Option 1: keep everything basically the way it is (Rich people stay rich, poor people stay poor)
Option 2: Distribute the wealth so that everyone can have the basic necessities. But not just for the United States, for the entire world. This would mean that rich people all forfeit nearly all their wealth, because all the money created in the world is only enough to give each person $865 / month.
Which would you choose?
Or would you rather have a 3rd option that spreads wealth only within the United States but keeps the rest of the world poor?
Donating money to a church is less effective than donating to non-profits like doctors without borders, etc, that don't have ulterior motives like converting people to their religion
And BTW you still need to provide citations for claims like "Conservatives donate more to charity", rather than simply asserting it. How else would we know if it is true? We all know conservatives can't simply be trusted. Afterall, most false assertions without citations are made by conservatives [citation needed].
Well it's not the government doing the supporting. It is the government forcing one group of people to help another group.
Charities and other forms of aid can be very large in scope. For example a large insurance provider will have no trouble helping in a large disaster. Afterall what is government aid (e.g. FEMA) but a giant insurance program. The only difference is that in government programs like this, participation is mandatory.
I'm not arguing for or against individualism or socialism. I am just pointing out that the significant feature of government welfare is not it's size, but rather it's ability to compel people to participate.
One could imagine a society where the government provides the same kind of insurance for disaster relief, but allows communities of people (e.g. states) to opt out. They may save some money by not having to pay the government for this service, but they also don't get the protection. This would be the same system we have now, except it would be voluntary.
A private insurance company could conceivably be just as large (to cover a whole country), but it would lack the authority to make participation mandatory.
Government does have a role. It's role is to deny the freedom to opt out. It's role is to compel people to pay for insurance they don't want, in order to help people they don't want to help. Is this a good or a bad thing? I guess it depends on the situation and how much you value freedom over safety.
There are many ideologies self identified as socialist, Marxism being one (albeit an important one). A broader definition of socialism is simply the opposite of individualism, and under this definition public education and healthcare would qualify. If you feel that other forms of socialism ( i.e. non Marxist forms) are not "real socialism", then that is only a semantic debate.
I think the real tragedy is that the label socialism has become so toxic. (e.g. if you can prove something is socialism, then it is automatically bad, because socialism is bad a priori). Rather than participating in this pointless game, I think it makes more sense to simply reject the idea that socialism is bad by virtue of being socialism. It makes more sense to me to analyze all systems whether categorized as socialist, capitalist, etc on an individual basis. Maybe Marxism had weaknesses, that doesn't mean variants of Marxism or other versions of socialism are doomed to fail. The same goes for capitalism.
All you need to do is start your own company and hire all the overqualified/underemployed old people, and you'll be a force to be reckoned with. You could probably conquer google with all their young programmers with less experience. Make the discrimination work for you. This is America.
I said "If it were an advantage to be selfish, rather than altruistic, the species would become more selfish". I didn't say it is an advantage. In essence, I agree with you here.
It is an advantage if you are really good at it.
It is also an advantage to be able to spot cheaters, if you are a team player.
The survival of the species is sort of an arbitrary metric. In the same way that some species of parasites need their host species to survive, cheaters need their victims to survive as well. That doesn;t mean they are playing on the same team. It also doesn't mean that they are on completely different teams either.
Here's where I disagree with you. Sexual selection _is_ natural selection.
Sexual selection is natural selection in the sense that it is a type of selection and it is "natural" (i.e. part of nature), but the term "sexual selection" can refer to a type of selection that is distinct from "natural selection". This is in fact how Darwin treated it. Although many people treat sexual selection as a part of natural selection, this just means that we don;t have a good name for the "non-sexual" part of natural selection.
Reproductive success is the be all and end all of evolution. I'm not sure how you can argue that it's not.
Sexual selection goes much deeper than simple reproductive success. Other factors like fitness indicators, are actually detrimental in many ways to survival and therefore reproductive success. In fact fitness indicators are required to be detrimental for survival in order to be good fitness indicators, as in the example of the peacock's feathers.
In many species good at surviving is not enough. You need to have some ridiculous plumage or some other handicap to show you are *really* good at surviving. Only a really genetically fit peacock could survive with such a big handicap.
Sexual selection was actual the subject of one of Darwin's later books (later than "On the Origin of Species") "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex".
