Ok. So you allege it's a complete hoax. Then where's the slander lawsuits? From what I've googled, O'Keefe has been sued for illegal videotaping not slander (he lost in California and another case is underway in Maryland). As far as I know, no court has established that his video was materially misleading and he hasn't admitted such.
And that's pretty odd. After all, he destroyed a fairly large non profit and harmed the reputation of a number of people. Several parties have shown they are willing to sue, and frankly, there's a pretty strong case against O'Keefe for slander due to the numerous material misrepresentations that he made both during and after the video was made.
So I think it's telling that they haven't done that. He's being attacked legally with lawsuits that don't require an evaluation of the truthfulness of his video or risk exposure of the internal workings of ACORN.
The relevant government investigations have been by either the heavily democratic Congress prior to the 2010 election or the Obama administration. Both have a vested interest in hiding any illegal actions that ACORN might have done. As I see it, ACORN was a publicly funded partisan group working for Democrat candidates. If that isn't illegal, it should be.
And ACORN's bankruptcy came at a convenient time, namely, before it could become an election year issue. As I see it, it ran into some trouble (whether unfairly or not) and closed shop as fast as an overseas shell corporation. One doesn't have to wholeheartedly embrace Republican ideology to smell the fishiness of that situation.
O'Keefe engaged in highly deceptive behavior in a number of ways, apparently, including presenting the video in a false light. But "fake"? The fundamental accusation of the video, that ACORN low level officials were willing to expedite minor crimes, still appears correct though I doubt it would hold up in a court of law due to O'Keefe's shenanigans.
I think ACORN's quick end in bankruptcy is an indication of how corrupt and unstable the organization was.
The same holds for any other property. There are certain circumstances under which a police officer can legally search your property, not necessarily requiring a warrant.
I think a good car analogy here is that the police suspect someone of having stolen a car. They can't compel that person to provide the keys to that car (and hence, incriminate themselves in the process) due to the Fifth Amendment. But if the police could demonstrate that there was a reasonable suspicion that the person had the keys at one time, they could compel the person to disclose what became of them.
Blaming shipping jobs and income overseas on "environmentalism" is just a bag of silly.
I'd rather call that "accurate". It's not the only factor driving industry overseas (cheap labor is a second), but it is a huge one.
All I can say is that if environmentalism had to follow the same sort of rigorous engineering that nuclear power has to follow, it would look radically different. The harm done by environmental policies wouldn't be vapidly dismissed as a "bag of silly", for example.
Well, that might be true, but; How many of the other accidents listed were near misses?
[...]
If you for instance look at the Forsmark incident
And depending on whose opinion you take. I notice that they still had two remaining generators even if those shared the fault of the two that went down, and could tap into a "second, separate network".
I see central planning as a natural phenomenon, like fire or gravity.
Natural phenomena is not natural law. Sure, we might go through phases where we have an excess of central planning, such as today. As I see it, the solution is to contest and peel away some of that central planning power not to "embrace" it and make the problem worse. There are forces towards central planning and there are forces away from central planning. I am a force away from central planning.
Yep, fires, explosions, meltdowns, partial meltdowns, critical electrical errors. A rather short list, repeated over and over again. Sure seems like you learn each time. How to cause the same effect in partially new way every time, that is.
This demonstrates the fundamental difference between nuclear engineering and environmentalism. The mistakes that are made in nuclear power can't be covered up or glossed over like they can in environmentalism. You end up with that "rather short list". And they are fixed. We've only had one meltdown in the thirty year period since Chernobyl and this was due to overwhelming natural disaster rather than the human errors common to the three previous meltdowns (of civilian reactors used for power generation).
The failures of environmentalism are not so evident. What of the massive transfer of industry to the developing world? I've heard pathetic excuses (such as "We didn't want that anyway" or it's the "greed" of rich people), but no one cares to admit that excessive environmental policy crippled the developed world economically.
