Who is going to waste that power on winning a bet?
That depends how much money is riding on that bet. If you have a bet that pays a hundred billion dollars to you if Ron Paul wins the presidential election, then you have a little bit of incentive to throw things Ron Paul's way.
That is a good point. The name, "Romulans" is an obvious pointer towards one of the mythological founders of Rome and they use Roman titles frequently (such as "centurion" and "praetor").
But the Roman empire was not at all isolationist (except when it came to repelling "barbarians" at the frontiers). I think one needs to look to communist China for what inspired that choice.
I see from Wikipedia that while the Romulans preceded the Klingons, both races were introduced in the first season (the Klingons here). I think the creators of Star Trek had all along looked to modern day analogies for creating the long standing conflicts of the Star Trek universe.
The consistency means there inherently is no contest. The subjective part of perception is what can be and oh-so-frequently is contested.
That's a mathematician's answer: technically correct, but completely impractical
Nobody contests the parts which aren't contested (duh, tautology). It's the parts that get contested that matter.
Is the glass half full, or half empty? The question cares not for the glass or water itself, but how one perceives that glass and water.
I disagree on two points. First, reality is not a tautology. It just happens to be no matter what you try to perceive or whether you agree or not. In other words, it is significant rather than merely a tautology that there exists a part which can't be contested.
Second, there's almost no consequence to describing a glass as half full or empty nor does these beliefs blind you to other viewpoints. It is trivial to switch between viewpoints. If you say a glass is half full then pessimistic me would know that it is half empty.
There is considerable consequence to having a belief like those we've been discussing and acting upon that belief, including considerable unintended consequences. This is how reality matters. It is as if I acted on my belief that the glass was half empty and that in turn caused a consequence contrary to my belief (an unintended consequence). And as you've stated some of those people with those beliefs have a bit of trouble understanding other people with different beliefs.
Which is what many socialist do: they want to do something about the unintended consequences when capitalist beliefs are implemented in reality. You may not think it's worth it and they created even worse unintended consequence, but they probably think otherwise. Again, story contest.
At that point, we ought to look at what really happened rather than just have a "story contest". Too often I see either blame deflection (the evil rich people thwarting socialists once again)
Ok. Now let's remember the first post I replied to you: you engaging in your own battle of narratives, a spinning of yarns, over who's to blame for creating the welfare state. He says it's Bismark and conservatives. You say it's socialist pressuring Bismark to act.
I just want to point out that we both agreed to both stories, but the other poster interpreted those stories in a way that was invalid. We don't always act for our own purposes. Sometimes we're spurred to by outside forces, such as Bismarck and the "conservatives". Note we both agreed that Bismarck acted because of pressure from socialists and we both agree that creation of welfare did to an extent reduce the socialist "threat" to Bismarck. But it doesn't follow that public welfare is a construction of conservative forces - especially when as I observe, its universal presence in socialist governments.
I see the original poster's story as a somewhat deft case of blame deflection. The welfare state didn't work like he wanted it to, so when the excuse came around that big, bad Bismarck did it, he readily latched on. Bismarck broke the modern socialist state with welfare, not the socialist belief system. I merely pointed out that once again, socialists of the time got some of what they wanted.
Actually, historically, US benefits greatly from cheap labor, from outside or inside. It was immigrants willing to work for cheap who propelled 19th century US from backwater ex-colony to industrial superpower (especially the Chinese, whose wages were kept down thanks to discriminatory laws from government). It's cheap outsourced labor and H1B visas which let American-owned corporations survive in today's economy.
Where's the competitive labor in the US? It should be there, but isn't. There's too much focus on ensuring that workers get a particular level of wages or benefits and not enough attention on doing what it takes to make t
I believe the Klingons and Romulans were crudely based on the USSR and Communistic China respectively. Keep in mind that China in the 60s was pretty much as isolated from the West as North Korea is now, which is a better match for the secretive and xenophobic Romulans than the Soviet Russians who tended to have schemes brewing everywhere and had a far more interventionist approach (which fits the Klingons much better).
If reality is consistency in perception, then reality is still a story contest: contest between consistent stories perhaps, but stories nevertheless.
The consistency means there inherently is no contest. The subjective part of perception is what can be and oh-so-frequently is contested. My view is that to some degree we do have to make decisions and reason based on the subjective parts, particularly, what we take as beliefs. And the variety of beliefs that can fall under the label of "socialism" are valid to consider.
But at some point you need to consider what happens when those beliefs are implemented in reality. A common problem here is unintended consequences, where the systems which you try to manage don't work as you expect, leading to problems which conflict with your beliefs.
In my quote of your original post, I had three complaints. The first was the trivialization of a counterintuitive result. Despite your insistence otherwise, usually when we pay a higher price for something, we end up spending more. When that doesn't hold (as in the case of Ford's "five dollar day"), there's something odd going on. It's my opinion that we should pay attention to such things for there are lessons to be learned.
For the second thing, once again just because you insist on something, even consistently, doesn't mean much. Especially when the insisting in question could be checked against an actual historical record and found wanting.
Third, you alluded to a popular narrative. I assume some variation of the "if you work hard, you can achieve your dreams". When I referred to "blowback", I meant that there was a good chance that the myth above was probably peddled by various socialists, especially in defense of labor unions.