My point is that you can't prove someone's state of mind. Maybe someone sent a text message to their boss that they were going to transport drugs. Maybe that someone only told his boss that because he needed to say that in order not to be killed. Obviously lawyers will try to persuade a jury, and a jury will just decide based on who they think is telling the truth. This doesn't prove anything. This is just the justice system that we have. It doesn't require proof to convict. It requires a consensus of 12 people.
My other point was that you don't even need to prove intent (which is impossible or really hard). You can just prove they had a compartment. That is sufficient, in the way that simply proving someone had drugs is sufficient. You don't need to prove he was going to use or sell them. The law can (and frequently is) crafted in such a way to make a simple thing (like possession of X amount) illegal, because it is assumed to imply a more complicated thing (like intent to sell), and it doesn't matter if you didn't plan to sell, because you had the amount that was decided to be illegal.
I'm not saying I agree with this law, but how do you ever prove intent? How do you prove what somebody was thinking? And yet we seem to do it (or at least pretend like we can do it) all the time. This case doesn't seem all that different.
I mean just the fact that some drugs are illegal to possess assumes that you were either going to use them or sell them to someone who would (i.e. as opposed to doing science experiments with them, or disposing of them, etc). The law presumes you are going to do something bad with the drugs merely by having them. They don't need to prove you were going to use or sell the drugs because simply possessing the drugs is a crime.
This law against "secret compartments" is no different. It assume you will use them to hide drugs by merely having it. They don't need to prove you were going to use the secret compartment for drugs because simply possessing the secret compartment is a crime.
Yeah, but since they found it, it became illegal. It's not really a secret compartment if they don't find it. I mean if no cops complain about the secret compartment they don't find, then they must be cool with it.
Obviously people are altruistic because it makes them feel good. The question is *why* does it make them feel good (i.e. is there an evolutionary drive to be altruistic?).
Why do people eat food? Why do the have sex?
Well because food is delicious and sex feels good, obviously. But there is an underlying reason why food is delicious and why sex feels good, and that reason is evolutionary in nature. Those things feel good because we are supposed to do them to improve our (i.e.our genes) chances of survival.
Yes... but evolution does not work like that. If it were an advantage to be selfish, rather than altruistic, the species would become more selfish, even if this decreases the viability of the species.
That's only true if there is no social consequences for selfishness. As long as the altruism comes with other things like ostracism, shunning, etc, for the individuals found to be selfish, the group can do a pretty good job at surviving. As long as you are more likely to thrive in the society by cooperating than you are to be a cheater with risks of being caught and outed, then it makes sense to cooperate.
As the number of cheaters goes up, it becomes more adaptive to spend more time and energy policing cheating. As the number of cheaters goes down, this extra time/energy spent policing becomes wasteful. Usually it's a game of cat and mouse with the cooperators and the cheaters, and some equilibrium point is reached.
Also, all of this goes out the window if you look to the gene as the unit of selection rather than the individual. This already makes a lot of sense considering that it is quite common for parents to put the survival of their offspring above their own (i.e. an offspring has a higher chance of spreading genes into the future than a parent). Treating the gene as the unit of selection simply extends this idea beyond parent/offspring relationships.
The ideal for males in these species is to be as large and powerful as possible, and survive. Being average, efficient and adaptable means that you won't reproduce.
You are referring to sexual selection, which is often an opposing force to natural selection. Natural selection selects for adaptability, while sexual selection can select for any number of ridiculous things like peacock feathers. Sexual selection is kept in check by natural selection, as you need to survive in order to reproduce.
I would like to point out the disadvantages of buying textbooks from for profit companies. We buy new textbooks every so many years from companies looking to make a giant profit, if it is their textbooks that are selected. Because of this many companies invest money into writing textbooks to have a chance at making a large profit. This seems like a waste to me, especially considering that states seem to want to decide what actually goes in to the textbooks.
Why don't we just have open source textbooks, like wikipedia. States would be free to fork and modify them as they see fit. All the money they spend on the books could instead be spent on making the content of the books current or just better in general. We wouldn't have to keep reinventing the wheel in every state every 10 years.
Whether you believe in creationism or evolution, whether you want religious politicians or scientists writing the books, this seems like a good way to save money and prevent wasted human effort. Probably 95% of the content of the textbooks stay the same, with the exception of recent history and quantum mechanics. Why are we paying to rewrite the same books over and over again? Why don't we as a society make an effort to own the intellectual property that we use to educate our children rather than renting it? Are we really destined to be this short sighted forever?
