So let me get this straight. The richest country in the world can't afford free health care for all of its citizens?
In short, yes. Demand for a free product is unlimited. Medical resources, on the other hand, are finite. Average person in the US earns $45k. We cannot possibly afford to pay for more than $45k/year in "free" medical care for each person; and that's not even leaving any money for food, housing, or any other necessities.
Do you have any level of education on economics? You cannot buy more than what you can pay for.
The fact that "free healthcare" countries don't go bankrupt is because they recognize reality and don't actually provide the best possible healthcare for each and every citizen. For the best care, you have to be politically connected and be Very Important (like a bureaucrat, or a politician!). Everyone else gets the amount of "free" healthcare the country is able to afford. (Ain't No Such Thing As a Free Lunch)
Fortunately, medical care has diminishing returns; basic healthcare, which most countries can afford, does a tremendous job of making the majority of people better off.
Since you're ignorant of the US's policies - we already have that basic level of "free healthcare" - walk into any ER and they will treat you for any life threatening disease, as demanded by law (but not paid for by said law).
I dunno how the intricacies of your society work but from where I am standing (in Australia) I would say something over there is seriously fucked.
Maybe you just like to keep the poor people in your society poor. That's fine. Maybe you should have let the south win the civil war though, just to make it a bit easier.
I take it you're a product of "free" public education, then. No use of logic or economic analysis on how "free" healthcare gets paid for and provided, but quick to appeal to emotions with accusations of hate.
Why would anyone be proud of their ignorance of the numbers and analysis? You don't know how it works, but you have an Opinion on how it should be run. Congratulations, your type of people ran the system for a while and broke it - now what?
If you want to vote Republican ticket because of Ryan's Plan - make sure to read it. Ryan's Plan does include privatization of social security (no specifics on how, mandatory 401ks or 'contracted' to Goldman Sachs?) and turns medicare into voucher system
About time.
(who will provide individual affordable healthcare coverage to sick and poor out of this population remains unclear).
Our current system isn't working. "Free" healthcare + unlimited demand => uncontrollable costs. People managed to give medical care to the poor before Medicare existed, but Medicare itself as a solution is unsustainable. Going bankrupt to do charity is a Very Bad Idea. The charity stops happening when the money runs out. That's hardly compassionate; especially if those people really need the charity.
Fundamental problem with Ryan's Plan is that as far as fiscally conservative plans go - it isn't one...
In closing, also make sure to examine Ryan's voting record - every Bush tax cut, every expense, TARP, bailouts were voted YES. His rhetoric aside, fiscal conservative he is not.
Would you like to point to Obama's alternative? No budget for 3 years, and you're complaining that the Republican plan is inadequate. The alternative is non-existent, sadly. Ryan's plan is a baby step towards eventual solvency. Unfortunately it looks like a good part of the country has to be dragged kicking and screaming to even *consider* the type of spending cuts needed.
Anyone looks like a fiscal conservative compared to the Democrat Presidency and Congress of 2008-2010.
Ryan isn't enough, but don't let that stop you from voting the current batch of politicians out. Hope and Change ain't working.
2: "False, no wife", or "False, do not beat wife". (tricky loaded question has two ways to be false)
"I don't know" is silly in this context, since I would know if I have a wife, and if I had been beating her. But if you shifted the statement to be about a 3rd party where ignorance is a reasonable possibility, then "I Don't Know" would again become a valid response.
Your first and last exceptions are both subsets of "True". Your second exception is irrelevant because the scenario was explicitly restricted to true/false statements.
In any case, the point was to make accurate evaluations, which the presumptive claim of falsehood does not.
When a guy says he wants to conserve the environment, does that mean he wants to torch the forest and cover it with parking lots?
The meaning of the word "conservative" is independent of America's political conservatives possibly being guilty of breaking things. "Conservative" as an engineering philosophy is about one's attitude towards technical problem solving, and has little to do with political actions..
But since you want to go there, "liberalism" apparently means transforming future generations into debt slaves, recreating the institution of slavery in the USA. Bondage is freedom. Vive Libre.
The actual way I'd characterize "liberal" in the context of this discussion is "freedom". In which case the "conservative" side is "security" - which frames the conservative/liberal philosophy as a well known computing tradeoff.
In logic, it's trivial to flip any statement so that your default presumption of falsehood becomes the exact opposite given a different statement
"John is a liar" -> False, he must be an honest man!
"John is an honest man" -> False, he must be a liar!
Same rule, opposite outcomes based on a completely arbitrary starting point.
When asked to evaluate a true/false statement, a person has 3 options, not 2. True, False, and "I Don't Know". Asserting a true statement to be false is just as wrong as asserting a false statement to be true. If one lacks the information to evaluate the veracity of a statement, the correct default is to acknowledge one's ignorance, instead of making a false claim.
As a conservative, the statement didn't bother me too much. We have justified fears. It's when you act on phobias that you end up in lala land.
"It's an assault rifle with a pistol grip and semi automatic fire! BAN IT."
The author could have formulated it more neutrally though. He should have kept his definition to just risk management - "ain't broke don't fix it". There's also different areas to apply conservatism; as sometimes conserving in one area means being liberal in another.
In the context of this discussion, an earlier post claimed single payer would fix all of the ills of America's health system.
