I hear your concern that the free market does much of this, however inequality is a greater concern than keeping a "pure" free market.
Why is "inequality" a concern? We should make sure nobody starves, but beyond that, I don't see inequality as a problem.
While some inequality may be due to lack of fairness, if you give government the power to redress unfair situations, it will invariably abuse that power, and the cure is worse than the disease.
Moreover the market is anything but free or else we'd be able to buy prescription drugs from Canada at 1/3 the cost.
Which is why I said: "The only problem is that we don't actually implement this system [the free market] very well,"
What's your plan for improving things?
Remove restrictions on the market; reduce regulations; privatize; stop worrying about inequality.
Now, such a transition is painful. Privatization involves enormous amounts of corruption (after all, who are you going to give all those publicly owned resources to) until finally market forces start operating again. And workers not used to operating in a free market and viewing themselves as a valuable resource rather than a wage slave are going to screw up for a while. It's still the right thing to do.
He said that the reality was that the deck was stacked in favor of the employer and he estimated that maybe 10% of lawsuits against employers were won by the employee.
That doesn't mean that the "deck is stacked against the employee", it means that a lot of lawsuits are groundless. It means that we should reconsider the entire idea of "sex discrimination lawsuits" since they are obviously being massively abused.
I know that it's the Slashdot way to just assume her case was groundless simply because a jury ruled that way.
Actually, I think, once she had an consensual affair with someone at work, she lost any credibility filing a sex discrimination lawsuits (the same is, of course, true for men).
She also said that a male colleague with whom she had an affair unfairly cut her out of e-mail correspondence and upper management did nothing about it.
If you're having an affair at work, don't complain when people eventually kick one of the two participants out; having squabbling ex lovers around is disruptive. That's why people don't shit where they eat.
So I'd suggest taking the taxes and giving them out as a quarterly bonus to anyone who had worked that quarter with no means testing
"Has worked" by what criteria? Did they do anything useful? Does some artist who produces shitty paintings nobody wants get money?
What about a system in which, if you do something useful for your fellow human beings, they give you tokens rewarding you, and how many tokens you have indicates how valuable you are to society?
Well, there is such a system: the free market, and the tokens are called "dollars". The only problem is that we don't actually implement this system very well, since the government keeps deciding that normal people don't know what they really want and that these tokens need to be redistributed according to other schemes.
The US lacks proper consumer protection laws, and attempts to fix that meet with attacks from peddlers of fake stuff...
What are you talking about? The US has some of the strongest consumer protection laws in the world.
But your implicit assumption that consumer protection laws and regulatory agencies are the right way of dealing with this is also wrong. The term "mayonnaise" and "mayo" should simply be trademarks owned by the AEB, and the AEB should be able to enforce labeling in court.
In civilized countries
I grew up in a "civilized country"; I very much prefer the uncivilized variety.
Makes you wonder about where hatchet pieces like this [businessinsider.com] came from. And who lit a fire under the FDA's ass [bloomberg.com] to crack down on the definition of "mayo?"
Doesn't "make you wonder" at all; of course, manufacturers of competing products are going to insist that their competitors don't mislead customers. If something is labeled as "mayo", that's what it should be. And in our progressive government, the enforcement of such basic truth-in-labeling falls on regulatory agencies like the FDA, so that's where competitors need to go to get things done. So, what nefarious goings-on are you implying?
And it is fundamentally contrary to the ideals of Nerds, Geeks, and those who believe in the potential of science and information to help mankind get out of the mess we've made of our world and our societies.
As a nerd and geek, I do believe in the potential of science and information to help mankind. But what is scientifically true and what constitutes accurate information is for each individual to decide; that's the nature of science and a free society.
You don't believe in science and information, you seem to believe in progressive politics; that's something entirely different. Progressives pay lip service to science and reason, but don't actually practice it.
The AEB is a taxpayer funded organization, so yes, running PR, misleading advertising campaigns, and undermining a private company, with my tax dollars is inappropriate.
Of course it is "inappropriate". It is, however, odd for a left wing newspaper to complain about this because their political objective is to have even more of this kind of sh*t going on.
Lobbying, which is called bribing when done by an individual.
No, "lobbying" isn't "bribing". And, yes, individuals can legally lobby and they can legally make campaign contributions. Wealthy individuals do it all the time.
Your head is really a muddled stew of left wing propaganda: "corporate personhood", "lobbying is bribery", etc.
