I am not. Not even that much is clear at this time. This could also very well be interaction with an universe where physics actually allows thinking matter. Or something else. Because it does not look very much like intelligence and consciousness generated by matter is possible in this universe. And it gets less and less plausible the more we know.
Which is a silly claim to make given that we already have you as a counterexample.
In short, do not confuse correlation (high value jobs have high pay) with causation (we do NOT give high pay to people with high value jobs because we value the jobs).
Don't buy this in the least.
We pay people what we need to pay in order to find someone to do the job.
Or we don't since we don't need that job. I'm not going to pay you $15 per hour to do a job that is worth $1 per hour to me. Conversely, if I'm paying you $1 per hour to do a job that is worth $15 per hour to me, then I likely can find more people to do the work and increase my profit. Substantial differences between the value of labor and the price commanded to labor are going to correct one way or another.
They didn't create it through private ownership of capital either. The Gilded Age is called that because the capitalist bling only exists on the surface. Underneath, it was also the period when the labor movement and progressive movement rose up, to eventually become dominant by the beginning other 20th century.
I think that's confusing cause and effect. You don't have powerful labor unions without a strong demand for labor. That's why labor unions were strong around 1900, but not a century later when attrition had greatly reduced labor unions outside of the public sector (which is immune to foreign labor competition).
Meanwhile, we have a well-studied history of the creation of new inventions, new businesses, and profound societal changes driven by people who owned the things and ideas which made those changes.
It's kinda why capitalist proponents such as yourself is complaining so much how we don't have enough capitalism these days. The move away from capitalism started way back, back before America became the biggest and strongest economy.
One doesn't destroy a mountain in a day. I find it interesting how one can complain about the many decades long decline in the US, both its industries and the quality of life and work of its workers without connecting the dots. There's this long abandonment of the things that made the US. And every step of the way, capitalism gets blamed while the failure from this new approach grows.
If you say the US, I'm going to punch you right in your government monopoly covered mouth.
You said it. The US, of course, is an example, They didn't magically create the biggest and most powerful economy on Earth through the power of public ownership of capital.
how cute. someone who still thinks that capitalism WORKS.
It's rather obvious that capitalism works.
hint: we're melting down in the US, the middle class is being attacked and destroyed, the upper classes accumulate more and more of the world's wealth and most of us will NEVER be able to retire.
I find it bizarre how people can intentionally break a capitalist system and then complain that capitalism isn't working for them. Don't break it, if you don't like the consequences.
Here, the problem is that the US has been aggressive interfering with business creation and employment while expending huge amounts of public resources on the largest businesses. Meanwhile, you and a lot of other people continue to ignore the elephant in the room - foreign labor competition that is a fraction of the US's labor cost. There needs to be something differentiating US labor as being more valuable than say, Chinese labor, or else businesses and economic power will shift elsewhere while US labor continues to decline in wages.
Further, the same can't be said of the rest of the world which has been doing just fine with massive middle class creation and collecting more and more of the world's wealth in the hands of the majority of its citizens.
so, telll me again how greed makes things all sunshine and rainbows?
So tell me again, what works better? Or even works at all?
If you're going to compare you really need to use the great depression as your benchmark, this was on that sort of scale and the recovery there was pretty slow.
The Great Depression had similar characteristics, an interfering president, Roosevelt who derailed the recovery he inherited to create a second recession as well as a long period of unemployment. If it weren't for the necessities of the Second World War, the US might still be in that depression today.
the democrats have been complicit in the failure that led to 2008 only when they have gone along willingly with the republican wet dreams about how less government regulation makes magic better world: of companies not punished for polluting, companies not punished for tanking the economy, companies not punished for screwing up the food supply, etc.
Well, that makes them complicit then. And they're so much better when they're shielding ATF officials who are accessories (in the legal sense of the word) to something like 200 murders and counting. Guess I'm still butthurt over the Fast and Furious thing and that hypocritical thing about punishing people for legal behavior, but not punishing people for genuine crime.
We've witnessed first hand how the Baby Boomers ruined the many gifts that we, and the generations before us, gave them. In the span of one generation they have undone the work and contributions of centuries of previous generations.
And the obvious rebuttal is that you raised the Boomers up on TV. You fucked up. [*]
[*] "You" being a stereotype of someone from your generation who probably doesn't exist any more than the Boomers described in this thread do. This post also has been shown to promote heat death of the universe and as a result should be consumed sparingly and with a degree of caution.
