Imagine if a bank saw a technique with which through hell and high water it could become the single bank owning every single penny anyone anywhere depositted? Would they be like "oh boy, we'd get too big, so risky!" hell no, they'd say SWEET WE WILL HAVE IT ALL! and trudge forth to doing it, the result being? If they happen to fail after that, well there goes *everyone's* money.
Where are they going to borrow the money for that little adventure from? Other banks.
Companies become to big to fail on purpose because it's a bloody profitable affair, and they're not going to stop until we put laws on corporate sizes
Or we let those companies fail when they fail. It's not that hard to get. What you propose is typical Rube Goldberg regulation. You start off with a bad idea: "Let's protect businesses from the consequences of their actions because it might hurt me." Then you have to incrementally add more bad regulation in order to cure the problems which you made. "Let's put laws on corporate sizes." "Let's give money and AUTHORITY to regulators to enforce my bad ideas,"
Do that a bunch of times and you end up with the US federal government which adds something like a couple hundred thousand pages of new regulation every year.
How about getting into an agreement to buy 92% of outstanding stock, then selling it off later for a $22.5 billion profit?
Because it generates an interest for the government to bail out the company rather than fix it. Where did that $22.5 billion profit come from? I imagine in large part it came from other federal programs such as the Federal Reserves's "quantitative easing" or other stimulus measures. IMHO that $22.5 billion profit only happened by the federal government spending money in less transparent ways and it may have been a loss overall.
Of course, there's still the question of whether eliminating the social security safety net would discourage poor investing choices, but again, I think that where individuals are concerned, the answer is "no", if only because most individuals cannot possibly be expected to have the depth of understanding required to recognize toxic assets and other such problems.
One doesn't get that experience either from social security safety nets. I would say instead that education and experience are better strategies than a safety net.
The most elite, wealthy, privileged blacks are still far more likely to commit crimes than the most disadvantaged non-blacks
Why would you claim that? You're certainly more likely to hear about crimes committed by wealthy rappers or sports stars than you are from somebody hanging out in the local trailer park. That doesn't mean they actually commit more such crimes.
I think a more likely customer here is black professionals. They have money and are relatively likely to have relatives going through the courts.
Well then perhaps you can provide some evidence that isn't based around your perception.
The outcome of the communist governments. Not one has been viable and some of them have been among the worst governments ever known (Cambodia under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, the USSR under Joseph Stalin).
Socialism also has something of a track record in ending democracies. There are several cases of democratically elected socialist governments that were so bad and incompetent that they generated substantial enemies within and without and were overthrown quickly by enduring authoritarian governments (Chile and Iran, for example). Socialists also played a prominent, but by no means unique role in the divisive politices of the era between the two world wars ending various European democracies in the time before the Second World War (Wiemar Republic and the Third French Republic).
Second, since Ford was a private actor, his activities were inherently capitalist not socialist. While it is known that one can get more, if one pays more, it was counterintuitive that Ford's "five dollar day" could do as well as it did. I think most businesses already have a good understanding of what happens when they pay their employees more, and it's not that useful to the business. Ford had factors within the company (such as addressing a high turnover issue that was costing the business a lot of money in training employees) and outside (the pool of labor was starting to dry up and workers were able to command and consequently expect higher wages) that caused higher wages to be unusually effective. The trick doesn't work so well in general.
Do those limits rely on assumptions about dimensions and time?
Yes. But these are assumptions borne out by our observations of our reality.
Might dark energy and/or dark matter change some of those assumptions and thus make limits that feel so fundamental now evaporate?
No. Dark energy is somewhat relevant in that an expanding universe does have an easier time of dissipating heat and a higher theoretical limit on information that can be packed into a cosmologically large space-time ball of given radius (the surface area (which is proportional to the maximum information a space can contain) of the ball becomes an exponential function of the radius rather than a fixed power). Against this, you have the problem of greatly reducing the number of states of the universe to which you can access and change.
So as I understand it, with dark energy, you can cram more information into a given space, but you have less information to cram.
Dark matter has little bearing except being something which can occupy the same space as your computational system and hence, reduce the maximum theoretical information density before a black hole is formed (since that bit of space has both information and dark matter in it).
Computational power can scale infinitely, and scales geometrically with time.
