DOOM. hell you take Aliens, throw in equal amounts of Event Horizon, and voila! Instant dark and scary shit.
You know, this is just about the best example I've heard of what the DOOM movie should have been?
Switch out 'teleporter' for 'FTL drive' and 'big base' instead of 'ship w/small crew', and add a marine protagonist. You're pretty much done. Make the monsters a bit tougher and more out in the open, and more of them.
I was already thinking of 'more like Aliens!, I just couldn't think of what movie to put in the mix as well, and Event Horizon is about perfect.
Personally, I'd have gone with A: kill a bunch of supporting actors. Heck, I'd have spent the first 5-10 minutes of the movie introducing supporting characters and making us care for at least some of them, while developing the story/background. Kind of a Halflife thing - Doomguy reporting to work security at a research lab on mars that does top secret work.
Then you start killing *everybody* he met when stuff starts going down. Play Doomguy as a real marine - first he works with others trying to save the facility, then simply to evacuate survivors while people(including marines) are dying like flies.
I would try hard to keep the marines from showing any incompetence, they set up choke points, blow sections of the station to stop attacks(why the protagonist needs to run all over the place rather than take direct routes), etc... It's just not enough. Some civilians help, some hinder, many die where they stand. Some turn into 'zombies' and go berserk from the psychic influence of the demons. A few marines go down from that as well. Still, most are ripped to shreds by the demons once they get through or avoid the choke points. Perhaps even have a bit of Doom 3 teleporting, just to screw them up more.
Our lead, by the same token, doesn't need the demons to turn into stormtroopers for him to survive and win. He's *smooth*, and smooth is fast. No wasted motions kind of stuff. Probably have to pull a Rambo - getting hurt then using an advanced medkit to slap a patch on. 'Biofoam' or something.
It'd have been a much more expensive movie though. Lots of computer animation for the monsters, the movie hardly showed them.
A rewrite by a real sci-fi writer and some decent casting (NO! NOT VIN DIESEL!) It could have worked well.
My thought was that Doom3 had a very usable basic plot; there was no need to turn the Doom movie, into Resident Evil in Space.
I'm thinking along the lines of having the lead show up, actually start his duties, start to get to know the people. Many are nice, cooperative, etc... Some are arseholes, most are indifferent.
Then the teleporter system one of the group is working on goes *BLAM*, the demons show up, and you get a hectic scramble as the lead and a few others try to save the facility and failing, then to get the surviving staff evacuated(relatively unsuccessfully), then finally just to close the damn portal before enough demons make it through that even Earth will be screwed.
I'm thinking take a younger Quaritch, maybe tone him down a notch or so on the bastard scale, turn him up a notch on 'badass'. The point being, he's a quiet badass until the action starts.
1) You're assuming that terrorist has a useful definition. As far as I can tell, that's an incorrect assumption.
I was using my personal definition, which I think is pretty mainstream: Somebody planning or trying to use violence to effect political change.
I have no problems calling somebody who's trying to take over or sneak a bomb onto a plane a terrorist, though I suppose somebody could try in order to, like, murder their wife, and technically NOT be a terrorist.
2) Catching a terrorist doesn't prove that the system is effective. The easiest way to do that is just catch everybody. You need to know both the percentage of false positives AND the percentage of false negatives. And you can't.
Wasn't I mentioning false positives throughout? A.000001% false positive rate would still have you catching nearly a thousand innocents per terrorist caught.
3) I don't think your fraction is small enough. If they identified the 0.1% most likely to be terrorists, the number of false positives would be so large as to drown any utility. You'd probably need to get it down to something like 0.001%, and THAT might not be small enough. The percentage of actual terrorists (using a reasonable definition of the term) is so small as to be nearly invisible. One in a million is probably overstating the case.
How many 'Random' elevated searches are we doing now? I figured it was probably above.1% (IE more than 1 in 1000 passangers get randomly selected for elevated screening), which is why I mentioned it.
Decrease the frequency by insisting that they also be concealed permit carriers and you probably won't find any. This isn't screening out terrorists, it's screening out *people*, and extremely small fraction of whom are terrorists (by any reasonable definition).
Well, that and CCW holders is unlikely to intersect the terrorist group because of the checks. Just allowing Muslims to pass without search wouldn't work; there's a much larger intersection with terrorism there. Just allowing 'Whites' also wouldn't work; we have our share of criminals, terrorist and non-terrorist. A permit holder has been cleared by the police and FBI to not have a criminal record, mental illness, or other disqualifiers.
Most of the hijackers on 9/11 were in the states illegally on expired visas, making them illegal immigrants unlikely to get permits.
N.B.: Terrorist has **LOTS** of unreasonable definitions. I've actually heard someone (not a govt. official) defend using it to describe someone who was playing a loud boombox.
It's become a swearword. Much like calling somebody a Bastard(when their parents are married), Bitch(no, they're not a female dog), Gay, etc...
It's worse than that. You don't have ANY way to measure their effectiveness. At least no way that doesn't depend on the definitions that they create and the measurement tools that they use. This allows them to define terrorists as "the people we caught", (not that I'm claiming that they did, just that they could), and that's a truly worthless measure.
I don't know. It'd actually be pretty easy; have them catch a terrorist.
Besides, even if they were 'only' successful at identifying, say, the.1% most likely to be terrorists, it'd be highly effective at stopping them, it's just that you'd end up doing the advanced search on around three quarters of a million passengers to find the, on average, one terrorist.
If it worked, we'd be able to get rid of a lot of the rest of the security theater, making most people's lives a bit better.
On the other hand, I'm reminded of the Texas state building - local employees and concealed carry permit holders don't need to go through the near-airport level security. Yes, that means that permit holders can haul their guns with them when they visit their representative.
When I think about it, I'm impressed at the amount of effort we go through to keep airports sterile; perhaps we should pursue the exact opposite strategy - encourage those who have been investigated to a higher level and received extra training in firearms to just [i]carry[/i]. Police, FBI, CCW permit, etc... I thought of saying military - but most of us are trained on rifles, if that, not handguns. A lot of military types who DO know handguns just get the CCW permit.
The problem becomes one of population. China has been using the rest of the world to haul it's own development levels and therefore standards of living up. I've been predicting this for quite some time; each outsourcing job results in a number of internal jobs starting up, thus the labor pool is emptied faster than many think.
Back on South America as a potential labor pool - China has 1.3 Billion people. India, which the same thing is happening to(and they're perhaps a bit further along), is 1.1 Billion. Wikipedia places the population of South America at around 385 Million, and it's quite a bit more developed than China, on average. Africa is right around a Billion, making it perhaps a better choice, but it's still got issues with stability.
After China and India industrialize, I figure they'll go through the same process we did, and start looking to export labor. Thing is, I don't think 'cheap' labor will last long in the rest of the under-developed world once China and India are 'used up', ie brought up to close to European/American wage rates.
I think that Stability will be a much bigger concern at that point. A region gets ahold of it's problems long enough to convince businesses to take the risk will be hauled up VERY quickly.
But basically - when your currency value recovers from an undervalued position - your prices do NOT improve. That means retailers get benefit from that recovery - but the entire rest of the economy never does, because the effective value of the currency (that which it can buy) is devalued PERMANENTLY.
ouch... Sounds like you don't have enough competition.
Therefore we do this....without considering if 'this' is useful or effective. It's pointless doing things that don't work or ineffective.
Actually, there's a specific circumstance where there is a point to doing things that don't work - when you don't know that they're not going to work; call it a specific method of study.
Still, in order for something like SPOT to work, I think we'd first need high definition video of how actual terrorists behaved in an actual airport before an attack. I'm not sure we have those. To train against false positives, we'd also need video of non-terrorists, but those would be relatively easy to get.
I could see myself signing off on a '5 year trial' of SPOT, but by the same token, I'd have no problems shutting it down if, at the end of five years, it had proven ineffective. Thing is, it can be tough to be effective. We average, what, 1-2 terrorist attacks on planes per year, and worldwide at that? Even then, I wouldn't necessarily consider the signs of an ineffective terrorist the same as an effective one. I'm sure the shoe and crotch bombers acted differently than the ones that committed 9/11. You go by that you're reduced to something like 1 major attack per decade, if that.
Meanwhile you have to screen around 2.1 Million passangers, in the USA, per day. 767.5 Million a year, 2009 figure.
You're looking at lottery level odds of any one passanger being a major terrorist intending to perform an act during that flight.
The SPOT guys could have a 99.9999% accuracy rate at eliminating false positives and a 100% rate of catching terrorists, and they'd still trigger on 768 innocent people per terrorist caught.
Except that's not true. What happens these days is people spend their lives saving... and then get to retirement age to discover their savings have lost value faster than their investments grew - and all the money they put away for all those years can't pay the bills for 5 years, let alone the 20 they were planning on.
That's part of the 'plan' part - far too many had their investments in risky investments too late in their career; too close to their retirement. Bush not doing what he should have done encouraged the house market boom and the following bust. You had a LOT of people counting on their homes giving an unreasonable part of their retirement.