Bred to have very much the same "rotten" attitude and mindset of their parents, we'll only see the disasters caused by the Baby Boomers prolonged by the Millennials that the Baby Boomers spawned.
Or maybe this is more evidence, as if we needed it, that there's no real difference between "generations" and the generation blame game is a silly waste of time?
And seriously what is the point of whining, pathetically, about someone just because of when they were born? Are all the bad people born between 1946 and 1964?
Credit where it's due: Obama has done a pretty good job, in spite of the unprecedented obstructionism he had had to put up with every step of the way.
Put me on the "nay" side. He's done more than his fair share of fiddling while Rome burns. The fossil fuel stuff is a good example. Maybe right after the worst recession in 80 years is not the best time to try to reduce fossil fuel consumption (for example, blocking off shore drilling and putting huge constraints on coal burning plants). Same goes with the Obamacare crap (we still don't have significant parts of the legislation active yet). He also completely blew the Keynesian spending strategy (such as TARP and ARRA).
And there's the ridiculous level of creativity in promoting US government power. During his two terms, there's been an unusually large number of unanimous Supreme Court decisions overturning some overreach of the federal government. For example, the EPA once argued that a family from Idaho didn't have standing to sue the EPA for blocking construction of a home until the family paid massive punitive fines first.
Those kinds of games don't help the economy and they demonstrate that he hasn't been focusing on stuff important to the US economy.
You do realize that the French language has changed the spelling of many of its words over the centuries? Glancing through the online dictionaries, it appears the word "connoisseur" entered the English language around the beginning of the 18th century, 300 years ago. And there's some French words that came over with William the Conqueror almost a millennium ago.
You are too, let us not forget. Personally, I think this whole thread is typical of delusional ideologies of the past couple of centuries. "Our system will work once we get rid of the bad people." Sorry, but I'm only interested in systems that work even when you can't do that.
Alas you are thinking far too simply my friend. We are approaching a point where automation will potentially render a sizable portion of the population unemployable because a machine can do their job just as well, if not better and for a lesser cost in a world where Humans Need Not Apply
I suppose we could be approaching such a situation. But I'll believe it when we act like that's happening. Instead, I see the societies with these job problems doing a lot of stuff to discourage employment. Guess what? When you punish someone for employing people, then they employ less people. Maybe we ought to do something about that first before hand wringing about the robotic apocalypse?
If you see computer viruses as alive, then we can terminate the discussion right here, as you are utterly clueless about physical reality.
Typical rhetorical dodge. I'm not going to think inside your comfort region. If one is to discuss life, rather than a very provincial opinion of what life is in terms of terrestrial biology or perhaps terrestrial philosophy/theology, one has to resort to thermodynamical definitions of life. And sooner or later, you end up with life being self-propagating information with the ability to manipulate its environment.
No it won't because this is the same type of denial suffered by drug abusers and alcoholics. The proof couldn't be much stronger than it is.
Which is a pretty dumb thing to say. Here's two obvious reasons why: 1) there hasn't been even a 1C rise in global mean temperature since the beginning of the industrial era, and 2) there's a factor of three uncertainty in the estimates of CO2 temperature forcing.
Most people who deny that our pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is causing the Earth to warm
I agree. What I disagree on is both the amount of resulting warming and the degree of need to do something about it.
Assuming of course, that the externalities are bigger than what I see. If they aren't, then I'm not ignoring them.
You can pretend that CO2 energy is a perpetual motion machine all you want. But in the end the laws of physics will reveal the true costs that you are ignoring.
Nonsense. CO2 energy doesn't have to last forever. As I noted earlier, if we just run it out a century, which I grant may be infeasible, then we have almost the entire world at or superior to the best economies at the of the last century. That gives us a huge amount of flexibility for handling the problems of the world, including the relatively mild one of climate change.
dunno what you mean with "actual experience with a market". if you mean i lack a degree in some pseudoscience then yes.
No, I mean extensive trading experience. When you assert, as you did in your linked reply that "inequality inevitably grows", then you haven't actually experienced the behaviors of markets that correct for high levels of wealth inequality.
When you say " they need a periodical correction or even 'reset'", you haven't traded through actual market corrections like recessions.
When you say "and the
"invisible hand" idea is just delusion", then you haven't actually experienced the huge variety of subtle dynamics which make earning a profit through trade so extraordinarily hard or studied large scale behavior of markets.
sort of a pun. free markets don't actually exist, it's a fallacy. all
markets are controlled in subtle (and not so subtle) ways.
