I think there's a few observations to make here. First, it is ultimately the US who caused the problem, though with the permission of Denmark. Second, it is not much of a problem at present nor would be much of a problem at any point in the future. Third, it would be particularly expensive to clean up at present. I think even Greenland could think of better things to do than clean up this particular mess.
I would take environmentalism more seriously, if its adherents knew how to prioritize.
To be clear, the US also used heavy taxation at the top end (90% in the top bracket!) in the past. From the Reagan era onward, we have continually decreased the top rates until you get what we have now - a very slightly progressive income tax scheme alongside a capital gains tax rate that ensures the top of the top wealthiest individuals pay less as a percentage of income than the average person does.
Not much point to a 90% bracket when almost no one ever paid that marginal rate due to tax loopholes such as trusts.
a very slightly progressive income tax scheme alongside a capital gains tax rate that ensures the top of the top wealthiest individuals pay less as a percentage of income than the average person does.
You have evidence for that? I see stuff like this or this or this.
If nature basically had a means to increase plant growth rate by 1/3, then there must have been something else in nature which made it more efficient in the long run NOT to take advantage of it.
What's in it for the bacteria to fix that much extra nitrogen?
Projects like ISS aren't just one thing. You have many groups involved each with their agenda. One of those groups unquestionably is researchers. [...] Likewise a lot of people would rather see the money that went into ISS go toward a Mars mission
And a third group just looks at something like the ISS as a profit center. One of three groups got what they wanted.
Worker salary is a classic example. From the employer's point of view, paying nothing for work would be ideal. But then they don't get any labor and hence, can't compete.
What are you ? Braindead ?
I'm making an obvious observation. Funny how people who make such a big deal about competition being less than perfect can't even manage to understand why workers have pricing power. It's as I suspected all along. You are operating from a profound ignorance of economics and reality.
The US didn't domestically get rid of it [slavery] properly until FDR
The mask has definitely slipped now. You're ignoring a considerable amount of history in making that erroneous claim (employers have been paying employees since before the US existed). And of course, you're ignoring that FDR drafted over 10 million people after he supposedly ended slavery.
But there is no other tool that can prevent it. Spraying a fire extinguisher on an electrical fire can potentially make the fire worse (depending on the type) - by your reasoning we should therefore get rid of fire extinguishers because the occasional misuse of them causing hardship cannot possibly be worth living with for the multitude of lives they save.
If you want to spray water on electrical fires, go ahead. Just don't be surprised yet again, when you get electrocuted. Oh wait, you didn't say that? Neither did I. Reading comprehension. Do it sometime.
Personal diaries were not fiction, especially since they never intended anybody else would read it. Now if one or two had done that, you could write it off as fantasies - but when they ALL say the same thing - the only reasonable explanation is that they are telling the truth.
Let's run a little exercise then. I'll list a bunch of UK industrialists and you point to the personal diaries that confirm they were serial rapists, raping their female workers to get more work out of them.
I'm done. There's no point debating with somebody who does not do so in good faith and is unwilling to concede anything. My posts have been filled with concessions "it sometimes works" " in the right circumstances". I have spoken of dealing with individual problems on an individual basis - you have subscribed to a one-size-fits-nothing ideology and refuse to countenance the possiblity that sometimes it fits really, really badly.
Good. It started out well, but you since descended into idiotic drivel. There's no point for me to argue with delusion. While your time is worthless to me, mine is moderately valuable to me.
So instead, I'll summarize for anyone who's been reading along to this point. I made the observation way back when that deregulation of the air passenger and telecom businesses was a libertarian contribution to the modern world. silentcoder then goes on and on about how competition is imperfect and not suited for everything. Notice that his first example was of a monopsony (plants which evolve into trees even though they collectively don't get anything out of it), which is already acknowledged as a negative situation by libertarians, free market types, etc. Then he brings out the example of a natural monopoly which despite his assertion that somehow it's relevant to poor countries (which I gather he thinks never have wealthy visitors or people passing through on trips to other places) and somehow air travel to these benighted places becomes a natural monopoly, even though it doesn't fit the definition at all (since anyone can provide service to a developing world country just like they can a developed world country).
Moving on, we then come to a long series of unfounded assertions such as the colorful one about the UK factory owners who all keep diaries expressing regret about how much their competitors force them to rape female employees in order to increase output, FDR ending slavery (even it had been e
Would you watch & do nothing while a bus sped towards an old guy standing in the road?
How many buses will you set into motion in the process of saving this one guy and how many people will they run over?
A key problem with climate change mitigation is that it doesn't take into account the harm that it causes, even to its own climate goals. Making a bunch of high fertility poor people is a great way to create future ecological problems among other things.
What was the point of this post suppose to be? You picked a bad example, which showed yet again the virtues of competition because we aren't grass. All this competition turned out quite advantageous for us, humans in the real world.
