I honestly don't think a real "organized" war of that kind is likely to ever happen again. We have long since passed the point where the major actors are just too big and powerful to risk war with eachother, so they engage in little more than proxy wars against eachother's minor interests.
I would love for that to be true. But I'm reminded of a maxim of Napoleon, "To have good soldiers, a nation must always be at war." Substantial military advantage will accrue to countries which fight on a regular basis. And if that advantage becomes great enough, then we may well see the real "organized" war of which you speak.
The distribution of asteroids that we can detect follow a power law: for a given cross-sectional area, the number is crudely inversely proportional. This not only holds for the biggest ones which we can observe in telescopes, but also meteorite impacts with the Earth and Moon. So we have estimates of asteroid populations by size from the largest to well below the minimum size which can cause harm to us on Earth.
Regulation means not only having the rules on paper, but having the executive framework to make sure they are implemented in practice. If they aren't then the industry is unregulated.
And it's worth noting by this weak standard, both accidents you mention were regulated. I find it interesting how canned this response is. It reminds me of the blowhards stating within a few days of Fukushima that the accident was due to the incompetence of the operators rather than the obvious magnitude 9 earthquake and its consequences without knowing anything about the situation.
Regulation doesn't magically provide perfect protection against nuclear accidents especially when as in today's world you don't have a lot of experience with nuclear accidents because they don't happen that often. A fundamental lesson of these accidents is that you often have to learn by failure what works and what doesn't work.
Neither which was a failure of regulation, let us note.
Actually both were, unless you're imagining 'regulation' to be only some rules written on a piece of paper, in which case you're just another slashdot fool. Which would also explain your ignorant comment above nicely.
I merely made a correct observation. Though I do have to agree that if it can't be written down on paper, it's probably not regulation.
Ah, but the risk of making an area the size of a small state uninhabitable for decades without incurring significant health risks is unique to nuclear.
In that the risk is unplanned. Hydroelectric has similar risk, but it's planned.
With other goods of value. Keep in mind the original poster was speaking of using gold and silver as money. How many people buy euros with their euros?
The historical evidence shows that Austerity causes demand contraction and often demand spiral, it has never in global history solved a budget crisis.
That's like claiming emergency rooms are responsible for vehicular deaths just because so many people die there. No one goes through a crash bout of austerity because they're doing well just as no one goes to an emergency room unless they have substantial problems.
The Euro eliminated currency barriers to unequal trade relationships which substantially hurt the Greece economy.
In other words, Greece fucked around for a couple of decades rather than deal with the above problem. Now they're paying the consequences.
The time to implement austerity and similar measures would have been two decades ago. It's not like the "unequal trade relationship" showed up yesterday.
And austerity does work. The Scandinavian countries successfully practice austerity right now. When you control spending over generations rather than only when your creditors force you to, you can have a much better society.
Debts on a national level will only rise as long as there is demand for that debt and confidence in it, or banks out to make money by selling people shit and betting against it.
It's worth noting here that Greece lied about its financial health for a time (and may still be lying, not like I care). So some of that debt was picked up under false pretenses.
You believe that thick, expensive concrete walls will appear magically by themselves without regulations? Or that a business won't sell some plutonium to the highest bidder if not prevented by the higher cost of a penalty? Then you're delusional.
There's always liability. And given the current huge burden of regulation, I don't buy that it's making nuclear plants safer, especially when we have nuclear plants operating well past their design lifespan.
You need examples? Check out Fukushima and Chernobyl.
Neither which was a failure of regulation, let us note. Fukushima was overwhelmed by a natural disaster for which regulation was inadequate at the time, but would have in around five to ten years (IMHO). Chernobyl was run by the people who regulated it. They deliberately ignored their regulations and took it into a regime where it would fail.