No, it's an ideal. And one doesn't have to fully achieve the ideal market in order to reap most of the benefits.
because of that there's no real balance, inequality inevitably grows
and they need a periodical correction or even 'reset' which is usualy
a rather violent event. in that sense i say "they don't work", and the
"invisible hand" idea is just delusion.
The thing is, markets both have inherent mechanisms against indefinitely growing wealth inequality and their own periodic corrections. First, there are diminishing returns to higher levels of wealth due to the difficulty of managing it and declining profit margins with higher wealth. Large businesses and mutual funds have run into this before.
Second, there's the business cycle which routinely disrupts wealth accumulation.
eve's economy is not completely player driven. basic resources are
always available and affordable regardless of player actions, thus
speculative behaviour has no effect at all on the system
Which is incorrect, because of two factors. First, there are other resources than basic resources. And second, for a lot of projects one needs a level of basic resources, far in excess of what one person can easily mine or extract for themselves. The levels of basic resources in the markets are way over what even a large group can comfortably mine in a short period of time. Hence, speculation and market shenanigans can manipulate the system.
And certain good and products have achieved considerable strategic value, such as "moon goo" (a variety of resources that are required for a whole level of advanced spacecraft and in turn require considerable fixed infrastructure to mine and hence, a strong incentive to hold sections of space) and the construction of capital ships (which are key components of the largest player militaries in the game).
You know, if you had actually paid attention in Eve Online, you would have noticed that things don't operate like you claim they do.
but it's just a game
That's a common excuse for ignoring evidence. But if one chooses not to do that, then one sees common patterns and behavior in markets. And one can't really understand the power of markets until one studies a variety of them, both in the real world and in games.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not. Not even that much is clear at this time. This could also very well be interaction with an universe where physics actually allows thinking matter. Or something else. Because it does not look very much like intelligence and consciousness generated by matter is possible in this universe. And it gets less and less plausible the more we know.
Which is a silly claim to make given that we already have you as a counterexample.
In short, do not confuse correlation (high value jobs have high pay) with causation (we do NOT give high pay to people with high value jobs because we value the jobs).
Don't buy this in the least.
We pay people what we need to pay in order to find someone to do the job.
Or we don't since we don't need that job. I'm not going to pay you $15 per hour to do a job that is worth $1 per hour to me. Conversely, if I'm paying you $1 per hour to do a job that is worth $15 per hour to me, then I likely can find more people to do the work and increase my profit. Substantial differences between the value of labor and the price commanded to labor are going to correct one way or another.
They didn't create it through private ownership of capital either. The Gilded Age is called that because the capitalist bling only exists on the surface. Underneath, it was also the period when the labor movement and progressive movement rose up, to eventually become dominant by the beginning other 20th century.
I think that's confusing cause and effect. You don't have powerful labor unions without a strong demand for labor. That's why labor unions were strong around 1900, but not a century later when attrition had greatly reduced labor unions outside of the public sector (which is immune to foreign labor competition).
Meanwhile, we have a well-studied history of the creation of new inventions, new businesses, and profound societal changes driven by people who owned the things and ideas which made those changes.
It's kinda why capitalist proponents such as yourself is complaining so much how we don't have enough capitalism these days. The move away from capitalism started way back, back before America became the biggest and strongest economy.
One doesn't destroy a mountain in a day. I find it interesting how one can complain about the many decades long decline in the US, both its industries and the quality of life and work of its workers without connecting the dots. There's this long abandonment of the things that made the US. And every step of the way, capitalism gets blamed while the failure from this new approach grows.
If you say the US, I'm going to punch you right in your government monopoly covered mouth.
You said it. The US, of course, is an example, They didn't magically create the biggest and most powerful economy on Earth through the power of public ownership of capital.
The reason for market regulations that have been enacted to date is that capitalism doesn't work.
Unregulated airlines or other businesses would be cheap but not necessarily safe.
Modest regulation doesn't indicate the absence of capitalism.
The whole damn point is to have the client's face everywhere, not your own.
Very good point. Makes his game particularly interesting in that light.
These guys are actively unhappy because *someone else* got a fair shake for a change?
Here's a protip: when only some people get the "fair shake", then it's not a fair shake.
how cute. someone who still thinks that capitalism WORKS.
