So they mean that they need the organized efforts of others.
Via trade. Namely, it doesn't require government bureaucrats to bless the organized effort. I still don't recognize the claim that organized effort is government BTW.
As the AC noted, it's more like 30% of current CO2 than 3-4%. Isotope measurements of the current CO2 indicate the increase probably came from fossil fuel deposits (with human activity being the obvious means for getting those deposits into the atmosphere as CO2). I'm not going to touch whether it "controls weather", but we are speaking of a change which is much larger than you claim.
And who made a mess of that ? it's not the environmentalists, that's for sure.
They don't have the political power or economic know-how to screw it up by themselves. But their support was required to create obviously flawed markets.
In your previous post, you made a position of strong certainty "That science is SETTLED my friend." But now, you're waffling like a breakfast buffet. You can't have it both ways.
It gives people more opportunity to concentrate on health and learn at own pace. It makes it harder for employers to exploit people of low intelligence and poor health.
That doesn't sound valuable to me.
"Shopping around" - listen to yourself! Most people can't shop around. The utopia of full employment is long past. At the bottom rungs, it's an employers' market. Sure, a few employers have a heart and operate partly outside of market principles, but it's not always easy for these guys to stay afloat.
Nonsense. It's hard, but it's also your life to improve whether you are bright or not, fortunate or not.
I'm in my 40s. I did the whole Ra Ra Libertarian thing a couple of decades ago. I see now how fortunate I am compared to others, and although my health has deteriorated significantly, it was not before I made some good business decisions that have kept me financially secure.
Because you did prudent and wise things, you are much less of a burden on others and thus have the opportunity to feel pity for those who didn't. Your Ra Ra Libertarian beliefs made the world better. You just choose not to recognize that.
I feel sorry for guys like you who are straitjacketed by adherence to a base ideology that simplifies the human condition... perhaps it's a useful way of justifying behaviour that causes suffering, or a neat way to evade complex thought by substituting simplistic hypotheses.
My "adherence to a base ideology" doesn't make me so blind that I confuse wage slavery with real slavery.
I have noticed that there's a lot of people who when discovering that their beliefs are seriously flawed in some way, jump instead to some very unrelated and different belief system which is just as flawed. There was a reason you originally were libertarian and it wasn't because you wanted to make poor people suffer. I similarly don't buy that you're really all that different now than you were then.
You still aren't seriously thinking about the problem, but have instead reached for another ideological copout. There's no point to shopping around for a new belief system when it's not going to reduce suffering or improve my ability to think.
And it's worth noting here that there is a huge point to simplifying the human condition as libertarianism and most other beliefs do. Namely, that the simpler problem becomes something that you can think about. I'm a mathematician and a key tool we use is abstraction - constructing a simpler model of phenomenon we wish to study in order to understand it.
Most of the complexity of the human conditions is simply irrelevant to discussions of whether to implement things like basic income. And it doesn't help when you dirty the pool with falsehoods like wage slavery == real slavery.
Another huge institutional bias towards project failure is the ridiculously high costing algorithms for government contracts. For example, NASA did a study (see discussion of the "final appendix") of SpaceX's development of the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets. Basically, for around $400 million SpaceX developed those rockets - NASA audited their books to verify that figure. Now, if NASA were to issue a cost plus contract to build that rocket, they would have used their normal costing algorithm. That yields an initial cost of $4b billion (we're not even to the stage where the cost gets inflated by a factor of two due to cost overruns). They had a second algorithm (which as I understand it, is not yet in use) which would have resulted in a lower costing of $1.7 billion.
Notice how the actual costs are way, way lower than the initial contract costing? Then toss in the cost overruns and you have a system that is badly out of whack with the actual costs and value of the desired outcome.
This is in large part why I believe that by having the US federal government do something, you lose an order of magnitude in effectiveness of the money spent.
You need to look at the failure much earlier in the chain.