Or for an example that comes right out of the Fukushima disaster, why oppose vigorously the development of new nuclear plants or the recycling and safe storage of used nuclear fuel? The earthquake happened around the time that the Fukushima reactors were originally scheduled to be decommissioned. They received a new lease on life because safer replacement plants were blocked in the 1995-2005 period.
Safety was compromised for environmentalist excuses.
And this leads to the worst sort of environmentalism failure, when environmentalist policy actually makes the problems it tries to fix worse. For example, recycling of paper and most plastics or the banning of incandescent light bulbs. Or policies that increase poverty (such as carbon dioxide emission reduction) and the substantial pollution increase that comes with poverty in exchange for weak environmental benefit.
No such reversal occurred. My very first argument against central planning was the moral hazard it created. Namely, the disincentive to plan at the private level. I wish you'd spend more time understanding my arguments and less time mischaracterizing them.
The scenario of airlines handling security is scary. Government regulation makes it more convenient for the travelers actually.
The solution then is to have non-scary, government regulated security handled by the airlines. Not the TSA power grab. That's scary in ways that should matter more to us (namely, growing TSA power is a more credible threat to our lives and freedoms than the vague threat of terrorism).
No, in pure business terms, the threat of hijacking and the loss of 1-2 airplanes and slight dip in customers is not worth the excess costs of keeping that 1-2 hijackings from happening out of millions of flights per year. This is why doing everything via private sector will fail.
Ok, you'll have to explain that logic. Why does that reasoning show that private sector will fail? I'm pretty sure the TSA does that reasoning as well. But they don't have to care, if they make flying so unpleasant that it hurts business.
Geological records show that a Tsunami about that size hits the coast of Japan every 300 years. The reactor was built to last 60 years. Just by random chance there was a 20% probability of being hit by a tsunami. But tsunamis don't happen randomly, they roughly happen at a known frequency, and northwest Japan was "due". So they failed to account for something that had a better than even chance of happening over the life of the reactor. This is why the greenies roll their eyes when the nukies say "Trust us, we know what we're doing!"
The difference is that nukies learn from their mistakes.
Jaczko did. Which was the point of the original poster's clarification.
It doesn't matter what other things were done right, because in the real world it still had a meltdown.
Of course it matters. Do you think less radiation would be released, if say the melted core had stayed critical for days after the tsunami, generating heat a considerable fraction of that of a working reactor? (Just scramming the reactor dropped heat production by a factor of ten. And keeping the reactor cool for about nine hours, dropped heat production significantly more.) Or while the core continued to boil sea water and release measurable radiation into the air today? Treating a core meltdown as the end state ignores that it could have been much worse.
Obviously, nobody likes it when a nuclear plant suffers a core meltdown. But it is worth noting here that the reactors in question were designed to fail in the way that they did rather than even more dangerous ways.
And as I've stated before, I don't see why a core meltdown is so bad that it should be avoided at all cost. It wasn't in the case of Fukushima. There's apparently little exposure of the public to radiation. And I consider most of the current clean up costs to be due to the placating of public hysteria and not actually required for public safety.
And at worst, you can always use the location for strictly non-residential use, such as industry, including more nuclear reactors.
How about we emphasize that it hurts productive industries and threatens the stability of the economy
There's no evidence for this. As to the claim that HFT serves no purpose, the people apparently making lots of money via HFT would demonstrate otherwise.
Has anyone shown definitively that any burps that occured in HFT transactions were caused by the algorithmic automatic trading or that they occurred because of human intervention?
Oh, ok. That is a good point.
To answer your question, I haven't seen any such evidence. However, there are a number of quotes from market professionals indicating that the market reaction to the twitter message was very fast. They might be lying - if one did fall for the message, it would be extremely embarrassing and damaging to your business if it became known that you lost a portion of your customers' investment portfolios to a fake news twitter.