It's rather obvious that capitalism works.
hint: we're melting down in the US, the middle class is being attacked and destroyed, the upper classes accumulate more and more of the world's wealth and most of us will NEVER be able to retire.
I find it bizarre how people can intentionally break a capitalist system and then complain that capitalism isn't working for them. Don't break it, if you don't like the consequences.
Here, the problem is that the US has been aggressive interfering with business creation and employment while expending huge amounts of public resources on the largest businesses. Meanwhile, you and a lot of other people continue to ignore the elephant in the room - foreign labor competition that is a fraction of the US's labor cost. There needs to be something differentiating US labor as being more valuable than say, Chinese labor, or else businesses and economic power will shift elsewhere while US labor continues to decline in wages.
Further, the same can't be said of the rest of the world which has been doing just fine with massive middle class creation and collecting more and more of the world's wealth in the hands of the majority of its citizens.
so, telll me again how greed makes things all sunshine and rainbows?
So tell me again, what works better? Or even works at all?
Good point. I'd call it tourism not work myself, but there it is.
If you're going to compare you really need to use the great depression as your benchmark, this was on that sort of scale and the recovery there was pretty slow.
The Great Depression had similar characteristics, an interfering president, Roosevelt who derailed the recovery he inherited to create a second recession as well as a long period of unemployment. If it weren't for the necessities of the Second World War, the US might still be in that depression today.
the democrats have been complicit in the failure that led to 2008 only when they have gone along willingly with the republican wet dreams about how less government regulation makes magic better world: of companies not punished for polluting, companies not punished for tanking the economy, companies not punished for screwing up the food supply, etc.
Well, that makes them complicit then. And they're so much better when they're shielding ATF officials who are accessories (in the legal sense of the word) to something like 200 murders and counting. Guess I'm still butthurt over the Fast and Furious thing and that hypocritical thing about punishing people for legal behavior, but not punishing people for genuine crime.
We've witnessed first hand how the Baby Boomers ruined the many gifts that we, and the generations before us, gave them. In the span of one generation they have undone the work and contributions of centuries of previous generations.
And the obvious rebuttal is that you raised the Boomers up on TV. You fucked up. [*] [*] "You" being a stereotype of someone from your generation who probably doesn't exist any more than the Boomers described in this thread do. This post also has been shown to promote heat death of the universe and as a result should be consumed sparingly and with a degree of caution.
Bred to have very much the same "rotten" attitude and mindset of their parents, we'll only see the disasters caused by the Baby Boomers prolonged by the Millennials that the Baby Boomers spawned.
Or maybe this is more evidence, as if we needed it, that there's no real difference between "generations" and the generation blame game is a silly waste of time?
And seriously what is the point of whining, pathetically, about someone just because of when they were born? Are all the bad people born between 1946 and 1964?
Only the median wage and the minimum wage are relevant.
As an aside, the minimum wage has always been $0 an hour.
Credit where it's due: Obama has done a pretty good job, in spite of the unprecedented obstructionism he had had to put up with every step of the way.
Put me on the "nay" side. He's done more than his fair share of fiddling while Rome burns. The fossil fuel stuff is a good example. Maybe right after the worst recession in 80 years is not the best time to try to reduce fossil fuel consumption (for example, blocking off shore drilling and putting huge constraints on coal burning plants). Same goes with the Obamacare crap (we still don't have significant parts of the legislation active yet). He also completely blew the Keynesian spending strategy (such as TARP and ARRA).
And there's the ridiculous level of creativity in promoting US government power. During his two terms, there's been an unusually large number of unanimous Supreme Court decisions overturning some overreach of the federal government. For example, the EPA once argued that a family from Idaho didn't have standing to sue the EPA for blocking construction of a home until the family paid massive punitive fines first.
Those kinds of games don't help the economy and they demonstrate that he hasn't been focusing on stuff important to the US economy.
You do realize that the French language has changed the spelling of many of its words over the centuries? Glancing through the online dictionaries, it appears the word "connoisseur" entered the English language around the beginning of the 18th century, 300 years ago. And there's some French words that came over with William the Conqueror almost a millennium ago.
If you are that ignorant of history
You are too, let us not forget. Personally, I think this whole thread is typical of delusional ideologies of the past couple of centuries. "Our system will work once we get rid of the bad people." Sorry, but I'm only interested in systems that work even when you can't do that.
I'm not going to try and rebut all of that.
Good move. You would fail if you tried.
So Stalin referred to above was not a real psychopath?