No, it can't. There are fundamental limits to information storage and computation. Those limits are a lot better than we can achieve, but they exist.
Or make the problem more efficient.
A better algorithm always works. It's worth noting here that at worst, one can just make the protein physically and see what happens in real time. So it can't be that hard computationally.
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.
Yes, you are the delusional one. Did I say that Fukushima had achieved cold shut down way back in March, 2011? Of course not. The reactor was not out of control the day before the Prime Minister's alleged statement, but showed steady improvement for many months, all the way from the very point I noted. Hence, why my statement was correct.
As you've demonstrated, your response was entirely predictable.
So what? The point of this debate isn't to surprise you, but to enlighten you.
You were wrong about when the reactor would be controlled, wrong about the seawall, ignorant of the operational parameters of the GE Mk1 reactor's basis design issues, wrong about the spent fuel pools, made up arguments that were refuted with *facts* from those organisations.
A reasonable person would have granted that my prediction was right and moved on. I have long given up on getting from you any sort of fair or rational discussion on the Fukushima accident. As I noted in that very post, I was correct about when the reactors would be controlled. They have all moved on to the "cold shut down" state since that post. I find it remarkable that here is this accurate prediction from only a couple weeks into the Fukushima accident. Yet it is still being contested. You long ago lost this fight.
Specifically, I predict that Dr Khallow will be unable to be specific about the prediction he has made in this thread.
What is there to be specific about? We already have linked the relevant posts from the past almost two years. One merely needs to read those to get both the exact details of my prediction and the depth of the perfidy and delusion to which you stooped in response. As far as I'm concerned, this is over.
My theory is that this is mostly a consequence of urbanization. One can have hucksters, con men, etc in rural environments and there are plenty of them out there, but the victims are far more concentrated and to an extent wealthier in urban areas. And once you get enough of such people in one place and they become influential enough, then society itself starts to glorify them.
One of the laws that some of the loans were issued under had a 30% failure rate budgeted for by the law from Congress.
Ugh, reading that reminds me why the US government should stay out of the investment business.
If what they were investing in had 100% success rates predicted, then there would be no need for the government to give loan guarantees, other investors would do that.
I guess then we need grown ups to evaluate these programs, not people who can only distinguish between perfect and not perfect. Everything is "not perfect". But some things, such as this program are a lot further from perfect than others.
Instead, the point of the program was to develop business and infrastructure that the market would not provide for initial development but would support after economy of scales kicked in
This has been tried before many times. The problem isn't economies of scale, but just that renewable power, electric cars, etc tends to be costly for what it delivers.
I've been entertained by how wrong your predictions were in the past.
Please give an example. I'll note in my Fukushima predictions that I was correct way back at the end of March, 2011, that the worst of the disaster was over (and yet you still tried to contest it). In the thread to that second link, I also predicted that eventual human exposure would be at least two orders of magnitude less than it was for Chernobyl. Given that 20-50 times less radiation was actually released onto land than was the case for Chernobyl (combination of 4-10 times less overall radiation released and 80% of that radiation ending up in the sea) and the population around Fukushima was evacuated at least a day earlier than was the case for people living around Chernobyl, I think that prediction will succeed easily.
I also predicted that there would be witch hunts for TEPCO executives. There is a criminal investigation underway. We'll see if there is any actual criminal negligence out there with respect to the Fukushima accident or if my prediction there gets borne out.
I will note that there has been at least a couple local government actions that have been shifty (for example, a local government study that claimed hundreds of deaths due to the stress of evacuation for the Fukushima accident and subsequent months long displacement from home and business).
So sure, I've made a bunch of predictions, but my record there looks pretty good.
I sure would. That's a remarkably bad failure rate (happening over only a couple of years since the loan guarantees were made), especially given the sums of money involved. Among other things, I think a number of companies are still burning through their loans. We'll see more bankruptcies.
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.
Things that work, especially when they were somewhat counterintuitive for the time are inherently interesting to me, and probably should be to you as well.
Well, Ford's case is not counter intuitive, that's why I said it's not that interesting.
Hence, why I said it should be interesting. You need to recalibrate your intuition.
A true libertarian would understand those structural problems rather than attempt to slap the bandaid of "government oversight" on top.
Ahh, the No True Scotsman argument.