Part of Keynesian economics is discouraging the boom as well as supporting during recession. The goal is an even keel, not ultimately unsupportable growth.
If Z however is increased... X doesn't increase, all that it means is that the money becomes worth less.
Have you studied macroeconomics? They even have a specific graph for this. While resources are still being unused, it's flat; no inflation. Near the end, you start encountering inflation as the last bits of resources are used. Once they're all used increasing the money supply simply increases inflation.
I'd say, that considering this, allowing currency trade is one of the stupidest ideas we ever had... you're now trading and influencing the amount of Z, in a way that is entirely disconnected from the value X...
??? Allowing currency trade is essential to freeflowing international trade. Otherwise you're reduced to the level of barter for it, and that's really inefficient.
Without such trade the US wouldn't be able to easily buy from Brazil, Brazil from China, China from Russia, Russia from Germany, and Germany from the USA. For example, of course.
It's HOW you connect currency values together.
I've lived through what that can do. A few years ago, a number of investors worldwide decided to cash in via South African Rand. So they dumped it... lots... in a week they drove it from a fairly realistic (at the time) R5.50 to the dollar to under R14 a dollar.
Ouch... That's why you generally want a central bank that acts as a kind of brake on that sort of stuff. So those traders end up losing money.;)
Congratulations. Now you can start critically doubting what you were taught, and doing so informedly. That's never a bad a thing.
Taught? It was a CLEP, IE I self studied and took a test to get the credit.
It's also pretty basic stuff.
Good for you... and do you expect to be C.E.O. of your company one day ? Maybe when you're 60 ? Didn't think so.
Don't need to be CEO to make mucho dinero. Could rather easily though - just start my own business. Huge 5 year failure rate though.
So now you're regulating the market - and hoping to regulate that section with by far the most current cash, and thus political clout. It's just not going to happen, and no amount of regulation will really change the fact that arbitrage always pays more than production - it's a fundamental flaw in the capitalist structures. To change it, you have to move away from capitalism alltogether.
We're already regulating the market, that's part of the whole 'mixed economy'. So what's your replacement? I figure managed capitalism is the worst system possible - except for every other one we've tried.
Some would say that the capacity to reach a comfort zone is a basic human right and the economy OUGHT to be structured in such a way that for all who are willing to work towards it, it's a guarantee. In theory - that's what retirement is SUPPOSED to be... but oh that lovely inflation...
I happen to agree - those willing to work should be able to have a 'comfortable' life. Still, that's not exactly what I meant by 'comfort zone'. A person in their comfort zone may not be happy or even pleased. It's what I use to explain why somebody getting $15k/year in welfare might not want to go to work for $30k. Why somebody doesn't want to change jobs, even if they'll get more money. Why people who've lost their job due to a factory closure will sit on their butts until they're almost completely out of money before they move.
these days nobody GET'S a comfortable retirement anymore.
No, they gotta plan and work for it.
Fundamental to Maltus's law is the reality that there are always too few resources... that being true isn't the absolutely STUPIDEST thing we can EVER do to let the little there is be concentrated among an elite few ?
Thing is, it's more difficult than ever to actually liquidate those amounts of resources without their 'value' dropping substantially.
And it's difficult to 'use them up' as well. Sure, they can hire servants and such - but said servants have to be paid, and that puts the money in the economy.
I've heard that rationalization before. It's bullshit.
Then they're not sweatshops by the definition you're going by.
You were saying ?
You also have a rather idyllic view of subsidence farming.
I'm not saying that industrialization is clean, easy, or even vastly better for most individuals than staying in the country. But it's a stage, one that China is working through, perhaps, hopefully, more rapidly than did the USA and Europe.
Yes, stuff sucks in China for many, many people. Yes, it's not fair. It's also mostly NOT the USA's fault. You seem to blame the USA for everything, I don't.
Yes, it will make the people suffer if we do that. Yes the government will make them hate us for it. Sooner or later though. That government will have to give in... when they do, the average Chinese person will actually KNOW what happened at Tiananmen square... and then they will love us for it.
Are you being sarcastic? Again, why should a country be so concerned about blaming us over the actions of their own government? Did hte French revolution spread a bit? Perhaps, but that wasn't covered when I was in school, so I doubt it reached the level it did in France. Besides, we're already a democracy. Well, federal republic.
That is a nice theory... too bad it never works. The employee promoted to management just never happens, which is why so many employees are overseen by incompetent managers. Nearly all managers START OUT as managers - with an MBA or related degree instead... and even they will still be on the losing side of salary scales.
Did you catch the part about continuing education? I have an associates and am working on my bachelor's. I've been working for quite a few years at this point. Mom didn't get her bachelor's until she was in her 40's.
The rich people don't even pretend otherwise. Hell in "rich dad poor dad" he explicitely states that production is a doomed means of wealth generation - you don't get rich by making things, you get rich by NOT making things, by not producing and certainly by not producing quality. The only way to actually gain WEALTH is to "let your money work for you"... to literally (the system is described in detail) live off your assets - not by creating anything.
Indeed - that's why later on I mentioned making 'paper shuffling' more expensive, IE more marginal means of making money. 'Traditional' asset and investment management is indeed a positive, contributing career path, because you're helping to ensure that the most potentially profitable, the most likely to succeed business ventures get funded.
They make more money out of property rental in a day than all the hamburgers they've sold have made in 30 years.
Source?
The fact that, that works - is what means capitalism is doomed. Communism and Capitalism are equally doomed by design - communism just happened to fail first and it's faillure delayed the faillure of capitalism, but it did not prevent it, and nothing short of a radical redesign could.
Current scheme in the world right now isn't capitalism, it's 'mixed economy'. Call it managed capitalism if you must.
Those are band-aids on a broken bone... we need to reset the bone and splint it. And that won't work while we keep pretending the bone is not broken, which must take some serious wishful thinking by now because frankly the two halfs are well past right-angles with each other.
Difference in opinion here - I don't believe the bone is broken, we just need to relieve the strain.
As a libertarian, I believe that people should be able to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Including paper shuffling if it's profitable. On the other hand, I'm not a supply sider, nor a classical economist. I'm more Kenesian, even as a libertarian. On the other hand - I don't think that governments, by and large, have successfully implemented kenesian economics - they don't recognize a boom well and act to moderate it. The idea is to level the peaks to fill the valleys, governments are forgetting the 'level the peaks' part.
Problem with supply side: Comfort zone. People aren't [i]that[/i] likely to work more/harder if you give them more money. They're certainly not going to spend the entire increase(big part of macroeconomics), though extra capital investment makes it easier for businesses to exploit opportunities.
Classical: Sure, the markets might eventually be self regulating, but ultimately so isn't our food supply, and I don't like the idea of people starving to death or sitting unproductive for years because of a depression.
Somehow my post got chopped, didn't notice until now...
That's what unions do as well. If it wasn't for unions American's would STILL be sweatshop workers. Why would you DENY the people of China, Indonesia and India the right to make the same progress towards their own pursuit of happiness that you have ? Instead their stuck in the England of Charles Dickins !
And the England of Charles Dickens progressed to the England of today.
Thing about sweatshops in China and such is that, believe it or not, they're actually better than the alternatives the workers there would otherwise have. To the point that they'll fight you to KEEP that sweatshop job.
With the extra money they gain they do things like send their kids through more schooling. Even one factory can raise the standard of living for a quite substantial region.
I remember a story about a sneaker factory that opened somewhere, most likely India. The workers started by walking to work. Within six months most had bicycles. Within 3 years many had mopeds. Meanwhile, the completion rate of their children for primary school went up by like a factor of 5 - something like 10% to 50%. Stores opened to service their additional wants - bicycle stores, moped stores, repair shops, etc...
By US standards it was a 'sweatshop'. By local standards? It was a job, even a career, to be proud of.
[quote]What happens when they do figure it out ? I have nasty suspicion what will happen is a revolution - that will end up with a group of people in power over these 2 billion people (a third of all humanity) that absolutely despise us - we're the enablers of their oppression. How can it NOT lead to World War 3 ?[/quote]
So they're going to attack us, the country that owes THEM the most money? The ones that funnel money to them, allowing them to go from subsidence farming to something better?
[quote]Every other time in history when laborers felt abused it led to revolution or war if they could not find an amicable middle ground (which seems to have consistently failed without government backed labor laws). Right back to the peasants revolt and probably even earlier.[/quote]
China has labor laws and their average wages are rising. Yes, there's lots of violations of even China's low minimum wage, but won't most workers(rightfully as far as I'm concerned) blame the local company/local corrupt government?
[quote]Most of the time - these failed because the barrons (ceo's, kings, pick your era) had better weapons,lances against rice-flails, arrows against scythes, guns against knives... well this next revolution will have peasants with nukes... I don't know about you but I don't want to take my chances on them.[/quote]
I don't think China is going to face another revolution, at least not a hugely violent one. They're coming at a mixed economy from a different angle, but they're still heading to arrive there.