I agree. The point though is that government contract pricing in the US is way out of control with actual costs having little to do with the original low ball estimates. This leads to disastrous future uncertainty, including both higher risk of way higher costs (well above double the initial costing) and increased likelihood of program cancellation.
That's literally not self-sufficiency, unless you only trade for things you don't need. If you depend on others and their work, you are not self - sufficient.
Well, now you know what libertarians mean by self-sufficiency.
Self sufficient in the sense that you can trade for the things you don't have.
One can make the argument that any time a group of people come together and pool resources to achieve a goal like a road or like collective security it's a form of government.
No. It's a form of organization. Else we end up with the silly situation where the local bridge club is considered a government.
Further, even if we do allow generously for your interpretation, so what? Just as government semantically shifted here so did libertarianism. As you probably have heard, a common philosophical foundation for libertarianism is the non-aggression principle, basically that one doesn't initiate unprovoked aggression (coercion, force, fraud, etc) on another (responding to aggression with aggression is usually allowed however).
This leads to certain organizational principles such as anything is allowed which doesn't significantly harm any one other than the actor (and you usually have to have standing as a precursor to demonstrate harm too). In other words, a permissive society where just about anything goes versus a society where things need to be explicitly allowed. In other words, bad behavior has to be blacklisted instead of good behavior being whitelisted.
It also leads to the principle that you don't take by force from others for your own benefit, sometimes (depending on the flavor of libertarian) even in the case of absolute desperation. But it is just fine for others to decide to help you either on their own initiative or by creating a voluntary group which satisfies such needs (like a soup kitchen).
The Objectivist approach where most welfare and charity is considered to some degree immoral or evil is not commonly accepted in libertarian philosophy nor rejected.
The point here is that libertarians view everything that you might need for survival due to a turn of remarkably bad luck can be provided by voluntary association rather than by forcibly taking stuff away from the rest of society. Meanwhile under a fairly broad range of outcomes, you can insure yourself against most of the bad stuff that the world has to offer. And that's as self sufficient as most libertarians care to be.
Basic income isn't going to fix being not so bright or being unhealthy.
And who cares which employer if they're all equally shitty, which they have no reason not to be - bar regulation - if so many desperate bodies.
You would care because they aren't equally shitty - especially if you happen to be one of those employers. And really, anyone who claims all employers are equal just hasn't been shopping around much.
I argued clearly that wage slavery isn't identical to regular slavery, my dear straw man, but that the difference is not economic, for most people.
I already explained the difference - one is real, one is imaginary.
Stop seeing the world through your own narrow experiences. You sound like me when I was 20.
If it's any comfort, you sounds like you're on the young side of 20.
It is not a voluntary exchange if the alternative is starvation/homelessness.
That's the same choice the billionaire faces too. They can choose to tough it out on their trust funds and dividends or starve. I guess they're slaves too./sarc
What makes this argument silly as well as being a false dilemma is first, no one forces you to work, much less work for a particular employer. Starvation is not the only other choice. Second, you can easily get paid a lot more than starvation level. It does require you to learn some skills (like getting to work on time, being able to communicate, and learning how not to backtalk a boss).
The owner under pure capitalism outsources the job of punishment for non-compliance with the system. The obvious capitalist counterargument is "but the wage-slave could start up their own business!" - this is true for the small proportion of people who have the intelligence and health to start up a successful business.
Well, you just shot down your only argument. Business creation is a reason, but far from the only one for why this isn't real slavery.
The reason regular slavery is not like wage-slavery isn't because the economics are much different, but because we have a whole lot of regulation designed to prevent people being worked to death like animals.
The real difference is that regular slavery is real slavery and wage slavery is imaginary slavery. Words mean things.
the far more sensible solution: a basic income to cater for basic (universal) human needs, with improvement coming through voluntary exchange that no party needs to get involved in, but chooses to.
Who's paying for it? Basic income is not the worst idea I've ever heard, but a very common problem is not having the funding (especially after any warping of the economics of the society happen).