And quite appropriate here. The term libertarian means someone who has a belief system more or less opposed to considerable government power and intervention. Why should I consider someone libertarian, if they fall back onto government intervention for a pretty simple matter? This could be settled in the courts (which is a level of government intervention that most libertarians are comfortable with)?
Let me give an example. Let's say you own a company and you want to motivate your sales staff to go out and sell. How do you compensate them? If you pay a salary they likely will not work as hard as on commission. If they are on commission what do you base the commission on? Base it on sales and they will have no reason to care about profitability. Base it on profits and they'll try to cherry pick. If there is no sunset provision on commissions they may try to build up a few clients and then not worry about getting new ones. Basically any incentive structure you can come up with, I can tell you how people will game it. It is REALLY hard to come up with a system that provides the right incentives and eliminates motivation to game the system
I would go further than that and say that it is impossible to come up with a system that provides the right incentives. Instead, what generally happens is that employers come up with incentive systems that that make enough profit even when the employee is gaming the system.
As to the LIBOR example, I imagine everyone who works professionally in the industry would know of the games played with LIBOR and could to a considerable degree account for them. Now that the LIBOR game is public knowledge, I think it'd be much harder for them to generate the same sorts of profit that they had in the past, just because major businesses understand better the game and can adjust for it (such as seeking a lower rate relative to LIBOR or using some other index in its place).
Yes, some sort of magical disease detector would be better, but how exactly do you detect something you don't know about?
Well, how does a disease spread? There's some basic organism, such as a virus or bacterium, which has to do the job. So you look for lots of organisms, particularly, organisms you haven't seen before.
Socializing treatment at least for the cheap/easy stuff and would likely be an effective way to eliminate the cost-inflation which currently goes to subsidize the more rare and expensive treatments, not to mention cutting the insurance industry (basically parasites) out of the loop for the bulk of the medical industry.
It encourages consumption of medical services, which has a history of increasing overall medical costs.
If you can get an 80% solution for 20% of the cost that seems to me an area that would be worth investing in as a society.
I don't see that being proposed here. Instead, I see a subsidy for a costly search for even more costly problems. There are some health care issues that are clear wins, such as immunizations with low costs and high return. I just don't see basic check ups falling in that category especially when they can be tied to demand creation for medical care.
Well, given that integrated circuits were a fast follow-on (within five years of the development of a working transistor, people were already proposing simple integrated circuits), I'd have to disagree.
Such gimmicks cut into the capability and reliability of the missile and make it cost more. One of the things to remember about a working defense system is that the strategies for overwhelming the system are costly and complicated in themselves. Currently, those costs are less than building a working system capable of withstanding that degree of overwhelming. That's the "math" of which the article speaks.
But it's worth considering that the tactical advantage might not stay there. For example, it may turn out that in a few decades a relatively cheap laser system can provide substantial defense against a number of missiles and decoys. In that case, the game changes.
Well, it's not that interesting. [...] Socialists have consistently insisted [...] Alas, that would go against the popular narrative
I see a lot of indications that you really don't have a clue what you're talking about. Reality isn't a story contest. Things that work, especially when they were somewhat counterintuitive for the time are inherently interesting to me, and probably should be to you as well.
Second, insistence is in itself useless. Socialists can consistently insistent whatever they want. The proof is in the outcome. There they stand on much weaker ground with a number of cases of socialism leading to economic and social disaster, such as the communist states.
And as to the "popular narrative", Ford was one of the many shapers of that particular kind of story. And it'd be interesting to see if socialists had any role as well in those myths. You might be complaining above about blowback.
In particular to the "welfare state" idea, there's a guy called Henry Ford who came up with a similar thing. Although Ford wasn't "the state", he certainly provided generous wages and welfare to his workers. His company became... kinda big.
What's interesting about that is how Ford's propaganda arm was able to market it (as "profit-sharing" and the employee being able to buy the product of their labor). I guess they pushed all the hot socialist buttons of the day. But the bottom line is that Ford did it, because it made him money by greatly reducing worker turnover which was an expensive problem of the time (though most employers of the time just accepted it and didn't do anything to change that).
Maybe I have been reading too much Taoist philosophy, but I am full convinced that the best way to deal with your enemies is to operate from a position of power and make them your friends.