But showing the involvement of HFT would require an analysis of the first few seconds of the stock markets after the twitter hoax message was released. I don't see any evidence that has been done yet. A reaction in say less than 100 milliseconds probably would indicate HFT scale trading (much of that time would be taken up by computer analysis and decision making acting on the twitter message).
The drop apparently lasted around three minutes, so I have to say that presently I don't see evidence for HFT involvement, but the evidence might support human-directed computer trading since several DJIA components were sold simultaneously over short times and the drop on the DJIA was a bit over half of what would have triggered a temporary stop of computer trading on the market (being able to reverse these trades would be an essential part of an automated strategy for reacting to news stories).
Again, what does that have to do with HFT? HFT is not a huge label covering every way that you can get screwed on the stock market. It's trades that happen on a very short time scale. The gimmicks you mention can be done with human traders and don't require HFT.
more generally, you have equally failed to demonstrate that planning is automatically worse than not planning (once again, a list of reasons why plans may fail is no guarantee of certainty.)
Keep in mind that "no planning" here means more planning at the private level. There may be some things like national defense which are inappropriate at the private level. But energy policy isn't one of those things. The knowledge and primary decision makers are mostly in the private world.
No. The Treaty of Versailles was the plan. Instead, they chose not to react to the rise of Nazi militarism.
You are simply cherry-picking what you call a plan in order to fit your dogma.
You gave the example. I merely corrected your error. Keep in mind that at the end of the First World War, the victors were worried among other things that Germany would rise again. The Treaty of Versailles contained a variety of terms to keep that from happening. Germany's military was severely constrained. They had to pay substantial war tribute or "reparations". They had substantial territorial reductions and restrictions. The obvious plan was keep Germany weak so that it couldn't be a military threat again.
And yet this very plan to keep Germany from rising againcontributed greatly to the rise of the Nazis!
Germany started violating the treaty from the start and the terms of the treaty were so abusive that there was no serious support for the treaty even in France and the UK, the countries that had forced the treaty in the first place. Several important countries refused to sign the treaty, including China, the US, and the USSR. And of course, the treaty completely failed in 20 years.
Further, we see that the French had planned for the failure of the Treaty of Versailles with the construction of the Maginot line. One cannot understand the French appeasement policy fully without considering their irrational confidence in the invincibility of those defenses.
If he gains an understanding of country level planning, that will lead him to the rational conclusion, which as I said is to exploit central planning.
And I'm sure, if he should get an understanding of influenza pandemics, that would allow him to exploit those as well. I wonder why your first impulse is to exploit a bad situation rather than attempt to avoid it? Inevitability doesn't mean that we can't delay it productively.
The rest of your post is just crap.
Sticks and stones my friend.
I was being descriptive. I suppose I could have been a bit more diplomatic. I don't see the point of it though.
Obviously, I get central planning to work for me by being the guy in charge of the central planning.
Sure, and I'm saying most of the supposedly rational/. crowd isn't coming up with the same smart solution as you have. It's funny.
Well, who gets a different "smart" solution? I think most central planning advocates do so with the erroneous assumption that their pet projects would then be supported. But they would just be more pawns without much to offer the central planners.
Is this a trick question? He can start by understanding the limits of country-level planning.
If you let people be free individuals and make decisions for himself, they will eventually make bad decisions and vote in central planners.
The rest of your post is just crap. We should make bad decisions now because bad decisions will happen eventually?
Rather than going "no government central planning, never ever" (or the opposite extreme "I love Big Brother"), you're better off asking "so how do I get central planning to work for me"
Obviously, I get central planning to work for me by being the guy in charge of the central planning.
Your rational self sees the benefit of thinking ahead, but your ideological self is so wedded to the idea that planning is anathema that you would veto any attempt to act on the results of thinking ahead. This combination amounts to intentional helplessness.
Nonsense. I mentioned two reasons: conflict of interest and moral hazard. I forgot also the third great problem of country-wide planning - incompetence and ignorance. The planners at that level don't know enough about their societies to make such plans and historically, they aren't terribly good at such things either.