I gather from that you must be in China because that would be the only thing that would make any sense ie if you were an American you would appreciate double standards in corporations from China as they would be feeding technology to your nation and would be making their infrastructure dependent upon your countries good will. So you should logically condemn your own countries corporations doubles standards and be cheering other countries corporations double standards (where they benefit rather than harm, think allies rather than ideological opposition).
Translation: poser sarcasm.
Face it the US government is pretty much a mess, with different corporate groups pulling in different directions creating a chaotic mess both internally and externally. Undermining each other efforts and the efforts of the government they each in part control because, well, pretty much nothing other than more greed now. All based upon the individuals within those corporations feeding their own ego and lusts first and pretty much basically not giving a fuck what happens after they have gorged themselves to death (along with the rest of us, of course starved more than gorged for us 99%).
I'd be more interested in such an analysis, if it took into account the powerful corporations like the US or China governments (or particularly powerful subunits like the NSA) rather than pants wetting about Walmart or Exxon.
There will always be someone above you who uses a part of your income or whatever to support the community as a whole. This can be done fairly well or poorly
I've seen this movie. (***spoiler alert***) It's going to be done fairly poorly because they don't care, are incompetent, and/or feathering their own nest.
You think you're self sufficient. You are not. You think that you don't need government. You do.
And you think you're not a patronizing idiot. This is going to turn into another burning straw man argument where you're going to argue that libertarians believe all sorts of crazy shit because your uninformed opinion. How about you carry that exercise offline? We don't need to hear, yet again, the bullshit about how caring bureaucrats carry our food from the farm straight to our dinner table, spoonfeed us, and wiping our asses for us.
You can be self-sufficient without growing your own food, shooting your own burglars, and building your own roads. You don't need the latest crazy patronage scheme or bribery scandal in order to survive. You most certainly don't need some nanny to watch what you say or do. We don't need (in the US) expensive food, real estate, health care, or education (because some helper made them more expensive). There is a lot of government we don't need and never will.
Why don't you read up on actual libertarian grievances (and actual tyranny of history) rather than just being another uninformed idiot on the internet? I don't expect most people to buy into the program. I don't fully buy in either. But this kind of ignorance and stupidity you demonstrate here is inexcusable.
Land generates risk free rent without the need for any investment.
Ok, suppose you have land. What's the risk free rent on that land?
Now, suppose I dump a melting nuclear core on your land and a court finds that you should share in the clean up costs. What is the risk free rent on that land now?
The problem with all these basic income schemes is that they will cause (or speed up) a gradual, but eventually overwhelming, shift in power from regular people to the super rich.
[...]
This sounds great, until you realize that once the rich pay all the taxes and the rest of us pay virtually no taxes, the rich will effectively own the government.
The huge, crippling flaw is the idea that paying taxes gives you power. That has never been true. The real problem is that this sort of scheme creates a tendency to vote up the basic income at the expense of everything else.
It's also worth noting here that 65 years is a long time to implement a developed world strategy. That took Japan originally from one of the most backwater nations of the 19th century to beating Imperial Russia in a significant war in 1905.
Multinationals like IBM and Oracle are only "American" when they are bidding on Government contracts.
How about multinationals with deep connections to the Chinese government and military? Funny how we only care about multinational corporations when they're "American" multinational corporations.
There's of course some mild overlap between the 8 or so categories that have been discussed so far. And I wouldn't call scope creep a case of failure to adapt. There are some things you just can't adapt to. Getting dumped out of an airplane at a few thousand meters without a parachute is an example of such failure to adapt.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I'm pretty sure Winston Churchill said that in his address in front of the Iron Curtain in 1949.
So they mean that they need the organized efforts of others.
Via trade. Namely, it doesn't require government bureaucrats to bless the organized effort. I still don't recognize the claim that organized effort is government BTW.
