Whose "security" is really threatened by Iran having the nuclear trump card? When was the last time Iran ever invaded or bullied around a nation, like the United States does regularly?
Everyone within about 1,000 km of them. And I think it's pretty naive to assume that their behavior won't change with the ownership of deployable and fairly reliable nuclear weapons.
Where do they get the idea that pandering to the people who are going to vote for them anyway is somehow going to sway an election?
Because those people aren't guaranteed to vote for you. The people who slobber over MPG dictates can vote for the Green party candidate or not vote at all! You have to at least make appearances in order to attract their vote.
Interesting how you call it "no place" when actually, the deux ex machina can happen anywhere and any time. This is one of the fundamental flaws of any reality-based philosophy. Namely, that they are by necessity incomplete.
I'm looking at what I think are likely outcomes, not worst possible outcomes. As I see it, there are much worse possible outcomes than what I mentioned.
Try comparing the best to the best and worst to the worst and see what it looks like.
You mean try some sort of twisted cost/benefits analysis? Best situation in the heavily regulated case is that we have a comfort and somewhat competent mediocrity versus a more ambitious, creative and fluid society with the less regulated one. Worst case either way is that we killed ourselves off in some very painful and humiliating manner.
*IF* these studies were reliable, repeated and valid science, then you would possibly have an argument for circumcision *in the countries where running water/cleanliness was a problem*. Does that really sound like the US to you?
Uh, yes. Don't forget STDs as well. I recall a chlamydia study which indicated the disease was inhibited considerably by male circumcision.
The modern theory of evolution simply has no place for God to stick his fingers in. There's no mechanism in it by which divine intervention could happen, and in all the data we have gathered (and there's a lot of data) there are absolutely no divine fingerprints.
There's two obvious places where you're wrong: the passing on of traits and selection.
You can't argue that a supernatural, omniscient, and omnipotent being would have even the slightest trouble pulling such a simple thing over on us. After all, we wouldn't even be able to show that the universe is older than ten minutes, much less find evidence that he drowned a population of disliked proto-ferns five hundred million years ago or tinkered with their genetics.
No, your C to Bitcoin analogy is a bit flawed. If C had a unique trait that was unique from all other computing languages that made it insulated and without consequences for virus writers (and this is impossible) than it would be a valid analogy.
So you seem to think that there was a property "unique" to Bitcoins that made them unusually conducive to fraud.
No, your C to Bitcoin analogy is a bit flawed. If C had a unique trait that was unique from all other computing languages that made it insulated and without consequences for virus writers (and this is impossible) than it would be a valid analogy.
Ok, so what's the feature that makes Bitcoin conducive to fraud? The above makes it less conducive to fraud. After all, what government isn't inherently fraudulent? For example, try doing a genuine accounting of any government's budget. The financial position of the government is invariably greatly exaggerated.
as a capitalist company, the objective is profit, but profit also leaves the company, so the company isn't really about selling/producing/achieving anything... its just about making profit. a non-profit on the other hand gets to keep its "profit" (revenue less expenses) and use it to achieve things
So does the profit making company. They usually invest a considerable fraction of their income in new infrastructure or ventures.
there are no doubt plenty of greedy wealthy people that would survive a nuclear winter and do well, but i think (and it is generalizing) that greedy people used to and dependent on a societal class structure would lack the skills and motivation for basic survival...
Compared to who? "Regular" people would have the same problem, but without the considerable wealth.
As to your comments about global disaster, I just don't think it's as common as you'd like or would have the positive benefits you think it should have. That's why I think waiting for a global disaster is an unusually unproductive thing to do.
That actually does work. One can always make a new state from the survivors of the fall of the old one. It's a pretty ugly and bloody process though. Which is why I propose government reduction rather than the destruction of society.
At this point I think it's pretty safe to say that we'll see the U.S.A. wracked by civil war before we see the demise of Goldman Sachs
One could have said the same of Lehman Brothers or Merill Lynch prior to 2008.
No national government has the will to take serious punitive action against most large companies (even when they are wantonly breaking the law) due to the nature of elections and campaign contributions. That's just here, before we get to how they just skip straight to out and out bribery in foreign jurisdictions. While they do have the capacity to; their power has been so captured by money as to render it nothing more than a ceremonial technicality.
In other words, I'm more powerful than the toll keeper, because I along with many others pay his considerable toll. I don't buy it.
"The Founders" most likely could never imagine a world where most wealth would concentrate so greatly in the hands of a few private individuals driven to use it to pursue absolute power through commerce
I already gave the premier counterexample of the British East India Company. At the time it was far more powerful than any modern business. The founders were quite aware that governments are more powerful than businesses. That hasn't changed.