It's bullshit, because all single payer does is create a monopsony and reduce the amount of medical care bought. It'll be cheaper, but it won't be better.
A policy that encourages an increase in the supply of medical care is the only type of policy that can claim to reduce prices *and* improve quality of care. (ex: Encourage training of more doctors/nurses -> higher supply of medical personnel to meet demand for their services)
All I want here is for people to understand the cause and effect they're playing with. If you're happy with your country's healthcare system, great. You'd be just as annoyed as I am when people talk about how to improve it while showing ignorance of how it actually works.
Of course, while Gamestop's behavior here is contemptible...
So horrible of Gamestop to provide used games to people who want them. It's so demeaning.
Horror - they even buy used games from people who want to sell them! Is there no decency?
... leveraging its monopoly to undercut the very industry that supports...
That word, I do not think it means what you think it means.
Monopoly - literally, single seller.
When Best Buy, Amazon, eBay, individuals, and an endless assortment of businesses all sell used games, calling "Gamestop" a "single seller" is to throw away the meaning of words.
No one has to shop at Gamestop. No one has to sell at Gamestop. They are not a monopoly (or monopsony) in any meaningful sense. The contempt you pour on them is undeserved, because its customers have options - and still choose to bring their business to Gamestop.
Educate people if you think they can do better, but don't blame Gamestop for providing a useful service.
So basically a professional gamer should do a cost-benefit analysis before jumping into it as a career field (hopefully with a good measure of his actual skill).
How is that different than any other profession, really? Main thing to watch out for is that kids might think pro-gaming means "playing games all day", without realizing that "play" isn't the same when it's your full time job and making rent depends on your dedication and performance.
And... ? Do these same citizens have experience with America's healthcare system? No baseline of comparison?
A vegetarian may really really enjoy their veggie burger, but it doesn't mean that I'd take it over a cheeseburger. It may be tasty in its own right, and certainly better than nothing, but their preferences are not mine.
How another country's citizens feel about their own healthcare system doesn't provide enough data to demonstrate objective superiority.
Facts are one thing. Opinions on how to interpret the facts are yet another.
Stats don't say anything of themselves, especially when it comes to something as difficult to quantify as human health. When it comes to comparing healthcare of different countries, what stats are you comparing? What stats are left out in the comparison? Your post is data free. Good for you if you believe it, but you have provided no reason for anyone to agree with you.
So instead of doing anything to increase the supply of doctors or medical care, we'll create a new system where the we have some single payer who simply pays less.
Econ 101: When you reduce the price paid without changing the supply curve, the market equilibrium shifts to a point on the supply curve with a lower "quantity". For medical care, quantity translates to availability and quality. You might end up with good doctors but a long waiting period, or available doctors who aren't as good. Depending on how much one values one's own health, that isn't a good tradeoff.
Does it really take a college education to realize that single payer does nothing to actually improve medical care? It's just a way of choosing to do without.
You believe that all of those countries that spend less have better outcomes?
A monopsony for medical care means that doctors and other medical professions get paid less for the time and effort they put in; either quality suffers, or quantity suffers. Both are reductions of the supply of medical care.
Actually, I'm not - I specifically addressed this in my post- we WILL go extinct, knowledge which we cannot sell now is the only thing that can prolong our time here - but it can't make it eternal. I also said we have no choice but to AIM for infinite survival, or we won't even be around as long as we CAN be.
No matter what your intentions, claiming infinite value when you do not actually have infinite value is a dishonest accounting system.
If I have $1000 in the bank, I am not a millionaire, no matter what I say. If I have $100k/year income, I could say that I will be a millionaire in 10 years, but that is an extrapolation, it is only true if I don't die or lose my job/business, and so on. I can claim to be a potential millionaire, but I cannot claim to be a millionaire without being a liar.
In the case of infinite value, no finite sum of finite numbers will yield infinity. Period.
You cannot claim infinite value when it is actually finite. If you don't think being demonstrably wrong is a problem, you are in fact rejecting knowledge and truth.
That wasn't the meaning of profit under discussion and certainly not what the GP meant by it. In this context "profit motive" for research literally meant: "The ability to sell products made from that research for more money than we spent on it."
Let's look at what he said:
Knowledge, knowledge is the most valuable commodity in the universe, far moreso than profit - especially monetary profit.
- contradiction in the very first sentence.
Value can be measured in the real world, it's not that hard, either people want it and are willing to SPEND on it, and thus you can have profit and you can measure efficiency or people don't want it and then there is NO VALUE except for what is in your head.
He said the same thing I am saying - value is based on people's valuation. It can be measured (estimated) by the cost people are willing to pay for it. Profit and value are LINKED concepts that you CANNOT separate.
When you said that infinite cost doesn't matter because the value outweighs the cost - THAT IS PROFIT MOTIVE. You seek more value than what you paid for. You deride the profit motive right before saying the pursuit of knowledge should be governed by it! Profit does not exclusively mean monetary profit; the fact that you used "monetary profit" should be a clue that there is also "non-monetary profit" (personal satisfaction, glory, anything non-material). Both are elements of "profit".