Sure, I don't know enough of the era to say who said what. But socialists have always been pretty good story tellers and the "American dream" is a great story. So I think there's a good chance that the story "of what made America great" which you seem to think is getting in the way, may be in large part a product of some socialist predecessor. That's something to think about there.
My view is that even if there is some battle of narratives going on here, at some point we should be looking for actual evidence on what worked not just deciding based on who spun the best yarn.
And historically, the US was doing great until its labor got exposed to competition from the cheaper parts of the world back in the 70s. That includes periods of relatively unfettered capitalism (the Gilded Age) and periods of regulated capitalism/socialism-lite (particularly after about 1932).
What I think happened was that life suddenly got hard and a bunch of people said "We will stick to the script. We won't change." But things didn't work out. So they had to find someone to blame, such as the people, who are currently called the "one percent", who could adapt and profit from the changes in global labor markets.
My view is that the US has been paying considerably for not adapting to the changes of the past few decades. And attitudes like "perception is reality" merely make that sort of transition more painful than it has to be. As I see it, US labor hasn't collectively grown more valuable over the past few decades, instead it has grown less valuable due to all the regulatory cruft that has built up, even when some of those regulations were attempts to the contrary (such as college loan subsidies, for example).
I think there's been a huge case of unintended consequences here that will result in a long term decline in US fortunes. And I think it happened because people tried to preserve a relatively nice period of the US's recent history (basically the early 60s economically) without providing a means for doing so.
... this. It is your (and many other's, as I said it's the popular narrative) claims about socialism that changes based on beliefs and observers (i.e a socialist wouldn't perceive socialism as a failure, no matter how much evidence is given)
Inability to perceive other viewpoints is a bug not a feature.
I remain a bit puzzled why patents are blamed in the paper for the system not working instead of the approval processes. For new drugs, it can take tens to hundreds of millions of dollars per potential use of a potential drug in order to pass government hurdles in the developed world. And there's a lot of risk that the drug won't work as expected. That's a lot of disincentive to research new pharmaceuticals or other medical technology.
Anyways, it's a relatively moot point as USPS tends to do a better job in terms of cost control than UPS and FedEx anyways. USPS is just required to do something that aren't profitable.
So no, it doesn't do a better job of cost control.
So until they can come up with a solution that completely solves the problem, we don't have to think about working toward solving the problem?
How about a solution that actually tries to solve the problem to some degree? No solution is going to be perfect, but some are far less perfect than others. For example, it remains that no one has shown that it is better to do these very inadequate attempts at mitigation rather than just doing nothing at all for a few decades.
There's an alternate explanation, namely, that most of your cited polls in question are deeply flawed in some way and not accurately reflecting the actual beliefs of the people they're polling. For example, if almost half of all US residents don't believe in evolution, then where are they? I don't exactly poll everyone I know on such issues, but if there really were that many people out there with those opinions, I'd have run into more of them than I do.
And on and on and on. Watching polls what you'll discover is about 10% of Americans are just outright fascists who wouldn't hesitate to do whatever any right wing authority told them to do, and think it should have been started yesterday. This is also the finding of Bob Altemeyer in his seminal work on authoritarianism
This I can believe, because I actually run into this sort of person on a regular basis. Though they don't always follow "right wing" authorities. More on this in a bit. I will say though that I remember your "send the deniers to the glue factory" tough talk from before. I never saw this sort of ruthless stormtrooper attitude in any of my other arguments on Slashdot. Something about AGW seems to bring out the inner Nazi in some people.
There's not enough time to reform the American character before we have to take radical and decisive action on global warming.
And one wouldn't need to, if there was demonstrated evidence that radical and decisive action on AGW was needed. Keep in mind that part of the fuel for conspiracy theory is a frequently repeated betrayal of trust. This is just as much a problem in climatology as any other field of endeavor with a huge political component to it.
The thing I find damning (though your rhetorical call for mass murder is pretty damning on its own) about "climate change" concerns is the ignorance of more pressing environmental issues such as habitat destruction, desertification (and bad farming practices), pollution, and global poverty. While it's probably true that there would be some aggravation of these problems from AGW, it remains that a large group of people are advocating unusually expensive remedies for a problem that isn't near the top of the list of the stuff we have to deal with.
So why should we think it is a character problem of people who happen to disagree with you when no one, including you, has yet to present a case for urgent action on global warming?
One of the things that has happened in history is the most powerful nation on earth is incapable of stopping a pending world wide ecological collapse.
That hasn't been true over the past few decades. The US had a genuine pollution problem and pretty much fixed it. They had genuine problems with habitat destruction, bad farming practices, poor fire prevention practices, and endangered species, and have made concrete improvements in all those genuine environmental needs. Sure, there is more we could do there, but real problems get fixed. All you need to do is show that you have a real problem.
The least divisive, least disrupting course of action is for the government to internally and secretly set up an Executive Action team within one the intelligence agencies whose purpose is to discredit, attack and dismantle and neutralize the leaders of the denier terrorist movement. We all know who they are. These *thought leaders* need to be attacked the same way we'd attack any group of terrorists building a bomb named which would have the same long term destructive power as global warming. Denialism is a bomb with the capacity to permanently destroy civilization and the people assembling that bomb are not working in secret. They need to be neutralized and their sources of funding and societal legitimacy attacked through and and all means necessary. They have forfeited their civil rights and constitutional protections. We simply need to deal with them like the world destroying terrorists they are.
