There is no reason for profit except that it allows weaker people to be exploited,
Even if your assertion were true, that would be a very good reason in itself to have the profit motive. Exploitation is just a negative connotation label for being useful to someone else. And the existence of profit indicates an endeavor that has a positive benefit. There are still a few preconditions you need in addition before it's a net benefit to society, but this is a good start.
and no reason for unequal wages except that profit motive means that many people are employed not because they want to work but because they have to work.
Unequal wages for unequal work and ability. And I'd rather those people work than starve too.
I'd be happy to sit here as a PhD-educated mathematician making the same as a street sweeper because I love my job. In fact, I give away about 50% of my salary, and live comfortably.
Funny, I have very similar circumstances, except that I save about 50% of my salary. That reduces the likelihood that I become a burden on someone else as I see it.
But we're as far as I know the only species that hunts and kills each other for no other reason than for fun. With every other species you can point to a logical reason to kill another member of your own species, be it competition for food, mating rights, territory or even to eat the competitor.
Well, if you just killed someone for fun. they aren't competing for your food, mating rights, or territory, and you always have the option to eat them. And should you ever have to kill someone for logical reasons (which would have been a rather common thing in many cultures of the past), then you have more practice at it.
Fair enough. But we still have the problem of determining what is "better". For example, we currently are improving the living standards of almost the entire world's population at a pretty good rate, but there's a lot of people out there with the delusion that the wealthy are making everyone poorer and things are getting worse economically.
The question was: could we, or are descendants live in a perfect world.
No, the question was could we live in a perfect world? Including descendants that can be warped to an unimaginable degree, moves the goalposts. My point is that for many of the would-be utopias, you have to profoundly change the inhabitants in order for the utopia to work at all.
To me, I get the most joy out of things that I have put real effort into achieving. Imagine you where allowed to run a marathon in the Olympics, but you where the only one allowed to use a car. Yes you would win, but so what, you had a massively unfair advantage. But if you trained hard and managed to win in a fair competition, then you should rightly feel proud of your achievement.
And why couldn't you do that in the above society?
Why not? I see no reason that individuality is inseparable from being human.
I do.
Again, from the wonderful work of communism and fascism, we know that people can be detached from their individuality. Does that mean those people are, at that point, not human?
Yes.
If they are not human, would that not mean we can deny them human rights?
Remove the individuality and you already removed almost all human rights.
Going at it from another angle: how much individuality do you need to be classified as human? It's easy to say that if somebody doesn't have it, they aren't. But what if two people each have some individuality, but one has "more" individuality (however that is measured)? Would that mean the other person is "less human", and from there we can do the same thing as if he was a non-human - deny him rights?
We already have this figured out legally because there's a fair number of ways happenstance can do this via illness or injury. In the US, it can happen by being judged legally incompetent, which can happen due to mental illness or dementia. As a result, the subject loses some rights and has assigned another party to act on their behalf. Legally, they are still considered human, but they don't have rights or privileges associated with normal humans.
But to deliberately excise individuality as a normal mode of existence, is to remove a key aspect of being human. The law might still consider you human, say via the above sort of law, but I would not.
What are these hard limits you speak of? I don't know any, is there a reason we cannot evolve to be perfect. Will we ever get to a perfect world (whatever that is, I don't even have a definition of that) probably not, should we stop trying to improve our lives, just because we can't attain perfection, NO.
An obvious one is our individuality. No matter how "perfect" we become, as long as we're separate from each other in thought, then there will be conflict of interests between us.
Another is our ignorance, especially of future consequences of complex actions and systems. I think we'll get much better at it, but it will still be possible to be surprised by things not working to expectations.
As a side note I personally wouldn't like to live in a world where the are no problems, everything get all that they want, how boring, what would you have to live for. That would not be my definition of a perfect world.
Doesn't sound that bad to me. I think I could make it work.
I really wish that they'd just admit that they've given up at being the best
We don't live in a fantasy world. There are many hard limits keeping us from getting that perfect society. Not least of which is that we're a bit far from perfect ourselves.
One obvious factor is that Africa will eventually be the sole source of population growth in the world (after around 2060 or so). The more stable it is, the lower the eventual population will be (assuming die-offs don't happen).
