Perhaps we could get that company that cleans up movies for Christian families to clean up the Internet and put it on a CD. Actually, cleaned up it would probably fit on a couple floppies.
Capitalism or any other economic system can in fact be tempered with a sense of justice, fairness, and decency and still function. One way of ensuring that justice, fairness, and decency prevail is to call out the opposite when you see it. Just because something is a certain way doesn't mean it should be. Your wording isn't clear, so let me ask straight up: are you saying we shouldn't criticize people who engage in immoral or unethical behavior but legal behavior?
If a system encourages the exploitation of weakness, is it in the best interest of the weak to support such a system?
Oh man. People like you give the rest of us Bush haters a bad name. Supporting Bush is not quite the equivalent of supporting child rape. We live in a constitutional democracy where the rights of the minority are (supposed to be) protected. People have a right to support Bush, I have a right to tell them they are idiots, and you even have a right to equate them with child molesters, but then I'm going to have to call you an idiot. Sorry.
Look, there's enough actual illegal, immoral, and downright evil shit that the Bush administration has actually done that you really don't need to resort to hyperbole.
I understand why, but I don't care that you lack outrage. What you are supporting is unconstitutional. That is the rulebook of our land and I would lay down my life to keep fools like you from torching it. You are also woefully ignorant of history. Please read up on COINTELPRO. This sort of shit has a long and sordid history of being used against people who disagree with those in power.
In a free market, money equals power. Those with more money have more power to influence the market. Those with more power gain more money more quickly. This positive feedback loop leads to the accumulation of money and power in fewer and fewer hands as the differential between haves and have nots increases. Soon we will have a large class of people who's only choice in life will be to do exactly what their landlord tells them. With absolute property rights, those with no property will be forced into economic slavery by those few who's concentrated wealth and power allows them to dominate the market for natural resources. People will not be able to eat without their say so.
Blocks of people will organize economic sanctions against one and other for not living according to their dictates. Larger blocks will threaten to cease trade with partners that do not follow their dictates. People will utilize the failure modes of the free market to gain advantage, gaming the inherent instabilities and inefficiencies in a free market system, including natural monopoly, externalities and imbalance of information. The rich and powerful will dominate the justice system, and the poor will have no access to real justice. The world will descend into a neo-feudalistic nightmare of poverty, violence and both scientific and artistic stagnation.
Social Anarchism with democratic control of natural resources is the only way to go.
I had originally thought of this in the context of adding civ or sim like elements to an MMORPG. Then I thought about a game where you play the ruler of a noble house, not quite as wide of a scope as Civ, say a few hundred years. But it boils down to the major problem with most computer RPGs, they don't have a game master. You can still have a dynamic environment if you incorporate elements of a sim.
In a Civ style game it doesn't make as much sense, even if the quests are minor and optional. I see it as something to add a little spice to single player. You can play and win Civ IV without ever generating a single great person. You could play and win my version without finishing a single quest.
Quests would be like wonders. You don't have to build wonders to win, but they each add a minor bonus, usually for a limited time period. Currently, there are several ways of getting experience bonuses for your troops. A great general, a barracks, various civics, etc. I see these quests as just another way of adding minor bonuses such as combat experience, increased production, gold, happiness and so forth.
Wonder races are closed-ended with fixed goals too. The goal is to build the wonder first, or you don't build it at all. I don't see that much difference in that regard. This wouldn't change the open ended nature of the game, it would only add to the available strategies. Again, this is obviously something that would only work for single player games.
My number one complaint is that it isn't addictive enough. I mean, to my knowledge no one has ever actually died from starvation or dehydration while playing Civ. We need to combine it with an MMORPG and a collectible trading card game. That should have players dropping like flies.
Just, you know, doing my part to combat overpopulation.
You know, I've given some thought to a game like that. You know the 'great people' of Civ IV? What if, to gain the benefits of a great person, you had to play that person and complete a short RPG style quest in the civilization you've created? Like the 'Rush Hour' expansion to Sim City 4, where you can gain cash, popularity, and other benefits from completing driving missions.
I know about the concepts. Pretty much everything at Mises is rubbish libertarian propaganda backed up by no actual research or experimentation.
The case of one person, or a small cabal, owning and controlling all resources is the natural end state of unregulated capitalism. People can use money and power to influence the market, gaining more money and power in a runaway feedback loop. Idiot libertarians think government can be unjustly influenced but the market can't. That's ludicrous.