The reason I'm making such a big deal of this is that you've routinely shown an eagerness to generalize from an observation that competition isn't perfect to a variety of anti-competition ideas and narratives:
This, indeed, is why historically privatized services for major infrastucture did not get cheaper, or better service - they usually end up just as terribly run but now your ticket costs 3 times more.
The funamental requirement for market competition to actually work is that companies must be able to fail - completely and utterly.
In industry it creates the "everybody is evil" problem
(bonus fantasy points for a gratuitous story about employers having to rape because the competition does it too. And they all keep diaries, oh dear!)
If you want to privatize a public service the ONLY just way to do it is to form a public company around it and give 100% of the shares of that company divided among the taxpayers.
The One True Way.
It's quite clear that you aren't thinking here and looking for any excuse to blow off the idea of competition. Contrary to your assertion air travel has gotten a lot cheaper from competition despite the existence of more costly cartel/monopoly destinations. Contrary to your assertion, we now have cell phones which we wouldn't have in the absence of competition. And contrary to your initial model, we can feed ourselves with grass-related plants because they competed unintentionally of course to better feed us.
But the same happens to humans all the time, that's the point of the analogy. In industry it creates the "everybody is evil" problem - where anybody who is NOT willing to do evil cannot compete and soon only evildoing companies are left.
Unless, of course, doing evil is disadvantageous. Then they don't do that. Worker salary is a classic example. From the employer's point of view, paying nothing for work would be ideal. But then they don't get any labor and hence, can't compete.
And yes, regulation is a well known way to prevent such things. It also is a well know way to create such situations.
A classic example from the industrial revolution. 19th century, England - standard practise of factory owners is to regularly rape (of the 'fuck me or your fired' variety) female staff as a way of maintaining worker discipline. A great many of those factory owners kept diaries. They all confess to engaging in the practise, all write that they find it abhorent and then proceed to say 'but because others do it, if I do not do it as well then my workers will be less productive, I cannot compete and I'd be out of business". Every one of them blames all the others for being evil and thereby forcing him to be evil as well. That's the human version of it.
Welcome to Victorian era porn. You do realize there is a difference between fiction and reality right?
>My point here is that the "competition is bad" idea is an entirely subjective judgment.
But nobody made that argument. Nobody said 'competition is bad'. Strawman. I merely said that competition is not universally good, it's outcomes are not universally ideal. It's not some utopian panacea. It can be good, and it can be evil, which it is depends entirely on the specific context being evaluated. Sometimes competition is good, sometimes it's bad, but you can't assume the former is always true - or even mostly true.
And you do so by using an example of an monopsony with trees instead of people. We've already known about monopsonies for a long time and how it's great for the controller (and frequently the members) of the monopsony, but not great for anyone else. The "always privatization" side always knows of these examples. The "do evil" example is better though not everyone is going to agree that the activities in question are evil or encouraged by competition.
Another thing here is that in the real world, the "sometimes competition is bad" argument gets used way out of scale with the problems it's supposed to address. For example, Franklin Roosevelt said in defense of the National Industrial Recovery Act which among other constitutional violations, created a variety of industry and labor cartels:
No employer and no group of less than all employers in a single trade could do this alone and continue to live in business competition. But if all employers in each trade now band themselves faithfully in these modern guilds--without exception- and agree to act together and at once, none will be hurt and millions of workers, so long deprived of the right to earn their bread in the sweat of their labor, can raise their heads again. The challenge of this law is whether we can sink selfish interest and present a solid front against a common peril.
and
It is, further, a challenge to administration. We are relaxing some of the safeguards of the anti-trust laws. The public must be protected against the abuses that led to their enactment, and to this end, we are putting in place of old principles of unchecked competition some new Government controls. They must, above all, be impartial and just. Their purpose is to free business, not to shackle it; and no man who stands on the constructive, forward-looking side of his industry has an
The plants are not the supplier in that example - they are just competing for access to a resource: sunlight. They didn't evolve to supply anything - plants on land evolved long before anything existed to eat them. That some plants would, much later, evolve a symbiotic relationship with things that eat them (fruit-plants and birds for example) has no bearing on the analogy.
Ok, demand then. It's not important. Intent is not important either. Finally, I can't help but notice that I'm not a plant. So all this cooperation for plants that would hypothetically result in a carpet is just not advantageous for me. I imagine you are in a similar situation.
Wood evolved more than 200-million years before people did. It's safe to say it's usefulness to us was not a consideration.
And I say that's irrelevant as well. What innovations they evolved back then would be useful for building stuff today.
