What you are complaining about here is just one other fellow editor being a prick.
No offense, but the editor is in the right. A person is not a source by Wikipedia standards nor should they be. How do you link to a person? Where's the more or less permanent reference to that person's claims? The problem was solved by the author writing something down in a reliable place and hence, creating a source.
Anyway, the point is that they limit the number of cabs in order to keep rates high enough that drivers can make a living wage
Sure, they do. I guess nobody in charge of such things recognizes that making taxis more expensive has the unintended consequence of raising the cost of living, thus, increasing the minimum so-called "living wage". Hurting millions of people so that a few can profit considerably is SOP.
And then when New York's streets are chocked cabs and congestion sucks
You probably just described New York City for the past two hundred years. While I admire someone who can actually find a problem and recognize it is a problem, who seriously believes that rigging the cab market so that it is deliberately overpriced and uncompetitive is in any way solving congestion?
I have not recently met a climate scientist who put a rifle to my head and demanded a AGW loyalty oath
And you probably haven't had a minister, rabbi, guru, or imam do that to you either. That's not how it's done. Instead, it's done by story.
I'm constantly reminded in the popular press that AGW has "detractors," and many of these detractors are billionaires who shape the public discourse with media, entertainment, endowments to scholarly institutions and overt political campaigns.
"Reminded" by whom? This is an example of a story. The antagonists of the story are "detractors" particularly "billionaires".
Let us recall a rival story. A story where tens of billions of dollars of public funds are waiting to be spent on global warming or whatever the flavor of the year environmental disaster is. All that they need is backup from climatologists to make that happen. Can that much money completely corrupt the field? I think so.
But AGW and the HIV-AIDS hypothesis are not examples of coercive religious doublethink.
Says you. You apparently have never been accused of betraying the human race merely because you have the wrong opinion on AGW. Or had to deal with hysterical people convinced that the very lives of their grandchildren are threatened by AGW (even though according to the studies that they cite, the effects of AGW take a long time to manifest). Or reason with people convinced that a one or two meter rise in sea level some how will be the death knell of humanity.
All the worst aspects of religion rear their ugly heads in AGW, the hysteria that the world is coming to an end, original sin (here, referring to industrial civilization), and of course, the need to force other people to do the righteous thing even if well, it isn't.
This legislation has very valid reasons to exist, it prevents money laundering.
Yet another reason to deep six that legislation. The Finnish government could just tax stuff, like property, that can't run off and hide in another country. Taxing cash flow is very tempting for obvious reasons, but like so many other usually well-intended efforts, it requires intrusive government monitoring in order to work.
Now, I recognize Finland isn't ever going libertarian and most of their citizens aren't going to care in the least about my observation above. But they really need to recognize bad unintended consequences when they happen. Here is a novel method for funding entrepreneurs and it's being strangled, at least in Finland, by bureaucrats.
You're free to disagree, but you're wrong here. Let us not forget the most important election of that period when the Nazi party received a large voting block in the Reichstag parliament under the Wiemar Republic in late 1932. As I noted, somewhere around 100 million people died (including a lot of brains splattered) due to poor choices made by the electorate of several countries.
There's also cases like the elections of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1970 and Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1951 where the election led to a significant body count a few years down the road.
If one goes far back in history, there's a notable example during the Peloponnesian War where Athens initiated war on Syracuse via democratic vote. When Athens lost its entire siege army a few years later at Syracuse, that led eventually to Athens's defeat.
So there's a number of counterexamples out there, if one looks for them. You can continue to insist for some reason that they aren't counterexamples, but what's the point?
Gingrich, Santorum, and Paul were still kicking by the time of the primaries. And how does that compare to the Democrat side which never had any action in the first place. It just backed the incumbent.
Much like Laffer curve, it has a peak somewhere between strong and weak.
It depends on what you are trying to optimize.
With overly weak regulation, you pretty much inevitably end up with large companies monopolizing whole markets and becoming nearly impossible to unseat without direct interference - mid-to-late 19th century USA is a classic example of that.
Actually it isn't. The monopolies of that time tended to be temporary things, unless they had government backing. Even Standard Oil, which is considered the most famous example of a monopoly, was getting its lunch eaten by the time it was broken up (it had rapidly lost market share in the years leading to its breakup).
And a lot of those markets didn't have monopolies. One hears about the monopolies in rail or oil, but not in groceries, ocean-based shipping, or mail order retail, because there weren't any in those.
The point here is that there's a lot of ranting about the evils of low regulation, but when are we going to hear about the evils of too much regulation?