In the 1930s, Britain chose not to plan for the rise of Nazi militarism, and that did not work out so well.
No. The Treaty of Versailles was the plan. Instead, they chose not to react to the rise of Nazi militarism.
I am not in favor of attempting to plan for its own sake or because I expect it to be successful, but because I think the alternative is certain to end badly. I also think it is the more likely outcome.
And I think you're just in error here. You haven't even demonstrated that having a plan at the country level is better than not having one.
There is this idea among some tea party idiots that you can cut half the economy and still have a healthy economy. That is like reasoning that since you do all your thinking with your head (well, non-tea party members do) you can cut of that useless gut bit at the bottom and be fine.
Drop the straw man and step away from the keyboard!
In what world of delusion does the developed world have a healthy economy? Have you forgotten what happened to Japan, Greece, or California? Have you forgotten just how much industry has fled to the rest of the world? Of course, you have.
Let's suppose that the developed world governments dump all this money into renewable energy R&D and China doesn't pay a cent. Guess what happens. All that industry still moves to China and elsewhere in the developing world. This is the fundamentally broken reality of the developed world. It's not going to be the primary recipient of publicly funded R&D.
The choice isn't between high paying and low paying. The choice is between low paying and non paying. If the west continues as it is doing now, soon we can't even afford to buy chinese made anymore.
So how does taking money away from the productive members of western civilization and giving most the benefits of that money to China and elsewhere, help western civilization?
That is what government grants/loans are supposed to be for. People bitch and moan because of a lot of the companies involved fail but that's the point. Invest in long term development of technologies that are either unprofitable or risky, so than 10 or 20 years down the line your country has them and isn't left behind because investors were too short sighted.
Well, given how short sighted government has been with these grants and loans, I think that will happen anyway. In fact, I think such economic adventurism encourages the short-sighted thinking that you are complaining of. I don't have to think about renewable energy because a number of governments are throwing tens of billions around. Some of it will stick. Surely.
Nor is it worth it for me to try to compete with the businesses that picked up all this easy money. Either I'm connected enough to rake it in (and I don't even have to produce a product!), or I'm not and I shouldn't bother.
I think this sort of naive, "let's throw money at the problem" thinking is a big contributor to the ongoing decline of Western civilization. All it does is encourage parasitism and even more short term thinking.
That's true, but it is not an argument against planning.
Sure. It's just an argument against having anyone, such as a government, in charge of the planning.
The assumption that planning is better than no planning at the country-level is unjustified. Sure, thinking ahead can have benefits. It works for you at a personal level, because you are both the planner and the primary recipient of the benefits of the planning. When that's no longer the case, the resulting conflict of interest and its exploitation can destroy any benefits from planning.
The other big problem with country-wide planning is that the private sector loses considerable incentive to plan. It's a variant of moral hazard.
If you can nakedly pursue short-sighted interests and have the government do all the long term thinking, including bailing you out when you break things too much or paying for your R&D, then why think past the next quarter? Your scheme creates the very problem that you complain about.
It has been suggested that democracy is not viable in the long term because it enables selfish behavior on too broad a base to be sustainable. I hope this is wrong, but I fear there's a grain of truth to it.
Then stop being part of the problem. Sure, everyone has their own interests and ideas of how things should be working. Democracy is just a good way to implement a decision making process fairly. It doesn't magically make bad decisions good.
It's also worth remembering that the "ancient grave" of water on the Moon is far more use to us in the near future than it would be to a future generation. After all, if they need water on the Moon, they would just be able to ship it to the Moon (due to all that fancy future tech and knowledge they'll have) while we don't have that luxury.
And there is, of course, time value where things are worth more today than they are in some distant future.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok. So you allege it's a complete hoax. Then where's the slander lawsuits? From what I've googled, O'Keefe has been sued for illegal videotaping not slander (he lost in California and another case is underway in Maryland). As far as I know, no court has established that his video was materially misleading and he hasn't admitted such.