Primarily by curbing the power and reach of government. We don't need a government that spies on us (most of the world). We don't need a government that runs the largest military in the world (the US), runs its own oil companies (Russia, China, and most of OPEC), pampers us by doing things for us that we could, if we really wanted to, do ourselves (social safety nets of most of the world), and runs the largest networks of corruption in human history (everyone either directly or by incentivizing the creation of black markets and smuggling).
And most of this crap doesn't help us create a counterweight to business, religious cults, or other possible rival power centers.
You have the same influence over the government as you do over the market. Actually, because of the *one person, one vote* thing, you have much more so
No. There are very substantial differences between the two. The most important is simply that markets can cater to small groups and interests and wants that change day to day. They have a responsive to wants that are simply not present in a government.
Further, this lack of immediate responsiveness in government is by design. There is no democratic government in the world that allows real time modification by its constituents/customers.
I think it's completely foolish to equate the infrequent and very coarse-grained opportunities for control changes of an election to the fluid and fine-grained changes of a modern market.
As an individual, you have just as much control over the government as you do the market.
I think I've already explained why that isn't so. You seem to have not gotten the point of the orange juice example. There's no analogue to the light weight activity of buying orange juice in a government.
And the government, as our representative, has every right to compete in the market and inform us where danger lies.
That would be termed an obligation not a right.
Otherwise, it's not really open, it's merely privateering, with everything simply going to the highest bidder, which is really what we have because presently that is who the government serves, and that is because the public can't be bothered...
So why are you wasting my time? I'm supposedly controlling this mess? That's news to me.
Meanwhile no biggie. There's enough demand to keep the orange juice infrastructure afloat and the price almost reasonable. But the real truth is that the price is arbitrarily set by some commodity brokers in London, Hong Kong or New York, under the watchful eye of the triads, yakuza and other wealthy "families". The whole "supply/demand" thing is a total myth.
Nice to know that. Here's the problem. Supply and demand is not a myth, but rather a basic observable thing of any market. It doesn't matter who sets the price when I can choose not to buy and the supplier can choose not to supply.
Oh yes there is. You're demonstrating it right now. Capitalism has failure baked in BECAUSE it doesn't have murder baked in.
See, capitalist free market competition creates winners and losers (failures).
The obvious rebuttal is that the loser can win later. There's nothing forcing you to do job X forever on, especially, when you demonstrate that you aren't good enough at job X to make a career of it.
Capitalism assumes, just like how communism makes assumptions, that the people who fail during the down times would pick themselves up the capitalist way. They don't. At least some of them will become disillusioned with capitalism.
So what? Capitalism is not a system of inspiration, but rather a system for getting shit done. And how are these "disillusioned" people going to do better in any other system? They have behavioral or psychological problems. Those don't magically get better in other systems.
But capitalism doesn't have murder baked in. So instead of letting those people die off, capitalism would try to uplift them too.
Why is letting people "die off" supposedly better? You do realize that capitalism also licked the overpopulation problem too. Just employ women gainfully. There's no need to kill people off.
In other words, capitalism's baked in failure is that it provides the perfect breeding ground for communism. Marx himself was a rich boy, whose wealth came from capitalism. Didn't stop him and other rich boys from biting the hand that fed them.
No. It's status signalling, like buying a huge yacht.
And just like in the market, you can vote for the government you desire.
In a market, I get what I want when I "vote" and the decisions can be fluidly changed. If I want to drink orange juice in the morning, I don't have to assemble a coalition of like-minded orange juice drinkers. Nor do I run the risk of losing and having to drink Coke for the next four years because I couldn't persuade enough of my fellow citizens to drink orange juice instead.
In government, all we have to do is stop reelecting crooked politicians, you know, like maybe being a bit more involved during the primaries, and demanding open primaries that don't favor any particular faction, and learning how to tune out propaganda.
I already did that. Somehow the crooked politicians keep getting elected.
