Maybe I'm missing something, but please clarify exactly how owning an M16 or something will be of any use when the stormtroopers come to knock down your door. Your house is probably already surrounded by that point. You might take a couple of them with you in that event, but eventually, you're hopelessly outgunned.
If you're armed, they'll eventually either hit you with non-lethals like tear gas or mace or tazers, or they'll shoot you. All a gun gets you when facing up against agents of the state is dead.
I never understood the belief that "in case of tyranny, take up arms and overthrow the state." Good luck with that. You have rifles and shotguns and pistols and they have tanks, artillery, attack helicopters, and all kinds of other goodies that ordinary citizens don't have.
Ask the Irish patriots of 1917 (I could be wrong about that date, too lazy to look it up) how well they did against artillery.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the thinking behind the 2nd amendment is "in case of tyranny, take up arms, overthrow the government", right?
So let me get this straight: Individual citizens armed with handguns and rifles and shotguns are going to go up against government forces, who have artillery, cruise missiles, and attack helicopters?
So unless 2nd amendment advocates are going to actually advocate private ownership of stinger missiles and anti-tank weapons and what-not, it makes no sense at all.
Because I see a couple of problems with competition: 1) Competition, to function properly, requires that consumers be basically pretty well informed. If I start talking to say, my mother or my girlfriend's parents about shaping and throttling and ping times, well, I might as well just be making up words that as far as they knew, I just made up. Competition falls apart with uninformed consumers. 2) "The market for lemons" argument. There's a wikipedia for it, or just google for it, but basically it's the argument that, if a customer cannot tell the difference between a quality product and crappy product in advance of buying it, then the crap will drive out the good stuff. 3) The idea of a natural monopoly. I don't think it necessarily makes sense for us to have 2 or 3 or 10 players in the marketplace for internet services, any more than it would make sense for me to have 2 or 3 sets of pipes for water and sewer coming into my house so that I can decide, day by day, whether to use water supplier A vs B, based on prices and service and quality.
Some things simply _are_ a natural monopoly, and though it seems like heresy these days, competition will simply make situations like that dramatically _less_ efficient, not more.
Of course, I'd love to be proven wrong here. Anybody got an example that would do that?
I don't think that's really something to get so worried about.
Given prosperous standard of living, and access to birth control, and women's rights, if nothing else, women start to figure out that having 1 or 2 kids is a lot more fun than having 10.
The fact that recent immigrants in europe from Muslim countries seem to be outbreeding middle-class white people isn't really saying much, because most of those "breeding like rabbits" still enjoy a much lower level of prosperity.
Educated middle-class Muslim women, for the most part, figure out that having more than one or 2 kids is a giant Pain it the Ass (amongst other regions). All you gotta do is ensure that they're in a position to have a choice.
While I agree with you about our current economic model being a pyramid scheme, I for one wouldn't mind living and working someplace with an extreme labor shortage, eh?
Of course, the devil is in the details about how we get to that point.
"I pointed out that "mini-nukes" do exist. They can be even used as 'backpack bombs'. Small nuclear munitions can be used to level cities.
No they can't. That's the point. If you can't understand that a 1kt weapon isn't sufficient to level a city then how can I go about convincing you that you hold an irrational belief? Do I have to give you a "10 million pages of congress" style analogy?"
Praise whatever deity appeals to you!
Know why battlefield nukes weren't really ever deployed? 'cause, (especially dollar for dollar), they can't do very much.
Now, if you wanted to blow up the hoover dam, something like the demolitions backpack nuke mentioned above might be great. But assuming you could just walk up to the hoover dam carrying a 70kg backpack (I have no idea if that's possible or not) then you could probably do this with conventional explosives (though it'd probably need multiple people carrying 70-kg backpacks.)
The idea of a groundburst nuke leveling a city, at least unless it's into the dozens of megatons range, shows somebody doesn't know what the hell they're talking about.
It's fair to point out that this, sure, is a 'backpack nuke', but you notice it's designed to take out a harbor or dam or some other piece of infrastructure, not to hit a city?