Since then it has consistently gone down again now up to where we are now - where middle-class relative income is only marginally higher than it was during the depression -and expected to go down, and the poverty rate is higher than it was in the depression (in the richest country on earth - 50-million people live BELOW the official poverty line), the limited wealth there is has reached the most concentrated level in human history.
Do you happen to have a study on the quality of life thing? Because I believe it's just the opposite. Sure, you have some aspects of life where it's worse than in the '50s, but on the whole I believe quality of life is a whole lot better than the '50s.
People living in poverty today often have cell phones, when in 1950 such a person wouldn't even have a phone. They are also more likely to own a vehicle, TV, computer, have internet access, etc...
Even for people NOT in poverty, home sizes have increased, as have TV sizes. Computers have entered the home. Medical care, for the quality/amount of treatment, hasn't actually really gone up in price. What has happened is that we're able to do so much more, but at additional cost. Restrict yourself to 1950 levels of care and the cost would be really, really cheap.
The trouble is that the period it takes for new graduates to enter a given field - cheap, is around 5-10 years from it's formation, the average CAREER however is more than 30 years. You pick a high-earning career, you can be quite sure by the time you get into it, it won't be anymore.
I think the idea here is that you get into a developing field, and by the time that glut of new graduates show up you already have those 5-10 years of experience and are therefore their supervisor/manager. If you've kept up with improving yourself, of course.
There was always a small group of wealthy people and a large group of poor people -but never before in all of human history has the wealthy group been this small, or the difference between them this vast.
Sure it has. Just go back to the medieval period... Not that it's necessarily a good thing.
Fix actions? A number of little things, I think. Simplify the tax system so that Buffett doesn't pay a lower percentage of net income in taxes than his secretary. Adjust corporate policies to reward longer term thinking. Making hiring people cheaper, playing paper games with money more expensive. Stuff like that.
I reported both, the first guys were caught, the second ones - never found.
Good! I like seeing criminals caught. Of course, as a libertarian gunnut, I also like seeing them shot*, but that's a personal quirk.;)
*Remember that in libertopia it takes a victim for it to be a crime.
The police is a LOT better now than they were even five years ago and improving - but there is still a lot of bad apples, too many cops who basically think of their job as a bribe-collection service. The results are becoming more visible though. More and more hijackers are ending up in prison and less and less are happening.
Very good. I'm very anti-corruption because of stuff(other s word initially used) like this. Police corruption = vastly more crime, and more damaging crime at that.
One major change in recent years have been the upcoming of major drug villages. In Johannesburg it's hillbrow - overrun by Nigerian druglords
So they've essentially ghettoized(in the original 'ethnic groups get their own section of the city' way) themselves? Well, if you can put an effective blockade up that would solve some of the crime problems.;)
Now, as a libertarian I'm rather free with the drugs - but I also require responsable use. As a military type I'm not adverse to suggesting that killing X% would make a whole lot of lives easier. Preferably the worst X%, of course.
When the problem is so bad you need the military to face it, it's time to start considering military options.
You're stating THAT they historically don't work well - but not considering WHY that is. Do the same issues that led to past failures still apply today ? Can we change them ? These are questions one needs to ask - you cannot learn from history without being able to view it in the context of the present.
It's a reduction in efficiency; results in slower growth.
The alternative is to go back to the Dickins' England and have 90% of children die before age 10 from working in unsafe factories... frankly I'd rather have 6 year olds living on my tax money than working a job.
Like I said, kids need to be taken care of; it's better they be getting an education anyways. Educated adults are more valuable production wise than the few extra production years child labor provides.
The biggest problem in the world of capitalism is this - without a minimum level of unemployment, there is no economic growth. No new workers for new businesses.
You'll still get this; more efficient use of labor will increase business, but if you need additional labor, especially skilled labor, you'll have to pay to get it.
The downside is - that means that salary earners are always and forever on the wrong side of the supply and demand law -and that's why we will always lose. Fix that- and you've made the perfect economy.
For unskilled labor this is true. There are many career fields where people can almost name their price if they have the skills and experience.
That would be South Africa - officially the most dangerous not-at-war country in the world.
Ouch, I used to follow Kim Du'toit, who emigrated to the USA from SA, who holds much the same views as I do.
I am quite sure that if I had been carrying - I would be dead.
Different situations; part of the problem you have is that you don't have effective police. In the USA the police are mostly effective at suppressing armed gangs; ergo most of my self defense needs would be against solitary or small groups of non-experts, because the experts end up dead or in prison, generally sooner than later.
Four against-one is the typical MO, follow the chosen target home from a mall, hijack it in the driveway. Two stay out of sight and keep a gun trained on you. If you so much as move funny, they kill you. Trust me - being armed REDUCES your survival rate by a massive margin in this country. You can be the fastest drawer in the west all you want, it's useless against a sniper you can't see.
Tough, tough situation. As a military member I'm trained to accept a loss of personal survival chances in return for an increase in group survival chances. Kind of a prisoner dilema. An individual resisting such an attack is much more likely to die than one that is passive. However, if ALL individuals resisted heavily, the odds would catch up with the 'professionals', they'd be dead/disabled/in prison, and group wise individuals would have a lower chance of being victimized.
Still, I'd follow it up with a 'concealed means concealed'. Don't deploy your weapon unless you have the advantage.
The average soccer mom isn't. Where you lie in between no study can tell you.
Mom's not a 'average soccer mom' then. She owns more handguns than me AND dad, and is nastier to boot. The thing is, in the USA the lowest rate of injury for rape attempts, including successful completion of the rape, is when the potential victim resists with a firearm. These are studies of 'average people'. Well, average americans.
I don't think a fully-automatic is a good self-defense weapon, nor is armor piercing bullets. A semi-automatic 45 cal has all the stopping power and accuracy you could ever realistically need for self defense because the only realistic time when it's an option is if you manage to alter the odds BEFORE you draw. A 9-mill is probably better as 45's are heavy and sluggish if you're not strong enough to handle it well and it's heavy kickback it's useless.
Depends on the situation. Personally, I think a quality semi-automatic is sufficient..45 vs 9mm is an eternal debate for gunnies that I solve merely by saying 'carry what works for you'. My 9mm has a 'sharper' recoil than my.45. I carry the 9mm because the gun itself is more accurate for me.
Shooting a criminal in the back when he runs away AFTER he took your weapon is NOT self-defense (shooting him in the leg could probably be considered justifiable but if he was armed you can be DAMNED sure he's going to shoot you after he falls and he'll aim for a killshot)
I'm not a SA self defense expert, but here in the USA shooting somebody deliberately in the leg will get you up on attempted or even actual murder charges; a shot to the leg is both less likely to disable/prevent an attack and almost as likely to kill(hit the artery they'll bleed out quick), while being a harder shot in general.
In the USA criminals are generally very hesitant to kill because the police bring down a shitstorm in comparison to a 'mere' robbery. I'll note that in none of the cases you mentioned did you say whether the criminals were caught, or even if you bothered to contact the police regarding it. Mr Du'toit's posts gave me the impression that the police are less than effective.
These are valid critiques, but I think more practical than philosophically wrong - and practical problems can be solved.
Actually, I think the very idea is flawed. You can certainly work around issues - but you end up having to keep working around issues. It just snowballs, basically, you need regulations to keep people from working around the regulations that were put in place to prevent the first round of work arounds. The end result is a protectionalist economy; and those end up with people worse off than in the open economy. The extra job growth from an open economy ends up outweighing the jobs saved by protectionalism.
I like your idea to an extent... except how on earth do you finance it ? I cannot imagine ANYTHING more stupid than a person paying tax AND getting a wellfare bonus (of any sort at all) - why not just let him keep the tax and lose the wellfare then ? Which means your cut off point needs to below the lowest income-tax bracket to make sense (sorry - I have NO idea what the tax-brackets in the US are).
Finance it - through taxes, of course. The idea though is to keep as many people as possible above the earning ceiling for welfare as possible, and even for those you have to subsidize to have them cost the government less because they're at least working for some income
As for both paying taxes and getting welfare, well, look up 'Earned Income Credit'. It allows federal income taxes to be net negative(IE the person gets back MORE than they paid in), for certain people. Generally low income with kids. Heck, that could be used as a vehicle for our reforming of welfare!
At the moment, for a single individual that nobody else can 'claim' as a dependent you already don't pay income tax on the first 9,350 of income (5700 standard deduction claiming 1x$3650). After that, it's 10% for the first, $8,350 of income, 15% up to 33,950.
It's deliberately set a bit low so that congress can mess around with people's decisions by offering deductions and write-offs and such. Oh, and as a military member I pay federal income taxes; we used to be exempt.
So somebody 'Earning' $17,500 would pay $815 of tax, assuming almost a worst case*, making an effective tax rate of 4.7%. If you don't count the welfare as taxable, that would have him paying $65 in taxes.
It'd actually be higher, can't forget FICA - think of it as the USA's mandatory retirement/disability plan. Social Security(retirement) is 6.2%, Medicare(disability) is 1.45%. So $765 of our hypothetical $10k of earnings would go towards FICA.