The bit about Pareto optimality shouldn't have made the final cut in that post, it was lead in to a paragraph that never got written, so I can see why you might think I'm confused. That bit is not very cogent.
Oh man. I'm sorry about your childhood. I thought I had a rough childhood, but the more stories I hear, the more I realize it really wasn't that bad at all. I wonder, do traumatic events in childhood create different changes in a developing brain than they do in an adult brain? I'd heard about EMDR treatment before, glad to hear it helps.
I count over four dozen completely off topic replies. You must be so proud. I just have one question: if you are against killing animals for sport, what was that I saw you doing with your mom, two hamsters, a quart of Wesson Oil, and a ball python the other night?
Oh Christ. It's not a conspiracy, it happened. Whether De Beers were fools for pursuing that course in the first place is something I never addressed. That's one strawman.
I don't know what kind of screwed up women you hang out with, but my wife, the women in my family, and my female friends do not shop into debt. You come across as severely misogynistic and ill informed. Women do not like surprises that denigrate their role as a potential partner. They like to be consulted about major decisions. They do not like being treated as unintelligent objects to be showered with pretty baubles, as you seem to think.
Let me quote your post, as you appear incapable of remembering the insults you hurl at others, "Let me guess: next you're going to tell me that half of all voters are disenfranchised because election poll records show that only half as many people voted, as told survey takers they were going to vote." That is a straw man, and deliberately worded as an insult.
Yes, exactly. Sorry if I was unclear. The point is as you say: step in when needed and stay the hell out of the way the rest of the time. I note that when natural monopolies such as public utilities are privatized, no good comes of it. When factories and such-like are privatized, efficiencies go up.
Barriers to entry can as easily be enacted by market force as by government.
Please. Don't try me. Do you think that at the turn of the century, when this campaign was launched and about 10% of people owned their own homes, that women really wanted men to waste two months salary on a ring?
Women told De Beers marketing they don't. Based on that, De Beers developed a campaign to promote surprise proposals and the 'two months salary' rule. That is a matter of historical record. Whether women of the day really wanted a flashy ring or not is something you and I will never know.
But sure, try to paint me as a naive fool. Set up a strawman involving a complete tangent and knock it down. Go nuts. You come across as a petulant whiny bitch, as usual.
The surprise proposal was invented by De Beers. They polled woman and found out that most women, when asked by their partners, would say they would rather that two months salary went to a down payment on a house. So De Beers marketing department convinced men that talking about marriage and discussing the proposal was unromantic, and they should simply surprise their intended with a flashy, expensive ring.
Good point, but would that actually be beneficial? I think a certain amount of fear is necessary for top combat performance. If this drug could help prevent overwhelming fear while still allowing the activation of the fight or flight response, then it might be useful in combat.
Argh. That is a very low level of moral reasoning. Certainly most people do not rise above that level, but some of us base our notions of right and wrong off of basic premises and their logical conclusions.
However, this drug treats the type of learned fear inherent in PTSD, not the learned behavior of not wanting to be caught doing something bad.
Infants, placed on a high surface will not crawl onto a glass plate. Fear of heights is innate. Most infants react with fear to things that look like snakes. Fear of snakes is innate. There are plenty of others. However, I believe that your main point is that most fear is learned, and I believe that to be true.
Since when is fear something that needs curing? And if it's so bad why do we make horror movies? Or play hide and seek in the graveyard at night? RTFM. PTSD.
The first post is more correct, as the drug might actually apply in a situation involving girls. The drug treats learned fear, not the innate fear of combat. It will be used to help control post traumatic stress disorder. Arguably, fear of women is a learned fear similar to PTSD.
This is about PTSD fear, not combat fear.
on
MIT Finds Cure For Fear
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Read the article. This is about extinguishing learned fear, such as post traumatic stress disorder. This is not a drug that controls fear in the present moment. It has absolutely nothing to do with either situation you mention.
Ah, the old, "restate the argument in case they just didn't understand it the first time" ploy. You have reversed cause and effect. Failures of the so-called free market have let a certain class of people amass a large amount of power, which they have used to corrupt the government and gain even more power. The real failure lies with corporations, their structure, and the laws governing them.
The catch-22 is that the free market really does need regulation to stay free, but any government interference is simply another point of attack for the power hungry. That is why we have a government with a series of checks and balances. It is not perfect, but at least it has checks and balances, unlike the free market in which money and power beget more money and power in an unending cycle that inevitably leads to a small group dominating the economic life of the entire planet.