Being aware of false information can have a negative impact, in the same way that bogus leads can hinder a police investigation.
That said, I think the FDA should be allowed to put their stamp of approval on things, but they shouldn't be allowed to prevent people from deciding what medical tests and procedures they do to themselves.
The goal of commerce and welfare are different types of wealth distribution. Welfare seeks to redistribute the amount of wealth each person has, to ensure a minimum wealth level.
Commerce seeks to redistribute types of wealth, so people can properly benefit from wealth, while not necessarily changing the amount of wealth people have. (i.e. trade). It doesn't do the owners of Sony any good to own 1 million playstation 4s if they can't sell them for other things like cars and fancy dinners.
Usually when people talk about wealth distribution, they are talking about the former (i.e. wealth amount redistribution).
Also I wasn't commenting on the merits of wealth distribution, merely the waste of spending lots of human effort in determining how wealth is distributed.
If it was one guy spending 1 hour every day or even a computer program deciding how much money everyone got, fair or not, that would not be much wasted human effort.
Unfortunately we spend a fairly large percentage of our GDP on figuring out how to distribute the rest of it.
Welfare is the provision of a minimal level of well-being and social support for all citizens, sometimes referred to as public aid. In most developed countries, welfare is largely provided by the government and to a lesser extent charities, informal social groups, religious groups, and inter-governmental organizations.
Can you imagine all the lawyers committing suicide? That seems just as hard for me to imagine as all the lawyers becoming productive members of society.
It's not productive because nothing is being produced. It's just taking money from one group of people and giving it to another. It's redistributive rather than productive.
Making phones is productive. Advancing technology is productive.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets say there were 2 options....
Option 1: keep everything basically the way it is (Rich people stay rich, poor people stay poor)
Option 2: Distribute the wealth so that everyone can have the basic necessities. But not just for the United States, for the entire world. This would mean that rich people all forfeit nearly all their wealth, because all the money created in the world is only enough to give each person $865 / month.
Which would you choose?
Or would you rather have a 3rd option that spreads wealth only within the United States but keeps the rest of the world poor?
Do you think laziness is a choice? Why would someone choose to be lazy or choose not to be lazy?
You say you ultimately got over your laziness. What if you didn't? Why don't other people get over their own laziness?
Donating money to a church is less effective than donating to non-profits like doctors without borders, etc, that don't have ulterior motives like converting people to their religion
And BTW you still need to provide citations for claims like "Conservatives donate more to charity", rather than simply asserting it. How else would we know if it is true? We all know conservatives can't simply be trusted. Afterall, most false assertions without citations are made by conservatives [citation needed].
Well it's not the government doing the supporting. It is the government forcing one group of people to help another group.
Charities and other forms of aid can be very large in scope. For example a large insurance provider will have no trouble helping in a large disaster. Afterall what is government aid (e.g. FEMA) but a giant insurance program. The only difference is that in government programs like this, participation is mandatory.
I'm not arguing for or against individualism or socialism. I am just pointing out that the significant feature of government welfare is not it's size, but rather it's ability to compel people to participate.
One could imagine a society where the government provides the same kind of insurance for disaster relief, but allows communities of people (e.g. states) to opt out. They may save some money by not having to pay the government for this service, but they also don't get the protection. This would be the same system we have now, except it would be voluntary.
A private insurance company could conceivably be just as large (to cover a whole country), but it would lack the authority to make participation mandatory.
Government does have a role. It's role is to deny the freedom to opt out. It's role is to compel people to pay for insurance they don't want, in order to help people they don't want to help. Is this a good or a bad thing? I guess it depends on the situation and how much you value freedom over safety.
What is the point of having freedom if you are not a utilitarian?
There are many ideologies self identified as socialist, Marxism being one (albeit an important one). A broader definition of socialism is simply the opposite of individualism, and under this definition public education and healthcare would qualify. If you feel that other forms of socialism ( i.e. non Marxist forms) are not "real socialism", then that is only a semantic debate.