In either case, a relatively minor reworking of tax law to go along with the reforming of the welfare system wouldn't be out of line.
Then the question becomes - can 30% or 40% of people pay enough tax to fund the running of the country AND pay those sliding scale wellfare checks ? Well possibly - in my country only 20% of people earn enough to pay any taxes at all- and we manage a fairly successful welfare state with 40% unemployment (but that 20% pay between 35 and 40 percent tax on average).
As you mention, it's actually possible for the top 20% of earners to pay to have 40% of the population on welfare. With 60% of people paying something, or at least not being negative, 30% receiving often token sums, and only 10% or less getting the 'full amount', you should be good. Sure, you're going to have to mess with the tax rates and deductions and such a bit, but for such a comprehensive welfare reform, it'd be expected.
The only practical way to reduce it however would be to significantly reduce that 40% number - and THAT will take at least one more generation, because almost ALL of that 40% are illiterate and this economy simply doesn't HAVE that much manual labor.
We don't have that problem here in the states, literacy is somewhere over 90%(depending on how you measure 'functional literacy') and I remember mentionin
Allow me to point out that slavery and indentured servitude are entirely separate things.
Which is why I listed both. Even in your examples there were different forms of indentured servitude, and some were indeed heriditary.
Still, both were abused to the point that we want to avoid them. Indeed, they're banned by the constitution except in cases of conviction by trial.
I'll state here, for the record, that slavery as practiced in the United States was the ugliest, most obscene form of slavery ever practiced anywhere.
While I'll agree that it's probably worse than 50% of slavery practices around the world, I'd disagree that it was the worst. There's some nasty, nasty examples if you get into history.
By the same token, slavery got WORSE leading up to the civil war - the ability to free slaves being removed, criminalizing literacy, etc...
One problem with your approach is that economically it doesn't work very well. If you decrease benefits by 1/5 of your earnings (just to pick a number), you are in effect taxing those earnings at 20%, which is far higher than the income tax rate paid by poverty level workers otherwise.
So what? They're still effectively paying a negative tax rate. Remember, I originally planned on decreasing benefits by 50%, then decided that was too much.
It's the equivalent of taking the $8/hr job and turning it into a $6.50/hr job. It's not hard to see that this might disincent many people that would be eligible.
Which is why I knocked it down from 50% in the first place. $6.50/hr is still good money when you have your other basic needs taken care of. Don't forget that the purpose is to get them off of welfare.
Let's take that $8/hour job. At 40 hours a week, that's $320/week, $16,640 a year. Let's say that 'welfare' is indeed $10k. That means that the individuals welfare payments are reduced by $3,328 over the course of a year.
He goes from 'earning' $10k for doing nothing to $23,312 by working that $8/hour job, earning the equivalent of $11.21 an hour.
Add to this the costs of transit, child care, and work clothes, and it's possible that working may be a zero gain for some of these people.
Which is why I mentioned dropping it from 50%... 20% is a much more gradual slope, and if the job costs that much that the marginal gain isn't worth it at 20%, maybe they shouldn't take the job. Personally, I don't think that employers that are that cheap should have an easy time getting workers...
You are quite a pleasant surprise... the idea of a libertarian with that much humanity irks something terrible in me.
irks something terrible? You hate that you found a libertarian with an ounce of compassion?
But that is why my solution is based on making even the worst possible job so much more attractive than wellfare that you take away the MOTIVATION to leach on it.
Took me a bit to find the post with your plan on it, and I've already responded to it.
It's also why my idea makes outsourcing effectively impossible while also removing the "hire an illegal and pay less than minimum wage" problem.
Actually, I don't think it does, as I stated in the other post. You're proposing a protectionist system, and historically those don't work well. My proposal is to lower the cost of labor such that manufacturers choose to stay here and can remain in business.
When you make working that attractive, and ensure there IS work - you'll great reduce your wellfare burden -and still have it available for those who cannot work - whether from an injury, disability or social difficulty of some sort (like a single parent who actually wants to see her child a few hours a day).
Thing is, you're effectively ensuring that there WILL be less work by artificially raising the cost of labor; therefore businesses will attempt to minimize it. It's economic law.
I view disability(injury counts even if temporary) as a different matter from 'welfare'. Just being 'handicapped' such as confined to a wheelchair doesn't mean you can't work. As for the single parent - well, it's a sticky thing for me, single parents bring all sorts of sub-optimal situations to the board; sometimes it's unavoidable(death), sometimes it's better than a dual parent(where one is abusive, for example). I prefer households to be complete, women to wait until marriage to have kids, etc... On the other hand, kids need to be taken care of. Yet we also have people in the states who have more kids specifically to get more benefits. They view state supported procreation as a right. The kids need to be taken care of(very very important). Sticky Sticky Sticky...
Still, with my idea the kids will have medical care, the woman can work part time, and even with a 40 hour a week job would be able to spend lots of time with her kids. I'm not going to require her to work 60-80 hours a week for benefits.
RE: Your sig - I started doing your poll, but I stopped a few questions in. I can recognize a loaded poll when I see one.
Not my poll... Just liked it and stuck it in my sig. Unfortuantly with the sig character limits being for the raw code, I can't add a disclaimer that it's not my site. However, I DO possess concealed carry permits for two states. Oh how I wish they were treated like driver's licenses(get one for the home state, good in all 50). I DO carry, but I'm don't tell random people that I do.
(in my country more than 50% of all shootings occur to steal the fire-arms of the victims - most common TARGET for such attacks are policemen. Shoot him in the head from behind while on patrol, steal his gun to use in other crimes) or force you to choose one answer when CLEARLY there are two that BOTH matter.
Man, what country are you in if shooting police officers for their weapons is common? In the whole USA on average just over a hundred police officers die 'in the line of duty' each year, and that includes things like car accidents.
Well this was the one I stopped on. It forces me to choose between "my safety" or "my attacker's safety" as if they are mutually exclusive. The law in the full developed world for THOUSANDS of years have CLEARLY felt differently.
Are you sure about that? I'm pretty sure the law has normally been on the side of the 'noble' party, and failing that, on allowing the defender to use any means, up to and including killing their attacker. Heck, 'cattle rustling' carrying the possibility of the death penalty wasn't a new thing for the 'old west', it was hallowed tradition from europe.
In reality of course, guns for self-defense is a myth. People who really KNOW guns (my dad is an ex-cop - he owns several firearms ranging from a 9mm glock through a number of hunting rifles to a full-military.33) tend to advise against even trying - and certainly against carrying or owning - as he does. In very situational cases, a gun could be a good defense, if you're driving through a hijack-notorious area, and give it to a passenger who may get a shot off and let him drive BEFORE the 4 other hijackers can fire a killing shot, maybe.
Depends on the threat, as you mention. This starts to make me think you're in Mexico, though I'm not familiar with any military that uses a.33 caliber weapon.
In the USA, we don't have to worry about hijackers, and generally speaking, if, on average, most people were armed and willing to use their arms in self defense, hijacking would be a thing of the past. It's a predator-prey thing. The predator has survive, normally without significant injury, every attack. The prey has every motivation to survive. Ergo, the predator normally goes after prey in situations where the prey is least likely to be able to effectively target back. The sick, the wounded, the old, and the extremely young. To move it into a human realm; the motivation is a bit less - hijackers normally don't kill, but the predator relation remains - they'll go after people with bodyguards less frequently than people without. They'll target those with the best payoff-risk ratios.
Part of carrying for self defense is avoiding known high-risk areas.
The reality though - being armed means that you now FORCE the attacker to use deadly force, when he would usually be quite satisfied to use threats to get what he wants - and chances are, he's better at it than you.
At least in the USA, the average CCW holder is up there with the cops. Most CCW holders are enthusiests who practice on their own regularly; many cops only shoot to qualify. Note that I'm talking about average cops - the low drag types are better, and there are enthusiests in the ranks of the police as well.
In addition, many criminals are experts on the threat - not the execution. Their equi
Still, I feel it's worth verifying if that movement has not been too successful, and that it might be worth swinging the pendulum a measure back in the other direction.
I agree; moderation in all things. Slavery, indentured servitude, both are bad. On the other hand, having multiple generations of people who think that getting food, housing, and money from the government for doing nothing is their right, is also bad.
And the problem isn't just in America. It being a problem in Belgium is new to me - but then I don't speak Dutch or French, and my german is atrocious. Still, I tend to hear the most 'welfare abuse' stories from England.
Maybe it's time that the system is re-evaluated and adjusted to kill off the more extreme leeches ?
Personally I'm more in favor of reform and re-education. Maybe they WILL need to get a bit hungry before they're willing to change.
And yeah, I'd like to see nature better taken care of. There's plenty of work to be done that's not replacing the bees.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like what would really happen if werewolves attacked a military unit. ;)
Hate to see such a good plot ruined by romance, predestination, fated warriors, etc...
I'll have to add dog soldiers to my netflix queue I guess. Thanks for the suggestion.