Our problem here is that you've created an accounting system where the "non-monetary profit" of knowledge is arbitrarily declared by you to be infinite. That is a false valuation. You aren't willing to pay an infinite cost for trivial knowledge. No one is willing to pay an infinite cost for trivial knowledge. Economics is concerned with the distribution of the scarce (finite), and your addition of "infinite value" where there is none only creates a broken economic system. (This is a big deal because hundreds of millions were murdered in the past century in attempts to implement fundamentally broken economic systems)
If you're honest, stick to "potentially infinite value". In which case you make it clear that you're using an extrapolation and allow for the chance that your valuation is wrong. But that doesn't sound as impressive for selling your proposal, does it?
There is sufficient demand for gold for it to have a large value to much of the population. It doesn't even have to be evenly distributed among the population; as long as I can find a buyer for gold at the price I want, it doesn't matter if there's 1 potential buyer or 1000.
When you say "unused", simple ownership is in of itself use. Sometimes we buy things just for its potential, not for the actual use itself. Think of insurance or airbags. Most go unused, but people buy it because it helps hedge their risks. When paper money inflates, gold is (relatively) stable in value.
Gold money doesn't have a history of stability. It was always supplemented with silver and sovereign debt as needed.
I meant it in a relative sort of sense, compared to paper currency. Paper currency can drastically lose its value. Gold has not and probably will never do so. It's possible people could collectively decide that gold is worthless, but that's much less likely than for any country's paper money.
Uh. You can't eat paper bills either. You can't eat a house, or a car, or a computer, or a book. Somehow, those things all have value to people all the same, and can be bartered for food, or traded for money which you trade for food.
For whatever funny reason, there is a large demand for gold by humanity in general, both now and in the past. That demand intersects the gold supply curve in a way that makes gold very valuable. For whatever reason, the value of gold has also been stabler than the value of any paper money. This is observation, not theory.
If you want a theory, I theorize that gold will continue to be stabler in value than paper money in the future, because gov't can't print it.
And as a result, there are now classical cathedrals where the stained glass is down according to a method that's been lost, which means when they get damaged, it's impossible to repair them since nobody knows how to do it anymore.
That's not a GOOD thing and we OUGHT to apply our technology to REDUCING that problem, not pretending it makes the exercise futile.
But it happens, and it invalidates your thesis that all knowledge has infinite value because it always has an infinite supply to meet an infinite demand.
>This being an information age, a lot of knowledge has been gathered and archived; but can you guarantee that 100% of it will be saved 100 years from now? Any knowledge that is lost cannot have infinite value, as its supply has gone from "infinite" to "0".
That doesn't mean it's value isn't infinite, it just means that an infinite sized value has been lost. When a cargo ship sinks, the value of it's cargo doesn't disappear, it still had the value it had before sinking, but that value is lost, and the owners have to recover it's cost. Lost knowledge is no less valuable for being loss, it's just not USEFUL, we end up paying for the lost value in the things we cannot do anymore.
Uh.... What distinction are you trying to make here? Call it lost, call it disappeared, no difference. You cannot use what you do not have. There is no infinite supply of information, when you cannot access the information in the first place. One cannot assign a value to something that does not exist.
All I am doing is pointing out how your absolute statement is wrong. Your belief that all knowledge has infinite value is based on the belief that there is infinite demand and infinite supply.
There is no infinite supply of knowledge when it can be lost forever through simple inaction.
There is no infinite demand, either. Demand is based on value, value is based on subjective human opinion, and no individual is qualified to speak for an infinite number of human beings on how they will value any given piece of knowledge. You base your infinite demand on presuming there are an infinite number of human beings who assign a non-zero positive value on every piece of knowledge that can ever exist. Don't be so sure of that. The existence of the phrase "TMI" indicates that some knowledge has negative value.
You're rather optimistic that humanity will exist forever for your infinite numbers, but optimism does not substitute for reality. There is nothing about this universe that prevents humans from going extinct; in fact, entropy guarantees it. If the universe exists for a finite duration, there cannot be an infinite number of humans to generate your infinite demand. Quit misusing "infinite".
I argued simply against the libertarian GP's idea that we should never do any research without a profit motive.
Indeed I argued that no research should have a profit motive. [snip]
One cannot separate "profit" from "value" in an economic discussion. Profit is value minus cost. Profit isn't a dirty word. All it means is that the value exceeded the cost.
But there is a difference between metal and paper based money. Back in the day when metal coins were actually made with their value in valuable metals (or something close to it), trust wasn't as big a component, because the coin actually had some value in of itself.
Contrast that with a paper bill - the paper doesn't have the "innate value" of gold/silver/whatever. You could recycle it, I guess, but what do you do with a paper bill besides money or collecting? That's what makes it fiat, it's a promise based on the trust without the material itself holding value.
All trade relies on trust, but fiat currency requires more trust, because paper money does not have the innate utility any random commodity has.
Oh, skilled diplomacy is definitely important. But talk alone is not enough, either. It is the combination of talk and the threat of force that yields results. (hopefully without the need to carry through on any of those threats of force)
The value of a fiat currency isn't based on nothing, it's based on a huge number of factors, including net economic output, GDP and so forth. Much more sensible than basing it on how much fucking gold the government is sitting on, which is utterly arbitrary and has little or nothing to do with the actual economic life of the country.
The value of a fiat currency is really one thing: Trust.
Lose that trust, and in an instant your paper money goes from being valuable to being no better than toilet paper.
Trust being immaterial, though, I'd see why people make the mistake of thinking it's based on "nothing".