So what? Take any corporation out there. It's pretty cheap to buy a larger share of that corporation than you can get from the federal government. And to get an equivalent share of the largest 5000 publicly traded companies (the components of the Wilshire 5000) as you have in the federal government, you'd only have to spend about 50k dollars.
In addition, you wouldn't inherit the US's considerable obligations (how big they are depends on your accounting method and whether the US choose to honor the obligation). For example, this guy claims, using GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) that the US has a bit over $70 trillion in accumulated obligations, debt and promised future payments. That's $200k per person roughly in obligations and increasing at a considerable rate per year.
scientists have been crying since the late 19th century, so perhaps they could be forgiven for getting a tad hysterical?
I have an alternate suggestion here. Maybe the "scientists" in question could grow up? One doesn't need maturity to do good science, but when engaging in public debate, I think maturity does provide an advantage.
Why do so many fools cling to the myth of the captured regulatory process and its resulting ills justifying the abolition of regulation?
Why cling to the myth of the excluded middle? Regulatory capture is a well known phenomenon and one painfully obvious way to avoid it is to not have the regulation in the first place. But even in situations where we desire regulation, we have reason to limit the extent of it, precisely to mitigate the effects of processes like regulatory capture.
I don't get why people think otherwise. I don't have much of a clue how much they're regulated, but I do know that they have to maintain a reserve and certain accounting standards, report transactions above a certain size (to prevent money laundering), lend to lower income brackets, and subject to intervention from the Fed, US Treasury, and state equivalents.
There's a ridiculous amount of regulation created every year. My take is that the banks and other financial institutions catch a lot of that.
We've had periods of little regulation. The results were horrific.
Sure, they were. You ignore that these periods were also times when human life was cheap. While I grant that lack of regulation can cheapen human life, the reverse is also true. We can afford the huge regulatory burden we've created, because we have substantial value in and of ourselves.
If that changes, say because the developed world duplicates the actions of the Ottoman Empire and destroys almost all of its productive enterprises through corruption and other means, then human life can become cheap again, no matter how much regulation is allegedly in place.
The "natural state of the market" does not allow you legal recourse to being shafted by a company or anyone with more power / money / manpower then you.
Sure, it does. You no longer do business with that company.
No, the prior poster (which would be you) was focusing on that word. It doesn't mean "business", "cartel", "monopoly", etc.
Where does this demented idea that govt is the cause of these problems?
From the very beginning of the US. The founders were quite aware of the dangers of overly strong governments, having not just dealt with England, but often having fled many other such governments. They were also quite aware of the power a business could wield. Keep in mind that the machinations of the British East India Company was one of the spurs for the US's Revolutionary War (a tea tax favoring the company's tea trade spurred the "Boston Tea Party", a notable step towards open rebellion).
So given that, why did they spend so much effort in writing the Constitution, developing the complex checks and balances of the US government when businesses are so bad? It's because the founders weren't fucking idiots. They knew that the power of a government-based tyranny was far stronger than that of a business. After all, you can always throw the tea overboard. A government isn't so easily dealt with.
Sorry, when I assess a form of government's goodness, I'm not judging by how long it lasted.
You probably should have said something other than:
Mon/olig/etc-archies of various kinds have been tried. Sometimes they work well, for a time. Democracy seems to do better on average, over the long run.
If democracy doesn't actually last over the long term, then what's the point of attribute long term success to it?
We're talking about regulating industries so if you take the power away from the government (which IS the people) then you give it to the corporations.
False dichotomy. It's quite easy, for example, to take power from both citizens and businesses. That is happening in the US.
I'd much rather an entity that represents me, in a collective sense, be in charge than a corporation.
Obama triangulated to center the moment he secured the Democratic Party nomination. That included backing out of his promises about FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. That is the moment I turned away from him. To abandon a promise so quickly and casually, indicated to me that he had few principles.
certainly, but what better strucutred approach is there? as soon as any kind of formal "organization" forms, in our current economic and political environment, motivations turn toward financing... i have one idea but i don't know who could make it work; a non-profit organization set up with the ultimate goal of establishing a huge space station at lagrange point L1 could possibly work if it was funded by an ever increasing number of subsidiaries run like profitable enterprises in all industries, supported by mass-marketing to leverage consumer sentiment (of course price must be competitive also, but without any need for a profit margin that should be possible)
The profit motive provides a fine focus. You don't need to overthink it. We have things of value in space. The catch is that they currently cost too much to access and retrieve. There's no reason to expect that to always be the case with modern technology development.