Research after research has proven that not only is dietary cholesterol not bad for you (and doesn't actually raise your blood cholesterol afterall,) but saturated fat isn't either, and in fact low fat high carb diets themselves are likely the cause of obesity
Largely true.
Vegan diets are ALL ABOUT low protein, low fat, high carb. It is NOT a healthy way to live
Pretty much false. Vegan diets are about not eating animal products, period. You can easily eat a high protein/high fat/low carb vegan diet.
Left-wing politics are political positions or activities that accept or support social equality, often in opposition to social hierarchy and social inequality. They typically involve concern for those in society who are perceived as disadvantaged relative to others and a belief that there are unjustified inequalities that need to be reduced or abolished.
The fact that the Guardian is a left wing paper is just a fact, since people who vote for self-identified left-wing parties favor it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The paper's readership is generally on the mainstream left of British political opinion: a MORI poll taken between April and June 2000 showed that 80% of Guardian readers were Labour Party voters; according to another MORI poll taken in 2005, 48% of Guardian readers were Labour voters and 34% Liberal Democrat voters.
Left wing European parties and newspapers tend to be anti-American because America's system of government is perceived as being too supportive of individual liberties and free markets, concepts that run contrary to left wing ideology.
You really need to read more.
Take your own advice. But in addition, stop trying to run away from your political orientation and identification.
I certainly do not agree with everything the Gaurdian prints, but it is worth remembering that as it is a UK publication they have printed this knowing that if they can't prove every word they would be sued into oblivion for liable [sic] under the strong laws we have in the UK. We also have a slightly more regulated press than the you in the US in terms of a body that overseas [sic] them and force retractions if they print anything that is utterly made up.
Those "strong libel laws" and censorship boards exist to protect important UK personalities and further UK political interests; the idea that they protect foreign governments from being badmouthed by UK publications is ridiculously naive.
So with that in mind you can be fairly sure that there is a fair amount of substance to this story
This story happens to be true: the US pays vast amounts of money to its agricultural lobby and agricultural lobbies heavily influence what the US government tells the people about food. Of course, what the Guardian neglects to tell you is that the crap that's going on with agricultural subsidies and agricultural lobbies in Europe is just as bad, if not worse. The purpose of articles like that is to distract ignorant Europeans from the enormous problems in Europe, which are being swept under the rug by your elites and your government controlled media. And while anti-Americanism serves the political elites and media in Europe to distract Europeans from their problems, Americans generally don't give a crap about all the political, social, and economic dysfunction in Europe.
We have a "high forest level", the highest since centuries.
How nice, but utterly irrelevant to my point. Europe used to be 90% old growth forest. Now it's less than 10% old growth forest, plus a lot of flimsily reforested areas that don't actually sequester much. Europeans should be held responsible both for the historical carbon release and the lack of sequestration. The fact that Europe isn't quite the environmental shithole it used to be is irrelevant when it comes to the global carbon balance.
I agree that there are lots of ways to arrange the data, however all of them show that wages for most people are stagnant or in some cases falling.
"Wages" are the wrong measure; you need to look at the combination of wages, non-wage compensation, working hours, defined benefits, government programs, and insurance. Second, you need to look at the workforce and demographics: as more women enter the workforce, as more family activities get turned into jobs, and as fewer people are married, of course, wages drop.
So far only Bernie and Trump are touching any of these topics so I'm not optimistic.
People like "Bernie" are the primary cause of both the nominal stagnation of wages (by forcing people to pay for crap they don't want or need), and for the generally slow growth of the economy. If you want to wreck our economy and economic future completely, vote for Bernie.
Taxing at rates comparable to earlier years is not throwing out the baby with the bath water
Of course it is: higher tax rates will cause companies, and increasingly workers, to (legally) evade taxes, or even flee the country to live where tax burdens are lower.
But even if we could tax at higher rates, what for? So that Bernie or Hillary or whoever can engage in even more crony capitalism?
Your idea implies: if mankind would not produce CO2, woods and oceans would suck up all of it, and soon we hat an CO2 free atmosphere: that is wrong.
In fact, that's exactly what happens: forests and oceans sequester carbon and remove it from the atmosphere. As a result, atmospheric CO2 concentrations drop. That continues to the point where temperatures drop so low that much of the land and ocean gets covered in ice and carbon capture by forests and oceans becomes so slow that it is balanced by carbon release from volcanoes, respiration, and decay. Every 100ka, that balance is then disturbed due to the Milankovich cycles, and we get rapid thawing, with CO2 release from formerly ice-covered areas creating a positive feedback. It stays warm for 20ka or so and then temperatures drop again as plants start removing CO2 again. That's been going for about 7 million years now.