My point here is that the "competition is bad" idea is an entirely subjective judgment. What is good for plants in terms of anti-competitive behavior would not be good for most of the rest of life. But a general observation is that anti-competitive behavior is good for whoever engages in it and bad for everyone else. Given that things like monopolies, cartels, monopsonies, etc are standard knowledge, the subjectivity of viewpoints on competition is well known.
Food supply may be critical but it is not a natural monopoly and there is no practical reason you can't have two farms.
Another thing which is irrelevant since the earlier poster didn't specify things which were allegedly natural monopolies, but instead made a blanket claim about everything.
Airports are an interesting one - they worked fantastically in rich countries. In poorer ones privatization never had an upswing, the prices got high and stayed high for ever. Because in anything but the richest countries air travel is a natural monopoly and the company never goes bankrupt. Whether something is a natural monopoly is partly detemined by the incomes of potential customers.
No, air travel is not a natural monopoly. What's going on here is control over gates which is a oligopoly or monopoly granted by the owners of the airports. The airport owner could distribute gate access between several providers instead of one, turning a monopoly into a competitive situation.
Eating grass? That's no better than eating wood. All of the grains, maize, etc that end up having substantial nutritional value underwent substantial breeding over thousands of years. They didn't start out ready for farming. And without some sort of evolution in the first place, they wouldn't have been nutritious for humans to eat at all.
Not that it makes much difference to the figurative point that was being made, but if you're going to talk important innovations for humanity, domestication of the major crops includes several grass derived varieties, and their usefulness is very significant.
Which I've already demonstrated is incorrect. It matters a great deal to everything that isn't grass or tree. The point of competition isn't to increase the profit margins of the given industry, it's to benefit everyone else. I find it telling that you haven't figured out who the benefactors of competition are.
As your second observation, domestication is a intentional selection process for more nutritious strains and other desirable characteristics. That means competition among these plants for varieties that better provided for humanity.
1) Competition does not always produce the most efficient outcomes. In fact, it can in the right conditions make the WORST possible outcome the ONLY possible outcome and make it impossible for any innovation to improve that. This is even true in nature with the competition that drives evolution. Richard Dawkins wrote a great article on it. A forest is nothing but a meadow that wastes nearly all it's energy on stilts. One tree taller than the grass - was a compeition winner, when everything copies the winning formula though - everything loses. And no plant can now STOP spening most it's energy on a useless giant trunk because then it gets no sun at all and loses the whole thing.
Competition is not for the supplier. We don't have competition so the sole monopoly provider of everything can sit on its ass and grow grass. As it turns, wood was a much more useful innovation for humanity than grass was.
2) The funamental requirement for market competition to actually work is that companies must be able to fail - completely and utterly. Dead. The problem is - you CANNOT allow critical national infrastructure to fail - because if you do the entire country WILL collapse with it. The entire rest of the economy will collapse as well. No sane government will let the failure of one business destroy their entire economy, plunge them into a depression (which pretty much guarantees not being reelected), starvation and suffering - and probably war.
A company's failure is not the same as failure of its infrastructure. That can always be sold to a more successful competitor (transfer of assets being a usual requirement of a capitalist economic system).
This pattern happens over and over. So what privatisation ACTUALLY ends up being is businesses allowed to rake in massive profits from essential infrastructure while the risks remain firmly with the taxpayers. You have to pay, out of pocket, for their profits when it works - and out of your taxes when it doesn't. The people who fuck up never get punished for their fuckups.
Then it's not privatization, is it?
In that scenario - none of the market theories even *apply* anymore at all. They have varying degrees of reliability in general and heaps of exceptions that libertarians ignore - but the scenario of critical infrastructure privatization is one where a market never will and never can exist and thus they have no application whatsoever.
Food supply is the obvious rebuttal here.
This, indeed, is why historically privatized services for major infrastucture did not get cheaper, or better service - they usually end up just as terribly run but now your ticket costs 3 times more.
Until the company goes bankrupt. Then those airports it had a lock on get sold to its competitors.
Eris is 27% more massive than Pluto, should it be a planet as well?
Why not? It's already a "dwarf planet". There's no real problem with having hundreds or thousands of planets except apparently someone is concerned school children will have to memorize them all.
Ford recognised that if he paid his workers enough to buy his cars, they'd both be better off.
That's ancient Ford propaganda. He instead realized that he needed to pay more in order to end a huge turnover problem he had at his factories.
It takes a remarkably short-sighted view point as well as a nearly rabid 'profit above all else' attitude to see large scale offshoring as anything other than detrimental.
You just look for shit to make smartass comments about? Or are you intellectually challenged, in which case I pologize because my mamma taught me to not pick pn retarded people.
No, I'm making a point which should be obvious. Just because something is inevitable doesn't mean it is a good idea to rush it. This again goes back to my observation that we have other priorities than just mitigating global warming. You say you agree, but where is that in your reasoning?