Then you should be a big fan of the Israeli approach. It's just taking a while to make their enemies friends.
But the fact is - you can't unwind all these transactions
That's a fundamentally broken way of looking at it. Consider a different sort of activity, murder. One can't "unwind" a murder". Do we say, "Golly, nothing we do can bring back the victim, so we'll just not do anything." Well, I can't rule out that there's someone out there who is that damaged in the head, but most of us realize that if you don't disincentivize murder in some way, then you're going to get a lot more murders as people figure out how to profit from the situation.
But as it turns out, we can do better than unwinding a zillion transactions. Figure out how much the defendant profited from the deception in question, and then force the defendant to pay oh, triple that amount, adjusted for inflation.
There's a vast difference between selling goods that are used in a voluntary activity that happens to shorten your life a little and having someone kill you directly or by taking away something you really need (like food).
To you, not to the dying men.
Only to someone trying to pollute the debate. I don't know who in the world got the cute idea to equate mass murder like the Holocaust with the entirely voluntary activity of smoking, but it's folly.
In any sort of society, such as a democracy, where people are free to act on their impulses, they will frequently choose to do things that will lead to an early death. To then claim that the businesses which profit from these choices are somehow equivalent to a Joseph Stalin or Genghis Khan, means either that one doesn't really care about the vilest crimes of history (perhaps with some sort of regulation attached - so Genghis Khan could properly lay waste to the heart of the Middle East, but only if he filled out the right paperwork), or that one is implicitly advocating Nuremberg trials for anyone who offers a service which shortens enough lifespans, such as, for example, hospitals (mistakes which are serious enough to cause serious medical harm and perhaps shorten peoples' lives happen somewhere around tens to hundreds of thousands of times a year) or road builders (tens of thousands of people die on roads every year).
And for the final absurdity, the US government gets excise taxes on every cigarette legally sold in the US. So that's an unusually large and powerful group profiting from the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people each year and yes, it happens to be a government.
I'm not sure which forums you are referring to, but the highest forum in the United States legal system considers corporations to be "people".
And I've already noted that it is a "legal fiction". Courts treat corporations for certain purposes like people in order for certain things to happen or be recognized.
For example, if a corporation fails to honor a contract with me, what is my redress? The courts choose in that specific case to treat corporations just as if they were people in a contract, which was a more or less solved problem. Because a corporation is treated like a person for the purposes of contracts, it gives me a target which I can sue in US (and other) court systems.
As I said, courts don't treat corporations as people, but rather like people for limited situations. For example, corporations don't get to vote; they can't occupy an elected position; and they can't be drafted to serve in the military or on a jury.
That's funny. And the Sozialistengesetze which accompanied the welfare reforms were also "an early win for socialists?" Your casuistry, I'm afraid, won't wash with people familiar with the actual history. You seem to be re-inscribing the misconception that the modern welfare state is socialist, whereas it is in fact a weapon designed originally to defeat socialism.
All the people "familiar" with the "actual" history all seem to have an agenda. I merely pointed out, correctly of course, that it was a win for socialism even when coupled with the anti-socialism laws you mention.
Bismarck, as typical of successful statemen in authoritarian regimes, was fond of the carrot and stick approach. The carrot was the welfare programs alluded to earlier and the stick was the various laws against socialist political parties (which glancing through Wikipedia, didn't actually appear to work either).
Self-defence, as a defence to murder, will only fly in the face of "pressure" from that attacker. This does not make the attacker's death an "early win."
Not all analogies work. In this one, there is no partial granting of that which the murderer seeks. You don't stab yourself a couple of times in recognition of the murderer's desires and then threaten to shoot him, if he tries to stab you any more times than that.
Further, I don't understand the point of trying to claim that the "welfare state" somehow didn't originate with socialism. Everyone in this thread seems to be claiming that Bismarck's case was implemented to placate potential followers of socialism. And it's in every socialist government now to varying degree.
A "win" for revolutionary socialists is a population so impoverished relative to the owning classes that they are willing to take up arms to overthrow them. Safer to throw them crumbs.
Well, last I heard, there were other sorts of socialists than the "revolutionary socialist". And while I don't appreciate the socialism ideology, it does appear that the non-revolutionary sort of socialism does seem to be a lot more successful.