And that's pretty odd. After all, he destroyed a fairly large non profit and harmed the reputation of a number of people. Several parties have shown they are willing to sue, and frankly, there's a pretty strong case against O'Keefe for slander due to the numerous material misrepresentations that he made both during and after the video was made.
So I think it's telling that they haven't done that. He's being attacked legally with lawsuits that don't require an evaluation of the truthfulness of his video or risk exposure of the internal workings of ACORN.
The relevant government investigations have been by either the heavily democratic Congress prior to the 2010 election or the Obama administration. Both have a vested interest in hiding any illegal actions that ACORN might have done. As I see it, ACORN was a publicly funded partisan group working for Democrat candidates. If that isn't illegal, it should be.
And ACORN's bankruptcy came at a convenient time, namely, before it could become an election year issue. As I see it, it ran into some trouble (whether unfairly or not) and closed shop as fast as an overseas shell corporation. One doesn't have to wholeheartedly embrace Republican ideology to smell the fishiness of that situation.
I keep thinking about James O'Keefe's fake video
O'Keefe engaged in highly deceptive behavior in a number of ways, apparently, including presenting the video in a false light. But "fake"? The fundamental accusation of the video, that ACORN low level officials were willing to expedite minor crimes, still appears correct though I doubt it would hold up in a court of law due to O'Keefe's shenanigans.
I think ACORN's quick end in bankruptcy is an indication of how corrupt and unstable the organization was.
The same holds for any other property. There are certain circumstances under which a police officer can legally search your property, not necessarily requiring a warrant.
I think a good car analogy here is that the police suspect someone of having stolen a car. They can't compel that person to provide the keys to that car (and hence, incriminate themselves in the process) due to the Fifth Amendment. But if the police could demonstrate that there was a reasonable suspicion that the person had the keys at one time, they could compel the person to disclose what became of them.
Blaming shipping jobs and income overseas on "environmentalism" is just a bag of silly.
I'd rather call that "accurate". It's not the only factor driving industry overseas (cheap labor is a second), but it is a huge one.
All I can say is that if environmentalism had to follow the same sort of rigorous engineering that nuclear power has to follow, it would look radically different. The harm done by environmental policies wouldn't be vapidly dismissed as a "bag of silly", for example.
Well, that might be true, but; How many of the other accidents listed were near misses?
[...]
If you for instance look at the Forsmark incident
And depending on whose opinion you take. I notice that they still had two remaining generators even if those shared the fault of the two that went down, and could tap into a "second, separate network".
That doesn't qualify to me as a "near miss".
I see central planning as a natural phenomenon, like fire or gravity.
Natural phenomena is not natural law. Sure, we might go through phases where we have an excess of central planning, such as today. As I see it, the solution is to contest and peel away some of that central planning power not to "embrace" it and make the problem worse. There are forces towards central planning and there are forces away from central planning. I am a force away from central planning.
Yep, fires, explosions, meltdowns, partial meltdowns, critical electrical errors. A rather short list, repeated over and over again. Sure seems like you learn each time. How to cause the same effect in partially new way every time, that is.
This demonstrates the fundamental difference between nuclear engineering and environmentalism. The mistakes that are made in nuclear power can't be covered up or glossed over like they can in environmentalism. You end up with that "rather short list". And they are fixed. We've only had one meltdown in the thirty year period since Chernobyl and this was due to overwhelming natural disaster rather than the human errors common to the three previous meltdowns (of civilian reactors used for power generation).
The failures of environmentalism are not so evident. What of the massive transfer of industry to the developing world? I've heard pathetic excuses (such as "We didn't want that anyway" or it's the "greed" of rich people), but no one cares to admit that excessive environmental policy crippled the developed world economically.
Or for an example that comes right out of the Fukushima disaster, why oppose vigorously the development of new nuclear plants or the recycling and safe storage of used nuclear fuel? The earthquake happened around the time that the Fukushima reactors were originally scheduled to be decommissioned. They received a new lease on life because safer replacement plants were blocked in the 1995-2005 period.