I'm pretty certain that the roller coaster ride has been set in motion, the amount of CO2 we've re-released will be there for a while. So while it behooves us to cut back on the amount we continue to release, as well as engage cleaner technologies, if for no other reason than the coal and oil ain't gonna last forever - the ride's been set in motion.
We're all also going to die. I guess we better kill ourselves off now, the ride's been set in motion after all.
My concerns at the moment, are that the rapid release of methane we've been experiencing lately are a wild card that wasn't mentioned nearly enough in the past several decades. While methane doesn't last as long in the atmosphere, it is much more powerful an energy retention substance then CO2.
What rapid release of methane? They've been measuring methane concentrations in atmosphere. While they are increasing, it's not a rapid release.
But even then, we're going to witness whatever we've put in motion without being able to do much about it.
Incorrect. We can still create a sophisticated, technologically advanced, global civilization capable of handling whatever climate change throws at us. That incidentally is the default, "no action" choice right there.
Guess who they ran those schemes FOR? Corporations.
Because corporations unlike you have something to offer in return.
Do you have anything relevant to say? In the "War is a Racket" example, there was one government and hundreds of businesses. It is foolish to claim that the businesses were the power, when the government had the money in the first place and the power.
So politicians SELL power.
Yes, that's my point. A small group sells power to a large market. Classic cartel market in favor of the politicians.
Only 0.5% compared to what? How many politicians and their lackeys can claim to have earn a fraction of that out of the war?
We can't know, can we? But General Butler was of the opinion that profit was about 25% of the spending, which would indicate that amount as a ceiling for the politicians and their lackeys.
But we can go further than that in the main story. The CIA doesn't even have to SELL power. They have a captive revenue stream of a few tens of billions, they have their own massive stable of CIA-run businesses, and they have a remarkable lack of accountability. To say that corporations are in control of that is nonsense.
DEspite your protesttions to the negative, the measurements hold up.
Do you understand these measurements well enough for that "holding up" to be relevant? From what I recall of your posting in the past, the answer is "no".
Let me point out there is a huge gap between "basic laws of physics" and global warming is severe enough that we should consider it our only priority. I grant that there is global warming and that it is likely that most of it is human caused. That doesn't mean that I agree that we should do something about it. There is a remarkable inability of the climate change crowd to show that doing something about global warming is better than doing nothing, even if your only care is global warming. There is a remarkable counterproductive aspect to global warming mitigation which has nothing to do with basic laws of physics.
You do realize that in the old US military, logistics was a notorious opportunity for rampant corruption and theft. General Smedley Butler, the author you link to, would be intimately aware of that. Well, guess who ran those schemes? Why it was the US government, of course.
As I implied in my previous reply, a common goal of government players is to monetize their power. Working out profitable deals with big businesses in a time of war is a convenient opportunity to do so. It's foolish however to assume that big business is in charge. After all, the government players can always find other big business to make deals. A common aspect of these sorts of schemes is a large variety of business parties and only one or a few government-side players.
Read Chapter 2 of War is A Racket and it outlines this aspect in gory detail. There is page after page of sweet deals made by many, many companies over the course of the First World War. If DuPont, to name the first example, was the driver of wartime profits, then how come they only managed to earn profits equal to 0.5% of the wartime spending (roughly $58 million per year from 1915-1918 versus was spending over $50 billion)?
It's very interesting to note how limited the profits were per company. I'm sure some enterprising businessmen in banking or elsewhere figured out how to dip into this pool multiple times via multiple companies. But the largess was carefully doled out to many different parties rather than concentrated in the hands of the few most powerful businesses.
And you took 15 words to say something wrong. The two posts clearly aren't equivalent. The obvious reason why is the connotation of the first post, that people are behaving in ways that kill themselves off which is a point the second post acknowledged right from the start with "Well it is. But not in the way you are implying it."
See this talk by Former national security advisor, their purpose is to keep the public misinformed and sow distrust so the public can't come together and confront corporate power.
What is up with this obsession over "corporate power"? Government is the power in "corporate power". A large corporate can monetize government power far better than a poor person can.
I think all the ranting about evil corporations is blame deflection from the true culprits.
This is different. From what I've heard so far, these people aren't being conned. They are merely stupid. And even that might be uncharitable.
It's still a con. Fear and stupidity work just as well as greed does in gaining the confidence of the victim. And contrary to the mythology you spin in the beginning, I have yet to meet a con artist who was above using such tactics.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there's a few observations to make here. First, it is ultimately the US who caused the problem, though with the permission of Denmark. Second, it is not much of a problem at present nor would be much of a problem at any point in the future. Third, it would be particularly expensive to clean up at present. I think even Greenland could think of better things to do than clean up this particular mess.
I would take environmentalism more seriously, if its adherents knew how to prioritize.