The huge difference here is that actual markets are quite refined. I control how much I choose to spend and how engaged I am with other members of the market. With a government, I don't have that degree of control and a lot of other people wouldn't like it if I did have the desired degree of control. That's the primary reason I favor throwing off most government functions to the private world. I get to have the control I want and you get to not care.
There isn't one obvious standard of optimization. Optimization inherently requires a choice about what is to be optimized. For example, a common failure mode is to optimize that which is more easily measurable. Governments do this all the time economically with GDP, a measure of economic activity. This results, among other problems, with the well-known problem of the Broken Window fallacy where economic activity is considered more important than the creation of value.
Prisoners' dilemma is the classic example. That covers a broad category of human interaction right there where one person can potentially screw over another for personal gain. Then there's a number of large projects where coordination of activity results in a better outcome than uncoordinated action.
The high prevalence of unintended consequences, delusional viewpoints, and "bang-bang" control.
For example, let's consider the current story. Prosecutors got to this point of casual abuses of laws and ethics because there are no consequences. People cared more about the appearance of "being tough on crime" and expediting the prosecution of crime than on results, the unintended consequence is that now there are a bunch of out of control prosecutors who can harass people and organizations just because they feel like it.
There are plenty of delusional viewpoints such as ignoring or rationalizing law enforcement abuses, rationalizing that it's ok to jail people because of drugs or unpopular things said on the internet, or assuming that the government which commits blatant abuses in one area of intervention won't commit similar abuses in an area that the person wants intervention in.
And a near universal delusion of government intervention is that it is possible for an external group to know enough about a problem to effectively intervene. Commonly, there are profound knowledge gaps that aren't acknowledged and which greatly impair actual intervention attempts.
Finally, the real world bang-bang control problem is balancing a rod, like a broom, by moving the bottom end back and forth, The official version allows movement in one dimension and the only choices are to move left or right at constant speed. For cases where the rod isn't too far out of balance or moving too fast, you can keep it suspended indefinitely even in the presence of small, continuing, random disturbances of the system. You are always moving left or right. This uses more energy than a gradual approach that uses smaller adjustments when conditions are near balance.
Government intervention is not gradual or nuanced. And it's not uncommon to see government set up systems with fundamental flaws and then propose increasingly complex and bizarre fixes as the system goes more and more out of balance.
A classic example is the military-industrial complexes of the developed world, particularly, the US. The fundamental problem is that the system is a vehicle for transferring wealth from the public to a well-connected private network. National defense and security is lower priority whether by intent or not.
This has resulted in the sorry spectacle of a system that can keep track of the quality of the screws, but not the quality of the final product. There are plenty of major US defense contractors who have produced crap, overpriced products for decades (with really nice screws), yet still get plenty of business from the US government. There's no credible means to correct the problem because there are a small number of suppliers and any punishment would either impair the US's near future defensive capabilities or be trivial enough to ignore.
In summary, there's plenty of evidence that the approach doesn't work very well, due to the ignorance of the people controlling the system, the crudity of the means of control, and often just due to having terrible goals that are wildly incompatible with the needs of society.
You're starting to see why I use a credit union. Yes, they charge nothing for routine transactions. My point here is that one can do a lot to protect oneself from nefarious actions of a business - most often simply by not doing business with them.
Shop around a little. It's not that hard to avoid bad players. But you have to try first.
I'm just pointing out that there are plenty of situations where judicious government intervention is warranted.
And I'm just pointing out that there are plenty of times when government intervention is not only unwarranted, it is actually counterproductive. I think a large part of the problem here is that =advocates of government intervention frequently don't have much idea what "judicious government intervention" means.
Slashdot Mirror
Especially when having three to four F-16s in the air may be more of a military advantage than having one F-35.
I honestly don't think a real "organized" war of that kind is likely to ever happen again. We have long since passed the point where the major actors are just too big and powerful to risk war with eachother, so they engage in little more than proxy wars against eachother's minor interests.