Safety was compromised for environmentalist excuses.
And this leads to the worst sort of environmentalism failure, when environmentalist policy actually makes the problems it tries to fix worse. For example, recycling of paper and most plastics or the banning of incandescent light bulbs. Or policies that increase poverty (such as carbon dioxide emission reduction) and the substantial pollution increase that comes with poverty in exchange for weak environmental benefit.
This sudden reversal on planning
No such reversal occurred. My very first argument against central planning was the moral hazard it created. Namely, the disincentive to plan at the private level. I wish you'd spend more time understanding my arguments and less time mischaracterizing them.
The scenario of airlines handling security is scary. Government regulation makes it more convenient for the travelers actually.
The solution then is to have non-scary, government regulated security handled by the airlines. Not the TSA power grab. That's scary in ways that should matter more to us (namely, growing TSA power is a more credible threat to our lives and freedoms than the vague threat of terrorism).
On 1), prior to 9/11, passengers would have been more cooperative as well.
And 3) it was legal to bring on the airplane the sort of weapons (eg, boxcutter knives) which the 9/11 hijackers used.
No, in pure business terms, the threat of hijacking and the loss of 1-2 airplanes and slight dip in customers is not worth the excess costs of keeping that 1-2 hijackings from happening out of millions of flights per year. This is why doing everything via private sector will fail.
Ok, you'll have to explain that logic. Why does that reasoning show that private sector will fail? I'm pretty sure the TSA does that reasoning as well. But they don't have to care, if they make flying so unpleasant that it hurts business.
Geological records show that a Tsunami about that size hits the coast of Japan every 300 years. The reactor was built to last 60 years. Just by random chance there was a 20% probability of being hit by a tsunami. But tsunamis don't happen randomly, they roughly happen at a known frequency, and northwest Japan was "due". So they failed to account for something that had a better than even chance of happening over the life of the reactor. This is why the greenies roll their eyes when the nukies say "Trust us, we know what we're doing!"
The difference is that nukies learn from their mistakes.
Has anyone said otherwise?
Jaczko did. Which was the point of the original poster's clarification.
It doesn't matter what other things were done right, because in the real world it still had a meltdown.
Of course it matters. Do you think less radiation would be released, if say the melted core had stayed critical for days after the tsunami, generating heat a considerable fraction of that of a working reactor? (Just scramming the reactor dropped heat production by a factor of ten. And keeping the reactor cool for about nine hours, dropped heat production significantly more.) Or while the core continued to boil sea water and release measurable radiation into the air today? Treating a core meltdown as the end state ignores that it could have been much worse.
Obviously, nobody likes it when a nuclear plant suffers a core meltdown. But it is worth noting here that the reactors in question were designed to fail in the way that they did rather than even more dangerous ways.
And as I've stated before, I don't see why a core meltdown is so bad that it should be avoided at all cost. It wasn't in the case of Fukushima. There's apparently little exposure of the public to radiation. And I consider most of the current clean up costs to be due to the placating of public hysteria and not actually required for public safety.
And at worst, you can always use the location for strictly non-residential use, such as industry, including more nuclear reactors.
How about we emphasize that it hurts productive industries and threatens the stability of the economy
There's no evidence for this. As to the claim that HFT serves no purpose, the people apparently making lots of money via HFT would demonstrate otherwise.
Has anyone shown definitively that any burps that occured in HFT transactions were caused by the algorithmic automatic trading or that they occurred because of human intervention?
Oh, ok. That is a good point.
To answer your question, I haven't seen any such evidence. However, there are a number of quotes from market professionals indicating that the market reaction to the twitter message was very fast. They might be lying - if one did fall for the message, it would be extremely embarrassing and damaging to your business if it became known that you lost a portion of your customers' investment portfolios to a fake news twitter.