Wouldn't it be a whole lot healthier to develop a belief system that doesn't require global disaster in order to be validated?
healthier maybe, but unlikely... believing in something doesn't make it so
Physician, heal thyself. After all, believing in something doesn't make it so.
You do realize that minerals exist off of Earth? And that minerals from Mars would sell just as well as minerals from Earth would. Frankly, I think a driver for space mining will be Earth-side regulation.
not sure what you were getting at here... i was referring to minerals on mars that would be rare on earth, and such mineral is likely something that doesn't have widespread use yet or there would already be extra-terrestrial mining operations
Well, rare earths aren't for the most part rare on Earth. Yet China has obtained a near monopoly on a good portion of them due in large part to its disregard for pollution.
a fallacy of the greedy class to be sure... unfortunately for them they have no idea how much they rely not only on the people class, but on society in general... in fact the whole class system depends on society.
Ok, so basically you're saying that a global disaster would wipe out the parasitic greedy class because it would at the least, lose enough of its hosts that they couldn't keep going. Guess I can't see anything wrong with that idea, except that such a parasite can survive on a lot fewer hosts.
so what if the value of every currency in the world plummeted to zero (except for paper money being a useful fire fuel)? a: wealthy people wouldn't be wealthy because there would be nothing they could get with their useless financial wealth
Well, there are other forms of wealth such as knowledge, resources, and relationships. Frankly, it wouldn't be that hard to create a feudal estate. In this alleged fall of society, the rich person (especially, if they had some warning or planning) could bring their most trusted employees plus hire a number of competent military personnel.
I imagine that building a comfortable and secure fortress would earn you a lot of lifelong goodwill from your fellow well-fed survivors. Transitioning from greedy businessperson to feudal lord in some isolated location isn't an easy transition, but I bet it's a lot more achievable than people trying to survive in a big city which lost its food supply.
Slashdot Mirror
Whose "security" is really threatened by Iran having the nuclear trump card? When was the last time Iran ever invaded or bullied around a nation, like the United States does regularly?
Everyone within about 1,000 km of them. And I think it's pretty naive to assume that their behavior won't change with the ownership of deployable and fairly reliable nuclear weapons.
Where do they get the idea that pandering to the people who are going to vote for them anyway is somehow going to sway an election?
Because those people aren't guaranteed to vote for you. The people who slobber over MPG dictates can vote for the Green party candidate or not vote at all! You have to at least make appearances in order to attract their vote.
Sad but true -- corporate personhood was invented to deal with issues of standing in federal court. So, to that extent we are peers to corporations.
In other words, we're not peers to corporations because corporations are not recognized as people except in limited circumstances.
Interesting how you call it "no place" when actually, the deux ex machina can happen anywhere and any time. This is one of the fundamental flaws of any reality-based philosophy. Namely, that they are by necessity incomplete.
Try comparing the best to the best and worst to the worst and see what it looks like.
You mean try some sort of twisted cost/benefits analysis? Best situation in the heavily regulated case is that we have a comfort and somewhat competent mediocrity versus a more ambitious, creative and fluid society with the less regulated one. Worst case either way is that we killed ourselves off in some very painful and humiliating manner.
*IF* these studies were reliable, repeated and valid science, then you would possibly have an argument for circumcision *in the countries where running water/cleanliness was a problem*. Does that really sound like the US to you?
Uh, yes. Don't forget STDs as well. I recall a chlamydia study which indicated the disease was inhibited considerably by male circumcision.
The modern theory of evolution simply has no place for God to stick his fingers in. There's no mechanism in it by which divine intervention could happen, and in all the data we have gathered (and there's a lot of data) there are absolutely no divine fingerprints.
There's two obvious places where you're wrong: the passing on of traits and selection.
You can't argue that a supernatural, omniscient, and omnipotent being would have even the slightest trouble pulling such a simple thing over on us. After all, we wouldn't even be able to show that the universe is older than ten minutes, much less find evidence that he drowned a population of disliked proto-ferns five hundred million years ago or tinkered with their genetics.
When it is also combined with medically valid reasons, then yes, it does matter.
No, your C to Bitcoin analogy is a bit flawed. If C had a unique trait that was unique from all other computing languages that made it insulated and without consequences for virus writers (and this is impossible) than it would be a valid analogy.
So you seem to think that there was a property "unique" to Bitcoins that made them unusually conducive to fraud.
No, your C to Bitcoin analogy is a bit flawed. If C had a unique trait that was unique from all other computing languages that made it insulated and without consequences for virus writers (and this is impossible) than it would be a valid analogy.
