Somebody who is all three is either schizophrenic or has multiple personality disorder- in which case they'd speak the language that best fits their current personality in that relationship.
I say this because the clueless stereotype and the sociopath stereotype in the description are mutually exclusive; the first is honorable and goes beyond the call of duty without motivation or recompense, the second you can't get out of bed without offering a six digit salary.
The losers are the people somewhere in the middle.
I'm not so sure. For one, I'm probably reading this slightly differently because the most I've watched The Office is during previews of reruns on an off channel interjected into Simpson's shows, so the character names mean nothing to me.
My career so far fits his stereotypical loser: due to my autism, I'm unable to make the low-work, high value deals of the sociopaths. Due to my idiot-savancy, I'm too smart to do any more than the minimum necessary. So I'm certainly usually in "wait out the clock mode" except for the few times a week somebody brings me an interesting problem and I jump into clueless mode enough for them to keep me around. (usually- doesn't always work and I've been both first and last laid off in downturns).
Despite my brilliant ideas, I do speak in something very like his Gamespeak, in that I view economics as a problem in Game theory. Due to that, I seem to run into mental blocks talking to sociopaths; the biggest two are their belief that *hard work=success* vs my belief in luck, combined with their belief in infinite resources available vs my belief in a finite world bordered such to create a zero sum game.
Due to that, we're talking different languages so much that the black line on this guy's diagram represents an utter lack of communication.
Depends on whether or not the oppressors take the bait, doesn't it? Rerum Novarum, and it's descendants, do paint a picture of an alternative economic system based on subsidarity and solidarity rather than efficiency. One that can free even the common worker in this country from debt slavery, if followed properly, for it does not separate the classes.
There have been some minor experiments towards this: the Mondragon Corporation in Spain, certain retreat centers and monasteries that have become self-sufficient, even a few non-Christian countries that put happiness above profitability. Knights of Columbus, here in America, have built a AAA rated insurance/investment company that didn't lose a dime last year- by following these values and by putting human life above profitability.
But all it takes is land and labor, to turn that perspective from doing nothing, to doing something. Something minor perhaps- like a worker-owned cooperative or a retreat house- but still something.
Way back when- the village doctor was a post in the government, for most villages. The government paid him a salary to keep him in the village, and then for more expensive procedures he'd ask for additional fees.
The last time I saw anything like this was in fiction: it was the primary story line of Northern Exposure on TV. I'm not sure if any cities like that still exist.
The problem with this assertion continues to be that resources are not the only part of an economy and that you're operating on time scales that we cannot rationally use in our society. For our purposes, we live in a world with expanding resources and knowledge.
Maybe for the purposes of those who choose to live on 40x what a human being actually needs to survive; but in reality that lifestyle needs a billion people laboring in poverty and slavery to support it.
And as far as we can tell, this environment isn't going to change to a zero-sum game for quite some time, especially if the predictions of static population growth in 2050 are accurate.
I believe those predictions also- but it doesn't change the fact that most of the free market is built on fraud, not on actual full-disclosure trades.
I can imagine, as you furiously bang out reply after nonsensical reply, your furrowed brow dripping with sweat, that you have to blame the state of your miserable life on someone; even if that "someone" is a mysterious cabal of dictionary publishers. It is certainly unfortunate that you are so terminally confused, and are unable to recognize it.
No mysterious cabal necessary, bias and fabrication are inherent in your subspecies.
Continuing with the resource issue, we also have matter resources in the interior of the Earth and far more in the Solar System. In theory, someone just needs to pay the energy cost of tearing these objects apart, then they can use it all. However, now we don't count on those resources as something we can use now. For an even more exaggerated example, even if you assume the universe is expanding at an exponential rate, we can in theory access everything within a billion light years. Why count those as resources now when we don't even know if someone (us or any other living organism or machine) will ever use them?
My point is, even with an expanding universe, we have only a finite amount of matter in it; therefore, whatever we do in this universe (economics or anything else) will *always* be a zero sum game.
No. That's not right. The resources haven't always been available exactly because our knowledge was lacking
The resources were still there. Humanity isn't the only species on the planet. It's arrogant to assume that the resources don't exist merely because we haven't yet developed the technology to get at them, just as it's arrogant to assume that there will always be more because advancing technology has always found more for us in the past.
Does everyone want such a ship? Probably not, so that's not a fundamental resource restriction.
Yep- which is what I'm pointing out. In any system where resources are finite, it is by definition a zero sum game.
If you are going to just ignore the reason I presented as to why your definition is useless, it's probably best just to not say anything at all. All you've done is show that your reading comprehension is just as lacking as your communication skills.
This thread is about economics, not communications skills. If you care so much, go ahead and start a new thread on how slashdot and blogs do not encourage good writing habits (hint, it's been done to death and nobody cares).