As the AC noted, it's more like 30% of current CO2 than 3-4%. Isotope measurements of the current CO2 indicate the increase probably came from fossil fuel deposits (with human activity being the obvious means for getting those deposits into the atmosphere as CO2). I'm not going to touch whether it "controls weather", but we are speaking of a change which is much larger than you claim.
NASA Study: Mass Gains of Antarctic Ice Sheet Greater than Losses
NASA seems to think it came from NASA. Maybe I should take their word over yours?
And who made a mess of that ? it's not the environmentalists, that's for sure.
They don't have the political power or economic know-how to screw it up by themselves. But their support was required to create obviously flawed markets.
In your previous post, you made a position of strong certainty "That science is SETTLED my friend." But now, you're waffling like a breakfast buffet. You can't have it both ways.
I have a suggestion here. Stop being a tool.
It gives people more opportunity to concentrate on health and learn at own pace. It makes it harder for employers to exploit people of low intelligence and poor health.
That doesn't sound valuable to me.
"Shopping around" - listen to yourself! Most people can't shop around. The utopia of full employment is long past. At the bottom rungs, it's an employers' market. Sure, a few employers have a heart and operate partly outside of market principles, but it's not always easy for these guys to stay afloat.
Nonsense. It's hard, but it's also your life to improve whether you are bright or not, fortunate or not.
I'm in my 40s. I did the whole Ra Ra Libertarian thing a couple of decades ago. I see now how fortunate I am compared to others, and although my health has deteriorated significantly, it was not before I made some good business decisions that have kept me financially secure.
Because you did prudent and wise things, you are much less of a burden on others and thus have the opportunity to feel pity for those who didn't. Your Ra Ra Libertarian beliefs made the world better. You just choose not to recognize that.
I feel sorry for guys like you who are straitjacketed by adherence to a base ideology that simplifies the human condition... perhaps it's a useful way of justifying behaviour that causes suffering, or a neat way to evade complex thought by substituting simplistic hypotheses.
My "adherence to a base ideology" doesn't make me so blind that I confuse wage slavery with real slavery.
I have noticed that there's a lot of people who when discovering that their beliefs are seriously flawed in some way, jump instead to some very unrelated and different belief system which is just as flawed. There was a reason you originally were libertarian and it wasn't because you wanted to make poor people suffer. I similarly don't buy that you're really all that different now than you were then.
You still aren't seriously thinking about the problem, but have instead reached for another ideological copout. There's no point to shopping around for a new belief system when it's not going to reduce suffering or improve my ability to think.
And it's worth noting here that there is a huge point to simplifying the human condition as libertarianism and most other beliefs do. Namely, that the simpler problem becomes something that you can think about. I'm a mathematician and a key tool we use is abstraction - constructing a simpler model of phenomenon we wish to study in order to understand it.
Most of the complexity of the human conditions is simply irrelevant to discussions of whether to implement things like basic income. And it doesn't help when you dirty the pool with falsehoods like wage slavery == real slavery.
Another huge institutional bias towards project failure is the ridiculously high costing algorithms for government contracts. For example, NASA did a study (see discussion of the "final appendix") of SpaceX's development of the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets. Basically, for around $400 million SpaceX developed those rockets - NASA audited their books to verify that figure. Now, if NASA were to issue a cost plus contract to build that rocket, they would have used their normal costing algorithm. That yields an initial cost of $4b billion (we're not even to the stage where the cost gets inflated by a factor of two due to cost overruns). They had a second algorithm (which as I understand it, is not yet in use) which would have resulted in a lower costing of $1.7 billion.
Notice how the actual costs are way, way lower than the initial contract costing? Then toss in the cost overruns and you have a system that is badly out of whack with the actual costs and value of the desired outcome.
This is in large part why I believe that by having the US federal government do something, you lose an order of magnitude in effectiveness of the money spent.
You need to look at the failure much earlier in the chain.