I think the real tragedy is that the label socialism has become so toxic. (e.g. if you can prove something is socialism, then it is automatically bad, because socialism is bad a priori). Rather than participating in this pointless game, I think it makes more sense to simply reject the idea that socialism is bad by virtue of being socialism. It makes more sense to me to analyze all systems whether categorized as socialist, capitalist, etc on an individual basis. Maybe Marxism had weaknesses, that doesn't mean variants of Marxism or other versions of socialism are doomed to fail. The same goes for capitalism.
All you need to do is start your own company and hire all the overqualified/underemployed old people, and you'll be a force to be reckoned with. You could probably conquer google with all their young programmers with less experience. Make the discrimination work for you. This is America.
You think hiring an American remote worker is any better? Try it and see.
See where your code ends up.
See where your confidential data ends up.
See where your company ends up.
I said "If it were an advantage to be selfish, rather than altruistic, the species would become more selfish". I didn't say it is an advantage. In essence, I agree with you here.
It is an advantage if you are really good at it.
It is also an advantage to be able to spot cheaters, if you are a team player.
The survival of the species is sort of an arbitrary metric. In the same way that some species of parasites need their host species to survive, cheaters need their victims to survive as well. That doesn;t mean they are playing on the same team. It also doesn't mean that they are on completely different teams either.
Here's where I disagree with you. Sexual selection _is_ natural selection.
Sexual selection is natural selection in the sense that it is a type of selection and it is "natural" (i.e. part of nature), but the term "sexual selection" can refer to a type of selection that is distinct from "natural selection". This is in fact how Darwin treated it. Although many people treat sexual selection as a part of natural selection, this just means that we don;t have a good name for the "non-sexual" part of natural selection.
Reproductive success is the be all and end all of evolution. I'm not sure how you can argue that it's not.
Sexual selection goes much deeper than simple reproductive success. Other factors like fitness indicators, are actually detrimental in many ways to survival and therefore reproductive success. In fact fitness indicators are required to be detrimental for survival in order to be good fitness indicators, as in the example of the peacock's feathers.
In many species good at surviving is not enough. You need to have some ridiculous plumage or some other handicap to show you are *really* good at surviving. Only a really genetically fit peacock could survive with such a big handicap.
Sexual selection was actual the subject of one of Darwin's later books (later than "On the Origin of Species") "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex".
My point is that you can't prove someone's state of mind. Maybe someone sent a text message to their boss that they were going to transport drugs. Maybe that someone only told his boss that because he needed to say that in order not to be killed. Obviously lawyers will try to persuade a jury, and a jury will just decide based on who they think is telling the truth. This doesn't prove anything. This is just the justice system that we have. It doesn't require proof to convict. It requires a consensus of 12 people.
My other point was that you don't even need to prove intent (which is impossible or really hard). You can just prove they had a compartment. That is sufficient, in the way that simply proving someone had drugs is sufficient. You don't need to prove he was going to use or sell them. The law can (and frequently is) crafted in such a way to make a simple thing (like possession of X amount) illegal, because it is assumed to imply a more complicated thing (like intent to sell), and it doesn't matter if you didn't plan to sell, because you had the amount that was decided to be illegal.
guilty until proven innocent like?
I'm not saying I agree with this law, but how do you ever prove intent? How do you prove what somebody was thinking? And yet we seem to do it (or at least pretend like we can do it) all the time. This case doesn't seem all that different.
I mean just the fact that some drugs are illegal to possess assumes that you were either going to use them or sell them to someone who would (i.e. as opposed to doing science experiments with them, or disposing of them, etc). The law presumes you are going to do something bad with the drugs merely by having them. They don't need to prove you were going to use or sell the drugs because simply possessing the drugs is a crime.
This law against "secret compartments" is no different. It assume you will use them to hide drugs by merely having it. They don't need to prove you were going to use the secret compartment for drugs because simply possessing the secret compartment is a crime.
Yeah, but since they found it, it became illegal. It's not really a secret compartment if they don't find it. I mean if no cops complain about the secret compartment they don't find, then they must be cool with it.
Obviously people are altruistic because it makes them feel good. The question is *why* does it make them feel good (i.e. is there an evolutionary drive to be altruistic?).
Why do people eat food? Why do the have sex?
Well because food is delicious and sex feels good, obviously. But there is an underlying reason why food is delicious and why sex feels good, and that reason is evolutionary in nature. Those things feel good because we are supposed to do them to improve our (i.e.our genes) chances of survival.