Someone who was interested in communicating his ideas would be..
Well, since they aren't my ideas- why should I be worried about somebody who can't use google?
See... If you had gotten that dictionary, you would have seen that "cost" may have next to nothing to do with the "price" of something. You're just embarrassing yourself now.
And you're just being an idiot if you think that either word has any meaning at all in a fiat system.
This has nothing to do with your ideas,
Thank you for admitting that you're just being an asshole.
only your complete inability to precisely express them.
And I should care about your utter inability to comprehend why?
Perhaps you'd get more responses about your actual ideas if you weren't so inept at expressing them. (Hint: cut back on the made-up definitions for commonly used words)
Except, of course, it wasn't made-up; it was taken from the textbook case of the Wörgl Austria Friedgeld experiment. The fact that since then, the idea of price and cost have become separated in YOUR mind, does not change the usage in Austria in 1932.
Plus, who is to say it isn't the dictionary publisher attempting to push a certain agenda on YOUR mind, as dictionary publishers have ever since the first edition of the OED defined a Tory as "an idiot with his head stuck up his ass"?
Why that definition is stupid: We already have a perfectly good word for an amount of matter. It's called "mass". It's pretty stupid to co-opt an existing word and replace its perfectly serviceable meaning with your own idiosyncratic and confused definition.
Mass, however, is not discrete, which is the entire point of my argument.
Why that definition is useless: Once you've managed to hijack an already defined word, if you are the only person using that definition, you've given up on using language for its intended purpose: conveying meaning. It is, very simply, useless.
You've made a pretty bad assumption there- that mass is my meaning, rather than discrete, macro-level units. Mass has properties that go way beyond the level of the atom; without adding meaning.
My advice would be for you to pick up a nice dictionary. They're cheap, and easy to find. You can look up the definitions to many commonly used words. That way, you'll be able to find the common definition of a word (like "cost"), see that the definition you are using is different, and pick out a different word to use.
Who the hell gives a rip about the common definition? I'm talking about the definition used in the Wörgl Austria Friedgeld experiment during the 1930s. Of course there is always some cost- the paper if nothing else- but this printed money didn't come out of taxes, it didn't come out of stuff Wörgl already owned, it simply paid to put people back to work long enough for the real economy to recover due to tourism from the infrastructure built on Friedgeld.
Your ideas will still be foolish and infantile.
And yet my ideas worked in the real world at one point in history- can YOU say the same, or are you just going to cry like a little baby about But, at least you won't continue to embarrass yourself by speciously redefining various words.?
No, I'm quite aware of what the word cost means. In a fiat money system, it just doesn't mean what YOU think it means. What I describe has been proven by a real-world experiment. How has yours been proven?
You would not do the hour of labor for $150 unless you felt $150 was worth MORE than one hour of your time. I would not pay $150 for that hour of labor unless I thought that hour of labor was worth MORE than $150. Both of us come out of deal thinking we got the better half. Both of us are better off afterward. Pretending this is a zero-sum game only works if you forget that in every transaction both parties think they are getting the better part of the deal.
That's because, in 99.99% of the cases, both parties are lying to themselves, because Obama's already printed enough money that in the real world, that $150 is worth a Zimbabwaean Baked Bean. And since it was a fiat currency to begin with- the whole belief that money has worth is just a myth and a lie to begin with.
Fraud built upon fraud does not make the economy a positive-worth game.
I'd point out that those resources have always been available. It's only our knowledge that was lacking. Thus, zero sum game.
Also, I'm pretty certain that my desire of one day building an experimental yacht/barge to do experiments in electrical generation for seasteading will pretty much be a function of whether or not I can get the necessary materials and workmen to build it.
I'd point out there's another group working in economics that sees labor as an important and mandatory part of the economy, but they're not American: The Vatican. Oddly enough, they've done so in a way totally opposed to both capitalism and communism, claiming that the individual earning money to do charity is the basic unit of the economy, rather than the state or the corporation, both of which, in the words of Pope Leo XIII, "The great mistake made in regard to the matter now under consideration is to take up with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict."
I think it should be palpably obvious that the obvious is true, from a simple examination of the world around you, and of history. If the economy (let's use the right term, economics is an area of study) of the world as a whole is a zero sum game, then wealth in the world could not consistently increase.
I would in fact argue that wealth in the world, as opposed to wealth utilized by a single species known as homo sapiens, has in fact been noticeably decreasing due to mismanagement by said species. That species THINKS that wealth is increasing merely because of increases in efficiency, NOT because of actual increases in wealth.
If you define wealth as I do, as the number of atoms of usable elements available on the planet, then you'll quickly see what I mean.
I don't think the two curves have met yet, however, except in a few minor circumstances.
And as for your definition of mega businesses creating wealth through organization of people, capital, and knowledge, well, we've had a definition for that for quite some time now: fraud.
well, I have actually seen one option to Keynes that might work under even austrian theories: Print expiring money.