(In fact, it's been going on for about 50-100 million years, it's just that only in the last 7 million years, the globe has become so cold that we have been living in a permanent ice age and get these massive glaciations.)
That conclusion is based on a simplistic analysis of tax records, not taking account demographic changes and not taking into account the vastly increased amounts of government services and benefits people increase. Furthermore, increases in government benefits and services primarily hurt the middle class, because that's who necessarily has to pay for it.
So, some people get rich through political corruption and that hurts the country. A lot of that political corruption is, in fact, directly related to increases in government services, because the easiest way to get money from the government is to get the government spend it on your products, whether it is military aircraft or drugs, and that spending is necessarily paid for through taxes. Other political corruption is based on giving tax breaks or financial support to the middle class for things specific industries lobby to sell, whether it's houses, solar cells, or education.
at the behest of their well heeled sponsors, to have the rich get richer while the 99% gets the shaft
"The rich" vs "the 99%" is a false dichotomy. There is clearly a lot of crony capitalism in this country, but there are also clearly many more people who got rich through hard work and without crony capitalism. If you take money away from "the rich" in general because some people who have money happen to be corrupt, you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater and you're not fixing the problem.
The attempts to measure "economic freedom" reward despotic countries that have low transactional friction.
Empirically, economic freedoms and individual freedoms are highly correlated. And political and economic theory explains why.
The idea that restricting economic freedoms somehow increases political or individual freedoms is a self-serving lie, a con-job by people who want to take away your money and your freedom.
It's predicated on impossible assumptions, and there are not enough resources to either make or have people be able to buy these products.
Your assumptions are wrong. In fact, a lot of growth is the result of gains in efficiency. For example, higher energy efficiency, faster computers, better programming languages, more powerful motors, etc. all correspond to economic growth. A lot of other value that is created is better entertainment, scientific knowledge, medical insights, that is, valuable information.
All it is in the near term is moving around resources to benefit corporations and maximize "shareholder value", and therefore "executive bonuses".
You're making a false zero-sum assumption. In fact, some of the most successful sectors, like services, entertainment, and IT, don't rely on "moving resources around"; their growth is almost entirely due to the creation of knowledge.
It's a fucking Ponzi scheme. It's a lie. It's a complete work of fiction.
You're like someone sitting in an airplane arguing that man will never fly. It's "fucking idiotic".
Or deluded and capitalist and claiming it's possible for companies to grow by 10% every year forever...
It's around 7%. Capitalists don't claim it's "forever" (what is?), but there is certainly no end in sight.
or that somehow giving tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations makes everyone else's lives better...
Correct.
or that corporations are entitled to strip out the jobs from the parent society to maximize shareholder value
Correct, they are entitled to do that.
And it might surprise you that many countries have struck a nice balance between having private industry and pretending like you can have a functioning society if nobody pays for it.
In your dreams.
But keep making it into your idiotic partisan position, and keep on demonstrating you're an idiot.
Twitter is a platform for self-righteous indignation and social signaling, and it seems to be very good at that. It's manna for the media, and media personalities and journalists seem to be its primary engine..
If you want news, discussion, or any other form of useful communication, Twitter is the wrong platform to use, starting with the fact that in 140 characters, you can really have any kind of serious dialog.
Neither is the puny amount of wood burned any comparison to the amount of oil/coal burned nor are we down to 10% of woods.
Well, I'm glad you at least agree implicitly that countries ought to be held responsible (1) for the carbon released by deforestation relative to natural, prehistoric levels, and (2) need to be charged for the capture deficit resulting for the forest cover that is missing relative to natural, prehistoric levels.
One can quibble about the percentages later, but suffice it to say: no matter how you look at it, Europe clearly has undergone massive deforestation at the hands of its inhabitants, and the resulting carbon that was released into the atmosphere, as well as the missing carbon sequestration capacity should be treated just like emissions.
All wood on earth burned today would add less than a one year CO2 pollution mankind is doing every year.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is "inequality" a concern? We should make sure nobody starves, but beyond that, I don't see inequality as a problem.
While some inequality may be due to lack of fairness, if you give government the power to redress unfair situations, it will invariably abuse that power, and the cure is worse than the disease.
Which is why I said: "The only problem is that we don't actually implement this system [the free market] very well,"
Remove restrictions on the market; reduce regulations; privatize; stop worrying about inequality.