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Imagine if a bank saw a technique with which through hell and high water it could become the single bank owning every single penny anyone anywhere depositted? Would they be like "oh boy, we'd get too big, so risky!" hell no, they'd say SWEET WE WILL HAVE IT ALL! and trudge forth to doing it, the result being? If they happen to fail after that, well there goes *everyone's* money.
Where are they going to borrow the money for that little adventure from? Other banks.
Companies become to big to fail on purpose because it's a bloody profitable affair, and they're not going to stop until we put laws on corporate sizes
Or we let those companies fail when they fail. It's not that hard to get. What you propose is typical Rube Goldberg regulation. You start off with a bad idea: "Let's protect businesses from the consequences of their actions because it might hurt me." Then you have to incrementally add more bad regulation in order to cure the problems which you made. "Let's put laws on corporate sizes." "Let's give money and AUTHORITY to regulators to enforce my bad ideas,"
Do that a bunch of times and you end up with the US federal government which adds something like a couple hundred thousand pages of new regulation every year.
How about getting into an agreement to buy 92% of outstanding stock, then selling it off later for a $22.5 billion profit?
Because it generates an interest for the government to bail out the company rather than fix it. Where did that $22.5 billion profit come from? I imagine in large part it came from other federal programs such as the Federal Reserves's "quantitative easing" or other stimulus measures. IMHO that $22.5 billion profit only happened by the federal government spending money in less transparent ways and it may have been a loss overall.
Of course, there's still the question of whether eliminating the social security safety net would discourage poor investing choices, but again, I think that where individuals are concerned, the answer is "no", if only because most individuals cannot possibly be expected to have the depth of understanding required to recognize toxic assets and other such problems.
One doesn't get that experience either from social security safety nets. I would say instead that education and experience are better strategies than a safety net.
The most elite, wealthy, privileged blacks are still far more likely to commit crimes than the most disadvantaged non-blacks
Why would you claim that? You're certainly more likely to hear about crimes committed by wealthy rappers or sports stars than you are from somebody hanging out in the local trailer park. That doesn't mean they actually commit more such crimes.
I think a more likely customer here is black professionals. They have money and are relatively likely to have relatives going through the courts.
Well then perhaps you can provide some evidence that isn't based around your perception.
The outcome of the communist governments. Not one has been viable and some of them have been among the worst governments ever known (Cambodia under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, the USSR under Joseph Stalin).
Socialism also has something of a track record in ending democracies. There are several cases of democratically elected socialist governments that were so bad and incompetent that they generated substantial enemies within and without and were overthrown quickly by enduring authoritarian governments (Chile and Iran, for example). Socialists also played a prominent, but by no means unique role in the divisive politices of the era between the two world wars ending various European democracies in the time before the Second World War (Wiemar Republic and the Third French Republic).
Second, since Ford was a private actor, his activities were inherently capitalist not socialist. While it is known that one can get more, if one pays more, it was counterintuitive that Ford's "five dollar day" could do as well as it did. I think most businesses already have a good understanding of what happens when they pay their employees more, and it's not that useful to the business. Ford had factors within the company (such as addressing a high turnover issue that was costing the business a lot of money in training employees) and outside (the pool of labor was starting to dry up and workers were able to command and consequently expect higher wages) that caused higher wages to be unusually effective. The trick doesn't work so well in general.
Do those limits rely on assumptions about dimensions and time?
Yes. But these are assumptions borne out by our observations of our reality.
Might dark energy and/or dark matter change some of those assumptions and thus make limits that feel so fundamental now evaporate?
No. Dark energy is somewhat relevant in that an expanding universe does have an easier time of dissipating heat and a higher theoretical limit on information that can be packed into a cosmologically large space-time ball of given radius (the surface area (which is proportional to the maximum information a space can contain) of the ball becomes an exponential function of the radius rather than a fixed power). Against this, you have the problem of greatly reducing the number of states of the universe to which you can access and change.
So as I understand it, with dark energy, you can cram more information into a given space, but you have less information to cram.
Dark matter has little bearing except being something which can occupy the same space as your computational system and hence, reduce the maximum theoretical information density before a black hole is formed (since that bit of space has both information and dark matter in it).
Computational power can scale infinitely, and scales geometrically with time.