In short, the financial, social, and personal responsibility benefits from doing away with such a safety net are almost purely imaginary in practice, likely falling well below the threshold of statistical noise for the public as a whole.
Based on what? I see no need for widespread retirement, for example. My view is that if you didn't save for it, then you must not have really wanted it. And that works pretty well in practice I might add since society then gets the benefit of the labor of those people who don't retire. That chops away quite a bit of the so-called "safety net".
For "minimum wage", it remains that the actual minimum wage is $0 per hour. And anyone who is paid more than the value they deliver, is being paid unfairly.
that you don't have people who die penniless on the streets
Well, how much do you really need for that? A big part of the problem with "safety nets" is that they end being used for reasons that aren't needed. For example, US Social Security, a sort of half-assed pension fund, is paid into by everyone even though almost everyone doesn't need it and current people paying in will get less out than they put in. It's just a boat anchor for the economy, a historical spending outlet for US Congress (who burned the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars per year in Social Security surpluses for the pork of the week), and mainly a transfer of wealth from those who need it (to raise families, education themselves, buy a first home, etc) to those who don't (wealthy retirees).
Anyone with a good idea is well advised to flee to somewhere the United States' and its notions about intellectual property aren't going to interfere. China is right now (literally) knocking down mountains and building cities at a breakneck pace. Their economy is driven because they copy, then improve, in an iterative process without regard for intellectual property considerations. As a result, many of the world's goods and services now flow out of China. Yes, we may have invented those things, but they took them and made them better. Why can't we do the same? Oh right... Corporations.
Let me get this right. Someone is going to "flee" the US which at least has significant protection for inventions and go to China which institutionalizes the theft of IP.
The point you responded to, which I quoted and asked for evidence, was about perception being reality (or not). In other words, I'm asking you to provide evidence that reality is not perception (without relying on perception, of course)
It's one of the great limitations of empiricism that one can't do that. It is always possible that our (well, your, since I could be faked) perception is being generated by oh, a computer program or godlike being and that it might at some point, just complete change what we perceive. Today a human typing stuff in the computer. Tomorrow a goldfish staring at the heart of a star or perhaps perceiving some sort of meaningless, randomly generated noise perceived by randomly generated sensory apparatus.
But we have perceived that there is consistency in what we perceive. For example, we appear to act in a four dimensional universe (three spatial and one timelike dimensions) and we to our knowledge universally agree on this perception (or at least don't perceive those who perceive such things differently from us!). Events are more or less universally perceived with disagreement explainable by models of how we observe things (including limitations such as sensitivity of our perception apparatus, perception "illusions", and the possibility of hallucination or perception bias (seeing what we expect to see)).
From this point of view, reality isn't perception, but rather the consistency in perception. That is, reality is objective, independent of how we perceive (so it should remain under changes of perception such as different sensory apparatus or having someone else make the observation), while perception is by definition subjective (it is the fundamental basis for subjectivity to be accurate).
For example, you've implied that merely having certain beliefs (which in turn changes our perception) makes certain things real. The problem is that you could have other beliefs instead. When things change merely because your beliefs change, then those things aren't consistent in terms of perception and hence, not real.
I do, and that it is utterly ridiculous to claim that in 14 days it "turned a corner" - and I repeat - whatever that means.
How about you stop being an idiot and actually figure out the meaning of phrases first? Here's what turn the corner means:
to pass a critical point in a process
The dictionary above gives an example of its use.
The patient turned the corner last night. She should begin to show improvement now.
It doesn't meant the process is finished, merely that it has passed a significant threshold or milestone.
Here, the process is bringing four nuclear reactors eventually to a stable point, "cold shut down". If one looks at the first two weeks, there was a lot of crazy stuff going on, including three meltdowns, at least one fire in a fuel rod pool, two evacuations of all personnel from the site and a number of substantial releases of radioactivity into the air.
Since, the worst problem to the outside world has been the slow leaking of contaminated water from the site and steady progress towards that final stage, "cold shut down" was made to the point that all of the reactors achieved cold shut down by early last year. The critical point was passing the stage of emergency and great danger.
If your position had any integrity you would not have engaged me.
Defending myself from accusation is now proof that I don't have integrity? I think I'll link this gem in the future in case I should have to deal with your bullshit.
I think it'll be instructive to look back on this program at the ten year mark and see what actually happened or didn't happen as the case may be. I think by that time, the failure rate will be so pronounced, it'll be highly embarrassing for defenders.
Specifically, I predict that Dr khallow will be unable to be specific about the prediction he has made in this thread.
Since there is the possibility that this could be highly instructive for you, I'll elaborate on what I mean by "failure". I think failure will be such things as bankruptcy, absence of any meaningful infrastructure built or technology acquired as a result of the loans, or creation of a continuing money sink which can pay its guaranteed loans, but only by consuming considerable public funding.
And glancing through the list of outstanding loans as of mid-2012, they're pretty big for the projects they're covering.