DOOM. hell you take Aliens, throw in equal amounts of Event Horizon, and voila! Instant dark and scary shit.
You know, this is just about the best example I've heard of what the DOOM movie should have been?
Switch out 'teleporter' for 'FTL drive' and 'big base' instead of 'ship w/small crew', and add a marine protagonist. You're pretty much done. Make the monsters a bit tougher and more out in the open, and more of them.
I was already thinking of 'more like Aliens!, I just couldn't think of what movie to put in the mix as well, and Event Horizon is about perfect.
Personally, I'd have gone with A: kill a bunch of supporting actors. Heck, I'd have spent the first 5-10 minutes of the movie introducing supporting characters and making us care for at least some of them, while developing the story/background. Kind of a Halflife thing - Doomguy reporting to work security at a research lab on mars that does top secret work.
Then you start killing *everybody* he met when stuff starts going down. Play Doomguy as a real marine - first he works with others trying to save the facility, then simply to evacuate survivors while people(including marines) are dying like flies.
I would try hard to keep the marines from showing any incompetence, they set up choke points, blow sections of the station to stop attacks(why the protagonist needs to run all over the place rather than take direct routes), etc... It's just not enough. Some civilians help, some hinder, many die where they stand. Some turn into 'zombies' and go berserk from the psychic influence of the demons. A few marines go down from that as well. Still, most are ripped to shreds by the demons once they get through or avoid the choke points. Perhaps even have a bit of Doom 3 teleporting, just to screw them up more.
Our lead, by the same token, doesn't need the demons to turn into stormtroopers for him to survive and win. He's *smooth*, and smooth is fast. No wasted motions kind of stuff. Probably have to pull a Rambo - getting hurt then using an advanced medkit to slap a patch on. 'Biofoam' or something.
It'd have been a much more expensive movie though. Lots of computer animation for the monsters, the movie hardly showed them.
A rewrite by a real sci-fi writer and some decent casting (NO! NOT VIN DIESEL!) It could have worked well.
My thought was that Doom3 had a very usable basic plot; there was no need to turn the Doom movie, into Resident Evil in Space.
I'm thinking along the lines of having the lead show up, actually start his duties, start to get to know the people. Many are nice, cooperative, etc... Some are arseholes, most are indifferent.
Then the teleporter system one of the group is working on goes *BLAM*, the demons show up, and you get a hectic scramble as the lead and a few others try to save the facility and failing, then to get the surviving staff evacuated(relatively unsuccessfully), then finally just to close the damn portal before enough demons make it through that even Earth will be screwed.
I'm thinking take a younger Quaritch, maybe tone him down a notch or so on the bastard scale, turn him up a notch on 'badass'. The point being, he's a quiet badass until the action starts.
1) You're assuming that terrorist has a useful definition. As far as I can tell, that's an incorrect assumption.
I was using my personal definition, which I think is pretty mainstream: Somebody planning or trying to use violence to effect political change.
I have no problems calling somebody who's trying to take over or sneak a bomb onto a plane a terrorist, though I suppose somebody could try in order to, like, murder their wife, and technically NOT be a terrorist.
2) Catching a terrorist doesn't prove that the system is effective. The easiest way to do that is just catch everybody. You need to know both the percentage of false positives AND the percentage of false negatives. And you can't.
Wasn't I mentioning false positives throughout? A .000001% false positive rate would still have you catching nearly a thousand innocents per terrorist caught.
3) I don't think your fraction is small enough. If they identified the 0.1% most likely to be terrorists, the number of false positives would be so large as to drown any utility. You'd probably need to get it down to something like 0.001%, and THAT might not be small enough. The percentage of actual terrorists (using a reasonable definition of the term) is so small as to be nearly invisible. One in a million is probably overstating the case.
How many 'Random' elevated searches are we doing now? I figured it was probably above .1% (IE more than 1 in 1000 passangers get randomly selected for elevated screening), which is why I mentioned it.
Decrease the frequency by insisting that they also be concealed permit carriers and you probably won't find any. This isn't screening out terrorists, it's screening out *people*, and extremely small fraction of whom are terrorists (by any reasonable definition).
Well, that and CCW holders is unlikely to intersect the terrorist group because of the checks. Just allowing Muslims to pass without search wouldn't work; there's a much larger intersection with terrorism there. Just allowing 'Whites' also wouldn't work; we have our share of criminals, terrorist and non-terrorist. A permit holder has been cleared by the police and FBI to not have a criminal record, mental illness, or other disqualifiers.
Most of the hijackers on 9/11 were in the states illegally on expired visas, making them illegal immigrants unlikely to get permits.
N.B.: Terrorist has **LOTS** of unreasonable definitions. I've actually heard someone (not a govt. official) defend using it to describe someone who was playing a loud boombox.
It's become a swearword. Much like calling somebody a Bastard(when their parents are married), Bitch(no, they're not a female dog), Gay, etc...
It's worse than that. You don't have ANY way to measure their effectiveness. At least no way that doesn't depend on the definitions that they create and the measurement tools that they use. This allows them to define terrorists as "the people we caught", (not that I'm claiming that they did, just that they could), and that's a truly worthless measure.
I don't know. It'd actually be pretty easy; have them catch a terrorist.
Besides, even if they were 'only' successful at identifying, say, the .1% most likely to be terrorists, it'd be highly effective at stopping them, it's just that you'd end up doing the advanced search on around three quarters of a million passengers to find the, on average, one terrorist.
If it worked, we'd be able to get rid of a lot of the rest of the security theater, making most people's lives a bit better.
On the other hand, I'm reminded of the Texas state building - local employees and concealed carry permit holders don't need to go through the near-airport level security. Yes, that means that permit holders can haul their guns with them when they visit their representative.
When I think about it, I'm impressed at the amount of effort we go through to keep airports sterile; perhaps we should pursue the exact opposite strategy - encourage those who have been investigated to a higher level and received extra training in firearms to just [i]carry[/i]. Police, FBI, CCW permit, etc... I thought of saying military - but most of us are trained on rifles, if that, not handguns. A lot of military types who DO know handguns just get the CCW permit.
The problem becomes one of population. China has been using the rest of the world to haul it's own development levels and therefore standards of living up. I've been predicting this for quite some time; each outsourcing job results in a number of internal jobs starting up, thus the labor pool is emptied faster than many think.
Back on South America as a potential labor pool - China has 1.3 Billion people. India, which the same thing is happening to(and they're perhaps a bit further along), is 1.1 Billion. Wikipedia places the population of South America at around 385 Million, and it's quite a bit more developed than China, on average. Africa is right around a Billion, making it perhaps a better choice, but it's still got issues with stability.
After China and India industrialize, I figure they'll go through the same process we did, and start looking to export labor. Thing is, I don't think 'cheap' labor will last long in the rest of the under-developed world once China and India are 'used up', ie brought up to close to European/American wage rates.
I think that Stability will be a much bigger concern at that point. A region gets ahold of it's problems long enough to convince businesses to take the risk will be hauled up VERY quickly.
But basically - when your currency value recovers from an undervalued position - your prices do NOT improve. That means retailers get benefit from that recovery - but the entire rest of the economy never does, because the effective value of the currency (that which it can buy) is devalued PERMANENTLY.
ouch... Sounds like you don't have enough competition.
On the other hand, it looks like the situation in China is improving: http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/06/07/1624239
Therefore we do this. ...without considering if 'this' is useful or effective. It's pointless doing things that don't work or ineffective.
Actually, there's a specific circumstance where there is a point to doing things that don't work - when you don't know that they're not going to work; call it a specific method of study.
Still, in order for something like SPOT to work, I think we'd first need high definition video of how actual terrorists behaved in an actual airport before an attack. I'm not sure we have those. To train against false positives, we'd also need video of non-terrorists, but those would be relatively easy to get.
I could see myself signing off on a '5 year trial' of SPOT, but by the same token, I'd have no problems shutting it down if, at the end of five years, it had proven ineffective. Thing is, it can be tough to be effective. We average, what, 1-2 terrorist attacks on planes per year, and worldwide at that? Even then, I wouldn't necessarily consider the signs of an ineffective terrorist the same as an effective one. I'm sure the shoe and crotch bombers acted differently than the ones that committed 9/11. You go by that you're reduced to something like 1 major attack per decade, if that.
Meanwhile you have to screen around 2.1 Million passangers, in the USA, per day. 767.5 Million a year, 2009 figure.
You're looking at lottery level odds of any one passanger being a major terrorist intending to perform an act during that flight.
The SPOT guys could have a 99.9999% accuracy rate at eliminating false positives and a 100% rate of catching terrorists, and they'd still trigger on 768 innocent people per terrorist caught.
Except that's not true. What happens these days is people spend their lives saving... and then get to retirement age to discover their savings have lost value faster than their investments grew - and all the money they put away for all those years can't pay the bills for 5 years, let alone the 20 they were planning on.