No, it can't. There are fundamental limits to information storage and computation. Those limits are a lot better than we can achieve, but they exist.
Or make the problem more efficient.
A better algorithm always works. It's worth noting here that at worst, one can just make the protein physically and see what happens in real time. So it can't be that hard computationally.
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.
Yes, you are the delusional one. Did I say that Fukushima had achieved cold shut down way back in March, 2011? Of course not. The reactor was not out of control the day before the Prime Minister's alleged statement, but showed steady improvement for many months, all the way from the very point I noted. Hence, why my statement was correct.
As you've demonstrated, your response was entirely predictable.
So what? The point of this debate isn't to surprise you, but to enlighten you.
You were wrong about when the reactor would be controlled, wrong about the seawall, ignorant of the operational parameters of the GE Mk1 reactor's basis design issues, wrong about the spent fuel pools, made up arguments that were refuted with *facts* from those organisations.
A reasonable person would have granted that my prediction was right and moved on. I have long given up on getting from you any sort of fair or rational discussion on the Fukushima accident. As I noted in that very post, I was correct about when the reactors would be controlled. They have all moved on to the "cold shut down" state since that post. I find it remarkable that here is this accurate prediction from only a couple weeks into the Fukushima accident. Yet it is still being contested. You long ago lost this fight.
Specifically, I predict that Dr Khallow will be unable to be specific about the prediction he has made in this thread.
What is there to be specific about? We already have linked the relevant posts from the past almost two years. One merely needs to read those to get both the exact details of my prediction and the depth of the perfidy and delusion to which you stooped in response. As far as I'm concerned, this is over.
My theory is that this is mostly a consequence of urbanization. One can have hucksters, con men, etc in rural environments and there are plenty of them out there, but the victims are far more concentrated and to an extent wealthier in urban areas. And once you get enough of such people in one place and they become influential enough, then society itself starts to glorify them.
One of the laws that some of the loans were issued under had a 30% failure rate budgeted for by the law from Congress.
Ugh, reading that reminds me why the US government should stay out of the investment business.
If what they were investing in had 100% success rates predicted, then there would be no need for the government to give loan guarantees, other investors would do that.
I guess then we need grown ups to evaluate these programs, not people who can only distinguish between perfect and not perfect. Everything is "not perfect". But some things, such as this program are a lot further from perfect than others.
Instead, the point of the program was to develop business and infrastructure that the market would not provide for initial development but would support after economy of scales kicked in
This has been tried before many times. The problem isn't economies of scale, but just that renewable power, electric cars, etc tends to be costly for what it delivers.
I've been entertained by how wrong your predictions were in the past.
Please give an example. I'll note in my Fukushima predictions that I was correct way back at the end of March, 2011, that the worst of the disaster was over (and yet you still tried to contest it). In the thread to that second link, I also predicted that eventual human exposure would be at least two orders of magnitude less than it was for Chernobyl. Given that 20-50 times less radiation was actually released onto land than was the case for Chernobyl (combination of 4-10 times less overall radiation released and 80% of that radiation ending up in the sea) and the population around Fukushima was evacuated at least a day earlier than was the case for people living around Chernobyl, I think that prediction will succeed easily.
I also predicted that there would be witch hunts for TEPCO executives. There is a criminal investigation underway. We'll see if there is any actual criminal negligence out there with respect to the Fukushima accident or if my prediction there gets borne out.
I will note that there has been at least a couple local government actions that have been shifty (for example, a local government study that claimed hundreds of deaths due to the stress of evacuation for the Fukushima accident and subsequent months long displacement from home and business).
So sure, I've made a bunch of predictions, but my record there looks pretty good.
I sure would. That's a remarkably bad failure rate (happening over only a couple of years since the loan guarantees were made), especially given the sums of money involved. Among other things, I think a number of companies are still burning through their loans. We'll see more bankruptcies.
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.
Perception is reality.
No. It really isn't.
Things that work, especially when they were somewhat counterintuitive for the time are inherently interesting to me, and probably should be to you as well.
Well, Ford's case is not counter intuitive, that's why I said it's not that interesting.
Hence, why I said it should be interesting. You need to recalibrate your intuition.
A true libertarian would understand those structural problems rather than attempt to slap the bandaid of "government oversight" on top.
Ahh, the No True Scotsman argument.