Ok, so what's the feature that makes Bitcoin conducive to fraud? The above makes it less conducive to fraud. After all, what government isn't inherently fraudulent? For example, try doing a genuine accounting of any government's budget. The financial position of the government is invariably greatly exaggerated.
"getting sumthin for nuthin" is exactly what intrest is.
So how did you manage to get interest without a deposit?
as a capitalist company, the objective is profit, but profit also leaves the company, so the company isn't really about selling/producing/achieving anything... its just about making profit. a non-profit on the other hand gets to keep its "profit" (revenue less expenses) and use it to achieve things
So does the profit making company. They usually invest a considerable fraction of their income in new infrastructure or ventures.
there are no doubt plenty of greedy wealthy people that would survive a nuclear winter and do well, but i think (and it is generalizing) that greedy people used to and dependent on a societal class structure would lack the skills and motivation for basic survival...
Compared to who? "Regular" people would have the same problem, but without the considerable wealth.
As to your comments about global disaster, I just don't think it's as common as you'd like or would have the positive benefits you think it should have. That's why I think waiting for a global disaster is an unusually unproductive thing to do.
so you destroy the parasites by killing the host
That actually does work. One can always make a new state from the survivors of the fall of the old one. It's a pretty ugly and bloody process though. Which is why I propose government reduction rather than the destruction of society.
At this point I think it's pretty safe to say that we'll see the U.S.A. wracked by civil war before we see the demise of Goldman Sachs
One could have said the same of Lehman Brothers or Merill Lynch prior to 2008.
No national government has the will to take serious punitive action against most large companies (even when they are wantonly breaking the law) due to the nature of elections and campaign contributions. That's just here, before we get to how they just skip straight to out and out bribery in foreign jurisdictions. While they do have the capacity to; their power has been so captured by money as to render it nothing more than a ceremonial technicality.
In other words, I'm more powerful than the toll keeper, because I along with many others pay his considerable toll. I don't buy it.
"The Founders" most likely could never imagine a world where most wealth would concentrate so greatly in the hands of a few private individuals driven to use it to pursue absolute power through commerce
I already gave the premier counterexample of the British East India Company. At the time it was far more powerful than any modern business. The founders were quite aware that governments are more powerful than businesses. That hasn't changed.
So what? Take any corporation out there. It's pretty cheap to buy a larger share of that corporation than you can get from the federal government. And to get an equivalent share of the largest 5000 publicly traded companies (the components of the Wilshire 5000) as you have in the federal government, you'd only have to spend about 50k dollars.
In addition, you wouldn't inherit the US's considerable obligations (how big they are depends on your accounting method and whether the US choose to honor the obligation). For example, this guy claims, using GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) that the US has a bit over $70 trillion in accumulated obligations, debt and promised future payments. That's $200k per person roughly in obligations and increasing at a considerable rate per year.
I am aware of the phenomenon. But it's a bit more infrequent to abandon promises you made a few weeks earlier as part of that shift to center.
scientists have been crying since the late 19th century, so perhaps they could be forgiven for getting a tad hysterical?
I have an alternate suggestion here. Maybe the "scientists" in question could grow up? One doesn't need maturity to do good science, but when engaging in public debate, I think maturity does provide an advantage.
Why do so many fools cling to the myth of the captured regulatory process and its resulting ills justifying the abolition of regulation?
Why cling to the myth of the excluded middle? Regulatory capture is a well known phenomenon and one painfully obvious way to avoid it is to not have the regulation in the first place. But even in situations where we desire regulation, we have reason to limit the extent of it, precisely to mitigate the effects of processes like regulatory capture.
I don't get why people think otherwise. I don't have much of a clue how much they're regulated, but I do know that they have to maintain a reserve and certain accounting standards, report transactions above a certain size (to prevent money laundering), lend to lower income brackets, and subject to intervention from the Fed, US Treasury, and state equivalents.
There's a ridiculous amount of regulation created every year. My take is that the banks and other financial institutions catch a lot of that.
We've had periods of little regulation. The results were horrific.
Sure, they were. You ignore that these periods were also times when human life was cheap. While I grant that lack of regulation can cheapen human life, the reverse is also true. We can afford the huge regulatory burden we've created, because we have substantial value in and of ourselves.
If that changes, say because the developed world duplicates the actions of the Ottoman Empire and destroys almost all of its productive enterprises through corruption and other means, then human life can become cheap again, no matter how much regulation is allegedly in place.