Now, such a transition is painful. Privatization involves enormous amounts of corruption (after all, who are you going to give all those publicly owned resources to) until finally market forces start operating again. And workers not used to operating in a free market and viewing themselves as a valuable resource rather than a wage slave are going to screw up for a while. It's still the right thing to do.
That doesn't mean that the "deck is stacked against the employee", it means that a lot of lawsuits are groundless. It means that we should reconsider the entire idea of "sex discrimination lawsuits" since they are obviously being massively abused.
Actually, I think, once she had an consensual affair with someone at work, she lost any credibility filing a sex discrimination lawsuits (the same is, of course, true for men).
If you're having an affair at work, don't complain when people eventually kick one of the two participants out; having squabbling ex lovers around is disruptive. That's why people don't shit where they eat.
Push it good! https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Crony capitalism... on speed! What a great idea!
"Has worked" by what criteria? Did they do anything useful? Does some artist who produces shitty paintings nobody wants get money?
What about a system in which, if you do something useful for your fellow human beings, they give you tokens rewarding you, and how many tokens you have indicates how valuable you are to society?
Well, there is such a system: the free market, and the tokens are called "dollars". The only problem is that we don't actually implement this system very well, since the government keeps deciding that normal people don't know what they really want and that these tokens need to be redistributed according to other schemes.
What are you talking about? The US has some of the strongest consumer protection laws in the world.
But your implicit assumption that consumer protection laws and regulatory agencies are the right way of dealing with this is also wrong. The term "mayonnaise" and "mayo" should simply be trademarks owned by the AEB, and the AEB should be able to enforce labeling in court.
I grew up in a "civilized country"; I very much prefer the uncivilized variety.
Doesn't "make you wonder" at all; of course, manufacturers of competing products are going to insist that their competitors don't mislead customers. If something is labeled as "mayo", that's what it should be. And in our progressive government, the enforcement of such basic truth-in-labeling falls on regulatory agencies like the FDA, so that's where competitors need to go to get things done. So, what nefarious goings-on are you implying?
I suspect he meant the Department of Commerce, an agency of the federal government dedicated to crony capitalism.
(In the US the Chamber of Commerce is, of course, a private lobbying group; in other nations, however, it is indeed a governmental entity.)
As a nerd and geek, I do believe in the potential of science and information to help mankind. But what is scientifically true and what constitutes accurate information is for each individual to decide; that's the nature of science and a free society.
You don't believe in science and information, you seem to believe in progressive politics; that's something entirely different. Progressives pay lip service to science and reason, but don't actually practice it.
Of course it is "inappropriate". It is, however, odd for a left wing newspaper to complain about this because their political objective is to have even more of this kind of sh*t going on.
No, "lobbying" isn't "bribing". And, yes, individuals can legally lobby and they can legally make campaign contributions. Wealthy individuals do it all the time.
Your head is really a muddled stew of left wing propaganda: "corporate personhood", "lobbying is bribery", etc.
Largely true.
Pretty much false. Vegan diets are about not eating animal products, period. You can easily eat a high protein/high fat/low carb vegan diet.
Most people understand what "the left" refers to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The fact that the Guardian is a left wing paper is just a fact, since people who vote for self-identified left-wing parties favor it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Left wing European parties and newspapers tend to be anti-American because America's system of government is perceived as being too supportive of individual liberties and free markets, concepts that run contrary to left wing ideology.
Take your own advice. But in addition, stop trying to run away from your political orientation and identification.
Those "strong libel laws" and censorship boards exist to protect important UK personalities and further UK political interests; the idea that they protect foreign governments from being badmouthed by UK publications is ridiculously naive.
This story happens to be true: the US pays vast amounts of money to its agricultural lobby and agricultural lobbies heavily influence what the US government tells the people about food. Of course, what the Guardian neglects to tell you is that the crap that's going on with agricultural subsidies and agricultural lobbies in Europe is just as bad, if not worse. The purpose of articles like that is to distract ignorant Europeans from the enormous problems in Europe, which are being swept under the rug by your elites and your government controlled media. And while anti-Americanism serves the political elites and media in Europe to distract Europeans from their problems, Americans generally don't give a crap about all the political, social, and economic dysfunction in Europe.
How nice, but utterly irrelevant to my point. Europe used to be 90% old growth forest. Now it's less than 10% old growth forest, plus a lot of flimsily reforested areas that don't actually sequester much. Europeans should be held responsible both for the historical carbon release and the lack of sequestration. The fact that Europe isn't quite the environmental shithole it used to be is irrelevant when it comes to the global carbon balance.