Which is why I never said we should devote ALL our resources to knowledge seeking, that was somebody else trying to set up a strawman. I just said that no resources we DO spend on that are ever WASTED.
But sometimes the knowledge is not worth the cost. Would you be willing to deliberately infect people with diseases and watch them die, so we can collect medical knowledge? That knowledge has infinite value! It can potentially help an infinite number of people, but it has an "infinite" cost of human lives, and you'd be evil to kill others to gain that knowledge.
The decision would be murkier if it used volunteers, but thankfully I don't think that's a dilemma we've had to resolve.
Me, very little, but an Australian scientist who made a study of various types of lint to answer the question "what is it and where does it come from" used to pay quite a bit for samples - exactly to find out how much lint was in somebody's pocket (or belly-button) at a given time and what it was composed off. That's STILL valid science, it won an award.
And he pays a finite amount of money to gain that knowledge. You yourself pay nothing (rightfully). He also does not pay for all the pocket lint in the world; only for select samples. The knowledge of my pocket lint may very be lost to the world. No one cares, nor should they. It never had infinite value.
Why is the supply infinite ? Because you cannot use knowledge up. If I tell you something I know, I don't STOP knowing it, now TWO people know it, and can tell other people - the supply of any given PIECE of knowledge is infinite.
The supply of NEW knowledge is NOT infinite of course, it takes investment to acquire knowledge, but that's a once-off cost and even when it's comparatively HUGE it pales in comparison to the INFINITE value derived from infinite supply of it in future.
Your analysis overlooks one thing that invalidates it: Knowledge transfer and maintenance has a cost.
It takes time and effort to organize information so it can be passed to future generations. It takes time and effort for someone to learn information in a specific field. No one on earth has the capacity to be a master of every single field and know the entirety of human knowledge. Rather, people dedicate themselves to master one aspect, and as far as that knowledge has value to society, it is maintained and transmitted. Even in the digital realm we play in, it still costs fractions of a penny both to transmit and store information. You may think it insignificant, but it adds up when you deal with the terabytes upon terabytes of information we collectively process. .
Next, because maintaining knowledge costs time and resources (which is equivalent to money), knowledge can be lost when humanity stops paying the cost to keep it. Knowledge has been lost to history when people didn't write it down, when those who knew it died off, and new generations didn't (or couldn't) learn it.
This being an information age, a lot of knowledge has been gathered and archived; but can you guarantee that 100% of it will be saved 100 years from now? Any knowledge that is lost cannot have infinite value, as its supply has gone from "infinite" to "0".
Information has high supply (ridiculously tiny reproduction cost), but it's not actually infinite.
You assumed human knowledge lasts forever, even though it does not. It has an upkeep cost and a transfer cost; if not paid, the knowledge is lost. Lost knowledge has finite value. Assigning infinite value to a finite value knowledge is wrong. It may be recreated in the future after being lost, but that'd be from an independent effort that bore new costs.
If knowledge has an infinite value because an infinite number of future people will consume it, it also has an infinite cost. An infinite number of teachers and students spend years to teach it and learn it; infinite resources are used to
A fairly nice achievement accomplished by the militaries of both sides having enough firepower to ensure mutual destruction.
Do you think any amount of diplomacy would have helped if either one of the factions had unmatched military strength?
Though the original quote is a little silly - war *is* a form of diplomacy. What we want is peaceful diplomacy when possible, while recognizing the sad reality being that it only takes one side to make peaceful results unlikely if not impossible.
Any and ALL knowledge have value. In fact, the value of it is INFINITE since knowledge cannot be used-up. It's a true post-scarcity supply.
Economists measure that value as "zero" - but that's because economists are using a too limited view.
The system of accounting you're using here is dishonest. It's multiplying the value of any piece of knowledge, with a theoretically infinite number of future consumers, to derive an "infinite value".
Not all knowledge is equal. Knowledge of E=mc^2 and its physical applications has more value than the knowledge of how much lint is in my pocket right now. Allowing that both have "infinite" value, we see that each has different levels of "infinite" value.
Next, we have limited resources. There may be an infinite demand for any knowledge we find (by counting on there being infinite people in the future), but we have a finite number of people to discover that knowledge.
Each piece of knowledge may have infinite value, but we don't have enough time or resources to learn everything, right now. The very second you try to prioritize one venue of research over the other, you have made an economic decision and assigned a finite value to knowledge.
How much money are you willing to shell out for the knowledge of how much lint is in my pocket? You may claim all knowledge has infinite value - but it doesn't actually have infinite value to you. You aren't willing to sell all that you have in order to pursue the "infinite value" of a random piece of knowledge. The value of something is very much related to how much anyone is willing to pay for it.
The system of accounting you're using justifies throwing an infinite amount of resources at even trivial knowledge, because it has "infinite value". That's simply not workable, and I have no doubt that you don't actually use that accounting when managing your own resources.
I don't mind if you want to criticize a society or gov't for putting the wrong value on some types of knowledge. But saying any and all knowledge has "infinite value" is simply wrong.
(PS: Economists don't assign a value of 0 to knowledge. Economists say the value of knowledge is the cost a person/society is willing to pay for it)
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So let me get this straight. The richest country in the world can't afford free health care for all of its citizens?