Slashdot Mirror
"Running" congress means having a 60% super-majority so you can force "up or down" votes. The Democrats don't have that.
Perhaps we could get that company that cleans up movies for Christian families to clean up the Internet and put it on a CD. Actually, cleaned up it would probably fit on a couple floppies.
Capitalism or any other economic system can in fact be tempered with a sense of justice, fairness, and decency and still function. One way of ensuring that justice, fairness, and decency prevail is to call out the opposite when you see it. Just because something is a certain way doesn't mean it should be. Your wording isn't clear, so let me ask straight up: are you saying we shouldn't criticize people who engage in immoral or unethical behavior but legal behavior?
If a system encourages the exploitation of weakness, is it in the best interest of the weak to support such a system?
Oh man. People like you give the rest of us Bush haters a bad name. Supporting Bush is not quite the equivalent of supporting child rape. We live in a constitutional democracy where the rights of the minority are (supposed to be) protected. People have a right to support Bush, I have a right to tell them they are idiots, and you even have a right to equate them with child molesters, but then I'm going to have to call you an idiot. Sorry.
Look, there's enough actual illegal, immoral, and downright evil shit that the Bush administration has actually done that you really don't need to resort to hyperbole.
I understand why, but I don't care that you lack outrage. What you are supporting is unconstitutional. That is the rulebook of our land and I would lay down my life to keep fools like you from torching it. You are also woefully ignorant of history. Please read up on COINTELPRO. This sort of shit has a long and sordid history of being used against people who disagree with those in power.
In a free market, money equals power. Those with more money have more power to influence the market. Those with more power gain more money more quickly. This positive feedback loop leads to the accumulation of money and power in fewer and fewer hands as the differential between haves and have nots increases. Soon we will have a large class of people who's only choice in life will be to do exactly what their landlord tells them. With absolute property rights, those with no property will be forced into economic slavery by those few who's concentrated wealth and power allows them to dominate the market for natural resources. People will not be able to eat without their say so.
Blocks of people will organize economic sanctions against one and other for not living according to their dictates. Larger blocks will threaten to cease trade with partners that do not follow their dictates. People will utilize the failure modes of the free market to gain advantage, gaming the inherent instabilities and inefficiencies in a free market system, including natural monopoly, externalities and imbalance of information. The rich and powerful will dominate the justice system, and the poor will have no access to real justice. The world will descend into a neo-feudalistic nightmare of poverty, violence and both scientific and artistic stagnation.
Social Anarchism with democratic control of natural resources is the only way to go.
I had originally thought of this in the context of adding civ or sim like elements to an MMORPG. Then I thought about a game where you play the ruler of a noble house, not quite as wide of a scope as Civ, say a few hundred years. But it boils down to the major problem with most computer RPGs, they don't have a game master. You can still have a dynamic environment if you incorporate elements of a sim.
In a Civ style game it doesn't make as much sense, even if the quests are minor and optional. I see it as something to add a little spice to single player. You can play and win Civ IV without ever generating a single great person. You could play and win my version without finishing a single quest.
Quests would be like wonders. You don't have to build wonders to win, but they each add a minor bonus, usually for a limited time period. Currently, there are several ways of getting experience bonuses for your troops. A great general, a barracks, various civics, etc. I see these quests as just another way of adding minor bonuses such as combat experience, increased production, gold, happiness and so forth.
Wonder races are closed-ended with fixed goals too. The goal is to build the wonder first, or you don't build it at all. I don't see that much difference in that regard. This wouldn't change the open ended nature of the game, it would only add to the available strategies. Again, this is obviously something that would only work for single player games.
My number one complaint is that it isn't addictive enough. I mean, to my knowledge no one has ever actually died from starvation or dehydration while playing Civ. We need to combine it with an MMORPG and a collectible trading card game. That should have players dropping like flies.
Just, you know, doing my part to combat overpopulation.
You know, I've given some thought to a game like that. You know the 'great people' of Civ IV? What if, to gain the benefits of a great person, you had to play that person and complete a short RPG style quest in the civilization you've created? Like the 'Rush Hour' expansion to Sim City 4, where you can gain cash, popularity, and other benefits from completing driving missions.
If a sea bass eats the planet, we can rape Al Gore!
Wait, what were we talking about?
Looked at another way, that's .009% of the surface area of Earth's oceans.
I know about the concepts. Pretty much everything at Mises is rubbish libertarian propaganda backed up by no actual research or experimentation.