But showing the involvement of HFT would require an analysis of the first few seconds of the stock markets after the twitter hoax message was released. I don't see any evidence that has been done yet. A reaction in say less than 100 milliseconds probably would indicate HFT scale trading (much of that time would be taken up by computer analysis and decision making acting on the twitter message).
The drop apparently lasted around three minutes, so I have to say that presently I don't see evidence for HFT involvement, but the evidence might support human-directed computer trading since several DJIA components were sold simultaneously over short times and the drop on the DJIA was a bit over half of what would have triggered a temporary stop of computer trading on the market (being able to reverse these trades would be an essential part of an automated strategy for reacting to news stories).
Again, what does that have to do with HFT? HFT is not a huge label covering every way that you can get screwed on the stock market. It's trades that happen on a very short time scale. The gimmicks you mention can be done with human traders and don't require HFT.
more generally, you have equally failed to demonstrate that planning is automatically worse than not planning (once again, a list of reasons why plans may fail is no guarantee of certainty.)
Keep in mind that "no planning" here means more planning at the private level. There may be some things like national defense which are inappropriate at the private level. But energy policy isn't one of those things. The knowledge and primary decision makers are mostly in the private world.
No. The Treaty of Versailles was the plan. Instead, they chose not to react to the rise of Nazi militarism.
You are simply cherry-picking what you call a plan in order to fit your dogma.
You gave the example. I merely corrected your error. Keep in mind that at the end of the First World War, the victors were worried among other things that Germany would rise again. The Treaty of Versailles contained a variety of terms to keep that from happening. Germany's military was severely constrained. They had to pay substantial war tribute or "reparations". They had substantial territorial reductions and restrictions. The obvious plan was keep Germany weak so that it couldn't be a military threat again.
And yet this very plan to keep Germany from rising againcontributed greatly to the rise of the Nazis!
Germany started violating the treaty from the start and the terms of the treaty were so abusive that there was no serious support for the treaty even in France and the UK, the countries that had forced the treaty in the first place. Several important countries refused to sign the treaty, including China, the US, and the USSR. And of course, the treaty completely failed in 20 years.
Further, we see that the French had planned for the failure of the Treaty of Versailles with the construction of the Maginot line. One cannot understand the French appeasement policy fully without considering their irrational confidence in the invincibility of those defenses.
If he gains an understanding of country level planning, that will lead him to the rational conclusion, which as I said is to exploit central planning.
And I'm sure, if he should get an understanding of influenza pandemics, that would allow him to exploit those as well. I wonder why your first impulse is to exploit a bad situation rather than attempt to avoid it? Inevitability doesn't mean that we can't delay it productively.
The rest of your post is just crap.
Sticks and stones my friend.
I was being descriptive. I suppose I could have been a bit more diplomatic. I don't see the point of it though.
Obviously, I get central planning to work for me by being the guy in charge of the central planning.
Sure, and I'm saying most of the supposedly rational /. crowd isn't coming up with the same smart solution as you have. It's funny.
Well, who gets a different "smart" solution? I think most central planning advocates do so with the erroneous assumption that their pet projects would then be supported. But they would just be more pawns without much to offer the central planners.
How will he do that?
Is this a trick question? He can start by understanding the limits of country-level planning.
If you let people be free individuals and make decisions for himself, they will eventually make bad decisions and vote in central planners.
The rest of your post is just crap. We should make bad decisions now because bad decisions will happen eventually?
Rather than going "no government central planning, never ever" (or the opposite extreme "I love Big Brother"), you're better off asking "so how do I get central planning to work for me"
Obviously, I get central planning to work for me by being the guy in charge of the central planning.
Your rational self sees the benefit of thinking ahead, but your ideological self is so wedded to the idea that planning is anathema that you would veto any attempt to act on the results of thinking ahead. This combination amounts to intentional helplessness.
Nonsense. I mentioned two reasons: conflict of interest and moral hazard. I forgot also the third great problem of country-wide planning - incompetence and ignorance. The planners at that level don't know enough about their societies to make such plans and historically, they aren't terribly good at such things either.