In short, yes. Demand for a free product is unlimited. Medical resources, on the other hand, are finite. Average person in the US earns $45k. We cannot possibly afford to pay for more than $45k/year in "free" medical care for each person; and that's not even leaving any money for food, housing, or any other necessities.
Do you have any level of education on economics? You cannot buy more than what you can pay for.
The fact that "free healthcare" countries don't go bankrupt is because they recognize reality and don't actually provide the best possible healthcare for each and every citizen. For the best care, you have to be politically connected and be Very Important (like a bureaucrat, or a politician!). Everyone else gets the amount of "free" healthcare the country is able to afford. (Ain't No Such Thing As a Free Lunch)
Fortunately, medical care has diminishing returns; basic healthcare, which most countries can afford, does a tremendous job of making the majority of people better off.
Since you're ignorant of the US's policies - we already have that basic level of "free healthcare" - walk into any ER and they will treat you for any life threatening disease, as demanded by law (but not paid for by said law).
I dunno how the intricacies of your society work but from where I am standing (in Australia) I would say something over there is seriously fucked.
Maybe you just like to keep the poor people in your society poor. That's fine. Maybe you should have let the south win the civil war though, just to make it a bit easier.
I take it you're a product of "free" public education, then. No use of logic or economic analysis on how "free" healthcare gets paid for and provided, but quick to appeal to emotions with accusations of hate.
Why would anyone be proud of their ignorance of the numbers and analysis? You don't know how it works, but you have an Opinion on how it should be run. Congratulations, your type of people ran the system for a while and broke it - now what?
If you want to vote Republican ticket because of Ryan's Plan - make sure to read it. Ryan's Plan does include privatization of social security (no specifics on how, mandatory 401ks or 'contracted' to Goldman Sachs?) and turns medicare into voucher system
About time.
(who will provide individual affordable healthcare coverage to sick and poor out of this population remains unclear).
Our current system isn't working. "Free" healthcare + unlimited demand => uncontrollable costs. People managed to give medical care to the poor before Medicare existed, but Medicare itself as a solution is unsustainable. Going bankrupt to do charity is a Very Bad Idea. The charity stops happening when the money runs out. That's hardly compassionate; especially if those people really need the charity.
Fundamental problem with Ryan's Plan is that as far as fiscally conservative plans go - it isn't one ...
In closing, also make sure to examine Ryan's voting record - every Bush tax cut, every expense, TARP, bailouts were voted YES. His rhetoric aside, fiscal conservative he is not.
Would you like to point to Obama's alternative? No budget for 3 years, and you're complaining that the Republican plan is inadequate. The alternative is non-existent, sadly. Ryan's plan is a baby step towards eventual solvency. Unfortunately it looks like a good part of the country has to be dragged kicking and screaming to even *consider* the type of spending cuts needed.
Anyone looks like a fiscal conservative compared to the Democrat Presidency and Congress of 2008-2010.
Ryan isn't enough, but don't let that stop you from voting the current batch of politicians out. Hope and Change ain't working.
1: "True, have stopped beating wife"
2: "False, no wife", or "False, do not beat wife". (tricky loaded question has two ways to be false)
"I don't know" is silly in this context, since I would know if I have a wife, and if I had been beating her. But if you shifted the statement to be about a 3rd party where ignorance is a reasonable possibility, then "I Don't Know" would again become a valid response.
Your first and last exceptions are both subsets of "True". Your second exception is irrelevant because the scenario was explicitly restricted to true/false statements.
In any case, the point was to make accurate evaluations, which the presumptive claim of falsehood does not.
When a guy says he wants to conserve the environment, does that mean he wants to torch the forest and cover it with parking lots?
The meaning of the word "conservative" is independent of America's political conservatives possibly being guilty of breaking things. "Conservative" as an engineering philosophy is about one's attitude towards technical problem solving, and has little to do with political actions..
But since you want to go there, "liberalism" apparently means transforming future generations into debt slaves, recreating the institution of slavery in the USA. Bondage is freedom. Vive Libre.
The actual way I'd characterize "liberal" in the context of this discussion is "freedom". In which case the "conservative" side is "security" - which frames the conservative/liberal philosophy as a well known computing tradeoff.
"Not (yet?) proven true" is not "false".
In logic, it's trivial to flip any statement so that your default presumption of falsehood becomes the exact opposite given a different statement
"John is a liar" -> False, he must be an honest man!
"John is an honest man" -> False, he must be a liar!
Same rule, opposite outcomes based on a completely arbitrary starting point.
When asked to evaluate a true/false statement, a person has 3 options, not 2. True, False, and "I Don't Know". Asserting a true statement to be false is just as wrong as asserting a false statement to be true. If one lacks the information to evaluate the veracity of a statement, the correct default is to acknowledge one's ignorance, instead of making a false claim.
As a conservative, the statement didn't bother me too much. We have justified fears. It's when you act on phobias that you end up in lala land.
"It's an assault rifle with a pistol grip and semi automatic fire! BAN IT."
The author could have formulated it more neutrally though. He should have kept his definition to just risk management - "ain't broke don't fix it". There's also different areas to apply conservatism; as sometimes conserving in one area means being liberal in another.
In the context of this discussion, an earlier post claimed single payer would fix all of the ills of America's health system.