For example, there's an insane amount of legislative law and regulation being added each year in the US. It's probably at the point that a reasonable person could not read all the law and regulation, simply because that person couldn't actually keep up with the creation of new law and regulation.
If the rate at which new regulation is added continues to increase, then it won't be long until industries become impossible to regulate simply because neither the industry nor the regulators can understand, much less comply with, the law and regulation that has been created.
Also, it's worth remembering who can be providing the regulation. It's a fairly common assumption that only governments regulate. But private markets can and do provide their own regulation.
How exactly would that work?
Why not look at real world examples like the stock markets. For example, the NYSE has listing standards that have to be met in order to be listed as a stock on the NYSE.
For example, a requirement of being listed on the NYSE is that one follows commonly accepted procedures for releasing "material information", that is, things that are thought likely to change the price of the stock.
Note the use of the conditional, "IF". Plus, the point was to point out that even in the best possible case, not the real world case, the president would have been an asshole, because that's the job.
It was highly contagious through airborne transmission,
Actually, smallpox requires contact with infectious skin flakes or direct skin to skin contact. So technically, it can be transmitted by skin flakes in air, but I wouldn't consider it highly contagious via that route.
It's worth noting that the US Presidency isn't one of those jobs where your nice side shines forth. Even if you're doing it in a way that most people would consider right, you'll still be a) routinely putting the interests of your 350 million citizens ahead of the other 6.7 or so billion humans on the planet, and b) occasionally committing pretty ruthless acts like killing people.
indeed, strong regulation is necessary to maintain the market free in that sense.
What is "strong" and "weak" in this case. In my experience, "strong" regulation correlates with a less free market. The reason is that compliance with all that regulation creates barriers to entry to who can enter and use the market.
The degree of regulation needed to have a market in the first place depends on how much structure the market requires. For example, a market trading electricity futures will require all sorts of infrastructure and regulation for both handling electricity, modest insurance that market activity doesn't cause electricity service disruptions, and providing some degree of guarantee that the traders on the market can support their futures positions. A market trading baseball cards just doesn't need much of anything for regulation aside possibly from some laws against fraud.
Also, it's worth remembering who can be providing the regulation. It's a fairly common assumption that only governments regulate. But private markets can and do provide their own regulation. Among other things, this creates competition among regulators which can help generate better regulation.
If you are imposing a community structure from the top down, the top also has to implement the feedback mechanisms to keep people honest.
And there's a flaw. What keeps the "top" honest in that case? The bottom-up mechanisms are more useful for pretty much the reasons you state, because they get used successfully on a small scale first.
However, I'll note that the system and often does change without intent, sometimes without people being aware of the changes. For example, I doubt anyone, particularly anyone in a leadership role, had an inkling of how birth control pills would change society.
Do you really believe that groups of people, regardless of their level of psychological commitment to any idea, are capable of convincing literally thousands of people in their own profession, aligned professions and knowledgeable bystanders to simply ignore facts and evidence, and to promulgate, knowingly, wrong information, proudly, authoritatively, and consistently without error.
No, the real question is how could you have believed otherwise? As has already been noted, religions of the world are great examples of the above in action. One just needs to learn a little history. There's a lot of such examples of human nature throughout history for people willing to pay attention.
Because no one gets killed when you misuse your right to vote?
The most excellent counterexamples were the democratically elected governments of England and France in the 30s. Because people had been misusing their votes for a while, the governments were cowardly and ineffective in the face of an existential threat, the growing power of the totalitarian states.
France, for example, was in a position to end the Second World War in 1936, by evicting Nazi Germany from the Rhineland after the latter moved troops in. They didn't and as a result somewhere around 100 million people died. I doubt deaths from non-military gun use in all the world over the entire history of the gun would add up to that figure.
Normally, the vote is rather insignificant. But one shouldn't ignore that there are actually times when voting is very important and can save a lot of lives. Frankly, I think now is such an occasion.
It's not my problem. I'm not the one arguing with you over workers or greed or whatever.
No one said it was. But a problem can be a problem, even if it isn't your problem.
Considering he has said he's going to stop talking to you, I don't think you succeeded even in your intended purpose. To him, you probably no longer exist, so in his mind, his opinion has universal agreement. He'll probably come up with solutions based on only his limited view of the world, but he'll try to ram it through because he has convinced himself he has universal agreement.
He might even stop talking to me. But having to engage those coping mechanisms means I did reach him. And that's ok for a drive by internet argument.