Though what I'd say is that most of the far fetched notions found there don't come close to explaining all situations and scenarios played out in Egypt. Correction. Elsewhere in the world such as Peru or England, with Stonehenge recently. Or how they found the rest of the statues (i.e the rest of the body) for the giant heads at Easter island yet another huge feat. There are amazing structures being uncovered all the time; even ones below the earths surface and have very little plausible explanation behind them.
What's supposed to be hard to explain? For example, Egypt of the time had plenty of manpower, plenty of time, and some good engineers. The same goes for the other places you mentioned. The feats discussed are well within their capabilities.
Fact is, if Apple tries to avoid paying the debt, it'll find itself paying it anyway, regardless of whether it pulls out of the EU. The EU will find ways.
You're probably talking to someone who believes Apple isn't going to pay $8 billion because it has more power than the EU. And it has more power than the EU because it has more money. Seriously, that's the argument I keep hearing.
Damning evidence of what? That I was writing a book and something in real life happened that looks strikingly similar?
If your book matches word for word instructions for carrying out a criminal act and you pulled out that story, there's a good chance you could get convicted on that basis alone.
But if they're just as you say searching for stuff that is just similar then there's going to be a lot of false positives.
Or maybe they don't even do that and just scoop up everyone who has documents with particular keywords or sentiment. This global searching opens up a huge can of worms.
We didn't create the road transportation network overnight
But we did create it and it works.
But the road network is crumbling, and we have displayed a lack of will to repair it, so what do you suggest?
Obviously, develop the modest amount of will required to repair the road network. After all, what's the point of building a duplicate monorail system and then displaying the lack of will to repair that too?
Normally, I'd agree that this was a bit aggressive to assert. But you're the one who thinks nothing of creating a vast monorail system. Compared to that, self-driving cars are easy.
So either come up with a serious argument or fuck off.
The US does not compete in the global labour market in the sense that it is selling cheaper labour (like, say, China, or India). It canâ(TM)t sell cheaper labour because it is an advanced country and the costs of maintaining that lifestyle are too high. Unless of course you want to drive down US living standards to the level of China or India (and there are plenty of people who seem to think thatâ(TM)s a good idea - for everyone except themselves, of course).
Competition isn't competition when the player deliberately plays bad? I don't agree. And I've never said that I want to drive down US living standards. It's just a thing that happens in the presence of superior labor competition.
I would have thought this meaning was obvious from the second part where I said âoeitâ(TM)s not trying to make a cheaper mousetrap, itâ(TM)s trying to make a better mousetrapâ. I suppose I could have been more explicit and said âoeâoeitâ(TM)s not trying to make a cheaper mousetrap through reducing input costs, itâ(TM)s trying to make a better mousetrapâ. Would that have helped ?
No, for two reasons. First, cheaper is an important category of better. Second, China in particular is doing a much better job here than the US is, including a much better job of taking advantage of US R&D.
You write âoethe more employers looking for employees, the better the deal for workersâ as if âoeemploying peopleâ is what businesses are there to do. They are not. Businesses are there to produce stuff and sell it. Having to employ people is simply an inconvenient consequence of producing stuff to sell. They only produce stuff if there is someone on the other side of the equation to consume that stuff. There is a demand shortage because most people are broke. With this stagnating or declining demand, there is no reason for employers to produce more (because why would you produce more than you can sell?), since employers have no need to produce more, they have no need to hire more employees (why would you hire employees if you had nothing for them to do?), since they have no reason to hire more employees, and there is a huge oversupply of employees in the market, there is no competition between employers and therefore, âoethe dealâ is most certainly not getting any better for employees.
They can always sell to markets that aren't as screwed up like China or India. These demand problems don't exist there. There may be a huge oversupply of employees in those markets, but it's getting sopped up. Meanwhile developed world countries like the US seem to try to make people useless.
And I note once again, the ridiculous ideological bias against employers rears its ugly head in your words. You keep harping on how lower wages hampers consumption and hence, economic progress, but you continue to completely ignore that this goes both ways. Increasing the cost of employees to employers also reduces demand for labor and cause all that stuff.
But instead, we're wasting time envying the rich because their wealth increased even faster. There is something profoundly sick with your outlook that you can completely dismiss a huge increase in wealth for poor people because rich people got it even more.