To be clear, the US also used heavy taxation at the top end (90% in the top bracket!) in the past. From the Reagan era onward, we have continually decreased the top rates until you get what we have now - a very slightly progressive income tax scheme alongside a capital gains tax rate that ensures the top of the top wealthiest individuals pay less as a percentage of income than the average person does.
Not much point to a 90% bracket when almost no one ever paid that marginal rate due to tax loopholes such as trusts.
a very slightly progressive income tax scheme alongside a capital gains tax rate that ensures the top of the top wealthiest individuals pay less as a percentage of income than the average person does.
You have evidence for that? I see stuff like this or this or this.
If nature basically had a means to increase plant growth rate by 1/3, then there must have been something else in nature which made it more efficient in the long run NOT to take advantage of it.
What's in it for the bacteria to fix that much extra nitrogen?
Projects like ISS aren't just one thing. You have many groups involved each with their agenda. One of those groups unquestionably is researchers. [...] Likewise a lot of people would rather see the money that went into ISS go toward a Mars mission
And a third group just looks at something like the ISS as a profit center. One of three groups got what they wanted.
This is how the real world works.
Worker salary is a classic example. From the employer's point of view, paying nothing for work would be ideal. But then they don't get any labor and hence, can't compete.
What are you ? Braindead ?
I'm making an obvious observation. Funny how people who make such a big deal about competition being less than perfect can't even manage to understand why workers have pricing power. It's as I suspected all along. You are operating from a profound ignorance of economics and reality.
The US didn't domestically get rid of it [slavery] properly until FDR
The mask has definitely slipped now. You're ignoring a considerable amount of history in making that erroneous claim (employers have been paying employees since before the US existed). And of course, you're ignoring that FDR drafted over 10 million people after he supposedly ended slavery.
But there is no other tool that can prevent it. Spraying a fire extinguisher on an electrical fire can potentially make the fire worse (depending on the type) - by your reasoning we should therefore get rid of fire extinguishers because the occasional misuse of them causing hardship cannot possibly be worth living with for the multitude of lives they save.
If you want to spray water on electrical fires, go ahead. Just don't be surprised yet again, when you get electrocuted. Oh wait, you didn't say that? Neither did I. Reading comprehension. Do it sometime.
Personal diaries were not fiction, especially since they never intended anybody else would read it. Now if one or two had done that, you could write it off as fantasies - but when they ALL say the same thing - the only reasonable explanation is that they are telling the truth.
Let's run a little exercise then. I'll list a bunch of UK industrialists and you point to the personal diaries that confirm they were serial rapists, raping their female workers to get more work out of them.
I'm done. There's no point debating with somebody who does not do so in good faith and is unwilling to concede anything. My posts have been filled with concessions "it sometimes works" " in the right circumstances". I have spoken of dealing with individual problems on an individual basis - you have subscribed to a one-size-fits-nothing ideology and refuse to countenance the possiblity that sometimes it fits really, really badly.
Good. It started out well, but you since descended into idiotic drivel. There's no point for me to argue with delusion. While your time is worthless to me, mine is moderately valuable to me.
So instead, I'll summarize for anyone who's been reading along to this point. I made the observation way back when that deregulation of the air passenger and telecom businesses was a libertarian contribution to the modern world. silentcoder then goes on and on about how competition is imperfect and not suited for everything. Notice that his first example was of a monopsony (plants which evolve into trees even though they collectively don't get anything out of it), which is already acknowledged as a negative situation by libertarians, free market types, etc. Then he brings out the example of a natural monopoly which despite his assertion that somehow it's relevant to poor countries (which I gather he thinks never have wealthy visitors or people passing through on trips to other places) and somehow air travel to these benighted places becomes a natural monopoly, even though it doesn't fit the definition at all (since anyone can provide service to a developing world country just like they can a developed world country).
Moving on, we then come to a long series of unfounded assertions such as the colorful one about the UK factory owners who all keep diaries expressing regret about how much their competitors force them to rape female employees in order to increase output, FDR ending slavery (even it had been e
Would you watch & do nothing while a bus sped towards an old guy standing in the road?
How many buses will you set into motion in the process of saving this one guy and how many people will they run over?
A key problem with climate change mitigation is that it doesn't take into account the harm that it causes, even to its own climate goals. Making a bunch of high fertility poor people is a great way to create future ecological problems among other things.
The reason I'm making such a big deal of this is that you've routinely shown an eagerness to generalize from an observation that competition isn't perfect to a variety of anti-competition ideas and narratives:
This, indeed, is why historically privatized services for major infrastucture did not get cheaper, or better service - they usually end up just as terribly run but now your ticket costs 3 times more.
The funamental requirement for market competition to actually work is that companies must be able to fail - completely and utterly.