I would love for that to be true. But I'm reminded of a maxim of Napoleon, "To have good soldiers, a nation must always be at war." Substantial military advantage will accrue to countries which fight on a regular basis. And if that advantage becomes great enough, then we may well see the real "organized" war of which you speak.
The distribution of asteroids that we can detect follow a power law: for a given cross-sectional area, the number is crudely inversely proportional. This not only holds for the biggest ones which we can observe in telescopes, but also meteorite impacts with the Earth and Moon. So we have estimates of asteroid populations by size from the largest to well below the minimum size which can cause harm to us on Earth.
Regulation means not only having the rules on paper, but having the executive framework to make sure they are implemented in practice. If they aren't then the industry is unregulated.
And it's worth noting by this weak standard, both accidents you mention were regulated. I find it interesting how canned this response is. It reminds me of the blowhards stating within a few days of Fukushima that the accident was due to the incompetence of the operators rather than the obvious magnitude 9 earthquake and its consequences without knowing anything about the situation.
Regulation doesn't magically provide perfect protection against nuclear accidents especially when as in today's world you don't have a lot of experience with nuclear accidents because they don't happen that often. A fundamental lesson of these accidents is that you often have to learn by failure what works and what doesn't work.
I just did. So do you have something to contribute or are you going to keep saying it is "not reasonable"?
Neither which was a failure of regulation, let us note.
Actually both were, unless you're imagining 'regulation' to be only some rules written on a piece of paper, in which case you're just another slashdot fool. Which would also explain your ignorant comment above nicely.
I merely made a correct observation. Though I do have to agree that if it can't be written down on paper, it's probably not regulation.
Ah, but the risk of making an area the size of a small state uninhabitable for decades without incurring significant health risks is unique to nuclear.
In that the risk is unplanned. Hydroelectric has similar risk, but it's planned.
That is not agility, the market is merely fickle and panicky.
In other words, agility. You can be too responsive though that is less of a problem than you claim.
how are you going to buy them?
With other goods of value. Keep in mind the original poster was speaking of using gold and silver as money. How many people buy euros with their euros?
That's incidentally what Japan did in 1991. And now their government owes twice as much as their GDP. So maybe that's not such a good investment.
The historical evidence shows that Austerity causes demand contraction and often demand spiral, it has never in global history solved a budget crisis.
That's like claiming emergency rooms are responsible for vehicular deaths just because so many people die there. No one goes through a crash bout of austerity because they're doing well just as no one goes to an emergency room unless they have substantial problems.
The Euro eliminated currency barriers to unequal trade relationships which substantially hurt the Greece economy.
In other words, Greece fucked around for a couple of decades rather than deal with the above problem. Now they're paying the consequences.
The time to implement austerity and similar measures would have been two decades ago. It's not like the "unequal trade relationship" showed up yesterday.
And austerity does work. The Scandinavian countries successfully practice austerity right now. When you control spending over generations rather than only when your creditors force you to, you can have a much better society.
Debts on a national level will only rise as long as there is demand for that debt and confidence in it, or banks out to make money by selling people shit and betting against it.
It's worth noting here that Greece lied about its financial health for a time (and may still be lying, not like I care). So some of that debt was picked up under false pretenses.
You believe that thick, expensive concrete walls will appear magically by themselves without regulations? Or that a business won't sell some plutonium to the highest bidder if not prevented by the higher cost of a penalty? Then you're delusional.
There's always liability. And given the current huge burden of regulation, I don't buy that it's making nuclear plants safer, especially when we have nuclear plants operating well past their design lifespan.
You need examples? Check out Fukushima and Chernobyl.
Neither which was a failure of regulation, let us note. Fukushima was overwhelmed by a natural disaster for which regulation was inadequate at the time, but would have in around five to ten years (IMHO). Chernobyl was run by the people who regulated it. They deliberately ignored their regulations and took it into a regime where it would fail.