Firstly, itâ(TM)s not envy. Secondly, itâ(TM)s not a huge increase in wealth for the poor, because of inflation. Thirdly, I have in no way dismissed a wealth increase, I have merely pointed out that it has not been evenly distributed, and argue that - absent any actual reason otherwise - it should be.
The obvious actual reason is that capital doesn't have to compete with several billion people.
For example, consider this alternate scenario. The poor and wealthy started as above with a dollar apiece and ten dollars apiece for the wealthy. After
There are consequences to bad decisions. For example, there are a number of people here saying they want to force everyone to work less hours a week. That cripples social mobility right there since the opportunity to work to improve one's lot is a big part of social mobility.
And the great incongruity of your post is that the actual quickest and most widespread increase in wealth and living standards in human history happened after the period of time you mention. It is happening now, not in the 1950s. Now is the time of increasing real wages, creation of a global large and financially secure middle, relatively high social mobility, etc. What happened in the developed world then is now happening everywhere. But I guess all those people are kind of hard to see from whatever podunk country you're from.
Citation needed. Social mobility is decreasing. Wages are flat for the middle class since the 70's. Your assertions are wrong.
Ah, yes, the magic demand for a link. Here, you go. Figure one is a graph indicating how global wealth by bracket increased over the period 1988-2008. It does show that the wealthiest people in the world did increase their wealth considerably. It also shows the wealth stagnation of the developed world. But it also shows that two thirds of the world saw large increases in their wealth over that period of time.
That's four to five billion current people whose lives were significantly improved over that twenty year period. Meanwhile global population was only about 2.6 billion in 1950.
You can easily make a PRT system out of self-driving cars with the advantage that they can use the existing road system rather having to create a new system from scratch.
Slashdot Mirror
Leasing doesn't magically make depreciation disappear. It just hides it and/or rearranges it.
Well, that is the point. Leasing rearranges depreciation so that it becomes not your problem, unless you were dumb enough to sign a bad contract.
There is no reason for profit except that it allows weaker people to be exploited,
Even if your assertion were true, that would be a very good reason in itself to have the profit motive. Exploitation is just a negative connotation label for being useful to someone else. And the existence of profit indicates an endeavor that has a positive benefit. There are still a few preconditions you need in addition before it's a net benefit to society, but this is a good start.
and no reason for unequal wages except that profit motive means that many people are employed not because they want to work but because they have to work.
Unequal wages for unequal work and ability. And I'd rather those people work than starve too.
I'd be happy to sit here as a PhD-educated mathematician making the same as a street sweeper because I love my job. In fact, I give away about 50% of my salary, and live comfortably.
Funny, I have very similar circumstances, except that I save about 50% of my salary. That reduces the likelihood that I become a burden on someone else as I see it.
But we're as far as I know the only species that hunts and kills each other for no other reason than for fun. With every other species you can point to a logical reason to kill another member of your own species, be it competition for food, mating rights, territory or even to eat the competitor.
Well, if you just killed someone for fun. they aren't competing for your food, mating rights, or territory, and you always have the option to eat them. And should you ever have to kill someone for logical reasons (which would have been a rather common thing in many cultures of the past), then you have more practice at it.
if person A wants C to happen, and person B wants does not want C to happen
Note that was my first complaint with the idea of utopias, conflicts of interest.
Fair enough. But we still have the problem of determining what is "better". For example, we currently are improving the living standards of almost the entire world's population at a pretty good rate, but there's a lot of people out there with the delusion that the wealthy are making everyone poorer and things are getting worse economically.
The society is where everyone gets what they wants
Well, if the society can't provide this (and really, I don't think it'd be that hard to provide), then you must not want it.
The question was: could we, or are descendants live in a perfect world.
No, the question was could we live in a perfect world? Including descendants that can be warped to an unimaginable degree, moves the goalposts. My point is that for many of the would-be utopias, you have to profoundly change the inhabitants in order for the utopia to work at all.
To me, I get the most joy out of things that I have put real effort into achieving. Imagine you where allowed to run a marathon in the Olympics, but you where the only one allowed to use a car. Yes you would win, but so what, you had a massively unfair advantage. But if you trained hard and managed to win in a fair competition, then you should rightly feel proud of your achievement.
And why couldn't you do that in the above society?
Why not? I see no reason that individuality is inseparable from being human.
I do.