You should have noticed that I had already mentioned them as examples.
All you are saying is that you believe some politicians are lying about being religious with no evidence given one way or the other.
Well, there's also their actions. They show up in church occasionally, but there's not the fervent demonstration of religious faith that George W. Bush showed.
One of the many large hurdles with life spontaneously generating lies with amino acids, in order to from protein they all need to be left handed and only 6% right handed can be present for a protein to form. The problem is that when amino acids are generated in nature you end up with equal number of left and right handed ones. There is no known natural way separate the left and right handed amino acids to get the concentration of left to 94%, currently the best natural separation method allows for a 68% left handed, these concentrations were found on a meteorite but no proteins were found.
There's no reason to expect early organisms to have the same restrictions on chirality that modern ones do. Nor reason to expect modern organisms to have the same versatility that ancient ones might and probably did have.
There's an problem here. Why would a better opponent disagree? They might present a more nuanced view than I did, but fundamentally they'd agree on the problem, that there are many, many people in the world willing to do work for much less than I can be legally paid to do so. At that point, it becomes a matter of debating the relative effectiveness of potential solutions.
As I see it, the same groups that confuse self-interest with worker rights are also naturally weak on debating skills. To argue that it is morally right to give additional benefits to workers, merely because that's what you want, is inherently a weak debating stand.
It doesn't help that the one you replied the most to is the guy who you deemed a "labeler" with a "simplistic view" of the world. You spent more time picking on weaker opponents instead of aspiring for more. It makes you look... small.
Was the observation incorrect? No, it wasn't. And my purpose with this effort is not to look "big" to you.
Instead, it was to make the other poster aware that he doesn't have an opinion with universal agreement. He coped mentally with the conflict by placing me in a category, but that's a good first step towards greater understanding of the issue. I'm pleased with the outcome.
Because obviously, one has to be an adherent of Ayn Rand in order to worry about whether developed world workers are demanding too much for the value they provide.
One merely needs to look at the propaganda of religion to see this. For example, the Christian song, "Rock of Ages" emphasizes the security and unchanging nature of God compared to human works. Similar claims of security or unwavering purpose appear in every other major religion.
Slashdot Mirror
What you are complaining about here is just one other fellow editor being a prick.
No offense, but the editor is in the right. A person is not a source by Wikipedia standards nor should they be. How do you link to a person? Where's the more or less permanent reference to that person's claims? The problem was solved by the author writing something down in a reliable place and hence, creating a source.
Anyway, the point is that they limit the number of cabs in order to keep rates high enough that drivers can make a living wage
Sure, they do. I guess nobody in charge of such things recognizes that making taxis more expensive has the unintended consequence of raising the cost of living, thus, increasing the minimum so-called "living wage". Hurting millions of people so that a few can profit considerably is SOP.
And then when New York's streets are chocked cabs and congestion sucks
You probably just described New York City for the past two hundred years. While I admire someone who can actually find a problem and recognize it is a problem, who seriously believes that rigging the cab market so that it is deliberately overpriced and uncompetitive is in any way solving congestion?
There was something to see here. A pointless argument.
What fucking Wikipedia corporation? There's a Wikimedia foundation, a non-profit.
There's the corporation. It doesn't have to be profit-oriented in order to be a corporation.
I have not recently met a climate scientist who put a rifle to my head and demanded a AGW loyalty oath
And you probably haven't had a minister, rabbi, guru, or imam do that to you either. That's not how it's done. Instead, it's done by story.
I'm constantly reminded in the popular press that AGW has "detractors," and many of these detractors are billionaires who shape the public discourse with media, entertainment, endowments to scholarly institutions and overt political campaigns.
"Reminded" by whom? This is an example of a story. The antagonists of the story are "detractors" particularly "billionaires".
Let us recall a rival story. A story where tens of billions of dollars of public funds are waiting to be spent on global warming or whatever the flavor of the year environmental disaster is. All that they need is backup from climatologists to make that happen. Can that much money completely corrupt the field? I think so.
But AGW and the HIV-AIDS hypothesis are not examples of coercive religious doublethink.
Says you. You apparently have never been accused of betraying the human race merely because you have the wrong opinion on AGW. Or had to deal with hysterical people convinced that the very lives of their grandchildren are threatened by AGW (even though according to the studies that they cite, the effects of AGW take a long time to manifest). Or reason with people convinced that a one or two meter rise in sea level some how will be the death knell of humanity.