For example, there's a $1.6 billion loan guarantee for a NRG Energy/Brightsource solar plant that generates 392 MW. That's about $4 per watt of generating capability. From what I understand, $1 per watt for solar is considered barely competitive with natural gas or other current peaking load power generation. Now maybe that particular loan will buy other things than just the plant, but as it stands, it seems around a factor of four too costly for what is obtained.
And Abengoa SA, which has received about $1.5 billion in loan guarantees looks to me like a WorldCom style failure waiting to happen. It's high debt, low cash flow, and probably using whatever assets it purchases as collateral for future loans. But it'll probably keep building up debt until the US and EU cuts back on renewable energy subsidies.
No I start off with "let's protected citizens from corporations".
But of course. That cascade of good-intentioned failure has to start somewhere. Government does serve a role in mediating our interactions with one another. But there's nothing unusual about corporations. Actions which are illegal to perform as a individual happen to be just as illegal when that person is doing so on behalf of a corporation. "Let's protected citizens from corporations" is already covered and has been so for a long time.
When those corporations fail, the ultra rich running them are guess what? Still filthy rich, only the honest working people who relied on that corporation are harmed.
In practice, it depends on the role. A corporate executive without much of a stake in the business can do quite well. A stockholder (and to a lesser extent a bondholder) can lose whatever they had in the business.
The ultrarich did lose a lot in the recent crisis (for example, the Forbes 400 list was about 20% less wealthy in 2009 than in 2008 and the actual losses from the people on the list in 2008 was probably a bit greater). But they also benefited inordinately from bail out funding (the people on the 2010 were a bit wealthier than the ones on the 2008 list), which aggravates the "too big to fail" problem you claim to care about.
You think fear of failure will stop them?
The thing about allowing businesses to fail is not just to introduce that risk into their decision making (which contrary to your assertion, it would change their behavior), but also simply to remove wealth from those who do engage in poor gambles.
As to corporations getting big, I guess I need to remind you of all the regulatory-side processes that advantage large corporations over small. There are big economies of scale in environmental, work, financial, etc regulation. A big business can afford a specialized staff to handle this regulation easily. A superficial law banning corporations above a certain size, doesn't remove this dynamic. And eventually the politically connected will find ways around such laws.
Going back to my original topic, corporate size regulation is just another poorly thought out kludge on top of a mountain of such things. I think it better overall to just change the dynamics so that "too big to fail" isn't rewarded in the first place. But that requires some discipline to let businesses fail.
When somebody suffers a major misfortune beyond their personal ability to recover and generally beyond their personal ability to insure or plan against
Well, how often does that happen - well aside from eventually dying? As I see it, what you are describing is a very infrequent event. And the assistance need not come from government. For the rest of us, there is insurance and planning.
When you said "Wait a month and you'll see that we turned the corner about a week ago" it meant nothing then and now. Like all of your purposely banal statements you attempt to mould them later saying "this is what I really meant" and then claim you were right all along.
I think the burden of proof is on you. As I see it, if I had really been wrong about my prediction, you would have had evidence by now. The only thing you brought up this time was:
On March 31 2001, you said "Wait a month and you'll see that we turned the corner about a week ago", whilst control of the reactor wasn't achieved until 16 December 2011 according to the Japanese Prime Minister. Yet, somehow, I'm the delusional one.
I find it incredible that you can't figure out why the two facts, my prediction and the subsequent announcement by the Japanese Prime Minister are consistent. We'd expect, if we had "turned the corner" to eventually get an announcement of this sort. And we did. Further, we'd expect such an announcement to be rather long in coming merely because it takes a while for a reactor to cool down due to the presence of isotopes with half lives longer than a few hours. In other words, the correctness of my position can't be determined merely on this basis - and you should know that.
And in that same post is this gem:
Fukushima shows that the Nuclear Industry FAILED to apply itself to learning the lessons of safety from Chernobyl.
Nonsense. As I see it, the primary two lessons of Chernobyl are a) don't do crazy shit to a nuclear reactor, and b) evacuate people when you know a meltdown is possible. Fukushima respected both lessons.
I also find it a bit odd to claim that my prediction could mean anything when previously you claimed that it's clearly wrong. Those two are mutually exclusive. You can't have a clearly wrong claim when there's wiggle room to interpret it as right.
As I see it, both stories are in error, but the fact that you can't settle on one such story indicates to me deeper problems with your reasoning than merely generating flawed arguments.
You know who else has problems keeping their stories straight? Liars. You also grotesquely misrepresent my previous defense on this matter ("Turns out I was wrong. - khallow September 24 2011"). I had already corrected your interpretation of that at the time (any would be readers can just scan that thread to see my defense of the time). Also during that discussion, you brought up six points which I helpfully demolished for you. Some of these were also misrepresentations of news articles. So you have a history of twisting the truth.
I really think you ought to spend more time cleaning up your act and less time wasting my time.
No, it's not because the government's sneakily manipulating its own balance sheet (this time).
I still think this is why. We're not getting the full picture accounting-wise. Keep in mind that the US government routinely does things that would put executives from private businesses in jail.
Slashdot Mirror
Who is going to waste that power on winning a bet?
That depends how much money is riding on that bet. If you have a bet that pays a hundred billion dollars to you if Ron Paul wins the presidential election, then you have a little bit of incentive to throw things Ron Paul's way.
That is a good point. The name, "Romulans" is an obvious pointer towards one of the mythological founders of Rome and they use Roman titles frequently (such as "centurion" and "praetor").
