Well, in the US, you also have these things called guns, which is why your suicide rate is five times that of us in the UK, despite the widespread availability of exhausts, buildings, razor blades, etc. Which rather goes to prove my point; people who are considering suicide tend to make just one attempt, and then reconsider. If the attempt is with a gun, they don't usually get a chance to reconsider.
And the number of "attempted suicides" who are walking around today leading happy lives, who would very much have regretted not being able to lead those lives, is as good ajustification as you need for making suicide as difficult as possible. Yes, even if that does mean giving up the utterly (provably) fictitious "protection" of a privately owned handgun.
This is amateur sociology and is in fact not true; if deprived of the means to cmmit suicide, most suicides will in fact lose the will to go through with it. The single largest fall in the suicide rate in the history of the UK, for example, occurred in the year when gas stoves switched from poisonous coal gas to non-poisonous natural gas.
The vasy majority of suicides do not "really, truly" want to die; they are temporarily overcome by the wish to die. Whether this justifies censoring information, otoh, is another matter.
You're assuming, however, that current workers should have an obligation to support individuals who no longer work
This obligation is a common thread of all cultures at all times throughout history; denial of it is entirely a modern thing and a sign of how sick we all are these days. The only society which has ever not taken care of its elderly was some Inuit tribes, where euthanasia was practiced as a response to incredibly harsh conditions. It's a moral obligation.
All people have the opportunity to save during their working years; those who choose to live beyond their means and maintain a negative savings rate should not become the burden of those who are saving while working
The first half of your conditional statement is false. In any case, individual savings are an inefficient method of paying for retirement when comapred to general pooling; it's always the case that the bigger the pool the better, as it reduces the overall risk.
but launching a public education campaign encouraging people to save while phasing social security out over a few generations is simply good fiscal sense.
It isn't not really. The imbalance and intergenerational liability still exists; you're just changing the name of it from "payroll tax" to "lower wages due to higher coupon payments on corporate bonds, plus higher taxes due to higher payments on T-Bonds". The only thing that changes demographics, is changes in demographics, not changes in savings behaviour. This is general equilibrium thinking, which doesn't come easy to people who haven't trained in this specific field, by the way.
Retirement should be a priviledge, not a right.
As I say, this is an entirely modern view, and to me a weird one. The obligation of children to their parents is a fairly (I hope) uncontroversial principle. To say that retirement is a right rather than a privilege is just to generalise that, and to say that it is not an obligation which is attached to procreation.
The difference between the payer/recipient and overall dependency ratio is children, sorry not to make this too clear. Although I do agree that the retirement age should rise in line with life expectancies, on simple logical grounds.
The ratio of interest is the total dependency ratio, not the beneficiary/payer. You also need to factor in the fact that labour productivity has hugely increased since the war; making one productive individual able to support more non-producers.
There is no question that social security will go bankrupt, it is only a question of when. As with any pyramid scheme, a linear increase in the number of people who are in a position to benefit from the system means that there is an exponential increase in the number of people who will ultimately not be able to reclaim their initial investment. It is taking longer and longer to seniors to reclaim their lifetime investment in social security because the scam has been running for 50 years.
Right. Let the bollocks end here (some chance). Social Security is not any sort of pyramid scheme, because it is not an investment scheme of any kind. Social Security is a transfer payment between the working generation and the retired generation.
In other words, Social Security is an institutionalised, pooled version of the practice of having the younger generation take care of the generation which has retired. Since this practice (elders being fed by youngers) has been in place since the beginning of human civilisation, I think we can agree that it is not "unsustainable" or "doomed to collapse" per se.
In fact, there is simply no alternative to this intergenerational transfer. If a retired generation is consuming, but no longer producing, then the younger generation will have to consume less than it produces. We can call this difference "tax", we can call it "Social Security" or we can call it "dividends and coupon payments", but it makes no difference at the macro level. Claiming that "saving" and "investment" will "solve" the "Social Security Problem" (sorry for multiple scare-quotes, but it wasn't me who introduced so much shit into the terminology) is just bowing down to the Gods of the Marketplace, invoking a few buzz-words and then carrying on the same. Taking a non-marketed future liability and changing it into a marketed claim on the future doesn't create any new capital; nor could it.