I agree. The point though is that government contract pricing in the US is way out of control with actual costs having little to do with the original low ball estimates. This leads to disastrous future uncertainty, including both higher risk of way higher costs (well above double the initial costing) and increased likelihood of program cancellation.
That's literally not self-sufficiency, unless you only trade for things you don't need. If you depend on others and their work, you are not self - sufficient.
Well, now you know what libertarians mean by self-sufficiency.
One can make the argument that any time a group of people come together and pool resources to achieve a goal like a road or like collective security it's a form of government.
No. It's a form of organization. Else we end up with the silly situation where the local bridge club is considered a government.
Further, even if we do allow generously for your interpretation, so what? Just as government semantically shifted here so did libertarianism. As you probably have heard, a common philosophical foundation for libertarianism is the non-aggression principle, basically that one doesn't initiate unprovoked aggression (coercion, force, fraud, etc) on another (responding to aggression with aggression is usually allowed however).
This leads to certain organizational principles such as anything is allowed which doesn't significantly harm any one other than the actor (and you usually have to have standing as a precursor to demonstrate harm too). In other words, a permissive society where just about anything goes versus a society where things need to be explicitly allowed. In other words, bad behavior has to be blacklisted instead of good behavior being whitelisted.
It also leads to the principle that you don't take by force from others for your own benefit, sometimes (depending on the flavor of libertarian) even in the case of absolute desperation. But it is just fine for others to decide to help you either on their own initiative or by creating a voluntary group which satisfies such needs (like a soup kitchen).
The Objectivist approach where most welfare and charity is considered to some degree immoral or evil is not commonly accepted in libertarian philosophy nor rejected.
The point here is that libertarians view everything that you might need for survival due to a turn of remarkably bad luck can be provided by voluntary association rather than by forcibly taking stuff away from the rest of society. Meanwhile under a fairly broad range of outcomes, you can insure yourself against most of the bad stuff that the world has to offer. And that's as self sufficient as most libertarians care to be.
No kidding. How did that get on my internets?
you obviously bright, healthy person.
Basic income isn't going to fix being not so bright or being unhealthy.
And who cares which employer if they're all equally shitty, which they have no reason not to be - bar regulation - if so many desperate bodies.
You would care because they aren't equally shitty - especially if you happen to be one of those employers. And really, anyone who claims all employers are equal just hasn't been shopping around much.
I argued clearly that wage slavery isn't identical to regular slavery, my dear straw man, but that the difference is not economic, for most people.
I already explained the difference - one is real, one is imaginary.
Stop seeing the world through your own narrow experiences. You sound like me when I was 20.
If it's any comfort, you sounds like you're on the young side of 20.
It is not a voluntary exchange if the alternative is starvation/homelessness.
That's the same choice the billionaire faces too. They can choose to tough it out on their trust funds and dividends or starve. I guess they're slaves too. /sarc
What makes this argument silly as well as being a false dilemma is first, no one forces you to work, much less work for a particular employer. Starvation is not the only other choice. Second, you can easily get paid a lot more than starvation level. It does require you to learn some skills (like getting to work on time, being able to communicate, and learning how not to backtalk a boss).
The owner under pure capitalism outsources the job of punishment for non-compliance with the system. The obvious capitalist counterargument is "but the wage-slave could start up their own business!" - this is true for the small proportion of people who have the intelligence and health to start up a successful business.
Well, you just shot down your only argument. Business creation is a reason, but far from the only one for why this isn't real slavery.
The reason regular slavery is not like wage-slavery isn't because the economics are much different, but because we have a whole lot of regulation designed to prevent people being worked to death like animals.
The real difference is that regular slavery is real slavery and wage slavery is imaginary slavery. Words mean things.
the far more sensible solution: a basic income to cater for basic (universal) human needs, with improvement coming through voluntary exchange that no party needs to get involved in, but chooses to.
Who's paying for it? Basic income is not the worst idea I've ever heard, but a very common problem is not having the funding (especially after any warping of the economics of the society happen).