That's part of the 'plan' part - far too many had their investments in risky investments too late in their career; too close to their retirement. Bush not doing what he should have done encouraged the house market boom and the following bust. You had a LOT of people counting on their homes giving an unreasonable part of their retirement.
Part of Keynesian economics is discouraging the boom as well as supporting during recession. The goal is an even keel, not ultimately unsupportable growth.
If Z however is increased... X doesn't increase, all that it means is that the money becomes worth less.
Have you studied macroeconomics? They even have a specific graph for this. While resources are still being unused, it's flat; no inflation. Near the end, you start encountering inflation as the last bits of resources are used. Once they're all used increasing the money supply simply increases inflation.
I'd say, that considering this, allowing currency trade is one of the stupidest ideas we ever had... you're now trading and influencing the amount of Z, in a way that is entirely disconnected from the value X...
??? Allowing currency trade is essential to freeflowing international trade. Otherwise you're reduced to the level of barter for it, and that's really inefficient.
Without such trade the US wouldn't be able to easily buy from Brazil, Brazil from China, China from Russia, Russia from Germany, and Germany from the USA. For example, of course.
It's HOW you connect currency values together.
I've lived through what that can do. A few years ago, a number of investors worldwide decided to cash in via South African Rand. So they dumped it... lots... in a week they drove it from a fairly realistic (at the time) R5.50 to the dollar to under R14 a dollar.
Ouch... That's why you generally want a central bank that acts as a kind of brake on that sort of stuff. So those traders end up losing money. ;)
Congratulations. Now you can start critically doubting what you were taught, and doing so informedly. That's never a bad a thing.
Taught? It was a CLEP, IE I self studied and took a test to get the credit.
It's also pretty basic stuff.
Good for you... and do you expect to be C.E.O. of your company one day ? Maybe when you're 60 ? Didn't think so.
Don't need to be CEO to make mucho dinero. Could rather easily though - just start my own business. Huge 5 year failure rate though.
So now you're regulating the market - and hoping to regulate that section with by far the most current cash, and thus political clout. It's just not going to happen, and no amount of regulation will really change the fact that arbitrage always pays more than production - it's a fundamental flaw in the capitalist structures. To change it, you have to move away from capitalism alltogether.
We're already regulating the market, that's part of the whole 'mixed economy'.
So what's your replacement? I figure managed capitalism is the worst system possible - except for every other one we've tried.
Some would say that the capacity to reach a comfort zone is a basic human right and the economy OUGHT to be structured in such a way that for all who are willing to work towards it, it's a guarantee. In theory - that's what retirement is SUPPOSED to be... but oh that lovely inflation...
I happen to agree - those willing to work should be able to have a 'comfortable' life. Still, that's not exactly what I meant by 'comfort zone'. A person in their comfort zone may not be happy or even pleased. It's what I use to explain why somebody getting $15k/year in welfare might not want to go to work for $30k. Why somebody doesn't want to change jobs, even if they'll get more money. Why people who've lost their job due to a factory closure will sit on their butts until they're almost completely out of money before they move.
these days nobody GET'S a comfortable retirement anymore.
No, they gotta plan and work for it.
Fundamental to Maltus's law is the reality that there are always too few resources... that being true isn't the absolutely STUPIDEST thing we can EVER do to let the little there is be concentrated among an elite few ?
Thing is, it's more difficult than ever to actually liquidate those amounts of resources without their 'value' dropping substantially.
And it's difficult to 'use them up' as well. Sure, they can hire servants and such - but said servants have to be paid, and that puts the money in the economy.
I've heard that rationalization before. It's bullshit.
Then they're not sweatshops by the definition you're going by.
You were saying ?
You also have a rather idyllic view of subsidence farming.
I'm not saying that industrialization is clean, easy, or even vastly better for most individuals than staying in the country. But it's a stage, one that China is working through, perhaps, hopefully, more rapidly than did the USA and Europe.
Yes, stuff sucks in China for many, many people. Yes, it's not fair. It's also mostly NOT the USA's fault. You seem to blame the USA for everything, I don't.
Yes, it will make the people suffer if we do that. Yes the government will make them hate us for it. Sooner or later though. That government will have to give in... when they do, the average Chinese person will actually KNOW what happened at Tiananmen square... and then they will love us for it.
Are you being sarcastic? Again, why should a country be so concerned about blaming us over the actions of their own government? Did hte French revolution spread a bit? Perhaps, but that wasn't covered when I was in school, so I doubt it reached the level it did in France. Besides, we're already a democracy. Well, federal republic.
Aside - just passed macroeconomics CLEP - woot. Also, fairly relevant here.
That is a nice theory... too bad it never works. The employee promoted to management just never happens, which is why so many employees are overseen by incompetent managers. Nearly all managers START OUT as managers - with an MBA or related degree instead... and even they will still be on the losing side of salary scales.
Did you catch the part about continuing education? I have an associates and am working on my bachelor's. I've been working for quite a few years at this point. Mom didn't get her bachelor's until she was in her 40's.
The rich people don't even pretend otherwise. Hell in "rich dad poor dad" he explicitely states that production is a doomed means of wealth generation - you don't get rich by making things, you get rich by NOT making things, by not producing and certainly by not producing quality. The only way to actually gain WEALTH is to "let your money work for you" ... to literally (the system is described in detail) live off your assets - not by creating anything.
Indeed - that's why later on I mentioned making 'paper shuffling' more expensive, IE more marginal means of making money. 'Traditional' asset and investment management is indeed a positive, contributing career path, because you're helping to ensure that the most potentially profitable, the most likely to succeed business ventures get funded.
They make more money out of property rental in a day than all the hamburgers they've sold have made in 30 years.
Source?
The fact that, that works - is what means capitalism is doomed. Communism and Capitalism are equally doomed by design - communism just happened to fail first and it's faillure delayed the faillure of capitalism, but it did not prevent it, and nothing short of a radical redesign could.
Current scheme in the world right now isn't capitalism, it's 'mixed economy'. Call it managed capitalism if you must.
Those are band-aids on a broken bone... we need to reset the bone and splint it. And that won't work while we keep pretending the bone is not broken, which must take some serious wishful thinking by now because frankly the two halfs are well past right-angles with each other.
Difference in opinion here - I don't believe the bone is broken, we just need to relieve the strain.
As a libertarian, I believe that people should be able to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Including paper shuffling if it's profitable. On the other hand, I'm not a supply sider, nor a classical economist. I'm more Kenesian, even as a libertarian. On the other hand - I don't think that governments, by and large, have successfully implemented kenesian economics - they don't recognize a boom well and act to moderate it. The idea is to level the peaks to fill the valleys, governments are forgetting the 'level the peaks' part.
Problem with supply side: Comfort zone. People aren't [i]that[/i] likely to work more/harder if you give them more money. They're certainly not going to spend the entire increase(big part of macroeconomics), though extra capital investment makes it easier for businesses to exploit opportunities.
Classical: Sure, the markets might eventually be self regulating, but ultimately so isn't our food supply, and I don't like the idea of people starving to death or sitting unproductive for years because of a depression.
Somehow my post got chopped, didn't notice until now...
That's what unions do as well. If it wasn't for unions American's would STILL be sweatshop workers. Why would you DENY the people of China, Indonesia and India the right to make the same progress towards their own pursuit of happiness that you have ? Instead their stuck in the England of Charles Dickins !
And the England of Charles Dickens progressed to the England of today.
Thing about sweatshops in China and such is that, believe it or not, they're actually better than the alternatives the workers there would otherwise have. To the point that they'll fight you to KEEP that sweatshop job.
With the extra money they gain they do things like send their kids through more schooling. Even one factory can raise the standard of living for a quite substantial region.
I remember a story about a sneaker factory that opened somewhere, most likely India. The workers started by walking to work. Within six months most had bicycles. Within 3 years many had mopeds. Meanwhile, the completion rate of their children for primary school went up by like a factor of 5 - something like 10% to 50%. Stores opened to service their additional wants - bicycle stores, moped stores, repair shops, etc...
By US standards it was a 'sweatshop'. By local standards? It was a job, even a career, to be proud of.
[quote]What happens when they do figure it out ? I have nasty suspicion what will happen is a revolution - that will end up with a group of people in power over these 2 billion people (a third of all humanity) that absolutely despise us - we're the enablers of their oppression. How can it NOT lead to World War 3 ?[/quote]
So they're going to attack us, the country that owes THEM the most money? The ones that funnel money to them, allowing them to go from subsidence farming to something better?
[quote]Every other time in history when laborers felt abused it led to revolution or war if they could not find an amicable middle ground (which seems to have consistently failed without government backed labor laws). Right back to the peasants revolt and probably even earlier.[/quote]
China has labor laws and their average wages are rising. Yes, there's lots of violations of even China's low minimum wage, but won't most workers(rightfully as far as I'm concerned) blame the local company/local corrupt government?
[quote]Most of the time - these failed because the barrons (ceo's, kings, pick your era) had better weapons ,lances against rice-flails, arrows against scythes, guns against knives... well this next revolution will have peasants with nukes... I don't know about you but I don't want to take my chances on them.[/quote]
I don't think China is going to face another revolution, at least not a hugely violent one. They're coming at a mixed economy from a different angle, but they're still heading to arrive there.