Groundburst nukes in the sub-megaton range just aren't gonna do that much. (this being a relative sort of comparison, of course) Probably no EMP, and casualty figures that you could easily match with cruise missiles or other types of aerial bombardment.
If this sorta nuke were fired off in downtown LA, you wouldn't even have the casualty figures seen in Hiroshima, even if somebody was smart enough to put it in a Cessna and climb up to 10,000 feet.
I hate to break it to you, but missile defense has never been about defensive capabilities, that's just something pleasant 'to tell the children'. SDI is, and always will be, a first-strike weapon.
Nobody ever expected SDI to knock out a full-on first strike launch by the USSR. No matter how good it is (if it ever works, which is by no means certain...), out of thousands of incoming missiles, some are going to get in. Even 1% getting through, if the missile you're talking about is a ICBM with MIRV capabilities, that's casualties in the hundreds of millions.
But it might conceivably stop a retaliatory strike. If you could do a surprise attack, and hit the USSR planes on the ground and missiles in the silos, if there were 50 incoming missiles coming in, stopping 1/2 them means your country still exists, where the other guy's doesn't.
This is why a treaty banning anti-ballistic missile tech is a good thing.
Yeah, well, you know what Friedman's ideal society was? Chile under Pinochet.
Take Friedman with a grain of salt. Sanity is not statistical.
I agree with you on the anti-fiat bias though. Fiat currencies aren't perfect, but what the hell is? Fiat currencies are like that line about democracy being the worst of all systems, except for all the others.
Heh, I at least understand enough about macro-economics to know that gold standard is, um, not desirable.
I think your point about over-production is probably true.
Back to my conjecture that the reason why there's no consensus amongst economists as to the causes of the Depression is that there's actually probably about 1/2 dozen causes, that were all happening at the same time.
Economists from various "schools of thought" (i.e., ideologies) examining causes of the depression are like that parable about the 3 blind men trying to examine an elephant and describe it, where one guy's holding the trunk, one has his hand on a leg, and one has his hand on the tail.
Can you cite a source for "all human knowledge" doubling every 4 years?
And, a precise definition of "knowledge"? Not all knowledge is created equal. Like, we might have really precise information about any given topic, but is it of any use? Can we even determine if any given piece of information is useful or not or meaningful or not with any certainty?
It doesn't seem to me that we understand any major problems any better than we did say, 10 years ago. Which suggests to me that, if human knowledge is doubling every 4 years, it doesn't seem to make much difference.
I don't know, all I know is there's no consensus amongst scholars as to what was the cause.
And, I can see how, you could get a situation where production goes up, but given a really skewed income distribution across society, the majority of people don't have their wages going up, so nobody buys any of the cool new stuff being produced, can't you?
Am I missing something here? Economics isn't my strong suit, but I could see how given an income distribution like you see in 3rd world countries, overproduction/underconsumption could be a problem, couldn't it?
I also can't shake the suspicion that part of the reason this debate is so murky is that you have various different economic "schools of thought" who wanna attribute a single cause to the depression, where it's really a matter of all the competing theories being partially right.
OK, I'm not an economist, or even a commerce major. But I've heard this sorta argument made before, that the fed should've loosened the monetary policy.
But the thing is, there's more to whether or not a business makes new investments than the monetary supply or interest rate. Business invest based on (at least, partially) what they expect to see in the next few years. So even if the interest rates are really low, or the supply of money is high/plentiful, I can still see a lot of ways where businesses might hunker down.\
Am I missing something? I've never been able to get my head around the "mechanism of action" of how adjusting the monetary supply would've stopped the Depression.
Can anybody help me out here with the 'mechanism of action'?
OK, but given that he's a child soldier, shouldn't he not be held accountable for that as well? Child soldiers commit all manner of atrocities, but even in Sierra Leone, they've had good success rehabilitating them.
Basically I'm saying that he ought not be accountable for his actions during the time he was a child soldier. He was a 15-year old kid brainwashed by a fanatical father/family and assorted scumbags.
How the fuck is it a crime for him to kill a US solider in a firefight?
That line of reasoning doesn't make sense unless you start out with an assumption that the US owns the whole world.