A small city in Austria did this at the height of the great depression and it worked wonderfully well, until their central bank stepped on them for breaking the monopoly of printing money.
The trick to getting it to work efficiently is to tie the expiration to the inflation rate: the excess bubble money should be taxed at the same rate as inflation, even when it is stored in a bank account. If the economy is still deflationary, this taxation should be either 0 or a tax prebate at the deflationary rate.
The effect of this is to cut the cost of government projects to zero while allowing a bubble of inflation-free money out into the real world to put people back to work.
heck, the Ne'ah'kah'nie Tilamook have similar legends- only all of theirs are about the ocean disappearing over the horizon and then coming back to inundate several miles inland.
If you're going to live on a coast with a fault line, Tsunamis will happen.
Not really- when reading the al Qaida link above, it made me wonder if a top-secret weapon today was smart dust.
In other words, who needs a network of spies if you can use a network of bluetooth-enabled robots less than a milimeter in diameter that stick to clothing?
Slashdot Mirror
Not as long as the sociopaths exist, buddy!
Actually, the US version fits US Business even better- and if that scares you, well, it should.
Somebody who is all three is either schizophrenic or has multiple personality disorder- in which case they'd speak the language that best fits their current personality in that relationship.
I say this because the clueless stereotype and the sociopath stereotype in the description are mutually exclusive; the first is honorable and goes beyond the call of duty without motivation or recompense, the second you can't get out of bed without offering a six digit salary.
The losers are the people somewhere in the middle.
I'm not so sure. For one, I'm probably reading this slightly differently because the most I've watched The Office is during previews of reruns on an off channel interjected into Simpson's shows, so the character names mean nothing to me.
My career so far fits his stereotypical loser: due to my autism, I'm unable to make the low-work, high value deals of the sociopaths. Due to my idiot-savancy, I'm too smart to do any more than the minimum necessary. So I'm certainly usually in "wait out the clock mode" except for the few times a week somebody brings me an interesting problem and I jump into clueless mode enough for them to keep me around. (usually- doesn't always work and I've been both first and last laid off in downturns).
Despite my brilliant ideas, I do speak in something very like his Gamespeak, in that I view economics as a problem in Game theory. Due to that, I seem to run into mental blocks talking to sociopaths; the biggest two are their belief that *hard work=success* vs my belief in luck, combined with their belief in infinite resources available vs my belief in a finite world bordered such to create a zero sum game.
Due to that, we're talking different languages so much that the black line on this guy's diagram represents an utter lack of communication.
Depends on whether or not the oppressors take the bait, doesn't it? Rerum Novarum, and it's descendants, do paint a picture of an alternative economic system based on subsidarity and solidarity rather than efficiency. One that can free even the common worker in this country from debt slavery, if followed properly, for it does not separate the classes.
There have been some minor experiments towards this: the Mondragon Corporation in Spain, certain retreat centers and monasteries that have become self-sufficient, even a few non-Christian countries that put happiness above profitability. Knights of Columbus, here in America, have built a AAA rated insurance/investment company that didn't lose a dime last year- by following these values and by putting human life above profitability.
But all it takes is land and labor, to turn that perspective from doing nothing, to doing something. Something minor perhaps- like a worker-owned cooperative or a retreat house- but still something.
Way back when- the village doctor was a post in the government, for most villages. The government paid him a salary to keep him in the village, and then for more expensive procedures he'd ask for additional fees.
The last time I saw anything like this was in fiction: it was the primary story line of Northern Exposure on TV. I'm not sure if any cities like that still exist.
The problem with this assertion continues to be that resources are not the only part of an economy and that you're operating on time scales that we cannot rationally use in our society. For our purposes, we live in a world with expanding resources and knowledge.
Maybe for the purposes of those who choose to live on 40x what a human being actually needs to survive; but in reality that lifestyle needs a billion people laboring in poverty and slavery to support it.
And as far as we can tell, this environment isn't going to change to a zero-sum game for quite some time, especially if the predictions of static population growth in 2050 are accurate.
I believe those predictions also- but it doesn't change the fact that most of the free market is built on fraud, not on actual full-disclosure trades.
Read Rerum Novarum again, this time from the perspective of the working man.
I can imagine, as you furiously bang out reply after nonsensical reply, your furrowed brow dripping with sweat, that you have to blame the state of your miserable life on someone; even if that "someone" is a mysterious cabal of dictionary publishers. It is certainly unfortunate that you are so terminally confused, and are unable to recognize it.
No mysterious cabal necessary, bias and fabrication are inherent in your subspecies.