And quite appropriate here. The term libertarian means someone who has a belief system more or less opposed to considerable government power and intervention. Why should I consider someone libertarian, if they fall back onto government intervention for a pretty simple matter? This could be settled in the courts (which is a level of government intervention that most libertarians are comfortable with)?
Let me give an example. Let's say you own a company and you want to motivate your sales staff to go out and sell. How do you compensate them? If you pay a salary they likely will not work as hard as on commission. If they are on commission what do you base the commission on? Base it on sales and they will have no reason to care about profitability. Base it on profits and they'll try to cherry pick. If there is no sunset provision on commissions they may try to build up a few clients and then not worry about getting new ones. Basically any incentive structure you can come up with, I can tell you how people will game it. It is REALLY hard to come up with a system that provides the right incentives and eliminates motivation to game the system
I would go further than that and say that it is impossible to come up with a system that provides the right incentives. Instead, what generally happens is that employers come up with incentive systems that that make enough profit even when the employee is gaming the system.
As to the LIBOR example, I imagine everyone who works professionally in the industry would know of the games played with LIBOR and could to a considerable degree account for them. Now that the LIBOR game is public knowledge, I think it'd be much harder for them to generate the same sorts of profit that they had in the past, just because major businesses understand better the game and can adjust for it (such as seeking a lower rate relative to LIBOR or using some other index in its place).
Yes, some sort of magical disease detector would be better, but how exactly do you detect something you don't know about?
Well, how does a disease spread? There's some basic organism, such as a virus or bacterium, which has to do the job. So you look for lots of organisms, particularly, organisms you haven't seen before.
Socializing treatment at least for the cheap/easy stuff and would likely be an effective way to eliminate the cost-inflation which currently goes to subsidize the more rare and expensive treatments, not to mention cutting the insurance industry (basically parasites) out of the loop for the bulk of the medical industry.
It encourages consumption of medical services, which has a history of increasing overall medical costs.
If you can get an 80% solution for 20% of the cost that seems to me an area that would be worth investing in as a society.
I don't see that being proposed here. Instead, I see a subsidy for a costly search for even more costly problems. There are some health care issues that are clear wins, such as immunizations with low costs and high return. I just don't see basic check ups falling in that category especially when they can be tied to demand creation for medical care.
Well, given that integrated circuits were a fast follow-on (within five years of the development of a working transistor, people were already proposing simple integrated circuits), I'd have to disagree.
Such gimmicks cut into the capability and reliability of the missile and make it cost more. One of the things to remember about a working defense system is that the strategies for overwhelming the system are costly and complicated in themselves. Currently, those costs are less than building a working system capable of withstanding that degree of overwhelming. That's the "math" of which the article speaks.
But it's worth considering that the tactical advantage might not stay there. For example, it may turn out that in a few decades a relatively cheap laser system can provide substantial defense against a number of missiles and decoys. In that case, the game changes.
Well, it's not that interesting. [...] Socialists have consistently insisted [...] Alas, that would go against the popular narrative
I see a lot of indications that you really don't have a clue what you're talking about. Reality isn't a story contest. Things that work, especially when they were somewhat counterintuitive for the time are inherently interesting to me, and probably should be to you as well.
Second, insistence is in itself useless. Socialists can consistently insistent whatever they want. The proof is in the outcome. There they stand on much weaker ground with a number of cases of socialism leading to economic and social disaster, such as the communist states.
And as to the "popular narrative", Ford was one of the many shapers of that particular kind of story. And it'd be interesting to see if socialists had any role as well in those myths. You might be complaining above about blowback.
In particular to the "welfare state" idea, there's a guy called Henry Ford who came up with a similar thing. Although Ford wasn't "the state", he certainly provided generous wages and welfare to his workers. His company became... kinda big.
What's interesting about that is how Ford's propaganda arm was able to market it (as "profit-sharing" and the employee being able to buy the product of their labor). I guess they pushed all the hot socialist buttons of the day. But the bottom line is that Ford did it, because it made him money by greatly reducing worker turnover which was an expensive problem of the time (though most employers of the time just accepted it and didn't do anything to change that).
Maybe I have been reading too much Taoist philosophy, but I am full convinced that the best way to deal with your enemies is to operate from a position of power and make them your friends.