In industry it creates the "everybody is evil" problem
(bonus fantasy points for a gratuitous story about employers having to rape because the competition does it too. And they all keep diaries, oh dear!)
If you want to privatize a public service the ONLY just way to do it is to form a public company around it and give 100% of the shares of that company divided among the taxpayers.
The One True Way.
It's quite clear that you aren't thinking here and looking for any excuse to blow off the idea of competition. Contrary to your assertion air travel has gotten a lot cheaper from competition despite the existence of more costly cartel/monopoly destinations. Contrary to your assertion, we now have cell phones which we wouldn't have in the absence of competition. And contrary to your initial model, we can feed ourselves with grass-related plants because they competed unintentionally of course to better feed us.
But the same happens to humans all the time, that's the point of the analogy. In industry it creates the "everybody is evil" problem - where anybody who is NOT willing to do evil cannot compete and soon only evildoing companies are left.
Unless, of course, doing evil is disadvantageous. Then they don't do that. Worker salary is a classic example. From the employer's point of view, paying nothing for work would be ideal. But then they don't get any labor and hence, can't compete.
And yes, regulation is a well known way to prevent such things. It also is a well know way to create such situations.
A classic example from the industrial revolution. 19th century, England - standard practise of factory owners is to regularly rape (of the 'fuck me or your fired' variety) female staff as a way of maintaining worker discipline. A great many of those factory owners kept diaries. They all confess to engaging in the practise, all write that they find it abhorent and then proceed to say 'but because others do it, if I do not do it as well then my workers will be less productive, I cannot compete and I'd be out of business". Every one of them blames all the others for being evil and thereby forcing him to be evil as well. That's the human version of it.
Welcome to Victorian era porn. You do realize there is a difference between fiction and reality right?
>My point here is that the "competition is bad" idea is an entirely subjective judgment.
But nobody made that argument. Nobody said 'competition is bad'. Strawman. I merely said that competition is not universally good, it's outcomes are not universally ideal. It's not some utopian panacea. It can be good, and it can be evil, which it is depends entirely on the specific context being evaluated. Sometimes competition is good, sometimes it's bad, but you can't assume the former is always true - or even mostly true.
And you do so by using an example of an monopsony with trees instead of people. We've already known about monopsonies for a long time and how it's great for the controller (and frequently the members) of the monopsony, but not great for anyone else. The "always privatization" side always knows of these examples. The "do evil" example is better though not everyone is going to agree that the activities in question are evil or encouraged by competition.
Another thing here is that in the real world, the "sometimes competition is bad" argument gets used way out of scale with the problems it's supposed to address. For example, Franklin Roosevelt said in defense of the National Industrial Recovery Act which among other constitutional violations, created a variety of industry and labor cartels:
No employer and no group of less than all employers in a single trade could do this alone and continue to live in business competition. But if all employers in each trade now band themselves faithfully in these modern guilds--without exception- and agree to act together and at once, none will be hurt and millions of workers, so long deprived of the right to earn their bread in the sweat of their labor, can raise their heads again. The challenge of this law is whether we can sink selfish interest and present a solid front against a common peril.
and
It is, further, a challenge to administration. We are relaxing some of the safeguards of the anti-trust laws. The public must be protected against the abuses that led to their enactment, and to this end, we are putting in place of old principles of unchecked competition some new Government controls. They must, above all, be impartial and just. Their purpose is to free business, not to shackle it; and no man who stands on the constructive, forward-looking side of his industry has an
The plants are not the supplier in that example - they are just competing for access to a resource: sunlight. They didn't evolve to supply anything - plants on land evolved long before anything existed to eat them. That some plants would, much later, evolve a symbiotic relationship with things that eat them (fruit-plants and birds for example) has no bearing on the analogy.
Ok, demand then. It's not important. Intent is not important either. Finally, I can't help but notice that I'm not a plant. So all this cooperation for plants that would hypothetically result in a carpet is just not advantageous for me. I imagine you are in a similar situation.
Wood evolved more than 200-million years before people did. It's safe to say it's usefulness to us was not a consideration.
And I say that's irrelevant as well. What innovations they evolved back then would be useful for building stuff today.
My point here is that the "competition is bad" idea is an entirely subjective judgment. What is good for plants in terms of anti-competitive behavior would not be good for most of the rest of life. But a general observation is that anti-competitive behavior is good for whoever engages in it and bad for everyone else. Given that things like monopolies, cartels, monopsonies, etc are standard knowledge, the subjectivity of viewpoints on competition is well known.
Food supply may be critical but it is not a natural monopoly and there is no practical reason you can't have two farms.
Another thing which is irrelevant since the earlier poster didn't specify things which were allegedly natural monopolies, but instead made a blanket claim about everything.