All the worst aspects of religion rear their ugly heads in AGW, the hysteria that the world is coming to an end, original sin (here, referring to industrial civilization), and of course, the need to force other people to do the righteous thing even if well, it isn't.
This legislation has very valid reasons to exist, it prevents money laundering.
Yet another reason to deep six that legislation. The Finnish government could just tax stuff, like property, that can't run off and hide in another country. Taxing cash flow is very tempting for obvious reasons, but like so many other usually well-intended efforts, it requires intrusive government monitoring in order to work.
Now, I recognize Finland isn't ever going libertarian and most of their citizens aren't going to care in the least about my observation above. But they really need to recognize bad unintended consequences when they happen. Here is a novel method for funding entrepreneurs and it's being strangled, at least in Finland, by bureaucrats.
{{Citation Needed}}
A counterexample has yet to be provided
You're free to disagree, but you're wrong here. Let us not forget the most important election of that period when the Nazi party received a large voting block in the Reichstag parliament under the Wiemar Republic in late 1932. As I noted, somewhere around 100 million people died (including a lot of brains splattered) due to poor choices made by the electorate of several countries.
There's also cases like the elections of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1970 and Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1951 where the election led to a significant body count a few years down the road.
If one goes far back in history, there's a notable example during the Peloponnesian War where Athens initiated war on Syracuse via democratic vote. When Athens lost its entire siege army a few years later at Syracuse, that led eventually to Athens's defeat.
So there's a number of counterexamples out there, if one looks for them. You can continue to insist for some reason that they aren't counterexamples, but what's the point?
Gingrich, Santorum, and Paul were still kicking by the time of the primaries. And how does that compare to the Democrat side which never had any action in the first place. It just backed the incumbent.
Much like Laffer curve, it has a peak somewhere between strong and weak.
It depends on what you are trying to optimize.
With overly weak regulation, you pretty much inevitably end up with large companies monopolizing whole markets and becoming nearly impossible to unseat without direct interference - mid-to-late 19th century USA is a classic example of that.
Actually it isn't. The monopolies of that time tended to be temporary things, unless they had government backing. Even Standard Oil, which is considered the most famous example of a monopoly, was getting its lunch eaten by the time it was broken up (it had rapidly lost market share in the years leading to its breakup).
And a lot of those markets didn't have monopolies. One hears about the monopolies in rail or oil, but not in groceries, ocean-based shipping, or mail order retail, because there weren't any in those.
The point here is that there's a lot of ranting about the evils of low regulation, but when are we going to hear about the evils of too much regulation?
For example, there's an insane amount of legislative law and regulation being added each year in the US. It's probably at the point that a reasonable person could not read all the law and regulation, simply because that person couldn't actually keep up with the creation of new law and regulation.
If the rate at which new regulation is added continues to increase, then it won't be long until industries become impossible to regulate simply because neither the industry nor the regulators can understand, much less comply with, the law and regulation that has been created.
Also, it's worth remembering who can be providing the regulation. It's a fairly common assumption that only governments regulate. But private markets can and do provide their own regulation.
How exactly would that work?
Why not look at real world examples like the stock markets. For example, the NYSE has listing standards that have to be met in order to be listed as a stock on the NYSE.
For example, a requirement of being listed on the NYSE is that one follows commonly accepted procedures for releasing "material information", that is, things that are thought likely to change the price of the stock.
Note the use of the conditional, "IF". Plus, the point was to point out that even in the best possible case, not the real world case, the president would have been an asshole, because that's the job.
It was highly contagious through airborne transmission,
Actually, smallpox requires contact with infectious skin flakes or direct skin to skin contact. So technically, it can be transmitted by skin flakes in air, but I wouldn't consider it highly contagious via that route.
It's worth noting that the US Presidency isn't one of those jobs where your nice side shines forth. Even if you're doing it in a way that most people would consider right, you'll still be a) routinely putting the interests of your 350 million citizens ahead of the other 6.7 or so billion humans on the planet, and b) occasionally committing pretty ruthless acts like killing people.
indeed, strong regulation is necessary to maintain the market free in that sense.
What is "strong" and "weak" in this case. In my experience, "strong" regulation correlates with a less free market. The reason is that compliance with all that regulation creates barriers to entry to who can enter and use the market.
The degree of regulation needed to have a market in the first place depends on how much structure the market requires. For example, a market trading electricity futures will require all sorts of infrastructure and regulation for both handling electricity, modest insurance that market activity doesn't cause electricity service disruptions, and providing some degree of guarantee that the traders on the market can support their futures positions. A market trading baseball cards just doesn't need much of anything for regulation aside possibly from some laws against fraud.