But the Roman empire was not at all isolationist (except when it came to repelling "barbarians" at the frontiers). I think one needs to look to communist China for what inspired that choice.
I see from Wikipedia that while the Romulans preceded the Klingons, both races were introduced in the first season (the Klingons here). I think the creators of Star Trek had all along looked to modern day analogies for creating the long standing conflicts of the Star Trek universe.
The consistency means there inherently is no contest. The subjective part of perception is what can be and oh-so-frequently is contested.
That's a mathematician's answer: technically correct, but completely impractical
Nobody contests the parts which aren't contested (duh, tautology). It's the parts that get contested that matter. Is the glass half full, or half empty? The question cares not for the glass or water itself, but how one perceives that glass and water.
I disagree on two points. First, reality is not a tautology. It just happens to be no matter what you try to perceive or whether you agree or not. In other words, it is significant rather than merely a tautology that there exists a part which can't be contested.
Second, there's almost no consequence to describing a glass as half full or empty nor does these beliefs blind you to other viewpoints. It is trivial to switch between viewpoints. If you say a glass is half full then pessimistic me would know that it is half empty.
There is considerable consequence to having a belief like those we've been discussing and acting upon that belief, including considerable unintended consequences. This is how reality matters. It is as if I acted on my belief that the glass was half empty and that in turn caused a consequence contrary to my belief (an unintended consequence). And as you've stated some of those people with those beliefs have a bit of trouble understanding other people with different beliefs.
Which is what many socialist do: they want to do something about the unintended consequences when capitalist beliefs are implemented in reality. You may not think it's worth it and they created even worse unintended consequence, but they probably think otherwise. Again, story contest.
At that point, we ought to look at what really happened rather than just have a "story contest". Too often I see either blame deflection (the evil rich people thwarting socialists once again)
Ok. Now let's remember the first post I replied to you: you engaging in your own battle of narratives, a spinning of yarns, over who's to blame for creating the welfare state. He says it's Bismark and conservatives. You say it's socialist pressuring Bismark to act.
I just want to point out that we both agreed to both stories, but the other poster interpreted those stories in a way that was invalid. We don't always act for our own purposes. Sometimes we're spurred to by outside forces, such as Bismarck and the "conservatives". Note we both agreed that Bismarck acted because of pressure from socialists and we both agree that creation of welfare did to an extent reduce the socialist "threat" to Bismarck. But it doesn't follow that public welfare is a construction of conservative forces - especially when as I observe, its universal presence in socialist governments.
I see the original poster's story as a somewhat deft case of blame deflection. The welfare state didn't work like he wanted it to, so when the excuse came around that big, bad Bismarck did it, he readily latched on. Bismarck broke the modern socialist state with welfare, not the socialist belief system. I merely pointed out that once again, socialists of the time got some of what they wanted.
Actually, historically, US benefits greatly from cheap labor, from outside or inside. It was immigrants willing to work for cheap who propelled 19th century US from backwater ex-colony to industrial superpower (especially the Chinese, whose wages were kept down thanks to discriminatory laws from government). It's cheap outsourced labor and H1B visas which let American-owned corporations survive in today's economy.
Where's the competitive labor in the US? It should be there, but isn't. There's too much focus on ensuring that workers get a particular level of wages or benefits and not enough attention on doing what it takes to make t
klingons germans, romulans russians, etc.
I believe the Klingons and Romulans were crudely based on the USSR and Communistic China respectively. Keep in mind that China in the 60s was pretty much as isolated from the West as North Korea is now, which is a better match for the secretive and xenophobic Romulans than the Soviet Russians who tended to have schemes brewing everywhere and had a far more interventionist approach (which fits the Klingons much better).
If reality is consistency in perception, then reality is still a story contest: contest between consistent stories perhaps, but stories nevertheless.
The consistency means there inherently is no contest. The subjective part of perception is what can be and oh-so-frequently is contested. My view is that to some degree we do have to make decisions and reason based on the subjective parts, particularly, what we take as beliefs. And the variety of beliefs that can fall under the label of "socialism" are valid to consider.
But at some point you need to consider what happens when those beliefs are implemented in reality. A common problem here is unintended consequences, where the systems which you try to manage don't work as you expect, leading to problems which conflict with your beliefs.
In my quote of your original post, I had three complaints. The first was the trivialization of a counterintuitive result. Despite your insistence otherwise, usually when we pay a higher price for something, we end up spending more. When that doesn't hold (as in the case of Ford's "five dollar day"), there's something odd going on. It's my opinion that we should pay attention to such things for there are lessons to be learned.
For the second thing, once again just because you insist on something, even consistently, doesn't mean much. Especially when the insisting in question could be checked against an actual historical record and found wanting.
Third, you alluded to a popular narrative. I assume some variation of the "if you work hard, you can achieve your dreams". When I referred to "blowback", I meant that there was a good chance that the myth above was probably peddled by various socialists, especially in defense of labor unions.
Sure, I don't know enough of the era to say who said what. But socialists have always been pretty good story tellers and the "American dream" is a great story. So I think there's a good chance that the story "of what made America great" which you seem to think is getting in the way, may be in large part a product of some socialist predecessor. That's something to think about there.