In the 1930s, Britain chose not to plan for the rise of Nazi militarism, and that did not work out so well.
No. The Treaty of Versailles was the plan. Instead, they chose not to react to the rise of Nazi militarism.
I am not in favor of attempting to plan for its own sake or because I expect it to be successful, but because I think the alternative is certain to end badly. I also think it is the more likely outcome.
And I think you're just in error here. You haven't even demonstrated that having a plan at the country level is better than not having one.
There is this idea among some tea party idiots that you can cut half the economy and still have a healthy economy. That is like reasoning that since you do all your thinking with your head (well, non-tea party members do) you can cut of that useless gut bit at the bottom and be fine.
Drop the straw man and step away from the keyboard!
In what world of delusion does the developed world have a healthy economy? Have you forgotten what happened to Japan, Greece, or California? Have you forgotten just how much industry has fled to the rest of the world? Of course, you have.
Let's suppose that the developed world governments dump all this money into renewable energy R&D and China doesn't pay a cent. Guess what happens. All that industry still moves to China and elsewhere in the developing world. This is the fundamentally broken reality of the developed world. It's not going to be the primary recipient of publicly funded R&D.
The choice isn't between high paying and low paying. The choice is between low paying and non paying. If the west continues as it is doing now, soon we can't even afford to buy chinese made anymore.
So how does taking money away from the productive members of western civilization and giving most the benefits of that money to China and elsewhere, help western civilization?
That is what government grants/loans are supposed to be for. People bitch and moan because of a lot of the companies involved fail but that's the point. Invest in long term development of technologies that are either unprofitable or risky, so than 10 or 20 years down the line your country has them and isn't left behind because investors were too short sighted.
Well, given how short sighted government has been with these grants and loans, I think that will happen anyway. In fact, I think such economic adventurism encourages the short-sighted thinking that you are complaining of. I don't have to think about renewable energy because a number of governments are throwing tens of billions around. Some of it will stick. Surely.
Nor is it worth it for me to try to compete with the businesses that picked up all this easy money. Either I'm connected enough to rake it in (and I don't even have to produce a product!), or I'm not and I shouldn't bother.
I think this sort of naive, "let's throw money at the problem" thinking is a big contributor to the ongoing decline of Western civilization. All it does is encourage parasitism and even more short term thinking.
That's true, but it is not an argument against planning.
Sure. It's just an argument against having anyone, such as a government, in charge of the planning.
The assumption that planning is better than no planning at the country-level is unjustified. Sure, thinking ahead can have benefits. It works for you at a personal level, because you are both the planner and the primary recipient of the benefits of the planning. When that's no longer the case, the resulting conflict of interest and its exploitation can destroy any benefits from planning.
The other big problem with country-wide planning is that the private sector loses considerable incentive to plan. It's a variant of moral hazard.
If you can nakedly pursue short-sighted interests and have the government do all the long term thinking, including bailing you out when you break things too much or paying for your R&D, then why think past the next quarter? Your scheme creates the very problem that you complain about.
It has been suggested that democracy is not viable in the long term because it enables selfish behavior on too broad a base to be sustainable. I hope this is wrong, but I fear there's a grain of truth to it.
Then stop being part of the problem. Sure, everyone has their own interests and ideas of how things should be working. Democracy is just a good way to implement a decision making process fairly. It doesn't magically make bad decisions good.
It's also worth remembering that the "ancient grave" of water on the Moon is far more use to us in the near future than it would be to a future generation. After all, if they need water on the Moon, they would just be able to ship it to the Moon (due to all that fancy future tech and knowledge they'll have) while we don't have that luxury.
And there is, of course, time value where things are worth more today than they are in some distant future.
The problem is that a lot of people who label themselves as pro-Constitution are actually nothing of the sort.
I thought the problem here was overreaching state secrecy. How are faux constitutionalists forcing that outcome?