It's bullshit, because all single payer does is create a monopsony and reduce the amount of medical care bought. It'll be cheaper, but it won't be better.
A policy that encourages an increase in the supply of medical care is the only type of policy that can claim to reduce prices *and* improve quality of care. (ex: Encourage training of more doctors/nurses -> higher supply of medical personnel to meet demand for their services)
All I want here is for people to understand the cause and effect they're playing with. If you're happy with your country's healthcare system, great. You'd be just as annoyed as I am when people talk about how to improve it while showing ignorance of how it actually works.
Of course, while Gamestop's behavior here is contemptible ...
So horrible of Gamestop to provide used games to people who want them. It's so demeaning.
Horror - they even buy used games from people who want to sell them! Is there no decency?
That word, I do not think it means what you think it means.
Monopoly - literally, single seller.
When Best Buy, Amazon, eBay, individuals, and an endless assortment of businesses all sell used games, calling "Gamestop" a "single seller" is to throw away the meaning of words.
No one has to shop at Gamestop. No one has to sell at Gamestop. They are not a monopoly (or monopsony) in any meaningful sense. The contempt you pour on them is undeserved, because its customers have options - and still choose to bring their business to Gamestop.
Educate people if you think they can do better, but don't blame Gamestop for providing a useful service.
So basically a professional gamer should do a cost-benefit analysis before jumping into it as a career field (hopefully with a good measure of his actual skill).
How is that different than any other profession, really? Main thing to watch out for is that kids might think pro-gaming means "playing games all day", without realizing that "play" isn't the same when it's your full time job and making rent depends on your dedication and performance.
And ... ? Do these same citizens have experience with America's healthcare system? No baseline of comparison?
A vegetarian may really really enjoy their veggie burger, but it doesn't mean that I'd take it over a cheeseburger. It may be tasty in its own right, and certainly better than nothing, but their preferences are not mine.
How another country's citizens feel about their own healthcare system doesn't provide enough data to demonstrate objective superiority.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Facts are one thing. Opinions on how to interpret the facts are yet another.
Stats don't say anything of themselves, especially when it comes to something as difficult to quantify as human health. When it comes to comparing healthcare of different countries, what stats are you comparing? What stats are left out in the comparison? Your post is data free. Good for you if you believe it, but you have provided no reason for anyone to agree with you.
So instead of doing anything to increase the supply of doctors or medical care, we'll create a new system where the we have some single payer who simply pays less.
Econ 101: When you reduce the price paid without changing the supply curve, the market equilibrium shifts to a point on the supply curve with a lower "quantity". For medical care, quantity translates to availability and quality. You might end up with good doctors but a long waiting period, or available doctors who aren't as good. Depending on how much one values one's own health, that isn't a good tradeoff.
Does it really take a college education to realize that single payer does nothing to actually improve medical care? It's just a way of choosing to do without.
You believe that all of those countries that spend less have better outcomes?
A monopsony for medical care means that doctors and other medical professions get paid less for the time and effort they put in; either quality suffers, or quantity suffers. Both are reductions of the supply of medical care.
Actually, I'm not - I specifically addressed this in my post- we WILL go extinct, knowledge which we cannot sell now is the only thing that can prolong our time here - but it can't make it eternal. I also said we have no choice but to AIM for infinite survival, or we won't even be around as long as we CAN be.
No matter what your intentions, claiming infinite value when you do not actually have infinite value is a dishonest accounting system.
If I have $1000 in the bank, I am not a millionaire, no matter what I say. If I have $100k/year income, I could say that I will be a millionaire in 10 years, but that is an extrapolation, it is only true if I don't die or lose my job/business, and so on. I can claim to be a potential millionaire, but I cannot claim to be a millionaire without being a liar.
In the case of infinite value, no finite sum of finite numbers will yield infinity. Period.
You cannot claim infinite value when it is actually finite. If you don't think being demonstrably wrong is a problem, you are in fact rejecting knowledge and truth.
That wasn't the meaning of profit under discussion and certainly not what the GP meant by it. In this context "profit motive" for research literally meant: "The ability to sell products made from that research for more money than we spent on it."
Let's look at what he said:
Knowledge, knowledge is the most valuable commodity in the universe, far moreso than profit - especially monetary profit.
- contradiction in the very first sentence. Value can be measured in the real world, it's not that hard, either people want it and are willing to SPEND on it, and thus you can have profit and you can measure efficiency or people don't want it and then there is NO VALUE except for what is in your head.
He said the same thing I am saying - value is based on people's valuation. It can be measured (estimated) by the cost people are willing to pay for it. Profit and value are LINKED concepts that you CANNOT separate.
When you said that infinite cost doesn't matter because the value outweighs the cost - THAT IS PROFIT MOTIVE. You seek more value than what you paid for. You deride the profit motive right before saying the pursuit of knowledge should be governed by it! Profit does not exclusively mean monetary profit; the fact that you used "monetary profit" should be a clue that there is also "non-monetary profit" (personal satisfaction, glory, anything non-material). Both are elements of "profit".