My view is that even if there is some battle of narratives going on here, at some point we should be looking for actual evidence on what worked not just deciding based on who spun the best yarn.
And historically, the US was doing great until its labor got exposed to competition from the cheaper parts of the world back in the 70s. That includes periods of relatively unfettered capitalism (the Gilded Age) and periods of regulated capitalism/socialism-lite (particularly after about 1932).
What I think happened was that life suddenly got hard and a bunch of people said "We will stick to the script. We won't change." But things didn't work out. So they had to find someone to blame, such as the people, who are currently called the "one percent", who could adapt and profit from the changes in global labor markets.
My view is that the US has been paying considerably for not adapting to the changes of the past few decades. And attitudes like "perception is reality" merely make that sort of transition more painful than it has to be. As I see it, US labor hasn't collectively grown more valuable over the past few decades, instead it has grown less valuable due to all the regulatory cruft that has built up, even when some of those regulations were attempts to the contrary (such as college loan subsidies, for example).
I think there's been a huge case of unintended consequences here that will result in a long term decline in US fortunes. And I think it happened because people tried to preserve a relatively nice period of the US's recent history (basically the early 60s economically) without providing a means for doing so.
... this. It is your (and many other's, as I said it's the popular narrative) claims about socialism that changes based on beliefs and observers (i.e a socialist wouldn't perceive socialism as a failure, no matter how much evidence is given)
Inability to perceive other viewpoints is a bug not a feature.
I remain a bit puzzled why patents are blamed in the paper for the system not working instead of the approval processes. For new drugs, it can take tens to hundreds of millions of dollars per potential use of a potential drug in order to pass government hurdles in the developed world. And there's a lot of risk that the drug won't work as expected. That's a lot of disincentive to research new pharmaceuticals or other medical technology.
IMHO research should be done on tax payers money, using global co-operation.
In other words, by just about the least effective way possible.
Well, they could always issue letters of marque and reprisal to Fed Ex and UPS.
Anyways, it's a relatively moot point as USPS tends to do a better job in terms of cost control than UPS and FedEx anyways. USPS is just required to do something that aren't profitable.
So no, it doesn't do a better job of cost control.
âoeFixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man.â
Well, what do you propose? A mobile capital that moves around the US? Certainly would be interesting.
Can you provide even one example of a country starting a war for "social justice" purposes?
Well, there's Nazi Germany and the USSR during the buildup to the Second World War, Lots of social justice excuses as part of their pretexts for war.
So until they can come up with a solution that completely solves the problem, we don't have to think about working toward solving the problem?
How about a solution that actually tries to solve the problem to some degree? No solution is going to be perfect, but some are far less perfect than others. For example, it remains that no one has shown that it is better to do these very inadequate attempts at mitigation rather than just doing nothing at all for a few decades.
And on and on and on. Watching polls what you'll discover is about 10% of Americans are just outright fascists who wouldn't hesitate to do whatever any right wing authority told them to do, and think it should have been started yesterday. This is also the finding of Bob Altemeyer in his seminal work on authoritarianism
This I can believe, because I actually run into this sort of person on a regular basis. Though they don't always follow "right wing" authorities. More on this in a bit. I will say though that I remember your "send the deniers to the glue factory" tough talk from before. I never saw this sort of ruthless stormtrooper attitude in any of my other arguments on Slashdot. Something about AGW seems to bring out the inner Nazi in some people.
There's not enough time to reform the American character before we have to take radical and decisive action on global warming.
And one wouldn't need to, if there was demonstrated evidence that radical and decisive action on AGW was needed. Keep in mind that part of the fuel for conspiracy theory is a frequently repeated betrayal of trust. This is just as much a problem in climatology as any other field of endeavor with a huge political component to it.
The thing I find damning (though your rhetorical call for mass murder is pretty damning on its own) about "climate change" concerns is the ignorance of more pressing environmental issues such as habitat destruction, desertification (and bad farming practices), pollution, and global poverty. While it's probably true that there would be some aggravation of these problems from AGW, it remains that a large group of people are advocating unusually expensive remedies for a problem that isn't near the top of the list of the stuff we have to deal with.
So why should we think it is a character problem of people who happen to disagree with you when no one, including you, has yet to present a case for urgent action on global warming?
One of the things that has happened in history is the most powerful nation on earth is incapable of stopping a pending world wide ecological collapse.
That hasn't been true over the past few decades. The US had a genuine pollution problem and pretty much fixed it. They had genuine problems with habitat destruction, bad farming practices, poor fire prevention practices, and endangered species, and have made concrete improvements in all those genuine environmental needs. Sure, there is more we could do there, but real problems get fixed. All you need to do is show that you have a real problem.
The least divisive, least disrupting course of action is for the government to internally and secretly set up an Executive Action team within one the intelligence agencies whose purpose is to discredit, attack and dismantle and neutralize the leaders of the denier terrorist movement. We all know who they are. These *thought leaders* need to be attacked the same way we'd attack any group of terrorists building a bomb named which would have the same long term destructive power as global warming. Denialism is a bomb with the capacity to permanently destroy civilization and the people assembling that bomb are not working in secret. They need to be neutralized and their sources of funding and societal legitimacy attacked through and and all means necessary. They have forfeited their civil rights and constitutional protections. We simply need to deal with them like the world destroying terrorists they are.