Child soldiers are generally speaking, basically brainwashed by whatever group they're with. The US is basically alone in the world for wanting to hold child soldiers criminally liable.
This case is about the US saving face. They wanted to grab up his dad, then they figured he might have useful intelligence, too. Oops. Now the only way to not admit that they fucked up and look stupid is to loudly assert that this kid is a criminal.
The point is to establish US "credibility", the same way that Tony Soprano worries about his credibility. The point was, they had this dictator in an oil-rich country, and he stopped following orders.
It was a cluster-fuck from Gulf 'War' I. The US did a great job of giving Saddam the impression that the wouldn't give a shit if he rolled into Kuwait. Saddam most likely thought that nobody in Washington would give a shit.
OK, speculators can push up the price of any traded commodity.
But if speculators push the price up, supply and demand eventually kicks in, demand falls, and the price falls.
The only way to KEEP the price high through speculation is by basically "hoarding", the classic example being how DeBeers et. al. keeps the price of diamonds high.
Who, pray tell, is buying and "hoarding" oil? Where are the inventories?
The biggest factors for the recent rise are 1) demand from China/India etc 2) the falling US dollar.
Let's not forget that the USD has lost about 1/3 of it's value since 2003 or so. (I may be off on the precise numbers here, but you get the idea) So $100 USD (2003) ~= to $150 USD (2008).
True, but even if 100% of Canada's oil production is sent south, um, it's still only 4 million barrels per day, out of a US consumption of >20 million.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I'm missing something, but please clarify exactly how owning an M16 or something will be of any use when the stormtroopers come to knock down your door. Your house is probably already surrounded by that point. You might take a couple of them with you in that event, but eventually, you're hopelessly outgunned.
and you're unarmed, then they take you away.
If you're armed, they'll eventually either hit you with non-lethals like tear gas or mace or tazers, or they'll shoot you. All a gun gets you when facing up against agents of the state is dead.
I never understood the belief that "in case of tyranny, take up arms and overthrow the state." Good luck with that. You have rifles and shotguns and pistols and they have tanks, artillery, attack helicopters, and all kinds of other goodies that ordinary citizens don't have.
Ask the Irish patriots of 1917 (I could be wrong about that date, too lazy to look it up) how well they did against artillery.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the thinking behind the 2nd amendment is "in case of tyranny, take up arms, overthrow the government", right?
So let me get this straight: Individual citizens armed with handguns and rifles and shotguns are going to go up against government forces, who have artillery, cruise missiles, and attack helicopters?
So unless 2nd amendment advocates are going to actually advocate private ownership of stinger missiles and anti-tank weapons and what-not, it makes no sense at all.
sort of problem?
Because I see a couple of problems with competition:
1) Competition, to function properly, requires that consumers be basically pretty well informed. If I start talking to say, my mother or my girlfriend's parents about shaping and throttling and ping times, well, I might as well just be making up words that as far as they knew, I just made up. Competition falls apart with uninformed consumers.
2) "The market for lemons" argument. There's a wikipedia for it, or just google for it, but basically it's the argument that, if a customer cannot tell the difference between a quality product and crappy product in advance of buying it, then the crap will drive out the good stuff.
3) The idea of a natural monopoly. I don't think it necessarily makes sense for us to have 2 or 3 or 10 players in the marketplace for internet services, any more than it would make sense for me to have 2 or 3 sets of pipes for water and sewer coming into my house so that I can decide, day by day, whether to use water supplier A vs B, based on prices and service and quality.
Some things simply _are_ a natural monopoly, and though it seems like heresy these days, competition will simply make situations like that dramatically _less_ efficient, not more.
Of course, I'd love to be proven wrong here. Anybody got an example that would do that?
I don't think that's really something to get so worried about.
Given prosperous standard of living, and access to birth control, and women's rights, if nothing else, women start to figure out that having 1 or 2 kids is a lot more fun than having 10.
The fact that recent immigrants in europe from Muslim countries seem to be outbreeding middle-class white people isn't really saying much, because most of those "breeding like rabbits" still enjoy a much lower level of prosperity.
Educated middle-class Muslim women, for the most part, figure out that having more than one or 2 kids is a giant Pain it the Ass (amongst other regions). All you gotta do is ensure that they're in a position to have a choice.