Again, from the wonderful work of communism and fascism, we know that people can be detached from their individuality. Does that mean those people are, at that point, not human?
Yes.
If they are not human, would that not mean we can deny them human rights?
Remove the individuality and you already removed almost all human rights.
Going at it from another angle: how much individuality do you need to be classified as human? It's easy to say that if somebody doesn't have it, they aren't. But what if two people each have some individuality, but one has "more" individuality (however that is measured)? Would that mean the other person is "less human", and from there we can do the same thing as if he was a non-human - deny him rights?
We already have this figured out legally because there's a fair number of ways happenstance can do this via illness or injury. In the US, it can happen by being judged legally incompetent, which can happen due to mental illness or dementia. As a result, the subject loses some rights and has assigned another party to act on their behalf. Legally, they are still considered human, but they don't have rights or privileges associated with normal humans.
But to deliberately excise individuality as a normal mode of existence, is to remove a key aspect of being human. The law might still consider you human, say via the above sort of law, but I would not.
What makes you think we cannot evolve that individuality away?
Sure, but then you're not human any more.
What are these hard limits you speak of? I don't know any, is there a reason we cannot evolve to be perfect. Will we ever get to a perfect world (whatever that is, I don't even have a definition of that) probably not, should we stop trying to improve our lives, just because we can't attain perfection, NO.
An obvious one is our individuality. No matter how "perfect" we become, as long as we're separate from each other in thought, then there will be conflict of interests between us.
Another is our ignorance, especially of future consequences of complex actions and systems. I think we'll get much better at it, but it will still be possible to be surprised by things not working to expectations.
As a side note I personally wouldn't like to live in a world where the are no problems, everything get all that they want, how boring, what would you have to live for. That would not be my definition of a perfect world.
Doesn't sound that bad to me. I think I could make it work.
I really wish that they'd just admit that they've given up at being the best
We don't live in a fantasy world. There are many hard limits keeping us from getting that perfect society. Not least of which is that we're a bit far from perfect ourselves.
One obvious factor is that Africa will eventually be the sole source of population growth in the world (after around 2060 or so). The more stable it is, the lower the eventual population will be (assuming die-offs don't happen).
like the lowering of taxes in the 1980's to create both a massive U.S. debt and further concentrating wealth in the hands of the few.
Both directly and by the spending that wasn't curtailed.
It's Wikipedia so it's hardly credible.
Look at the citations then.
Though what I'd say is that most of the far fetched notions found there don't come close to explaining all situations and scenarios played out in Egypt. Correction. Elsewhere in the world such as Peru or England, with Stonehenge recently. Or how they found the rest of the statues (i.e the rest of the body) for the giant heads at Easter island yet another huge feat. There are amazing structures being uncovered all the time; even ones below the earths surface and have very little plausible explanation behind them.
What's supposed to be hard to explain? For example, Egypt of the time had plenty of manpower, plenty of time, and some good engineers. The same goes for the other places you mentioned. The feats discussed are well within their capabilities.
What's the point of a watch list when you're going to watch everyone anyway?
Fact is, if Apple tries to avoid paying the debt, it'll find itself paying it anyway, regardless of whether it pulls out of the EU. The EU will find ways.
You're probably talking to someone who believes Apple isn't going to pay $8 billion because it has more power than the EU. And it has more power than the EU because it has more money. Seriously, that's the argument I keep hearing.
You know the best way to abolish corporate income taxes? By abolishing corporations.
Because we didn't really want that developed world society anyway.
Damning evidence of what? That I was writing a book and something in real life happened that looks strikingly similar?
If your book matches word for word instructions for carrying out a criminal act and you pulled out that story, there's a good chance you could get convicted on that basis alone.
But if they're just as you say searching for stuff that is just similar then there's going to be a lot of false positives.
Or maybe they don't even do that and just scoop up everyone who has documents with particular keywords or sentiment. This global searching opens up a huge can of worms.
We didn't create the road transportation network overnight
But we did create it and it works.
But the road network is crumbling, and we have displayed a lack of will to repair it, so what do you suggest?
Obviously, develop the modest amount of will required to repair the road network. After all, what's the point of building a duplicate monorail system and then displaying the lack of will to repair that too?
Easily?
Normally, I'd agree that this was a bit aggressive to assert. But you're the one who thinks nothing of creating a vast monorail system. Compared to that, self-driving cars are easy.