I gather from that you must be in China because that would be the only thing that would make any sense ie if you were an American you would appreciate double standards in corporations from China as they would be feeding technology to your nation and would be making their infrastructure dependent upon your countries good will. So you should logically condemn your own countries corporations doubles standards and be cheering other countries corporations double standards (where they benefit rather than harm, think allies rather than ideological opposition).
Translation: poser sarcasm.
Face it the US government is pretty much a mess, with different corporate groups pulling in different directions creating a chaotic mess both internally and externally. Undermining each other efforts and the efforts of the government they each in part control because, well, pretty much nothing other than more greed now. All based upon the individuals within those corporations feeding their own ego and lusts first and pretty much basically not giving a fuck what happens after they have gorged themselves to death (along with the rest of us, of course starved more than gorged for us 99%).
I'd be more interested in such an analysis, if it took into account the powerful corporations like the US or China governments (or particularly powerful subunits like the NSA) rather than pants wetting about Walmart or Exxon.
There will always be someone above you who uses a part of your income or whatever to support the community as a whole. This can be done fairly well or poorly
I've seen this movie. (***spoiler alert***) It's going to be done fairly poorly because they don't care, are incompetent, and/or feathering their own nest.
You think you're self sufficient. You are not. You think that you don't need government. You do.
And you think you're not a patronizing idiot. This is going to turn into another burning straw man argument where you're going to argue that libertarians believe all sorts of crazy shit because your uninformed opinion. How about you carry that exercise offline? We don't need to hear, yet again, the bullshit about how caring bureaucrats carry our food from the farm straight to our dinner table, spoonfeed us, and wiping our asses for us.
You can be self-sufficient without growing your own food, shooting your own burglars, and building your own roads. You don't need the latest crazy patronage scheme or bribery scandal in order to survive. You most certainly don't need some nanny to watch what you say or do. We don't need (in the US) expensive food, real estate, health care, or education (because some helper made them more expensive). There is a lot of government we don't need and never will.
Why don't you read up on actual libertarian grievances (and actual tyranny of history) rather than just being another uninformed idiot on the internet? I don't expect most people to buy into the program. I don't fully buy in either. But this kind of ignorance and stupidity you demonstrate here is inexcusable.
Land generates risk free rent without the need for any investment.
Ok, suppose you have land. What's the risk free rent on that land?
Now, suppose I dump a melting nuclear core on your land and a court finds that you should share in the clean up costs. What is the risk free rent on that land now?
The problem with all these basic income schemes is that they will cause (or speed up) a gradual, but eventually overwhelming, shift in power from regular people to the super rich.
[...]
This sounds great, until you realize that once the rich pay all the taxes and the rest of us pay virtually no taxes, the rich will effectively own the government.
The huge, crippling flaw is the idea that paying taxes gives you power. That has never been true. The real problem is that this sort of scheme creates a tendency to vote up the basic income at the expense of everything else.
Copout. I don't buy that at all.
Less agile != not agile.
The US, home of double standards.
Funny how we only care about the US's double standards.
It's also worth noting here that 65 years is a long time to implement a developed world strategy. That took Japan originally from one of the most backwater nations of the 19th century to beating Imperial Russia in a significant war in 1905.
Multinationals like IBM and Oracle are only "American" when they are bidding on Government contracts.
How about multinationals with deep connections to the Chinese government and military? Funny how we only care about multinational corporations when they're "American" multinational corporations.
There's of course some mild overlap between the 8 or so categories that have been discussed so far. And I wouldn't call scope creep a case of failure to adapt. There are some things you just can't adapt to. Getting dumped out of an airplane at a few thousand meters without a parachute is an example of such failure to adapt.
Most people I know are more responsible with other people's money than with their own, because they feel responsibility for it.
And I bet most people you know don't have access to a lot of other peoples' money and thus, don't have a lot to feel responsible about.