Since then it has consistently gone down again now up to where we are now - where middle-class relative income is only marginally higher than it was during the depression -and expected to go down, and the poverty rate is higher than it was in the depression (in the richest country on earth - 50-million people live BELOW the official poverty line), the limited wealth there is has reached the most concentrated level in human history.
Do you happen to have a study on the quality of life thing? Because I believe it's just the opposite. Sure, you have some aspects of life where it's worse than in the '50s, but on the whole I believe quality of life is a whole lot better than the '50s.
People living in poverty today often have cell phones, when in 1950 such a person wouldn't even have a phone. They are also more likely to own a vehicle, TV, computer, have internet access, etc...
Even for people NOT in poverty, home sizes have increased, as have TV sizes. Computers have entered the home. Medical care, for the quality/amount of treatment, hasn't actually really gone up in price. What has happened is that we're able to do so much more, but at additional cost. Restrict yourself to 1950 levels of care and the cost would be really, really cheap.
The trouble is that the period it takes for new graduates to enter a given field - cheap, is around 5-10 years from it's formation, the average CAREER however is more than 30 years. You pick a high-earning career, you can be quite sure by the time you get into it, it won't be anymore.
I think the idea here is that you get into a developing field, and by the time that glut of new graduates show up you already have those 5-10 years of experience and are therefore their supervisor/manager. If you've kept up with improving yourself, of course.
There was always a small group of wealthy people and a large group of poor people -but never before in all of human history has the wealthy group been this small, or the difference between them this vast.
Sure it has. Just go back to the medieval period... Not that it's necessarily a good thing.
Fix actions? A number of little things, I think. Simplify the tax system so that Buffett doesn't pay a lower percentage of net income in taxes than his secretary. Adjust corporate policies to reward longer term thinking. Making hiring people cheaper, playing paper games with money more expensive. Stuff like that.
I reported both, the first guys were caught, the second ones - never found.
Good! I like seeing criminals caught. Of course, as a libertarian gunnut, I also like seeing them shot*, but that's a personal quirk. ;)
*Remember that in libertopia it takes a victim for it to be a crime.
The police is a LOT better now than they were even five years ago and improving - but there is still a lot of bad apples, too many cops who basically think of their job as a bribe-collection service. The results are becoming more visible though. More and more hijackers are ending up in prison and less and less are happening.
Very good. I'm very anti-corruption because of stuff(other s word initially used) like this. Police corruption = vastly more crime, and more damaging crime at that.
One major change in recent years have been the upcoming of major drug villages. In Johannesburg it's hillbrow - overrun by Nigerian druglords
So they've essentially ghettoized(in the original 'ethnic groups get their own section of the city' way) themselves? Well, if you can put an effective blockade up that would solve some of the crime problems. ;)
Now, as a libertarian I'm rather free with the drugs - but I also require responsable use. As a military type I'm not adverse to suggesting that killing X% would make a whole lot of lives easier. Preferably the worst X%, of course.
When the problem is so bad you need the military to face it, it's time to start considering military options.
You're stating THAT they historically don't work well - but not considering WHY that is. Do the same issues that led to past failures still apply today ? Can we change them ? These are questions one needs to ask - you cannot learn from history without being able to view it in the context of the present.
It's a reduction in efficiency; results in slower growth.
The alternative is to go back to the Dickins' England and have 90% of children die before age 10 from working in unsafe factories... frankly I'd rather have 6 year olds living on my tax money than working a job.
Like I said, kids need to be taken care of; it's better they be getting an education anyways. Educated adults are more valuable production wise than the few extra production years child labor provides.
The biggest problem in the world of capitalism is this - without a minimum level of unemployment, there is no economic growth. No new workers for new businesses.
You'll still get this; more efficient use of labor will increase business, but if you need additional labor, especially skilled labor, you'll have to pay to get it.
The downside is - that means that salary earners are always and forever on the wrong side of the supply and demand law -and that's why we will always lose. Fix that- and you've made the perfect economy.
For unskilled labor this is true. There are many career fields where people can almost name their price if they have the skills and experience.
That would be South Africa - officially the most dangerous not-at-war country in the world.
Ouch, I used to follow Kim Du'toit, who emigrated to the USA from SA, who holds much the same views as I do.
I am quite sure that if I had been carrying - I would be dead.
Different situations; part of the problem you have is that you don't have effective police. In the USA the police are mostly effective at suppressing armed gangs; ergo most of my self defense needs would be against solitary or small groups of non-experts, because the experts end up dead or in prison, generally sooner than later.
Four against-one is the typical MO, follow the chosen target home from a mall, hijack it in the driveway. Two stay out of sight and keep a gun trained on you. If you so much as move funny, they kill you.
Trust me - being armed REDUCES your survival rate by a massive margin in this country. You can be the fastest drawer in the west all you want, it's useless against a sniper you can't see.
Tough, tough situation. As a military member I'm trained to accept a loss of personal survival chances in return for an increase in group survival chances. Kind of a prisoner dilema. An individual resisting such an attack is much more likely to die than one that is passive. However, if ALL individuals resisted heavily, the odds would catch up with the 'professionals', they'd be dead/disabled/in prison, and group wise individuals would have a lower chance of being victimized.
Still, I'd follow it up with a 'concealed means concealed'. Don't deploy your weapon unless you have the advantage.
The average soccer mom isn't. Where you lie in between no study can tell you.
Mom's not a 'average soccer mom' then. She owns more handguns than me AND dad, and is nastier to boot. The thing is, in the USA the lowest rate of injury for rape attempts, including successful completion of the rape, is when the potential victim resists with a firearm. These are studies of 'average people'. Well, average americans.
I don't think a fully-automatic is a good self-defense weapon, nor is armor piercing bullets. A semi-automatic 45 cal has all the stopping power and accuracy you could ever realistically need for self defense because the only realistic time when it's an option is if you manage to alter the odds BEFORE you draw. A 9-mill is probably better as 45's are heavy and sluggish if you're not strong enough to handle it well and it's heavy kickback it's useless.
Depends on the situation. Personally, I think a quality semi-automatic is sufficient. .45 vs 9mm is an eternal debate for gunnies that I solve merely by saying 'carry what works for you'. My 9mm has a 'sharper' recoil than my .45. I carry the 9mm because the gun itself is more accurate for me.
Shooting a criminal in the back when he runs away AFTER he took your weapon is NOT self-defense (shooting him in the leg could probably be considered justifiable but if he was armed you can be DAMNED sure he's going to shoot you after he falls and he'll aim for a killshot)
I'm not a SA self defense expert, but here in the USA shooting somebody deliberately in the leg will get you up on attempted or even actual murder charges; a shot to the leg is both less likely to disable/prevent an attack and almost as likely to kill(hit the artery they'll bleed out quick), while being a harder shot in general.
In the USA criminals are generally very hesitant to kill because the police bring down a shitstorm in comparison to a 'mere' robbery. I'll note that in none of the cases you mentioned did you say whether the criminals were caught, or even if you bothered to contact the police regarding it. Mr Du'toit's posts gave me the impression that the police are less than effective.
These are valid critiques, but I think more practical than philosophically wrong - and practical problems can be solved.
Actually, I think the very idea is flawed. You can certainly work around issues - but you end up having to keep working around issues. It just snowballs, basically, you need regulations to keep people from working around the regulations that were put in place to prevent the first round of work arounds. The end result is a protectionalist economy; and those end up with people worse off than in the open economy. The extra job growth from an open economy ends up outweighing the jobs saved by protectionalism.
I like your idea to an extent... except how on earth do you finance it ? I cannot imagine ANYTHING more stupid than a person paying tax AND getting a wellfare bonus (of any sort at all) - why not just let him keep the tax and lose the wellfare then ? Which means your cut off point needs to below the lowest income-tax bracket to make sense (sorry - I have NO idea what the tax-brackets in the US are).
Finance it - through taxes, of course. The idea though is to keep as many people as possible above the earning ceiling for welfare as possible, and even for those you have to subsidize to have them cost the government less because they're at least working for some income
As for both paying taxes and getting welfare, well, look up 'Earned Income Credit'. It allows federal income taxes to be net negative(IE the person gets back MORE than they paid in), for certain people. Generally low income with kids. Heck, that could be used as a vehicle for our reforming of welfare!
At the moment, for a single individual that nobody else can 'claim' as a dependent you already don't pay income tax on the first 9,350 of income (5700 standard deduction claiming 1x$3650). After that, it's 10% for the first, $8,350 of income, 15% up to 33,950.
It's deliberately set a bit low so that congress can mess around with people's decisions by offering deductions and write-offs and such. Oh, and as a military member I pay federal income taxes; we used to be exempt.
So somebody 'Earning' $17,500 would pay $815 of tax, assuming almost a worst case*, making an effective tax rate of 4.7%. If you don't count the welfare as taxable, that would have him paying $65 in taxes.