"Wages" are the wrong measure; you need to look at the combination of wages, non-wage compensation, working hours, defined benefits, government programs, and insurance. Second, you need to look at the workforce and demographics: as more women enter the workforce, as more family activities get turned into jobs, and as fewer people are married, of course, wages drop.
People like "Bernie" are the primary cause of both the nominal stagnation of wages (by forcing people to pay for crap they don't want or need), and for the generally slow growth of the economy. If you want to wreck our economy and economic future completely, vote for Bernie.
Of course it is: higher tax rates will cause companies, and increasingly workers, to (legally) evade taxes, or even flee the country to live where tax burdens are lower.
But even if we could tax at higher rates, what for? So that Bernie or Hillary or whoever can engage in even more crony capitalism?
In fact, that's exactly what happens: forests and oceans sequester carbon and remove it from the atmosphere. As a result, atmospheric CO2 concentrations drop. That continues to the point where temperatures drop so low that much of the land and ocean gets covered in ice and carbon capture by forests and oceans becomes so slow that it is balanced by carbon release from volcanoes, respiration, and decay. Every 100ka, that balance is then disturbed due to the Milankovich cycles, and we get rapid thawing, with CO2 release from formerly ice-covered areas creating a positive feedback. It stays warm for 20ka or so and then temperatures drop again as plants start removing CO2 again. That's been going for about 7 million years now.
(In fact, it's been going on for about 50-100 million years, it's just that only in the last 7 million years, the globe has become so cold that we have been living in a permanent ice age and get these massive glaciations.)
That conclusion is based on a simplistic analysis of tax records, not taking account demographic changes and not taking into account the vastly increased amounts of government services and benefits people increase. Furthermore, increases in government benefits and services primarily hurt the middle class, because that's who necessarily has to pay for it.
So, some people get rich through political corruption and that hurts the country. A lot of that political corruption is, in fact, directly related to increases in government services, because the easiest way to get money from the government is to get the government spend it on your products, whether it is military aircraft or drugs, and that spending is necessarily paid for through taxes. Other political corruption is based on giving tax breaks or financial support to the middle class for things specific industries lobby to sell, whether it's houses, solar cells, or education.
"The rich" vs "the 99%" is a false dichotomy. There is clearly a lot of crony capitalism in this country, but there are also clearly many more people who got rich through hard work and without crony capitalism. If you take money away from "the rich" in general because some people who have money happen to be corrupt, you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater and you're not fixing the problem.
Empirically, economic freedoms and individual freedoms are highly correlated. And political and economic theory explains why.
The idea that restricting economic freedoms somehow increases political or individual freedoms is a self-serving lie, a con-job by people who want to take away your money and your freedom.
Your assumptions are wrong. In fact, a lot of growth is the result of gains in efficiency. For example, higher energy efficiency, faster computers, better programming languages, more powerful motors, etc. all correspond to economic growth. A lot of other value that is created is better entertainment, scientific knowledge, medical insights, that is, valuable information.
You're making a false zero-sum assumption. In fact, some of the most successful sectors, like services, entertainment, and IT, don't rely on "moving resources around"; their growth is almost entirely due to the creation of knowledge.
You're like someone sitting in an airplane arguing that man will never fly. It's "fucking idiotic".
It's around 7%. Capitalists don't claim it's "forever" (what is?), but there is certainly no end in sight.
Correct.
Correct, they are entitled to do that.
In your dreams.
Take your own advice.
Twitter is a platform for self-righteous indignation and social signaling, and it seems to be very good at that. It's manna for the media, and media personalities and journalists seem to be its primary engine..
If you want news, discussion, or any other form of useful communication, Twitter is the wrong platform to use, starting with the fact that in 140 characters, you can really have any kind of serious dialog.
Isn't that what I just said?
Well, I'm glad you at least agree implicitly that countries ought to be held responsible (1) for the carbon released by deforestation relative to natural, prehistoric levels, and (2) need to be charged for the capture deficit resulting for the forest cover that is missing relative to natural, prehistoric levels.
One can quibble about the percentages later, but suffice it to say: no matter how you look at it, Europe clearly has undergone massive deforestation at the hands of its inhabitants, and the resulting carbon that was released into the atmosphere, as well as the missing carbon sequestration capacity should be treated just like emissions.
Actually, forests hold more carbon than the entire atmosphere. ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/0...
They also capture the equivalent of 30% of all man-made emissions (about as much as oceans).