Furthermore, there is no problem. The ratio of retired to working is only one part of the picture. The ratio of interest is the "dependency ratio"; that of the total non-working population to the total working population. This ratio is nowhere near the boundaries of its historical range; nor is it projected to be during the current demographic forecasting horizon.
Keynes said that "Economics is a difficult thing, but nobody will believe it". If proof be needed for this statement, look at the number of people who think they understand Social Security.
Linux will have made this "major transition" when a product of this type is actually made, not when someone "seems to be developing" it. Vapourware may be all right the "aint it cool" category, but in the marketplace, it's products that sell. Even Windows has been harmed by MS's constant trailing of half-baked products. BTW, the post below yours seems to suggest that this is a hoax anyway.
Sorry, but I think you mean "misandristic". "Misanthropic" means "having a dislike of the entire human race"; it is not the mere polar opposite of "misogynistic".
Obviously, "misanthropic" would be the opposite of "nisgynistic" if we were prepared to abandon the stupid convention that "men" means "people" rather than "men" (believe me, I'm no happier than you with an abortion like "misandristic"), but since it seems difficult to get any force behind non-phallo-generic language, you need to distinguish between misanthropy and hatred of men.
If the cellphone manufacturers currently know that mobile phones cause cancer...
And if they continue to deny it while knowing it's true...
... And if they rubbish reputable scientific research proving a link between mobile phones and cancer, while knowing it to be true....
... and if they then refuse to produce less dangerous mobile phones, in order to avoid creating the poor publicity of implying that the old dangerous phones were dangerous...
... and if they start to market mobile phones in Third World countries without any of the safety warnings which they are required to put on them in the USA...
... then, and only then, would the comparison with tobacco be accurate, and in that case I think we'd have a decent case for suing them.
This is precisely how Populist and Socialist positions were incorporated into the Democratic Party
With the effect that the Democratic Party is now a populist, socialist party? Similarly, I believe that racial segregation has been dropped by the Republicans this year, so the Dixiecrats got the short end too.
As far as I can see, your examples point up the impossibility and futility of third party candidates. And as I say, I don't want to support Nader or Buchanan's platforms, in any case.
Not every household. Every household with a male who is in the militia. Which counts out: Households of foreign expatriates, households with no male member between the ages of 23 and 60 and households in which the appropriately aged male has elected to do some other form of public service.
In fact, the percentage of households with guns in them in Switzerland is rather lower than in the USA.
There are in fact very few "poor peasants" in Switzerland; most of the population is employed in either financial services, pharmaceuticals or precision engineering. Switzerland has the highest standard of living anywhere in the world. It is also surprisingly non-urbanised for such a small country, creating far fewer opportunities for crime; neverthless, it still has a higher murder rate than France, Germany or the United Kingdom. If anyone wants any other facts about Switzerland, just post your question here.
you mean "with all the taxes you save from the rest of the LP platform, you can buy a package of services on the open market about half as good as what was available when everyone was pooled together. We've heard of economies of scale, but want no part in them".
Pray what magic is it that ensures that privately funded space exploration would be more efficient?
Oh yeh, and do email me if your party ever gets a coherent line on intellectual property and privacy regulation.
As for Flatpacks comments that "freedom of speech is not an absolute concept" I commend you for your own opinion. However, I remind you that you have the ability to publish your opinion for the very concept you claim is not absolute.
This is a high-school debating society argument, which is pretty weak even in a high-school debating society. Of course flatpack is free to publish his opinion; it's not remotely objectionable. So what?
And furthermore our founding fathers and mothers DID realize freedom of speech IS an absolute concept First up, "and mothers" is a piece of posthumous PC here; there were none. Second, are you trying to imply that the Army of the Revolution permitted dissent in the ranks? Were serving officials of the United States permitted to stand in support of the King? Has incitement to murder ever not been a crime in the USA? To name but three obvious examples. Freedom of speech very definitely isn't an absolute concept and the founders of the USA never thought any such foolish thing. Unless you have evidence to the contrary.
"absolute" means absolute. It's not just a random word hanging round in the air for you to pick up to show us all how much you support freedom of speech.