The American Civil War was the greatest crime ever perpetrated on US soil, caused by the pro-slavery side.
What was the crime?
however, I don't recall conspiracy theory nutjobs speculating about the LIBOR fixing
I imagine you wouldn't have whether or not conspiracy theory nutjobs were speculating about LIBOR.
In short, the financial, social, and personal responsibility benefits from doing away with such a safety net are almost purely imaginary in practice, likely falling well below the threshold of statistical noise for the public as a whole.
Based on what? I see no need for widespread retirement, for example. My view is that if you didn't save for it, then you must not have really wanted it. And that works pretty well in practice I might add since society then gets the benefit of the labor of those people who don't retire. That chops away quite a bit of the so-called "safety net".
For "minimum wage", it remains that the actual minimum wage is $0 per hour. And anyone who is paid more than the value they deliver, is being paid unfairly.
that you don't have people who die penniless on the streets
Well, how much do you really need for that? A big part of the problem with "safety nets" is that they end being used for reasons that aren't needed. For example, US Social Security, a sort of half-assed pension fund, is paid into by everyone even though almost everyone doesn't need it and current people paying in will get less out than they put in. It's just a boat anchor for the economy, a historical spending outlet for US Congress (who burned the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars per year in Social Security surpluses for the pork of the week), and mainly a transfer of wealth from those who need it (to raise families, education themselves, buy a first home, etc) to those who don't (wealthy retirees).
I wonder what book is being marketed to generate so many of these stories.
Anyone with a good idea is well advised to flee to somewhere the United States' and its notions about intellectual property aren't going to interfere. China is right now (literally) knocking down mountains and building cities at a breakneck pace. Their economy is driven because they copy, then improve, in an iterative process without regard for intellectual property considerations. As a result, many of the world's goods and services now flow out of China. Yes, we may have invented those things, but they took them and made them better. Why can't we do the same? Oh right... Corporations.
Let me get this right. Someone is going to "flee" the US which at least has significant protection for inventions and go to China which institutionalizes the theft of IP.
The flying over one's house part is easy to solve by routing correctly.
That alone would defeat most of the point of flying cars. It'll be rare to find urban land that doesn't have something valuable and breakable on it.
The point you responded to, which I quoted and asked for evidence, was about perception being reality (or not). In other words, I'm asking you to provide evidence that reality is not perception (without relying on perception, of course)
It's one of the great limitations of empiricism that one can't do that. It is always possible that our (well, your, since I could be faked) perception is being generated by oh, a computer program or godlike being and that it might at some point, just complete change what we perceive. Today a human typing stuff in the computer. Tomorrow a goldfish staring at the heart of a star or perhaps perceiving some sort of meaningless, randomly generated noise perceived by randomly generated sensory apparatus.
But we have perceived that there is consistency in what we perceive. For example, we appear to act in a four dimensional universe (three spatial and one timelike dimensions) and we to our knowledge universally agree on this perception (or at least don't perceive those who perceive such things differently from us!). Events are more or less universally perceived with disagreement explainable by models of how we observe things (including limitations such as sensitivity of our perception apparatus, perception "illusions", and the possibility of hallucination or perception bias (seeing what we expect to see)).
From this point of view, reality isn't perception, but rather the consistency in perception. That is, reality is objective, independent of how we perceive (so it should remain under changes of perception such as different sensory apparatus or having someone else make the observation), while perception is by definition subjective (it is the fundamental basis for subjectivity to be accurate).
For example, you've implied that merely having certain beliefs (which in turn changes our perception) makes certain things real. The problem is that you could have other beliefs instead. When things change merely because your beliefs change, then those things aren't consistent in terms of perception and hence, not real.
I do, and that it is utterly ridiculous to claim that in 14 days it "turned a corner" - and I repeat - whatever that means.
How about you stop being an idiot and actually figure out the meaning of phrases first? Here's what turn the corner means:
to pass a critical point in a process
The dictionary above gives an example of its use.
The patient turned the corner last night. She should begin to show improvement now.
It doesn't meant the process is finished, merely that it has passed a significant threshold or milestone.
Here, the process is bringing four nuclear reactors eventually to a stable point, "cold shut down". If one looks at the first two weeks, there was a lot of crazy stuff going on, including three meltdowns, at least one fire in a fuel rod pool, two evacuations of all personnel from the site and a number of substantial releases of radioactivity into the air.
Since, the worst problem to the outside world has been the slow leaking of contaminated water from the site and steady progress towards that final stage, "cold shut down" was made to the point that all of the reactors achieved cold shut down by early last year. The critical point was passing the stage of emergency and great danger.
If your position had any integrity you would not have engaged me.
Defending myself from accusation is now proof that I don't have integrity? I think I'll link this gem in the future in case I should have to deal with your bullshit.
I think it'll be instructive to look back on this program at the ten year mark and see what actually happened or didn't happen as the case may be. I think by that time, the failure rate will be so pronounced, it'll be highly embarrassing for defenders.
Specifically, I predict that Dr khallow will be unable to be specific about the prediction he has made in this thread.
Since there is the possibility that this could be highly instructive for you, I'll elaborate on what I mean by "failure". I think failure will be such things as bankruptcy, absence of any meaningful infrastructure built or technology acquired as a result of the loans, or creation of a continuing money sink which can pay its guaranteed loans, but only by consuming considerable public funding.