Our problem here is that you've created an accounting system where the "non-monetary profit" of knowledge is arbitrarily declared by you to be infinite. That is a false valuation. You aren't willing to pay an infinite cost for trivial knowledge. No one is willing to pay an infinite cost for trivial knowledge. Economics is concerned with the distribution of the scarce (finite), and your addition of "infinite value" where there is none only creates a broken economic system. (This is a big deal because hundreds of millions were murdered in the past century in attempts to implement fundamentally broken economic systems)
If you're honest, stick to "potentially infinite value". In which case you make it clear that you're using an extrapolation and allow for the chance that your valuation is wrong. But that doesn't sound as impressive for selling your proposal, does it?
There is sufficient demand for gold for it to have a large value to much of the population. It doesn't even have to be evenly distributed among the population; as long as I can find a buyer for gold at the price I want, it doesn't matter if there's 1 potential buyer or 1000.
When you say "unused", simple ownership is in of itself use. Sometimes we buy things just for its potential, not for the actual use itself. Think of insurance or airbags. Most go unused, but people buy it because it helps hedge their risks. When paper money inflates, gold is (relatively) stable in value.
Gold money doesn't have a history of stability. It was always supplemented with silver and sovereign debt as needed.
I meant it in a relative sort of sense, compared to paper currency. Paper currency can drastically lose its value. Gold has not and probably will never do so. It's possible people could collectively decide that gold is worthless, but that's much less likely than for any country's paper money.
Uh. You can't eat paper bills either. You can't eat a house, or a car, or a computer, or a book. Somehow, those things all have value to people all the same, and can be bartered for food, or traded for money which you trade for food.
For whatever funny reason, there is a large demand for gold by humanity in general, both now and in the past. That demand intersects the gold supply curve in a way that makes gold very valuable. For whatever reason, the value of gold has also been stabler than the value of any paper money. This is observation, not theory.
If you want a theory, I theorize that gold will continue to be stabler in value than paper money in the future, because gov't can't print it.
And as a result, there are now classical cathedrals where the stained glass is down according to a method that's been lost, which means when they get damaged, it's impossible to repair them since nobody knows how to do it anymore. That's not a GOOD thing and we OUGHT to apply our technology to REDUCING that problem, not pretending it makes the exercise futile.
But it happens, and it invalidates your thesis that all knowledge has infinite value because it always has an infinite supply to meet an infinite demand.
>This being an information age, a lot of knowledge has been gathered and archived; but can you guarantee that 100% of it will be saved 100 years from now? Any knowledge that is lost cannot have infinite value, as its supply has gone from "infinite" to "0".
That doesn't mean it's value isn't infinite, it just means that an infinite sized value has been lost. When a cargo ship sinks, the value of it's cargo doesn't disappear, it still had the value it had before sinking, but that value is lost, and the owners have to recover it's cost. Lost knowledge is no less valuable for being loss, it's just not USEFUL, we end up paying for the lost value in the things we cannot do anymore.
Uh.... What distinction are you trying to make here? Call it lost, call it disappeared, no difference. You cannot use what you do not have. There is no infinite supply of information, when you cannot access the information in the first place. One cannot assign a value to something that does not exist.
All I am doing is pointing out how your absolute statement is wrong. Your belief that all knowledge has infinite value is based on the belief that there is infinite demand and infinite supply.
There is no infinite supply of knowledge when it can be lost forever through simple inaction.
There is no infinite demand, either. Demand is based on value, value is based on subjective human opinion, and no individual is qualified to speak for an infinite number of human beings on how they will value any given piece of knowledge. You base your infinite demand on presuming there are an infinite number of human beings who assign a non-zero positive value on every piece of knowledge that can ever exist. Don't be so sure of that. The existence of the phrase "TMI" indicates that some knowledge has negative value.
You're rather optimistic that humanity will exist forever for your infinite numbers, but optimism does not substitute for reality. There is nothing about this universe that prevents humans from going extinct; in fact, entropy guarantees it. If the universe exists for a finite duration, there cannot be an infinite number of humans to generate your infinite demand. Quit misusing "infinite".
I argued simply against the libertarian GP's idea that we should never do any research without a profit motive. Indeed I argued that no research should have a profit motive. [snip]
One cannot separate "profit" from "value" in an economic discussion. Profit is value minus cost. Profit isn't a dirty word. All it means is that the value exceeded the cost.
Both currencies rely on trust. But one of those trusts is more fickle than the other.
If governments could print gold, gold probably wouldn't have the value it is given.
Wasn't saying that.
But there is a difference between metal and paper based money. Back in the day when metal coins were actually made with their value in valuable metals (or something close to it), trust wasn't as big a component, because the coin actually had some value in of itself.
Contrast that with a paper bill - the paper doesn't have the "innate value" of gold/silver/whatever. You could recycle it, I guess, but what do you do with a paper bill besides money or collecting? That's what makes it fiat, it's a promise based on the trust without the material itself holding value.
All trade relies on trust, but fiat currency requires more trust, because paper money does not have the innate utility any random commodity has.
Oh, skilled diplomacy is definitely important. But talk alone is not enough, either. It is the combination of talk and the threat of force that yields results. (hopefully without the need to carry through on any of those threats of force)
The value of a fiat currency isn't based on nothing, it's based on a huge number of factors, including net economic output, GDP and so forth. Much more sensible than basing it on how much fucking gold the government is sitting on, which is utterly arbitrary and has little or nothing to do with the actual economic life of the country.
The value of a fiat currency is really one thing: Trust.