Actually, most of the largest insurance companies in the world are mutuals, which exist for the benefit of their customers rather than their shareholders, and which do not have charters which oblige them to maximise profits. Certainly this is the case for BUPA, the only UK health insurer of material size.
Because insurance is about pooling risks, not pricing them. If you allow some players to price risks and take a certain segment out of the market, you reduce the efficiency of the overall pooling. You also alter the characteristics of the remaining population, with no guarantee that the remaining population will represent an insurable risk. In general, the largest pool of risks is the most efficient from the viewpoint of society; this may even be the case at the industry level as well. Certainly, the insurance industry is by no means unanimously in support of genetic testing.
The economics of the insurance industry are very complicated and strange indeed (they revolve around game theory, and tend to be pushed off into their own specialisation of actuarial science). Certainly, it is not possible to make blanket claims like "More information = cheaper premia", or even "More information is good" for the general case.
The first effect of this policy is to make all existing actuarial tables redundant; they were calculated for a general undifferentiated population and cannot be applied to a selected sub-population.
A possible further effect is that the tests end up creating an unstable equilibrium, whereby the insurer's decision to sell insurance to you is a signal to you that you're better off self-insuring and vice versa. It's not difficult when you play with the economics of these things to get "no trade theorems" -- results when the introduction of a little bit of information destroys the entire market, because it gives opportunities for people to behave in ways which are individually rational but collectively destructive.
There's a lot of good stuff on this issue at The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, the vastly superior British actuarial body (this is not a flame on USians; the fact is that USian actuaries are basically auditors of insurance companies and the mathematical content of their training is about four years less).
It's worth adding that the insurance industry is by no means unanimous in supporting this kind of proposition; it's an industry which has developed over the years for an environment of pooling of unknown risks. The idea that major health risks can become non-random has all sorts of competitive ramifications for the market. For a start, it makes all currently calculated actuarial tables unusable. Second, it brings the spectre of an "adverse selection" problem; this is the phenomenon whereby the only people who are prepared to buy insurance are those who the companies are not prepared to sell it to (trying to buy insurance is a signal that you need it and therefore should not be sold it). It's quite easy, in theoretical models of this sort of market, to get situations where no sort of market can exist.
Only 50% of them are; the whole point is, which 50%?
And the humorous thing is that Streetlawyer seems to be using a great deal of his creativity for these posts. He can't even troll profoundly, sort of spewing off something he's read somewhere & fitting it into the trollCheeky fucker.
Maybe I'll begin trolling
Of course you will. They all do, eventually.......
What it fundamentally is, is a summary of historical materialism -- of course, there's much more to Marx than this. But I think you're wrong that Marx didn't both predict and advocate violent revolution; it's hard to fit the Communist Manifesto into the framework you describe. Though, of course, there are passages of Marx where he comes over like a social democrat.
Vanguardism and Leninism have to be taken as phenomena that Marx did not advocate, that he constantly railed against, but which were predictable consequences of his work, and for which he has to take ultimate responsibility.
I think your verdict on my summary is excessively harsh.
Slashdot Mirror
They both commit suicide at the end too.
No, but Ben Franklin did.
need to control for hours of sunshine; this is one of the best explanatory factors due to the extreme effects of Seasonal Affective Disorder.
And the number of "attempted suicides" who are walking around today leading happy lives, who would very much have regretted not being able to lead those lives, is as good ajustification as you need for making suicide as difficult as possible. Yes, even if that does mean giving up the utterly (provably) fictitious "protection" of a privately owned handgun.
The vasy majority of suicides do not "really, truly" want to die; they are temporarily overcome by the wish to die. Whether this justifies censoring information, otoh, is another matter.
Well, how did all those interstates and universities get there then? Spooky .....
This obligation is a common thread of all cultures at all times throughout history; denial of it is entirely a modern thing and a sign of how sick we all are these days. The only society which has ever not taken care of its elderly was some Inuit tribes, where euthanasia was practiced as a response to incredibly harsh conditions. It's a moral obligation.
All people have the opportunity to save during their working years; those who choose to live beyond their means and maintain a negative savings rate should not become the burden of those who are saving while working
The first half of your conditional statement is false. In any case, individual savings are an inefficient method of paying for retirement when comapred to general pooling; it's always the case that the bigger the pool the better, as it reduces the overall risk.
but launching a public education campaign encouraging people to save while phasing social security out over a few generations is simply good fiscal sense.