And glancing through the list of outstanding loans as of mid-2012, they're pretty big for the projects they're covering.
For example, there's a $1.6 billion loan guarantee for a NRG Energy/Brightsource solar plant that generates 392 MW. That's about $4 per watt of generating capability. From what I understand, $1 per watt for solar is considered barely competitive with natural gas or other current peaking load power generation. Now maybe that particular loan will buy other things than just the plant, but as it stands, it seems around a factor of four too costly for what is obtained.
And Abengoa SA, which has received about $1.5 billion in loan guarantees looks to me like a WorldCom style failure waiting to happen. It's high debt, low cash flow, and probably using whatever assets it purchases as collateral for future loans. But it'll probably keep building up debt until the US and EU cuts back on renewable energy subsidies.
No I start off with "let's protected citizens from corporations".
But of course. That cascade of good-intentioned failure has to start somewhere. Government does serve a role in mediating our interactions with one another. But there's nothing unusual about corporations. Actions which are illegal to perform as a individual happen to be just as illegal when that person is doing so on behalf of a corporation. "Let's protected citizens from corporations" is already covered and has been so for a long time.
When those corporations fail, the ultra rich running them are guess what? Still filthy rich, only the honest working people who relied on that corporation are harmed.
In practice, it depends on the role. A corporate executive without much of a stake in the business can do quite well. A stockholder (and to a lesser extent a bondholder) can lose whatever they had in the business.
The ultrarich did lose a lot in the recent crisis (for example, the Forbes 400 list was about 20% less wealthy in 2009 than in 2008 and the actual losses from the people on the list in 2008 was probably a bit greater). But they also benefited inordinately from bail out funding (the people on the 2010 were a bit wealthier than the ones on the 2008 list), which aggravates the "too big to fail" problem you claim to care about.
You think fear of failure will stop them?
The thing about allowing businesses to fail is not just to introduce that risk into their decision making (which contrary to your assertion, it would change their behavior), but also simply to remove wealth from those who do engage in poor gambles.
As to corporations getting big, I guess I need to remind you of all the regulatory-side processes that advantage large corporations over small. There are big economies of scale in environmental, work, financial, etc regulation. A big business can afford a specialized staff to handle this regulation easily. A superficial law banning corporations above a certain size, doesn't remove this dynamic. And eventually the politically connected will find ways around such laws.
Going back to my original topic, corporate size regulation is just another poorly thought out kludge on top of a mountain of such things. I think it better overall to just change the dynamics so that "too big to fail" isn't rewarded in the first place. But that requires some discipline to let businesses fail.
When somebody suffers a major misfortune beyond their personal ability to recover and generally beyond their personal ability to insure or plan against
Well, how often does that happen - well aside from eventually dying? As I see it, what you are describing is a very infrequent event. And the assistance need not come from government. For the rest of us, there is insurance and planning.
When you said "Wait a month and you'll see that we turned the corner about a week ago" it meant nothing then and now. Like all of your purposely banal statements you attempt to mould them later saying "this is what I really meant" and then claim you were right all along.
I think the burden of proof is on you. As I see it, if I had really been wrong about my prediction, you would have had evidence by now. The only thing you brought up this time was:
On March 31 2001, you said "Wait a month and you'll see that we turned the corner about a week ago", whilst control of the reactor wasn't achieved until 16 December 2011 according to the Japanese Prime Minister. Yet, somehow, I'm the delusional one.
I find it incredible that you can't figure out why the two facts, my prediction and the subsequent announcement by the Japanese Prime Minister are consistent. We'd expect, if we had "turned the corner" to eventually get an announcement of this sort. And we did. Further, we'd expect such an announcement to be rather long in coming merely because it takes a while for a reactor to cool down due to the presence of isotopes with half lives longer than a few hours. In other words, the correctness of my position can't be determined merely on this basis - and you should know that.
And in that same post is this gem:
Fukushima shows that the Nuclear Industry FAILED to apply itself to learning the lessons of safety from Chernobyl.
Nonsense. As I see it, the primary two lessons of Chernobyl are a) don't do crazy shit to a nuclear reactor, and b) evacuate people when you know a meltdown is possible. Fukushima respected both lessons.
I also find it a bit odd to claim that my prediction could mean anything when previously you claimed that it's clearly wrong. Those two are mutually exclusive. You can't have a clearly wrong claim when there's wiggle room to interpret it as right.
As I see it, both stories are in error, but the fact that you can't settle on one such story indicates to me deeper problems with your reasoning than merely generating flawed arguments.
You know who else has problems keeping their stories straight? Liars. You also grotesquely misrepresent my previous defense on this matter ("Turns out I was wrong. - khallow September 24 2011"). I had already corrected your interpretation of that at the time (any would be readers can just scan that thread to see my defense of the time). Also during that discussion, you brought up six points which I helpfully demolished for you. Some of these were also misrepresentations of news articles. So you have a history of twisting the truth.
I really think you ought to spend more time cleaning up your act and less time wasting my time.
No, it's not because the government's sneakily manipulating its own balance sheet (this time).
I still think this is why. We're not getting the full picture accounting-wise. Keep in mind that the US government routinely does things that would put executives from private businesses in jail.