Yes... but evolution does not work like that. If it were an advantage to be selfish, rather than altruistic, the species would become more selfish, even if this decreases the viability of the species.
That's only true if there is no social consequences for selfishness. As long as the altruism comes with other things like ostracism, shunning, etc, for the individuals found to be selfish, the group can do a pretty good job at surviving. As long as you are more likely to thrive in the society by cooperating than you are to be a cheater with risks of being caught and outed, then it makes sense to cooperate.
As the number of cheaters goes up, it becomes more adaptive to spend more time and energy policing cheating. As the number of cheaters goes down, this extra time/energy spent policing becomes wasteful. Usually it's a game of cat and mouse with the cooperators and the cheaters, and some equilibrium point is reached.
Also, all of this goes out the window if you look to the gene as the unit of selection rather than the individual. This already makes a lot of sense considering that it is quite common for parents to put the survival of their offspring above their own (i.e. an offspring has a higher chance of spreading genes into the future than a parent). Treating the gene as the unit of selection simply extends this idea beyond parent/offspring relationships.
The ideal for males in these species is to be as large and powerful as possible, and survive. Being average, efficient and adaptable means that you won't reproduce.
You are referring to sexual selection, which is often an opposing force to natural selection. Natural selection selects for adaptability, while sexual selection can select for any number of ridiculous things like peacock feathers. Sexual selection is kept in check by natural selection, as you need to survive in order to reproduce.
[goes crazy]
I would like to point out the disadvantages of buying textbooks from for profit companies. We buy new textbooks every so many years from companies looking to make a giant profit, if it is their textbooks that are selected. Because of this many companies invest money into writing textbooks to have a chance at making a large profit. This seems like a waste to me, especially considering that states seem to want to decide what actually goes in to the textbooks.
Why don't we just have open source textbooks, like wikipedia. States would be free to fork and modify them as they see fit. All the money they spend on the books could instead be spent on making the content of the books current or just better in general. We wouldn't have to keep reinventing the wheel in every state every 10 years.
Whether you believe in creationism or evolution, whether you want religious politicians or scientists writing the books, this seems like a good way to save money and prevent wasted human effort. Probably 95% of the content of the textbooks stay the same, with the exception of recent history and quantum mechanics. Why are we paying to rewrite the same books over and over again? Why don't we as a society make an effort to own the intellectual property that we use to educate our children rather than renting it? Are we really destined to be this short sighted forever?
Im a nuclear scientist and a brain surgeon and the CEO of 5 fortune 500 companies, and I say you're full of shit.
Being aware of false information can have a negative impact, in the same way that bogus leads can hinder a police investigation.
That said, I think the FDA should be allowed to put their stamp of approval on things, but they shouldn't be allowed to prevent people from deciding what medical tests and procedures they do to themselves.
The goal of commerce and welfare are different types of wealth distribution. Welfare seeks to redistribute the amount of wealth each person has, to ensure a minimum wealth level.
Commerce seeks to redistribute types of wealth, so people can properly benefit from wealth, while not necessarily changing the amount of wealth people have. (i.e. trade). It doesn't do the owners of Sony any good to own 1 million playstation 4s if they can't sell them for other things like cars and fancy dinners.
Usually when people talk about wealth distribution, they are talking about the former (i.e. wealth amount redistribution).
Also I wasn't commenting on the merits of wealth distribution, merely the waste of spending lots of human effort in determining how wealth is distributed.
If it was one guy spending 1 hour every day or even a computer program deciding how much money everyone got, fair or not, that would not be much wasted human effort.
Unfortunately we spend a fairly large percentage of our GDP on figuring out how to distribute the rest of it.
Welfare is the provision of a minimal level of well-being and social support for all citizens, sometimes referred to as public aid. In most developed countries, welfare is largely provided by the government and to a lesser extent charities, informal social groups, religious groups, and inter-governmental organizations.
Welfare is more than just wealth redistribution.
No it's not a waste for Apple. It's a waste for humanity.
Can you imagine all the lawyers committing suicide? That seems just as hard for me to imagine as all the lawyers becoming productive members of society.
It's not productive because nothing is being produced. It's just taking money from one group of people and giving it to another. It's redistributive rather than productive.
Making phones is productive. Advancing technology is productive.