The case of one person, or a small cabal, owning and controlling all resources is the natural end state of unregulated capitalism. People can use money and power to influence the market, gaining more money and power in a runaway feedback loop. Idiot libertarians think government can be unjustly influenced but the market can't. That's ludicrous.
The bit about Pareto optimality shouldn't have made the final cut in that post, it was lead in to a paragraph that never got written, so I can see why you might think I'm confused. That bit is not very cogent.
Oh man. I'm sorry about your childhood. I thought I had a rough childhood, but the more stories I hear, the more I realize it really wasn't that bad at all. I wonder, do traumatic events in childhood create different changes in a developing brain than they do in an adult brain? I'd heard about EMDR treatment before, glad to hear it helps.
I count over four dozen completely off topic replies. You must be so proud. I just have one question: if you are against killing animals for sport, what was that I saw you doing with your mom, two hamsters, a quart of Wesson Oil, and a ball python the other night?
Oh Christ. It's not a conspiracy, it happened. Whether De Beers were fools for pursuing that course in the first place is something I never addressed. That's one strawman.
I don't know what kind of screwed up women you hang out with, but my wife, the women in my family, and my female friends do not shop into debt. You come across as severely misogynistic and ill informed. Women do not like surprises that denigrate their role as a potential partner. They like to be consulted about major decisions. They do not like being treated as unintelligent objects to be showered with pretty baubles, as you seem to think.
Let me quote your post, as you appear incapable of remembering the insults you hurl at others, "Let me guess: next you're going to tell me that half of all voters are disenfranchised because election poll records show that only half as many people voted, as told survey takers they were going to vote." That is a straw man, and deliberately worded as an insult.
Yes, exactly. Sorry if I was unclear. The point is as you say: step in when needed and stay the hell out of the way the rest of the time. I note that when natural monopolies such as public utilities are privatized, no good comes of it. When factories and such-like are privatized, efficiencies go up.
Barriers to entry can as easily be enacted by market force as by government.
Please. Don't try me. Do you think that at the turn of the century, when this campaign was launched and about 10% of people owned their own homes, that women really wanted men to waste two months salary on a ring?
Women told De Beers marketing they don't. Based on that, De Beers developed a campaign to promote surprise proposals and the 'two months salary' rule. That is a matter of historical record. Whether women of the day really wanted a flashy ring or not is something you and I will never know.
But sure, try to paint me as a naive fool. Set up a strawman involving a complete tangent and knock it down. Go nuts. You come across as a petulant whiny bitch, as usual.
The surprise proposal was invented by De Beers. They polled woman and found out that most women, when asked by their partners, would say they would rather that two months salary went to a down payment on a house. So De Beers marketing department convinced men that talking about marriage and discussing the proposal was unromantic, and they should simply surprise their intended with a flashy, expensive ring.
Good point, but would that actually be beneficial? I think a certain amount of fear is necessary for top combat performance. If this drug could help prevent overwhelming fear while still allowing the activation of the fight or flight response, then it might be useful in combat.
Argh. That is a very low level of moral reasoning. Certainly most people do not rise above that level, but some of us base our notions of right and wrong off of basic premises and their logical conclusions.
However, this drug treats the type of learned fear inherent in PTSD, not the learned behavior of not wanting to be caught doing something bad.
Infants, placed on a high surface will not crawl onto a glass plate. Fear of heights is innate. Most infants react with fear to things that look like snakes. Fear of snakes is innate. There are plenty of others. However, I believe that your main point is that most fear is learned, and I believe that to be true.
The first post is more correct, as the drug might actually apply in a situation involving girls. The drug treats learned fear, not the innate fear of combat. It will be used to help control post traumatic stress disorder. Arguably, fear of women is a learned fear similar to PTSD.
Read the article. This is about extinguishing learned fear, such as post traumatic stress disorder. This is not a drug that controls fear in the present moment. It has absolutely nothing to do with either situation you mention.
Ah, the old, "restate the argument in case they just didn't understand it the first time" ploy. You have reversed cause and effect. Failures of the so-called free market have let a certain class of people amass a large amount of power, which they have used to corrupt the government and gain even more power. The real failure lies with corporations, their structure, and the laws governing them.
The catch-22 is that the free market really does need regulation to stay free, but any government interference is simply another point of attack for the power hungry. That is why we have a government with a series of checks and balances. It is not perfect, but at least it has checks and balances, unlike the free market in which money and power beget more money and power in an unending cycle that inevitably leads to a small group dominating the economic life of the entire planet.