Primarily by curbing the power and reach of government. We don't need a government that spies on us (most of the world). We don't need a government that runs the largest military in the world (the US), runs its own oil companies (Russia, China, and most of OPEC), pampers us by doing things for us that we could, if we really wanted to, do ourselves (social safety nets of most of the world), and runs the largest networks of corruption in human history (everyone either directly or by incentivizing the creation of black markets and smuggling).
And most of this crap doesn't help us create a counterweight to business, religious cults, or other possible rival power centers.
You have the same influence over the government as you do over the market. Actually, because of the *one person, one vote* thing, you have much more so
No. There are very substantial differences between the two. The most important is simply that markets can cater to small groups and interests and wants that change day to day. They have a responsive to wants that are simply not present in a government.
Further, this lack of immediate responsiveness in government is by design. There is no democratic government in the world that allows real time modification by its constituents/customers.
I think it's completely foolish to equate the infrequent and very coarse-grained opportunities for control changes of an election to the fluid and fine-grained changes of a modern market.
Yes, you are, with your vote
What does "control" mean here?
As an individual, you have just as much control over the government as you do the market.
I think I've already explained why that isn't so. You seem to have not gotten the point of the orange juice example. There's no analogue to the light weight activity of buying orange juice in a government.
And the government, as our representative, has every right to compete in the market and inform us where danger lies.
That would be termed an obligation not a right.
Otherwise, it's not really open, it's merely privateering, with everything simply going to the highest bidder, which is really what we have because presently that is who the government serves, and that is because the public can't be bothered...
So why are you wasting my time? I'm supposedly controlling this mess? That's news to me.
Meanwhile no biggie. There's enough demand to keep the orange juice infrastructure afloat and the price almost reasonable. But the real truth is that the price is arbitrarily set by some commodity brokers in London, Hong Kong or New York, under the watchful eye of the triads, yakuza and other wealthy "families". The whole "supply/demand" thing is a total myth.
Nice to know that. Here's the problem. Supply and demand is not a myth, but rather a basic observable thing of any market. It doesn't matter who sets the price when I can choose not to buy and the supplier can choose not to supply.
you ain't gettin' any for less than a thousand dollars a quart
Which I can do should I desire it enough.
Oh yes there is. You're demonstrating it right now. Capitalism has failure baked in BECAUSE it doesn't have murder baked in.
See, capitalist free market competition creates winners and losers (failures).
The obvious rebuttal is that the loser can win later. There's nothing forcing you to do job X forever on, especially, when you demonstrate that you aren't good enough at job X to make a career of it.
Capitalism assumes, just like how communism makes assumptions, that the people who fail during the down times would pick themselves up the capitalist way. They don't. At least some of them will become disillusioned with capitalism.
So what? Capitalism is not a system of inspiration, but rather a system for getting shit done. And how are these "disillusioned" people going to do better in any other system? They have behavioral or psychological problems. Those don't magically get better in other systems.
But capitalism doesn't have murder baked in. So instead of letting those people die off, capitalism would try to uplift them too.
Why is letting people "die off" supposedly better? You do realize that capitalism also licked the overpopulation problem too. Just employ women gainfully. There's no need to kill people off.
In other words, capitalism's baked in failure is that it provides the perfect breeding ground for communism. Marx himself was a rich boy, whose wealth came from capitalism. Didn't stop him and other rich boys from biting the hand that fed them.
No. It's status signalling, like buying a huge yacht.
And just like in the market, you can vote for the government you desire.
In a market, I get what I want when I "vote" and the decisions can be fluidly changed. If I want to drink orange juice in the morning, I don't have to assemble a coalition of like-minded orange juice drinkers. Nor do I run the risk of losing and having to drink Coke for the next four years because I couldn't persuade enough of my fellow citizens to drink orange juice instead.
In government, all we have to do is stop reelecting crooked politicians, you know, like maybe being a bit more involved during the primaries, and demanding open primaries that don't favor any particular faction, and learning how to tune out propaganda.