Also, it's worth remembering who can be providing the regulation. It's a fairly common assumption that only governments regulate. But private markets can and do provide their own regulation. Among other things, this creates competition among regulators which can help generate better regulation.
If you are imposing a community structure from the top down, the top also has to implement the feedback mechanisms to keep people honest.
And there's a flaw. What keeps the "top" honest in that case? The bottom-up mechanisms are more useful for pretty much the reasons you state, because they get used successfully on a small scale first.
However, I'll note that the system and often does change without intent, sometimes without people being aware of the changes. For example, I doubt anyone, particularly anyone in a leadership role, had an inkling of how birth control pills would change society.
You said "religious". G. W. Bush is the only religious president since Reagan. That's one out of four.
Do you really believe that groups of people, regardless of their level of psychological commitment to any idea, are capable of convincing literally thousands of people in their own profession, aligned professions and knowledgeable bystanders to simply ignore facts and evidence, and to promulgate, knowingly, wrong information, proudly, authoritatively, and consistently without error.
No, the real question is how could you have believed otherwise? As has already been noted, religions of the world are great examples of the above in action. One just needs to learn a little history. There's a lot of such examples of human nature throughout history for people willing to pay attention.
Because no one gets killed when you misuse your right to vote?
The most excellent counterexamples were the democratically elected governments of England and France in the 30s. Because people had been misusing their votes for a while, the governments were cowardly and ineffective in the face of an existential threat, the growing power of the totalitarian states.
France, for example, was in a position to end the Second World War in 1936, by evicting Nazi Germany from the Rhineland after the latter moved troops in. They didn't and as a result somewhere around 100 million people died. I doubt deaths from non-military gun use in all the world over the entire history of the gun would add up to that figure.
Normally, the vote is rather insignificant. But one shouldn't ignore that there are actually times when voting is very important and can save a lot of lives. Frankly, I think now is such an occasion.
It's not my problem. I'm not the one arguing with you over workers or greed or whatever.
No one said it was. But a problem can be a problem, even if it isn't your problem.
Considering he has said he's going to stop talking to you, I don't think you succeeded even in your intended purpose. To him, you probably no longer exist, so in his mind, his opinion has universal agreement. He'll probably come up with solutions based on only his limited view of the world, but he'll try to ram it through because he has convinced himself he has universal agreement.
He might even stop talking to me. But having to engage those coping mechanisms means I did reach him. And that's ok for a drive by internet argument.
Ok, give a counterexample then?
George H. W. Bush,
Bill Clinton,
Barack Obama.
You should have noticed that I had already mentioned them as examples.
All you are saying is that you believe some politicians are lying about being religious with no evidence given one way or the other.
Well, there's also their actions. They show up in church occasionally, but there's not the fervent demonstration of religious faith that George W. Bush showed.
One of the many large hurdles with life spontaneously generating lies with amino acids, in order to from protein they all need to be left handed and only 6% right handed can be present for a protein to form. The problem is that when amino acids are generated in nature you end up with equal number of left and right handed ones. There is no known natural way separate the left and right handed amino acids to get the concentration of left to 94%, currently the best natural separation method allows for a 68% left handed, these concentrations were found on a meteorite but no proteins were found.
There's no reason to expect early organisms to have the same restrictions on chirality that modern ones do. Nor reason to expect modern organisms to have the same versatility that ancient ones might and probably did have.
As I see it, the same groups that confuse self-interest with worker rights are also naturally weak on debating skills. To argue that it is morally right to give additional benefits to workers, merely because that's what you want, is inherently a weak debating stand.
It doesn't help that the one you replied the most to is the guy who you deemed a "labeler" with a "simplistic view" of the world. You spent more time picking on weaker opponents instead of aspiring for more. It makes you look... small.
Was the observation incorrect? No, it wasn't. And my purpose with this effort is not to look "big" to you.
Instead, it was to make the other poster aware that he doesn't have an opinion with universal agreement. He coped mentally with the conflict by placing me in a category, but that's a good first step towards greater understanding of the issue. I'm pleased with the outcome.
Because obviously, one has to be an adherent of Ayn Rand in order to worry about whether developed world workers are demanding too much for the value they provide.
One merely needs to look at the propaganda of religion to see this. For example, the Christian song, "Rock of Ages" emphasizes the security and unchanging nature of God compared to human works. Similar claims of security or unwavering purpose appear in every other major religion.