While I agree with you about our current economic model being a pyramid scheme, I for one wouldn't mind living and working someplace with an extreme labor shortage, eh?
Of course, the devil is in the details about how we get to that point.
Yeah, try and walk up to the top of a wall street building with an unidentified, oversized backpack.
And all most of us have been saying is, this would punch a great big hole in Manhattan, but it would not level a city.
Look, QuantumG et. al. arent' saying it'd be a picnic to have something like a 130kg nuke go off in a city.
Just that the idea of a sub-megaton bomb leveling a city isn't going to happen. Especially as a groundburst.
"I pointed out that "mini-nukes" do exist. They can be even used as 'backpack bombs'. Small nuclear munitions can be used to level cities.
No they can't. That's the point. If you can't understand that a 1kt weapon isn't sufficient to level a city then how can I go about convincing you that you hold an irrational belief? Do I have to give you a "10 million pages of congress" style analogy?"
Praise whatever deity appeals to you!
Know why battlefield nukes weren't really ever deployed? 'cause, (especially dollar for dollar), they can't do very much.
Now, if you wanted to blow up the hoover dam, something like the demolitions backpack nuke mentioned above might be great. But assuming you could just walk up to the hoover dam carrying a 70kg backpack (I have no idea if that's possible or not) then you could probably do this with conventional explosives (though it'd probably need multiple people carrying 70-kg backpacks.)
The idea of a groundburst nuke leveling a city, at least unless it's into the dozens of megatons range, shows somebody doesn't know what the hell they're talking about.
It's fair to point out that this, sure, is a 'backpack nuke', but you notice it's designed to take out a harbor or dam or some other piece of infrastructure, not to hit a city?
Groundburst nukes in the sub-megaton range just aren't gonna do that much. (this being a relative sort of comparison, of course) Probably no EMP, and casualty figures that you could easily match with cruise missiles or other types of aerial bombardment.
If this sorta nuke were fired off in downtown LA, you wouldn't even have the casualty figures seen in Hiroshima, even if somebody was smart enough to put it in a Cessna and climb up to 10,000 feet.
I hate to break it to you, but missile defense has never been about defensive capabilities, that's just something pleasant 'to tell the children'. SDI is, and always will be, a first-strike weapon.
Nobody ever expected SDI to knock out a full-on first strike launch by the USSR. No matter how good it is (if it ever works, which is by no means certain...), out of thousands of incoming missiles, some are going to get in. Even 1% getting through, if the missile you're talking about is a ICBM with MIRV capabilities, that's casualties in the hundreds of millions.
But it might conceivably stop a retaliatory strike. If you could do a surprise attack, and hit the USSR planes on the ground and missiles in the silos, if there were 50 incoming missiles coming in, stopping 1/2 them means your country still exists, where the other guy's doesn't.
This is why a treaty banning anti-ballistic missile tech is a good thing.
Yeah, well, you know what Friedman's ideal society was? Chile under Pinochet.
Take Friedman with a grain of salt. Sanity is not statistical.
I agree with you on the anti-fiat bias though. Fiat currencies aren't perfect, but what the hell is? Fiat currencies are like that line about democracy being the worst of all systems, except for all the others.
I know wikipedia is far from the final word on stuff (I like to think of it as a starting point, not an end point), but there's this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_great_depression
It's um, the first line. "The causes of the Great Depression are still a matter of active debate among economists. "
The article lists about 1/2 dozen competing theories. There's more to economics than the Monetarist school of thought.
Are you familiar with Romeo Dallaire?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rom%C3%A9o_Dallaire
I know this sounds like an "appeal to authority" argument, but _he_ thinks that this kid should be rehabilitated, not put on trial.
Dallaire knows a thing or two about conflict zones and child soldiers, eh?
Heh, I at least understand enough about macro-economics to know that gold standard is, um, not desirable.
I think your point about over-production is probably true.
Back to my conjecture that the reason why there's no consensus amongst economists as to the causes of the Depression is that there's actually probably about 1/2 dozen causes, that were all happening at the same time.