I already did that. Somehow the crooked politicians keep getting elected.
The huge difference here is that actual markets are quite refined. I control how much I choose to spend and how engaged I am with other members of the market. With a government, I don't have that degree of control and a lot of other people wouldn't like it if I did have the desired degree of control. That's the primary reason I favor throwing off most government functions to the private world. I get to have the control I want and you get to not care.
So what's the best we can hope for?
A free society where we can be the best we can be as we see it.
Outcomes. We try to optimize outcomes.
There isn't one obvious standard of optimization. Optimization inherently requires a choice about what is to be optimized. For example, a common failure mode is to optimize that which is more easily measurable. Governments do this all the time economically with GDP, a measure of economic activity. This results, among other problems, with the well-known problem of the Broken Window fallacy where economic activity is considered more important than the creation of value.
Care to name a few?
Prisoners' dilemma is the classic example. That covers a broad category of human interaction right there where one person can potentially screw over another for personal gain. Then there's a number of large projects where coordination of activity results in a better outcome than uncoordinated action.
The high prevalence of unintended consequences, delusional viewpoints, and "bang-bang" control.
For example, let's consider the current story. Prosecutors got to this point of casual abuses of laws and ethics because there are no consequences. People cared more about the appearance of "being tough on crime" and expediting the prosecution of crime than on results, the unintended consequence is that now there are a bunch of out of control prosecutors who can harass people and organizations just because they feel like it.
There are plenty of delusional viewpoints such as ignoring or rationalizing law enforcement abuses, rationalizing that it's ok to jail people because of drugs or unpopular things said on the internet, or assuming that the government which commits blatant abuses in one area of intervention won't commit similar abuses in an area that the person wants intervention in.
And a near universal delusion of government intervention is that it is possible for an external group to know enough about a problem to effectively intervene. Commonly, there are profound knowledge gaps that aren't acknowledged and which greatly impair actual intervention attempts.
Finally, the real world bang-bang control problem is balancing a rod, like a broom, by moving the bottom end back and forth, The official version allows movement in one dimension and the only choices are to move left or right at constant speed. For cases where the rod isn't too far out of balance or moving too fast, you can keep it suspended indefinitely even in the presence of small, continuing, random disturbances of the system. You are always moving left or right. This uses more energy than a gradual approach that uses smaller adjustments when conditions are near balance.
Government intervention is not gradual or nuanced. And it's not uncommon to see government set up systems with fundamental flaws and then propose increasingly complex and bizarre fixes as the system goes more and more out of balance.
A classic example is the military-industrial complexes of the developed world, particularly, the US. The fundamental problem is that the system is a vehicle for transferring wealth from the public to a well-connected private network. National defense and security is lower priority whether by intent or not.
This has resulted in the sorry spectacle of a system that can keep track of the quality of the screws, but not the quality of the final product. There are plenty of major US defense contractors who have produced crap, overpriced products for decades (with really nice screws), yet still get plenty of business from the US government. There's no credible means to correct the problem because there are a small number of suppliers and any punishment would either impair the US's near future defensive capabilities or be trivial enough to ignore.
In summary, there's plenty of evidence that the approach doesn't work very well, due to the ignorance of the people controlling the system, the crudity of the means of control, and often just due to having terrible goals that are wildly incompatible with the needs of society.
You're starting to see why I use a credit union. Yes, they charge nothing for routine transactions. My point here is that one can do a lot to protect oneself from nefarious actions of a business - most often simply by not doing business with them.
Shop around a little. It's not that hard to avoid bad players. But you have to try first.
Who is it you think is making that excuse?
Whoever I was replying to.
I'm just pointing out that there are plenty of situations where judicious government intervention is warranted.
And I'm just pointing out that there are plenty of times when government intervention is not only unwarranted, it is actually counterproductive. I think a large part of the problem here is that =advocates of government intervention frequently don't have much idea what "judicious government intervention" means.