortgaging all the assets they foreclosed on back out again, and businesses start working hard to earn a proffit and repay those loans. At this point we come back to a thrifty, productive, society that saves its money and invests in its own enterprises.
A few generations go by. People forget all about the crash of 'whenever. The cycle repeats.
Politics are just a distraction. While they're busy entertaining everyone with their constant bickering over bullshit issues big business is free to do as it pleases - bribing regulators, exporting not just the jobs but also the technology that made the west the world's industrial powerhouse to China, and generally pissing on people's freedom just because they can. It doesn't matter who's elected because, with very few exceptions, they'll be bought within minutes of taking office. Just think of how many millions of dollars worth of donations all the candidates are bragging about right now - you think they're likely to forget where that money came from?
People are fighting the wrong monster. Don't donate to the other candidate just because his hands aren't quite as bloody as the current puppet's - protest the moneyed idiocy that likes the status quo so much. The government can't make Chinese imports safe, but tens of millions of people refusing to waste their money on them might. Assuming those people act before there's nothing but the toxic toothpaste left, that is.
Go to Newfoundland? What? People still live there? Judging by the number of random people here that speak in that incomprehensible east-coast accent of yours I was convinced you'd all already moved to Alberta years ago...
Live and learn I guess.
You should read "What's Expected of Us" by Ted Chiang. It's about a future where this device has not only been built but has also been mass-marketed and sold as a toy - and a good half of humanity just shuts down and dies because the idea that they can't freely act against the universe is too depressing to live with. Very good read, and only 3-4 pages long.
Probably, but if your fortune teller's worth anything then all the other chairs will probably be occupied by the time you get there. Or maybe you'll suddenly start believing that not sitting in the proscribed chair would offend some mysterious power, somewhere. Maybe you'll be told you'll sit in the sixth chair from the left so you decide to sit in the sixth from the right instead, only to realize that there are 11 chairs in that row.
If it were possible to deterministically predict that you will sit in that chair then you'll sit in the chair - otherwise it wasn't really a valid prediction. Either that or you're not really deterministic and are thus impossible to predict.
If you get the chance I highly recommend reading "What's Expected of Us" by Ted Chiang (I read it in "Year's Best SF11" but I'm sure it's been published elsewhere as well). It's an interesting take on the "assuming we're deterministic" case (and damn good reading).
The interesting part to me is there seems to be a bit of Heisenberg in the whole thing;Yeah, the answer isn't necessarily a binary we are/aren't deterministic. It could be that on a "small" scale we have a lot of (real) choice but on a "larger" scale (say, someone's killing me and my will to live is very much intact) there isn't really any choice (though we might say that there was in order to take credit for the outcome). Hrm...I wonder if electrons have this sort of dillema? Of course, once you make that comparison, have you not essentially turned all that we call "choice" into simple randomness?
Oh and one more thing, given the current state of the universe, there is absolutely no possibility of you sending me a large sum of money in the near future :)
It doesn't. I'm not trivializing ethics, your finger, the beauty of a forest, or anything else. I'm just saying that if you're going to assume that humans are deterministic then you can't start talking about humans doing non-deterministic things (like choosing - really choosing - something). That's just logic. If we're non-deterministic (based on soul, consciousness, whatever) then the things you mention have a very real (for lack of a better word) spiritual significance. If we're machines then consciousness and everything that goes with it is an integral part of the processing architecture, and is still significant and non-trivial.
What I was attacking is the parent post's use of the word "choice":
Let us assume the brain is deterministic, but that it has no way of knowing whether it is. However, society chooses to believe that it is. Based on the belief that it is non-deterministic, will it not make different decisions?because in the context of deterministic beings moving about a (we think) non-deterministic universe the only way a bunch of humans (society) could "choose" to believe anything is if they somehow happened to start believing it (say one of them got hit on the head - or reacted to some other outside force), and it happened to be beneficial - which evolution would then select for.
Is that what you meant to say? Because if it is then we're in complete agreement, and I'm sorry for attacking the badly chosen word "chooses" with the badly chosen word "quirk". But if you really did mean to say that society actually chooses - as in the thing that "spiritual" free-will-posessing people may or may not actually be doing - despite the assumption that people are deterministic, then you'll have to explain what you mean by "society" more clearly (are you talking about some super-being where we assume the role of neurons or something?).
> You don't need music like milk and bread.
Oh god no! Don't tell them what our weakness is!
Not sure what's on their coins but as far as most Aussies (at least those I've talked to recently) are concerned their government has pretty much sold them out to the US. Much like the UK. Much like Canada. /sigh
> It seems the RIAA-pists won't be happy until there's an income tax component for "expected music/media consumption."
Meh. Canada's already got a tax on CDRs for exactly that reason and as far as we know the RIAA still hates us. I imagine most music execs have to be medicated to feel happiness; sanity, common sense, and decency are just words in the dictionary to these guys.
I think the thing most people on this thread are unaware of (maybe purposefully, because a rant feels good every now ant then) is the difference in how the videos are viewed here as opposed to in Thailand.
Example: take any public figure you respect. Make one up if you don't respect any public figures. Let's callthis person X. If I post something along the lines of "I disagree with X's policy of Y" that's considered a healthy level of dissent. I might also phrase it as "X is an idiot for supporting Y" and most people would take it the same way. If I, however, just said "X sucks, the man's a total retard, he should be [insert something unpleasant here]" and left it at that then that's just defamation and shouldn't be tolerated by anyone beause it adds nothing to the discussion - *unless there was enough context to unambiguously link my statement to whatever Y is* - and I could, quite rightfully, be sued for making that statement.
From where we sit the videos are a display of dissatisfaction with the king/the lese majeste laws/whatever and we get angry that it's being suppressed. We go off about free speech and we equate it to the first (maybe second) statement. However, due to either the king actually being a good ruler or the people being indoctrinated from birth (which is a separate issue), Thais see nothing but insult, defamation, and they respond as any of us would to such a claim. It doesn't matter if they're right or wrong (again, a different issue) that's how they see it, and it's a whole other level of insult to them.
So to everyone on the whole "learn to take a joke/deal with the insult/you're insecure" rant: it's one thing for you to claim tolerance when the angry people are half the world away. But I bet a good majority of you would break my nose (and probably do more) if I randomly walked up to you and said "your mom [or whoever it is you respect] is a dirty [etc] whore" - whether it's true or not. I would.
I'm not really defending the Thais, but our time might be better spent discussing something like "if group X thinks a statement is defamatory but Y doesn't - who's right and should the statement be suppressed?" instead of spewing mindless rhetoric (and basically acting like the people we're trying to attack).