Airports are an interesting one - they worked fantastically in rich countries. In poorer ones privatization never had an upswing, the prices got high and stayed high for ever. Because in anything but the richest countries air travel is a natural monopoly and the company never goes bankrupt. Whether something is a natural monopoly is partly detemined by the incomes of potential customers.
No, air travel is not a natural monopoly. What's going on here is control over gates which is a oligopoly or monopoly granted by the owners of the airports. The airport owner could distribute gate access between several providers instead of one, turning a monopoly into a competitive situation.
Depends on whether or not or you like eating.
Eating grass? That's no better than eating wood. All of the grains, maize, etc that end up having substantial nutritional value underwent substantial breeding over thousands of years. They didn't start out ready for farming. And without some sort of evolution in the first place, they wouldn't have been nutritious for humans to eat at all.
Not that it makes much difference to the figurative point that was being made, but if you're going to talk important innovations for humanity, domestication of the major crops includes several grass derived varieties, and their usefulness is very significant.
Which I've already demonstrated is incorrect. It matters a great deal to everything that isn't grass or tree. The point of competition isn't to increase the profit margins of the given industry, it's to benefit everyone else. I find it telling that you haven't figured out who the benefactors of competition are.
As your second observation, domestication is a intentional selection process for more nutritious strains and other desirable characteristics. That means competition among these plants for varieties that better provided for humanity.
1) Competition does not always produce the most efficient outcomes. In fact, it can in the right conditions make the WORST possible outcome the ONLY possible outcome and make it impossible for any innovation to improve that. This is even true in nature with the competition that drives evolution. Richard Dawkins wrote a great article on it. A forest is nothing but a meadow that wastes nearly all it's energy on stilts. One tree taller than the grass - was a compeition winner, when everything copies the winning formula though - everything loses. And no plant can now STOP spening most it's energy on a useless giant trunk because then it gets no sun at all and loses the whole thing.
Competition is not for the supplier. We don't have competition so the sole monopoly provider of everything can sit on its ass and grow grass. As it turns, wood was a much more useful innovation for humanity than grass was.
2) The funamental requirement for market competition to actually work is that companies must be able to fail - completely and utterly. Dead. The problem is - you CANNOT allow critical national infrastructure to fail - because if you do the entire country WILL collapse with it. The entire rest of the economy will collapse as well. No sane government will let the failure of one business destroy their entire economy, plunge them into a depression (which pretty much guarantees not being reelected), starvation and suffering - and probably war.
A company's failure is not the same as failure of its infrastructure. That can always be sold to a more successful competitor (transfer of assets being a usual requirement of a capitalist economic system).
This pattern happens over and over. So what privatisation ACTUALLY ends up being is businesses allowed to rake in massive profits from essential infrastructure while the risks remain firmly with the taxpayers. You have to pay, out of pocket, for their profits when it works - and out of your taxes when it doesn't. The people who fuck up never get punished for their fuckups.
Then it's not privatization, is it?
In that scenario - none of the market theories even *apply* anymore at all. They have varying degrees of reliability in general and heaps of exceptions that libertarians ignore - but the scenario of critical infrastructure privatization is one where a market never will and never can exist and thus they have no application whatsoever.
Food supply is the obvious rebuttal here.
This, indeed, is why historically privatized services for major infrastucture did not get cheaper, or better service - they usually end up just as terribly run but now your ticket costs 3 times more.
Until the company goes bankrupt. Then those airports it had a lock on get sold to its competitors.
No way are we going to get matierials for projects like these into space consistently with regular rockets.
From Earth. A number of other places don't have the delta-v problems that the surface of Earth has.
Eris is 27% more massive than Pluto, should it be a planet as well?
Why not? It's already a "dwarf planet". There's no real problem with having hundreds or thousands of planets except apparently someone is concerned school children will have to memorize them all.
And yet, Libertarians have yet to to make any kind of mark on any country's politics.
Telecom and passenger air privatization. US and Europe did that some time ago.
Ford recognised that if he paid his workers enough to buy his cars, they'd both be better off.
That's ancient Ford propaganda. He instead realized that he needed to pay more in order to end a huge turnover problem he had at his factories.
It takes a remarkably short-sighted view point as well as a nearly rabid 'profit above all else' attitude to see large scale offshoring as anything other than detrimental.
Or merely not live in the US.
You just look for shit to make smartass comments about? Or are you intellectually challenged, in which case I pologize because my mamma taught me to not pick pn retarded people.
No, I'm making a point which should be obvious. Just because something is inevitable doesn't mean it is a good idea to rush it. This again goes back to my observation that we have other priorities than just mitigating global warming. You say you agree, but where is that in your reasoning?