I don't know if he was a psychopath or just a normal human responding to a very sick environment.
Alas you are thinking far too simply my friend. We are approaching a point where automation will potentially render a sizable portion of the population unemployable because a machine can do their job just as well, if not better and for a lesser cost in a world where Humans Need Not Apply
I suppose we could be approaching such a situation. But I'll believe it when we act like that's happening. Instead, I see the societies with these job problems doing a lot of stuff to discourage employment. Guess what? When you punish someone for employing people, then they employ less people. Maybe we ought to do something about that first before hand wringing about the robotic apocalypse?
If you see computer viruses as alive, then we can terminate the discussion right here, as you are utterly clueless about physical reality.
Typical rhetorical dodge. I'm not going to think inside your comfort region. If one is to discuss life, rather than a very provincial opinion of what life is in terms of terrestrial biology or perhaps terrestrial philosophy/theology, one has to resort to thermodynamical definitions of life. And sooner or later, you end up with life being self-propagating information with the ability to manipulate its environment.
No it won't because this is the same type of denial suffered by drug abusers and alcoholics. The proof couldn't be much stronger than it is.
Which is a pretty dumb thing to say. Here's two obvious reasons why: 1) there hasn't been even a 1C rise in global mean temperature since the beginning of the industrial era, and 2) there's a factor of three uncertainty in the estimates of CO2 temperature forcing.
Most people who deny that our pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is causing the Earth to warm
I agree. What I disagree on is both the amount of resulting warming and the degree of need to do something about it.
CO2 not cheaper. You ignore externalities.
Assuming of course, that the externalities are bigger than what I see. If they aren't, then I'm not ignoring them.
You can pretend that CO2 energy is a perpetual motion machine all you want. But in the end the laws of physics will reveal the true costs that you are ignoring.
Nonsense. CO2 energy doesn't have to last forever. As I noted earlier, if we just run it out a century, which I grant may be infeasible, then we have almost the entire world at or superior to the best economies at the of the last century. That gives us a huge amount of flexibility for handling the problems of the world, including the relatively mild one of climate change.
dunno what you mean with "actual experience with a market". if you mean i lack a degree in some pseudoscience then yes.
No, I mean extensive trading experience. When you assert, as you did in your linked reply that "inequality inevitably grows", then you haven't actually experienced the behaviors of markets that correct for high levels of wealth inequality.
When you say " they need a periodical correction or even 'reset'", you haven't traded through actual market corrections like recessions.
When you say "and the "invisible hand" idea is just delusion", then you haven't actually experienced the huge variety of subtle dynamics which make earning a profit through trade so extraordinarily hard or studied large scale behavior of markets.
sort of a pun. free markets don't actually exist, it's a fallacy. all markets are controlled in subtle (and not so subtle) ways.
No, it's an ideal. And one doesn't have to fully achieve the ideal market in order to reap most of the benefits.
because of that there's no real balance, inequality inevitably grows and they need a periodical correction or even 'reset' which is usualy a rather violent event. in that sense i say "they don't work", and the "invisible hand" idea is just delusion.
The thing is, markets both have inherent mechanisms against indefinitely growing wealth inequality and their own periodic corrections. First, there are diminishing returns to higher levels of wealth due to the difficulty of managing it and declining profit margins with higher wealth. Large businesses and mutual funds have run into this before.
Second, there's the business cycle which routinely disrupts wealth accumulation.
eve's economy is not completely player driven. basic resources are always available and affordable regardless of player actions, thus speculative behaviour has no effect at all on the system
Which is incorrect, because of two factors. First, there are other resources than basic resources. And second, for a lot of projects one needs a level of basic resources, far in excess of what one person can easily mine or extract for themselves. The levels of basic resources in the markets are way over what even a large group can comfortably mine in a short period of time. Hence, speculation and market shenanigans can manipulate the system.
And certain good and products have achieved considerable strategic value, such as "moon goo" (a variety of resources that are required for a whole level of advanced spacecraft and in turn require considerable fixed infrastructure to mine and hence, a strong incentive to hold sections of space) and the construction of capital ships (which are key components of the largest player militaries in the game).
You know, if you had actually paid attention in Eve Online, you would have noticed that things don't operate like you claim they do.
but it's just a game
That's a common excuse for ignoring evidence. But if one chooses not to do that, then one sees common patterns and behavior in markets. And one can't really understand the power of markets until one studies a variety of them, both in the real world and in games.