It isn't not really. The imbalance and intergenerational liability still exists; you're just changing the name of it from "payroll tax" to "lower wages due to higher coupon payments on corporate bonds, plus higher taxes due to higher payments on T-Bonds". The only thing that changes demographics, is changes in demographics, not changes in savings behaviour. This is general equilibrium thinking, which doesn't come easy to people who haven't trained in this specific field, by the way.
Retirement should be a priviledge, not a right.
As I say, this is an entirely modern view, and to me a weird one. The obligation of children to their parents is a fairly (I hope) uncontroversial principle. To say that retirement is a right rather than a privilege is just to generalise that, and to say that it is not an obligation which is attached to procreation.
The difference between the payer/recipient and overall dependency ratio is children, sorry not to make this too clear. Although I do agree that the retirement age should rise in line with life expectancies, on simple logical grounds.
The ratio of interest is the total dependency ratio, not the beneficiary/payer. You also need to factor in the fact that labour productivity has hugely increased since the war; making one productive individual able to support more non-producers.
Right. Let the bollocks end here (some chance). Social Security is not any sort of pyramid scheme, because it is not an investment scheme of any kind. Social Security is a transfer payment between the working generation and the retired generation.
In other words, Social Security is an institutionalised, pooled version of the practice of having the younger generation take care of the generation which has retired. Since this practice (elders being fed by youngers) has been in place since the beginning of human civilisation, I think we can agree that it is not "unsustainable" or "doomed to collapse" per se.
In fact, there is simply no alternative to this intergenerational transfer. If a retired generation is consuming, but no longer producing, then the younger generation will have to consume less than it produces. We can call this difference "tax", we can call it "Social Security" or we can call it "dividends and coupon payments", but it makes no difference at the macro level. Claiming that "saving" and "investment" will "solve" the "Social Security Problem" (sorry for multiple scare-quotes, but it wasn't me who introduced so much shit into the terminology) is just bowing down to the Gods of the Marketplace, invoking a few buzz-words and then carrying on the same. Taking a non-marketed future liability and changing it into a marketed claim on the future doesn't create any new capital; nor could it.
Furthermore, there is no problem. The ratio of retired to working is only one part of the picture. The ratio of interest is the "dependency ratio"; that of the total non-working population to the total working population. This ratio is nowhere near the boundaries of its historical range; nor is it projected to be during the current demographic forecasting horizon.
Keynes said that "Economics is a difficult thing, but nobody will believe it". If proof be needed for this statement, look at the number of people who think they understand Social Security.
People set up offshore trusts to avoid taxes. Why would they set up an offshore trust because a tax was repealed?
Linux will have made this "major transition" when a product of this type is actually made, not when someone "seems to be developing" it. Vapourware may be all right the "aint it cool" category, but in the marketplace, it's products that sell. Even Windows has been harmed by MS's constant trailing of half-baked products. BTW, the post below yours seems to suggest that this is a hoax anyway.
Obviously, "misanthropic" would be the opposite of "nisgynistic" if we were prepared to abandon the stupid convention that "men" means "people" rather than "men" (believe me, I'm no happier than you with an abortion like "misandristic"), but since it seems difficult to get any force behind non-phallo-generic language, you need to distinguish between misanthropy and hatred of men.
If the cellphone manufacturers currently know that mobile phones cause cancer ...
And if they continue to deny it while knowing it's true ...
... And if they rubbish reputable scientific research proving a link between mobile phones and cancer, while knowing it to be true ....
... and if they then refuse to produce less dangerous mobile phones, in order to avoid creating the poor publicity of implying that the old dangerous phones were dangerous ...
... and if they start to market mobile phones in Third World countries without any of the safety warnings which they are required to put on them in the USA ...
... then, and only then, would the comparison with tobacco be accurate, and in that case I think we'd have a decent case for suing them.
With the effect that the Democratic Party is now a populist, socialist party? Similarly, I believe that racial segregation has been dropped by the Republicans this year, so the Dixiecrats got the short end too.