It'd actually be higher, can't forget FICA - think of it as the USA's mandatory retirement/disability plan. Social Security(retirement) is 6.2%, Medicare(disability) is 1.45%. So $765 of our hypothetical $10k of earnings would go towards FICA.
In either case, a relatively minor reworking of tax law to go along with the reforming of the welfare system wouldn't be out of line.
Then the question becomes - can 30% or 40% of people pay enough tax to fund the running of the country AND pay those sliding scale wellfare checks ? Well possibly - in my country only 20% of people earn enough to pay any taxes at all- and we manage a fairly successful welfare state with 40% unemployment (but that 20% pay between 35 and 40 percent tax on average).
As you mention, it's actually possible for the top 20% of earners to pay to have 40% of the population on welfare. With 60% of people paying something, or at least not being negative, 30% receiving often token sums, and only 10% or less getting the 'full amount', you should be good. Sure, you're going to have to mess with the tax rates and deductions and such a bit, but for such a comprehensive welfare reform, it'd be expected.
The only practical way to reduce it however would be to significantly reduce that 40% number - and THAT will take at least one more generation, because almost ALL of that 40% are illiterate and this economy simply doesn't HAVE that much manual labor.
We don't have that problem here in the states, literacy is somewhere over 90%(depending on how you measure 'functional literacy') and I remember mentionin
Allow me to point out that slavery and indentured servitude are entirely separate things.
Which is why I listed both. Even in your examples there were different forms of indentured servitude, and some were indeed heriditary.
Still, both were abused to the point that we want to avoid them. Indeed, they're banned by the constitution except in cases of conviction by trial.
I'll state here, for the record, that slavery as practiced in the United States was the ugliest, most obscene form of slavery ever practiced anywhere.
While I'll agree that it's probably worse than 50% of slavery practices around the world, I'd disagree that it was the worst. There's some nasty, nasty examples if you get into history.
By the same token, slavery got WORSE leading up to the civil war - the ability to free slaves being removed, criminalizing literacy, etc...
One problem with your approach is that economically it doesn't work very well. If you decrease benefits by 1/5 of your earnings (just to pick a number), you are in effect taxing those earnings at 20%, which is far higher than the income tax rate paid by poverty level workers otherwise.
So what? They're still effectively paying a negative tax rate. Remember, I originally planned on decreasing benefits by 50%, then decided that was too much.
It's the equivalent of taking the $8/hr job and turning it into a $6.50/hr job. It's not hard to see that this might disincent many people that would be eligible.
Which is why I knocked it down from 50% in the first place. $6.50/hr is still good money when you have your other basic needs taken care of. Don't forget that the purpose is to get them off of welfare.
Let's take that $8/hour job. At 40 hours a week, that's $320/week, $16,640 a year. Let's say that 'welfare' is indeed $10k. That means that the individuals welfare payments are reduced by $3,328 over the course of a year.
He goes from 'earning' $10k for doing nothing to $23,312 by working that $8/hour job, earning the equivalent of $11.21 an hour.
Add to this the costs of transit, child care, and work clothes, and it's possible that working may be a zero gain for some of these people.
Which is why I mentioned dropping it from 50%... 20% is a much more gradual slope, and if the job costs that much that the marginal gain isn't worth it at 20%, maybe they shouldn't take the job. Personally, I don't think that employers that are that cheap should have an easy time getting workers...
You are quite a pleasant surprise... the idea of a libertarian with that much humanity irks something terrible in me.
irks something terrible? You hate that you found a libertarian with an ounce of compassion?
But that is why my solution is based on making even the worst possible job so much more attractive than wellfare that you take away the MOTIVATION to leach on it.
Took me a bit to find the post with your plan on it, and I've already responded to it.
It's also why my idea makes outsourcing effectively impossible while also removing the "hire an illegal and pay less than minimum wage" problem.
Actually, I don't think it does, as I stated in the other post. You're proposing a protectionist system, and historically those don't work well. My proposal is to lower the cost of labor such that manufacturers choose to stay here and can remain in business.
When you make working that attractive, and ensure there IS work - you'll great reduce your wellfare burden -and still have it available for those who cannot work - whether from an injury, disability or social difficulty of some sort (like a single parent who actually wants to see her child a few hours a day).
Thing is, you're effectively ensuring that there WILL be less work by artificially raising the cost of labor; therefore businesses will attempt to minimize it. It's economic law.
I view disability(injury counts even if temporary) as a different matter from 'welfare'. Just being 'handicapped' such as confined to a wheelchair doesn't mean you can't work. As for the single parent - well, it's a sticky thing for me, single parents bring all sorts of sub-optimal situations to the board; sometimes it's unavoidable(death), sometimes it's better than a dual parent(where one is abusive, for example). I prefer households to be complete, women to wait until marriage to have kids, etc... On the other hand, kids need to be taken care of. Yet we also have people in the states who have more kids specifically to get more benefits. They view state supported procreation as a right. The kids need to be taken care of(very very important). Sticky Sticky Sticky...
Still, with my idea the kids will have medical care, the woman can work part time, and even with a 40 hour a week job would be able to spend lots of time with her kids. I'm not going to require her to work 60-80 hours a week for benefits.
RE: Your sig - I started doing your poll, but I stopped a few questions in. I can recognize a loaded poll when I see one.
Not my poll... Just liked it and stuck it in my sig. Unfortuantly with the sig character limits being for the raw code, I can't add a disclaimer that it's not my site. However, I DO possess concealed carry permits for two states. Oh how I wish they were treated like driver's licenses(get one for the home state, good in all 50). I DO carry, but I'm don't tell random people that I do.
(in my country more than 50% of all shootings occur to steal the fire-arms of the victims - most common TARGET for such attacks are policemen. Shoot him in the head from behind while on patrol, steal his gun to use in other crimes) or force you to choose one answer when CLEARLY there are two that BOTH matter.
Man, what country are you in if shooting police officers for their weapons is common? In the whole USA on average just over a hundred police officers die 'in the line of duty' each year, and that includes things like car accidents.
Well this was the one I stopped on. It forces me to choose between "my safety" or "my attacker's safety" as if they are mutually exclusive. The law in the full developed world for THOUSANDS of years have CLEARLY felt differently.
Are you sure about that? I'm pretty sure the law has normally been on the side of the 'noble' party, and failing that, on allowing the defender to use any means, up to and including killing their attacker. Heck, 'cattle rustling' carrying the possibility of the death penalty wasn't a new thing for the 'old west', it was hallowed tradition from europe.
In reality of course, guns for self-defense is a myth. People who really KNOW guns (my dad is an ex-cop - he owns several firearms ranging from a 9mm glock through a number of hunting rifles to a full-military .33) tend to advise against even trying - and certainly against carrying or owning - as he does.
In very situational cases, a gun could be a good defense, if you're driving through a hijack-notorious area, and give it to a passenger who may get a shot off and let him drive BEFORE the 4 other hijackers can fire a killing shot, maybe.
Depends on the threat, as you mention. This starts to make me think you're in Mexico, though I'm not familiar with any military that uses a .33 caliber weapon.
In the USA, we don't have to worry about hijackers, and generally speaking, if, on average, most people were armed and willing to use their arms in self defense, hijacking would be a thing of the past. It's a predator-prey thing. The predator has survive, normally without significant injury, every attack. The prey has every motivation to survive. Ergo, the predator normally goes after prey in situations where the prey is least likely to be able to effectively target back. The sick, the wounded, the old, and the extremely young. To move it into a human realm; the motivation is a bit less - hijackers normally don't kill, but the predator relation remains - they'll go after people with bodyguards less frequently than people without. They'll target those with the best payoff-risk ratios.
Part of carrying for self defense is avoiding known high-risk areas.
The reality though - being armed means that you now FORCE the attacker to use deadly force, when he would usually be quite satisfied to use threats to get what he wants - and chances are, he's better at it than you.
At least in the USA, the average CCW holder is up there with the cops. Most CCW holders are enthusiests who practice on their own regularly; many cops only shoot to qualify. Note that I'm talking about average cops - the low drag types are better, and there are enthusiests in the ranks of the police as well.
In addition, many criminals are experts on the threat - not the execution. Their equi
Still, I feel it's worth verifying if that movement has not been too successful, and that it might be worth swinging the pendulum a measure back in the other direction.
I agree; moderation in all things. Slavery, indentured servitude, both are bad. On the other hand, having multiple generations of people who think that getting food, housing, and money from the government for doing nothing is their right, is also bad.
And the problem isn't just in America. It being a problem in Belgium is new to me - but then I don't speak Dutch or French, and my german is atrocious. Still, I tend to hear the most 'welfare abuse' stories from England.
Maybe it's time that the system is re-evaluated and adjusted to kill off the more extreme leeches ?
Personally I'm more in favor of reform and re-education. Maybe they WILL need to get a bit hungry before they're willing to change.
And yeah, I'd like to see nature better taken care of. There's plenty of work to be done that's not replacing the bees.