So either come up with a serious argument or fuck off.
The US does not compete in the global labour market in the sense that it is selling cheaper labour (like, say, China, or India). It canâ(TM)t sell cheaper labour because it is an advanced country and the costs of maintaining that lifestyle are too high. Unless of course you want to drive down US living standards to the level of China or India (and there are plenty of people who seem to think thatâ(TM)s a good idea - for everyone except themselves, of course).
Competition isn't competition when the player deliberately plays bad? I don't agree. And I've never said that I want to drive down US living standards. It's just a thing that happens in the presence of superior labor competition.
I would have thought this meaning was obvious from the second part where I said âoeitâ(TM)s not trying to make a cheaper mousetrap, itâ(TM)s trying to make a better mousetrapâ. I suppose I could have been more explicit and said âoeâoeitâ(TM)s not trying to make a cheaper mousetrap through reducing input costs, itâ(TM)s trying to make a better mousetrapâ. Would that have helped ?
No, for two reasons. First, cheaper is an important category of better. Second, China in particular is doing a much better job here than the US is, including a much better job of taking advantage of US R&D.
You write âoethe more employers looking for employees, the better the deal for workersâ as if âoeemploying peopleâ is what businesses are there to do. They are not. Businesses are there to produce stuff and sell it. Having to employ people is simply an inconvenient consequence of producing stuff to sell. They only produce stuff if there is someone on the other side of the equation to consume that stuff. There is a demand shortage because most people are broke. With this stagnating or declining demand, there is no reason for employers to produce more (because why would you produce more than you can sell?), since employers have no need to produce more, they have no need to hire more employees (why would you hire employees if you had nothing for them to do?), since they have no reason to hire more employees, and there is a huge oversupply of employees in the market, there is no competition between employers and therefore, âoethe dealâ is most certainly not getting any better for employees.
They can always sell to markets that aren't as screwed up like China or India. These demand problems don't exist there. There may be a huge oversupply of employees in those markets, but it's getting sopped up. Meanwhile developed world countries like the US seem to try to make people useless.
And I note once again, the ridiculous ideological bias against employers rears its ugly head in your words. You keep harping on how lower wages hampers consumption and hence, economic progress, but you continue to completely ignore that this goes both ways. Increasing the cost of employees to employers also reduces demand for labor and cause all that stuff.
But instead, we're wasting time envying the rich because their wealth increased even faster. There is something profoundly sick with your outlook that you can completely dismiss a huge increase in wealth for poor people because rich people got it even more.
Firstly, itâ(TM)s not envy. Secondly, itâ(TM)s not a huge increase in wealth for the poor, because of inflation. Thirdly, I have in no way dismissed a wealth increase, I have merely pointed out that it has not been evenly distributed, and argue that - absent any actual reason otherwise - it should be.
The obvious actual reason is that capital doesn't have to compete with several billion people.
For example, consider this alternate scenario. The poor and wealthy started as above with a dollar apiece and ten dollars apiece for the wealthy. After
There are consequences to bad decisions. For example, there are a number of people here saying they want to force everyone to work less hours a week. That cripples social mobility right there since the opportunity to work to improve one's lot is a big part of social mobility.
And the great incongruity of your post is that the actual quickest and most widespread increase in wealth and living standards in human history happened after the period of time you mention. It is happening now, not in the 1950s. Now is the time of increasing real wages, creation of a global large and financially secure middle, relatively high social mobility, etc. What happened in the developed world then is now happening everywhere. But I guess all those people are kind of hard to see from whatever podunk country you're from.
Citation needed. Social mobility is decreasing. Wages are flat for the middle class since the 70's. Your assertions are wrong.
Ah, yes, the magic demand for a link. Here, you go. Figure one is a graph indicating how global wealth by bracket increased over the period 1988-2008. It does show that the wealthiest people in the world did increase their wealth considerably. It also shows the wealth stagnation of the developed world. But it also shows that two thirds of the world saw large increases in their wealth over that period of time.
That's four to five billion current people whose lives were significantly improved over that twenty year period. Meanwhile global population was only about 2.6 billion in 1950.
You can easily make a PRT system out of self-driving cars with the advantage that they can use the existing road system rather having to create a new system from scratch.