As far as I can see, your examples point up the impossibility and futility of third party candidates. And as I say, I don't want to support Nader or Buchanan's platforms, in any case.
In fact, the percentage of households with guns in them in Switzerland is rather lower than in the USA.
There are in fact very few "poor peasants" in Switzerland; most of the population is employed in either financial services, pharmaceuticals or precision engineering. Switzerland has the highest standard of living anywhere in the world. It is also surprisingly non-urbanised for such a small country, creating far fewer opportunities for crime; neverthless, it still has a higher murder rate than France, Germany or the United Kingdom. If anyone wants any other facts about Switzerland, just post your question here.
Pray what magic is it that ensures that privately funded space exploration would be more efficient?
Oh yeh, and do email me if your party ever gets a coherent line on intellectual property and privacy regulation.
This is a high-school debating society argument, which is pretty weak even in a high-school debating society. Of course flatpack is free to publish his opinion; it's not remotely objectionable. So what?
And furthermore our founding fathers and mothers DID realize freedom of speech IS an absolute concept First up, "and mothers" is a piece of posthumous PC here; there were none. Second, are you trying to imply that the Army of the Revolution permitted dissent in the ranks? Were serving officials of the United States permitted to stand in support of the King? Has incitement to murder ever not been a crime in the USA? To name but three obvious examples. Freedom of speech very definitely isn't an absolute concept and the founders of the USA never thought any such foolish thing. Unless you have evidence to the contrary.
"absolute" means absolute. It's not just a random word hanging round in the air for you to pick up to show us all how much you support freedom of speech.
Actually, most of the largest insurance companies in the world are mutuals, which exist for the benefit of their customers rather than their shareholders, and which do not have charters which oblige them to maximise profits. Certainly this is the case for BUPA, the only UK health insurer of material size.
Because insurance is about pooling risks, not pricing them. If you allow some players to price risks and take a certain segment out of the market, you reduce the efficiency of the overall pooling. You also alter the characteristics of the remaining population, with no guarantee that the remaining population will represent an insurable risk. In general, the largest pool of risks is the most efficient from the viewpoint of society; this may even be the case at the industry level as well. Certainly, the insurance industry is by no means unanimously in support of genetic testing.
The first effect of this policy is to make all existing actuarial tables redundant; they were calculated for a general undifferentiated population and cannot be applied to a selected sub-population.
A possible further effect is that the tests end up creating an unstable equilibrium, whereby the insurer's decision to sell insurance to you is a signal to you that you're better off self-insuring and vice versa. It's not difficult when you play with the economics of these things to get "no trade theorems" -- results when the introduction of a little bit of information destroys the entire market, because it gives opportunities for people to behave in ways which are individually rational but collectively destructive.
There's a lot of good stuff on this issue at The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, the vastly superior British actuarial body (this is not a flame on USians; the fact is that USian actuaries are basically auditors of insurance companies and the mathematical content of their training is about four years less).
It's worth adding that the insurance industry is by no means unanimous in supporting this kind of proposition; it's an industry which has developed over the years for an environment of pooling of unknown risks. The idea that major health risks can become non-random has all sorts of competitive ramifications for the market. For a start, it makes all currently calculated actuarial tables unusable. Second, it brings the spectre of an "adverse selection" problem; this is the phenomenon whereby the only people who are prepared to buy insurance are those who the companies are not prepared to sell it to (trying to buy insurance is a signal that you need it and therefore should not be sold it). It's quite easy, in theoretical models of this sort of market, to get situations where no sort of market can exist.
heh, heh, IHBT. Never let it be said that I am not a mindless compulsively replying Slashbot.
Only 50% of them are; the whole point is, which 50%?
And the humorous thing is that Streetlawyer seems to be using a great deal of his creativity for these posts. He can't even troll profoundly, sort of spewing off something he's read somewhere & fitting it into the trollCheeky fucker.
Maybe I'll begin trolling
Of course you will. They all do, eventually .......
just to show how it could be an art form
Pompous fucker.
Vanguardism and Leninism have to be taken as phenomena that Marx did not advocate, that he constantly railed against, but which were predictable consequences of his work, and for which he has to take ultimate responsibility.
I think your verdict on my summary is excessively harsh.