Lose that trust, and in an instant your paper money goes from being valuable to being no better than toilet paper.
Trust being immaterial, though, I'd see why people make the mistake of thinking it's based on "nothing".
Which is why I never said we should devote ALL our resources to knowledge seeking, that was somebody else trying to set up a strawman. I just said that no resources we DO spend on that are ever WASTED.
But sometimes the knowledge is not worth the cost. Would you be willing to deliberately infect people with diseases and watch them die, so we can collect medical knowledge? That knowledge has infinite value! It can potentially help an infinite number of people, but it has an "infinite" cost of human lives, and you'd be evil to kill others to gain that knowledge. The decision would be murkier if it used volunteers, but thankfully I don't think that's a dilemma we've had to resolve.
Me, very little, but an Australian scientist who made a study of various types of lint to answer the question "what is it and where does it come from" used to pay quite a bit for samples - exactly to find out how much lint was in somebody's pocket (or belly-button) at a given time and what it was composed off. That's STILL valid science, it won an award.
And he pays a finite amount of money to gain that knowledge. You yourself pay nothing (rightfully). He also does not pay for all the pocket lint in the world; only for select samples. The knowledge of my pocket lint may very be lost to the world. No one cares, nor should they. It never had infinite value.
Why is the supply infinite ? Because you cannot use knowledge up. If I tell you something I know, I don't STOP knowing it, now TWO people know it, and can tell other people - the supply of any given PIECE of knowledge is infinite. The supply of NEW knowledge is NOT infinite of course, it takes investment to acquire knowledge, but that's a once-off cost and even when it's comparatively HUGE it pales in comparison to the INFINITE value derived from infinite supply of it in future.
Your analysis overlooks one thing that invalidates it: Knowledge transfer and maintenance has a cost.
It takes time and effort to organize information so it can be passed to future generations. It takes time and effort for someone to learn information in a specific field. No one on earth has the capacity to be a master of every single field and know the entirety of human knowledge. Rather, people dedicate themselves to master one aspect, and as far as that knowledge has value to society, it is maintained and transmitted. Even in the digital realm we play in, it still costs fractions of a penny both to transmit and store information. You may think it insignificant, but it adds up when you deal with the terabytes upon terabytes of information we collectively process. .
Next, because maintaining knowledge costs time and resources (which is equivalent to money), knowledge can be lost when humanity stops paying the cost to keep it. Knowledge has been lost to history when people didn't write it down, when those who knew it died off, and new generations didn't (or couldn't) learn it.
This being an information age, a lot of knowledge has been gathered and archived; but can you guarantee that 100% of it will be saved 100 years from now? Any knowledge that is lost cannot have infinite value, as its supply has gone from "infinite" to "0".
Information has high supply (ridiculously tiny reproduction cost), but it's not actually infinite.
You assumed human knowledge lasts forever, even though it does not. It has an upkeep cost and a transfer cost; if not paid, the knowledge is lost. Lost knowledge has finite value. Assigning infinite value to a finite value knowledge is wrong. It may be recreated in the future after being lost, but that'd be from an independent effort that bore new costs.
If knowledge has an infinite value because an infinite number of future people will consume it, it also has an infinite cost. An infinite number of teachers and students spend years to teach it and learn it; infinite resources are used to
A fairly nice achievement accomplished by the militaries of both sides having enough firepower to ensure mutual destruction.
Do you think any amount of diplomacy would have helped if either one of the factions had unmatched military strength?
Though the original quote is a little silly - war *is* a form of diplomacy. What we want is peaceful diplomacy when possible, while recognizing the sad reality being that it only takes one side to make peaceful results unlikely if not impossible.
Any and ALL knowledge have value. In fact, the value of it is INFINITE since knowledge cannot be used-up. It's a true post-scarcity supply. Economists measure that value as "zero" - but that's because economists are using a too limited view.
The system of accounting you're using here is dishonest. It's multiplying the value of any piece of knowledge, with a theoretically infinite number of future consumers, to derive an "infinite value".
Not all knowledge is equal. Knowledge of E=mc^2 and its physical applications has more value than the knowledge of how much lint is in my pocket right now. Allowing that both have "infinite" value, we see that each has different levels of "infinite" value.
Next, we have limited resources. There may be an infinite demand for any knowledge we find (by counting on there being infinite people in the future), but we have a finite number of people to discover that knowledge.
Each piece of knowledge may have infinite value, but we don't have enough time or resources to learn everything, right now. The very second you try to prioritize one venue of research over the other, you have made an economic decision and assigned a finite value to knowledge.
How much money are you willing to shell out for the knowledge of how much lint is in my pocket? You may claim all knowledge has infinite value - but it doesn't actually have infinite value to you. You aren't willing to sell all that you have in order to pursue the "infinite value" of a random piece of knowledge. The value of something is very much related to how much anyone is willing to pay for it.
The system of accounting you're using justifies throwing an infinite amount of resources at even trivial knowledge, because it has "infinite value". That's simply not workable, and I have no doubt that you don't actually use that accounting when managing your own resources.
I don't mind if you want to criticize a society or gov't for putting the wrong value on some types of knowledge. But saying any and all knowledge has "infinite value" is simply wrong.
(PS: Economists don't assign a value of 0 to knowledge. Economists say the value of knowledge is the cost a person/society is willing to pay for it)