Economists from various "schools of thought" (i.e., ideologies) examining causes of the depression are like that parable about the 3 blind men trying to examine an elephant and describe it, where one guy's holding the trunk, one has his hand on a leg, and one has his hand on the tail.
I don't know - can't you make a case that kids like this are basically brainwashed?
Can you cite a source for "all human knowledge" doubling every 4 years?
And, a precise definition of "knowledge"? Not all knowledge is created equal. Like, we might have really precise information about any given topic, but is it of any use? Can we even determine if any given piece of information is useful or not or meaningful or not with any certainty?
It doesn't seem to me that we understand any major problems any better than we did say, 10 years ago. Which suggests to me that, if human knowledge is doubling every 4 years, it doesn't seem to make much difference.
I don't know, all I know is there's no consensus amongst scholars as to what was the cause.
And, I can see how, you could get a situation where production goes up, but given a really skewed income distribution across society, the majority of people don't have their wages going up, so nobody buys any of the cool new stuff being produced, can't you?
Am I missing something here? Economics isn't my strong suit, but I could see how given an income distribution like you see in 3rd world countries, overproduction/underconsumption could be a problem, couldn't it?
I also can't shake the suspicion that part of the reason this debate is so murky is that you have various different economic "schools of thought" who wanna attribute a single cause to the depression, where it's really a matter of all the competing theories being partially right.
OK, I'm not an economist, or even a commerce major. But I've heard this sorta argument made before, that the fed should've loosened the monetary policy.
But the thing is, there's more to whether or not a business makes new investments than the monetary supply or interest rate. Business invest based on (at least, partially) what they expect to see in the next few years. So even if the interest rates are really low, or the supply of money is high/plentiful, I can still see a lot of ways where businesses might hunker down.\
Am I missing something? I've never been able to get my head around the "mechanism of action" of how adjusting the monetary supply would've stopped the Depression.
Can anybody help me out here with the 'mechanism of action'?
OK, but given that he's a child soldier, shouldn't he not be held accountable for that as well? Child soldiers commit all manner of atrocities, but even in Sierra Leone, they've had good success rehabilitating them.
Basically I'm saying that he ought not be accountable for his actions during the time he was a child soldier. He was a 15-year old kid brainwashed by a fanatical father/family and assorted scumbags.
How the fuck is it a crime for him to kill a US solider in a firefight?
That line of reasoning doesn't make sense unless you start out with an assumption that the US owns the whole world.
Child soldiers are generally speaking, basically brainwashed by whatever group they're with. The US is basically alone in the world for wanting to hold child soldiers criminally liable.
This case is about the US saving face. They wanted to grab up his dad, then they figured he might have useful intelligence, too. Oops. Now the only way to not admit that they fucked up and look stupid is to loudly assert that this kid is a criminal.
The point is to establish US "credibility", the same way that Tony Soprano worries about his credibility. The point was, they had this dictator in an oil-rich country, and he stopped following orders.
It was a cluster-fuck from Gulf 'War' I. The US did a great job of giving Saddam the impression that the wouldn't give a shit if he rolled into Kuwait. Saddam most likely thought that nobody in Washington would give a shit.
Thefirethistime.com
Oh, here we go with the speculators.
OK, speculators can push up the price of any traded commodity.
But if speculators push the price up, supply and demand eventually kicks in, demand falls, and the price falls.
The only way to KEEP the price high through speculation is by basically "hoarding", the classic example being how DeBeers et. al. keeps the price of diamonds high.
Who, pray tell, is buying and "hoarding" oil? Where are the inventories?
The biggest factors for the recent rise are
1) demand from China/India etc
2) the falling US dollar.
Let's not forget that the USD has lost about 1/3 of it's value since 2003 or so. (I may be off on the precise numbers here, but you get the idea) So $100 USD (2003) ~= to $150 USD (2008).
That's most of the increase right there.
True, but even if 100% of Canada's oil production is sent south, um, it's still only 4 million barrels per day, out of a US consumption of >20 million.
Given that oil price is being caused by
a) rising demand
b) declining value of the USD
what pray tell can congressional democrats, or anybody else, do about it?