Then you should be a big fan of the Israeli approach. It's just taking a while to make their enemies friends.
But the fact is - you can't unwind all these transactions
That's a fundamentally broken way of looking at it. Consider a different sort of activity, murder. One can't "unwind" a murder". Do we say, "Golly, nothing we do can bring back the victim, so we'll just not do anything." Well, I can't rule out that there's someone out there who is that damaged in the head, but most of us realize that if you don't disincentivize murder in some way, then you're going to get a lot more murders as people figure out how to profit from the situation.
But as it turns out, we can do better than unwinding a zillion transactions. Figure out how much the defendant profited from the deception in question, and then force the defendant to pay oh, triple that amount, adjusted for inflation.
There's a vast difference between selling goods that are used in a voluntary activity that happens to shorten your life a little and having someone kill you directly or by taking away something you really need (like food).
To you, not to the dying men.
Only to someone trying to pollute the debate. I don't know who in the world got the cute idea to equate mass murder like the Holocaust with the entirely voluntary activity of smoking, but it's folly.
In any sort of society, such as a democracy, where people are free to act on their impulses, they will frequently choose to do things that will lead to an early death. To then claim that the businesses which profit from these choices are somehow equivalent to a Joseph Stalin or Genghis Khan, means either that one doesn't really care about the vilest crimes of history (perhaps with some sort of regulation attached - so Genghis Khan could properly lay waste to the heart of the Middle East, but only if he filled out the right paperwork), or that one is implicitly advocating Nuremberg trials for anyone who offers a service which shortens enough lifespans, such as, for example, hospitals (mistakes which are serious enough to cause serious medical harm and perhaps shorten peoples' lives happen somewhere around tens to hundreds of thousands of times a year) or road builders (tens of thousands of people die on roads every year).
And for the final absurdity, the US government gets excise taxes on every cigarette legally sold in the US. So that's an unusually large and powerful group profiting from the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people each year and yes, it happens to be a government.
I'm not sure which forums you are referring to, but the highest forum in the United States legal system considers corporations to be "people".
And I've already noted that it is a "legal fiction". Courts treat corporations for certain purposes like people in order for certain things to happen or be recognized.
For example, if a corporation fails to honor a contract with me, what is my redress? The courts choose in that specific case to treat corporations just as if they were people in a contract, which was a more or less solved problem. Because a corporation is treated like a person for the purposes of contracts, it gives me a target which I can sue in US (and other) court systems.
As I said, courts don't treat corporations as people, but rather like people for limited situations. For example, corporations don't get to vote; they can't occupy an elected position; and they can't be drafted to serve in the military or on a jury.
That's funny. And the Sozialistengesetze which accompanied the welfare reforms were also "an early win for socialists?" Your casuistry, I'm afraid, won't wash with people familiar with the actual history. You seem to be re-inscribing the misconception that the modern welfare state is socialist, whereas it is in fact a weapon designed originally to defeat socialism.
All the people "familiar" with the "actual" history all seem to have an agenda. I merely pointed out, correctly of course, that it was a win for socialism even when coupled with the anti-socialism laws you mention.
Bismarck, as typical of successful statemen in authoritarian regimes, was fond of the carrot and stick approach. The carrot was the welfare programs alluded to earlier and the stick was the various laws against socialist political parties (which glancing through Wikipedia, didn't actually appear to work either).
Self-defence, as a defence to murder, will only fly in the face of "pressure" from that attacker. This does not make the attacker's death an "early win."
Not all analogies work. In this one, there is no partial granting of that which the murderer seeks. You don't stab yourself a couple of times in recognition of the murderer's desires and then threaten to shoot him, if he tries to stab you any more times than that.
Further, I don't understand the point of trying to claim that the "welfare state" somehow didn't originate with socialism. Everyone in this thread seems to be claiming that Bismarck's case was implemented to placate potential followers of socialism. And it's in every socialist government now to varying degree.
A "win" for revolutionary socialists is a population so impoverished relative to the owning classes that they are willing to take up arms to overthrow them. Safer to throw them crumbs.
Well, last I heard, there were other sorts of socialists than the "revolutionary socialist". And while I don't appreciate the socialism ideology, it does appear that the non-revolutionary sort of socialism does seem to be a lot more successful.