I'm pretty certain that the roller coaster ride has been set in motion, the amount of CO2 we've re-released will be there for a while. So while it behooves us to cut back on the amount we continue to release, as well as engage cleaner technologies, if for no other reason than the coal and oil ain't gonna last forever - the ride's been set in motion.
We're all also going to die. I guess we better kill ourselves off now, the ride's been set in motion after all.
My concerns at the moment, are that the rapid release of methane we've been experiencing lately are a wild card that wasn't mentioned nearly enough in the past several decades. While methane doesn't last as long in the atmosphere, it is much more powerful an energy retention substance then CO2.
What rapid release of methane? They've been measuring methane concentrations in atmosphere. While they are increasing, it's not a rapid release.
But even then, we're going to witness whatever we've put in motion without being able to do much about it.
Incorrect. We can still create a sophisticated, technologically advanced, global civilization capable of handling whatever climate change throws at us. That incidentally is the default, "no action" choice right there.
Guess who they ran those schemes FOR? Corporations.
Because corporations unlike you have something to offer in return.
Do you have anything relevant to say? In the "War is a Racket" example, there was one government and hundreds of businesses. It is foolish to claim that the businesses were the power, when the government had the money in the first place and the power.
So politicians SELL power.
Yes, that's my point. A small group sells power to a large market. Classic cartel market in favor of the politicians.
Only 0.5% compared to what? How many politicians and their lackeys can claim to have earn a fraction of that out of the war?
We can't know, can we? But General Butler was of the opinion that profit was about 25% of the spending, which would indicate that amount as a ceiling for the politicians and their lackeys.
But we can go further than that in the main story. The CIA doesn't even have to SELL power. They have a captive revenue stream of a few tens of billions, they have their own massive stable of CIA-run businesses, and they have a remarkable lack of accountability. To say that corporations are in control of that is nonsense.
DEspite your protesttions to the negative, the measurements hold up.
Do you understand these measurements well enough for that "holding up" to be relevant? From what I recall of your posting in the past, the answer is "no".
Let me point out there is a huge gap between "basic laws of physics" and global warming is severe enough that we should consider it our only priority. I grant that there is global warming and that it is likely that most of it is human caused. That doesn't mean that I agree that we should do something about it. There is a remarkable inability of the climate change crowd to show that doing something about global warming is better than doing nothing, even if your only care is global warming. There is a remarkable counterproductive aspect to global warming mitigation which has nothing to do with basic laws of physics.
You do realize that in the old US military, logistics was a notorious opportunity for rampant corruption and theft. General Smedley Butler, the author you link to, would be intimately aware of that. Well, guess who ran those schemes? Why it was the US government, of course.
As I implied in my previous reply, a common goal of government players is to monetize their power. Working out profitable deals with big businesses in a time of war is a convenient opportunity to do so. It's foolish however to assume that big business is in charge. After all, the government players can always find other big business to make deals. A common aspect of these sorts of schemes is a large variety of business parties and only one or a few government-side players.
Read Chapter 2 of War is A Racket and it outlines this aspect in gory detail. There is page after page of sweet deals made by many, many companies over the course of the First World War. If DuPont, to name the first example, was the driver of wartime profits, then how come they only managed to earn profits equal to 0.5% of the wartime spending (roughly $58 million per year from 1915-1918 versus was spending over $50 billion)?
It's very interesting to note how limited the profits were per company. I'm sure some enterprising businessmen in banking or elsewhere figured out how to dip into this pool multiple times via multiple companies. But the largess was carefully doled out to many different parties rather than concentrated in the hands of the few most powerful businesses.
And you took 15 words to say something wrong. The two posts clearly aren't equivalent. The obvious reason why is the connotation of the first post, that people are behaving in ways that kill themselves off which is a point the second post acknowledged right from the start with "Well it is. But not in the way you are implying it."
See this talk by Former national security advisor, their purpose is to keep the public misinformed and sow distrust so the public can't come together and confront corporate power.
What is up with this obsession over "corporate power"? Government is the power in "corporate power". A large corporate can monetize government power far better than a poor person can.
I think all the ranting about evil corporations is blame deflection from the true culprits.
You exploit them by preying upon their own greed.
That's bullshit.
This is different. From what I've heard so far, these people aren't being conned. They are merely stupid. And even that might be uncharitable.
It's still a con. Fear and stupidity work just as well as greed does in gaining the confidence of the victim. And contrary to the mythology you spin in the beginning, I have yet to meet a con artist who was above using such tactics.
The problem for the denialists is that they have to come up with a proveable hypothesis of how the greenhouse effect fails on a global scale.
And why is that a problem for the "denialists" and not for the people actually making the extraordinary claims without the extraordinary evidence?
When was the last time you heard about terrorists shooting up a hockey game?
All the time. The terrorists get on the ice and brutalize everyone in sight with these funny shaped sticks. I believe the FBI has issued a warning.