The "natural state of the market" does not allow you legal recourse to being shafted by a company or anyone with more power / money / manpower then you.
Sure, it does. You no longer do business with that company.
You're focusing on the word corporation.
No, the prior poster (which would be you) was focusing on that word. It doesn't mean "business", "cartel", "monopoly", etc.
Where does this demented idea that govt is the cause of these problems?
From the very beginning of the US. The founders were quite aware of the dangers of overly strong governments, having not just dealt with England, but often having fled many other such governments. They were also quite aware of the power a business could wield. Keep in mind that the machinations of the British East India Company was one of the spurs for the US's Revolutionary War (a tea tax favoring the company's tea trade spurred the "Boston Tea Party", a notable step towards open rebellion).
So given that, why did they spend so much effort in writing the Constitution, developing the complex checks and balances of the US government when businesses are so bad? It's because the founders weren't fucking idiots. They knew that the power of a government-based tyranny was far stronger than that of a business. After all, you can always throw the tea overboard. A government isn't so easily dealt with.
Sorry, when I assess a form of government's goodness, I'm not judging by how long it lasted.
You probably should have said something other than:
Mon/olig/etc-archies of various kinds have been tried. Sometimes they work well, for a time. Democracy seems to do better on average, over the long run.
If democracy doesn't actually last over the long term, then what's the point of attribute long term success to it?
We're talking about regulating industries so if you take the power away from the government (which IS the people) then you give it to the corporations.
False dichotomy. It's quite easy, for example, to take power from both citizens and businesses. That is happening in the US.
I'd much rather an entity that represents me, in a collective sense, be in charge than a corporation.
A government is just another corporation.
When things get too out of balance the Earth tends to get rid of the thing causing the imbalance.
Does it hurt when you try to think? Maybe some aspirin would help?
That's why we should take warning signs seriously.
What warning sign? The "sky is falling" hysteria is getting a bit old.
Obama triangulated to center the moment he secured the Democratic Party nomination. That included backing out of his promises about FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. That is the moment I turned away from him. To abandon a promise so quickly and casually, indicated to me that he had few principles.
certainly, but what better strucutred approach is there? as soon as any kind of formal "organization" forms, in our current economic and political environment, motivations turn toward financing... i have one idea but i don't know who could make it work; a non-profit organization set up with the ultimate goal of establishing a huge space station at lagrange point L1 could possibly work if it was funded by an ever increasing number of subsidiaries run like profitable enterprises in all industries, supported by mass-marketing to leverage consumer sentiment (of course price must be competitive also, but without any need for a profit margin that should be possible)
The profit motive provides a fine focus. You don't need to overthink it. We have things of value in space. The catch is that they currently cost too much to access and retrieve. There's no reason to expect that to always be the case with modern technology development.
Wouldn't it be a whole lot healthier to develop a belief system that doesn't require global disaster in order to be validated?
healthier maybe, but unlikely... believing in something doesn't make it so
Physician, heal thyself. After all, believing in something doesn't make it so.
You do realize that minerals exist off of Earth? And that minerals from Mars would sell just as well as minerals from Earth would. Frankly, I think a driver for space mining will be Earth-side regulation.
not sure what you were getting at here... i was referring to minerals on mars that would be rare on earth, and such mineral is likely something that doesn't have widespread use yet or there would already be extra-terrestrial mining operations
Well, rare earths aren't for the most part rare on Earth. Yet China has obtained a near monopoly on a good portion of them due in large part to its disregard for pollution.
a fallacy of the greedy class to be sure... unfortunately for them they have no idea how much they rely not only on the people class, but on society in general... in fact the whole class system depends on society.
Ok, so basically you're saying that a global disaster would wipe out the parasitic greedy class because it would at the least, lose enough of its hosts that they couldn't keep going. Guess I can't see anything wrong with that idea, except that such a parasite can survive on a lot fewer hosts.
so what if the value of every currency in the world plummeted to zero (except for paper money being a useful fire fuel)? a: wealthy people wouldn't be wealthy because there would be nothing they could get with their useless financial wealth
Well, there are other forms of wealth such as knowledge, resources, and relationships. Frankly, it wouldn't be that hard to create a feudal estate. In this alleged fall of society, the rich person (especially, if they had some warning or planning) could bring their most trusted employees plus hire a number of competent military personnel.
I imagine that building a comfortable and secure fortress would earn you a lot of lifelong goodwill from your fellow well-fed survivors. Transitioning from greedy businessperson to feudal lord in some isolated location isn't an easy transition, but I bet it's a lot more achievable than people trying to survive in a big city which lost its food supply.