Continuing with the resource issue, we also have matter resources in the interior of the Earth and far more in the Solar System. In theory, someone just needs to pay the energy cost of tearing these objects apart, then they can use it all. However, now we don't count on those resources as something we can use now. For an even more exaggerated example, even if you assume the universe is expanding at an exponential rate, we can in theory access everything within a billion light years. Why count those as resources now when we don't even know if someone (us or any other living organism or machine) will ever use them?
My point is, even with an expanding universe, we have only a finite amount of matter in it; therefore, whatever we do in this universe (economics or anything else) will *always* be a zero sum game.
No. That's not right. The resources haven't always been available exactly because our knowledge was lacking
The resources were still there. Humanity isn't the only species on the planet. It's arrogant to assume that the resources don't exist merely because we haven't yet developed the technology to get at them, just as it's arrogant to assume that there will always be more because advancing technology has always found more for us in the past.
Does everyone want such a ship? Probably not, so that's not a fundamental resource restriction.
Yep- which is what I'm pointing out. In any system where resources are finite, it is by definition a zero sum game.
If you are going to just ignore the reason I presented as to why your definition is useless, it's probably best just to not say anything at all. All you've done is show that your reading comprehension is just as lacking as your communication skills.
This thread is about economics, not communications skills. If you care so much, go ahead and start a new thread on how slashdot and blogs do not encourage good writing habits (hint, it's been done to death and nobody cares).
Someone who was interested in communicating his ideas would be..
Well, since they aren't my ideas- why should I be worried about somebody who can't use google?
See... If you had gotten that dictionary, you would have seen that "cost" may have next to nothing to do with the "price" of something. You're just embarrassing yourself now.
And you're just being an idiot if you think that either word has any meaning at all in a fiat system.
This has nothing to do with your ideas,
Thank you for admitting that you're just being an asshole.
only your complete inability to precisely express them.
And I should care about your utter inability to comprehend why?
Perhaps you'd get more responses about your actual ideas if you weren't so inept at expressing them. (Hint: cut back on the made-up definitions for commonly used words)
Except, of course, it wasn't made-up; it was taken from the textbook case of the Wörgl Austria Friedgeld experiment. The fact that since then, the idea of price and cost have become separated in YOUR mind, does not change the usage in Austria in 1932.
Plus, who is to say it isn't the dictionary publisher attempting to push a certain agenda on YOUR mind, as dictionary publishers have ever since the first edition of the OED defined a Tory as "an idiot with his head stuck up his ass"?
Why that definition is stupid: We already have a perfectly good word for an amount of matter. It's called "mass". It's pretty stupid to co-opt an existing word and replace its perfectly serviceable meaning with your own idiosyncratic and confused definition.
Mass, however, is not discrete, which is the entire point of my argument.
Why that definition is useless: Once you've managed to hijack an already defined word, if you are the only person using that definition, you've given up on using language for its intended purpose: conveying meaning. It is, very simply, useless.
You've made a pretty bad assumption there- that mass is my meaning, rather than discrete, macro-level units. Mass has properties that go way beyond the level of the atom; without adding meaning.
My advice would be for you to pick up a nice dictionary. They're cheap, and easy to find. You can look up the definitions to many commonly used words. That way, you'll be able to find the common definition of a word (like "cost"), see that the definition you are using is different, and pick out a different word to use.
Who the hell gives a rip about the common definition? I'm talking about the definition used in the Wörgl Austria Friedgeld experiment during the 1930s. Of course there is always some cost- the paper if nothing else- but this printed money didn't come out of taxes, it didn't come out of stuff Wörgl already owned, it simply paid to put people back to work long enough for the real economy to recover due to tourism from the infrastructure built on Friedgeld.
Your ideas will still be foolish and infantile.
And yet my ideas worked in the real world at one point in history- can YOU say the same, or are you just going to cry like a little baby about But, at least you won't continue to embarrass yourself by speciously redefining various words.?
No, I'm quite aware of what the word cost means. In a fiat money system, it just doesn't mean what YOU think it means. What I describe has been proven by a real-world experiment. How has yours been proven?
Why is that definition *either* stupid or useless?
Do you have another way of defining the limit to "wealth of the world" that is different and still makes sense in a finite universe?
You would not do the hour of labor for $150 unless you felt $150 was worth MORE than one hour of your time. I would not pay $150 for that hour of labor unless I thought that hour of labor was worth MORE than $150. Both of us come out of deal thinking we got the better half. Both of us are better off afterward. Pretending this is a zero-sum game only works if you forget that in every transaction both parties think they are getting the better part of the deal.
That's because, in 99.99% of the cases, both parties are lying to themselves, because Obama's already printed enough money that in the real world, that $150 is worth a Zimbabwaean Baked Bean. And since it was a fiat currency to begin with- the whole belief that money has worth is just a myth and a lie to begin with.
Fraud built upon fraud does not make the economy a positive-worth game.
I'd point out that those resources have always been available. It's only our knowledge that was lacking. Thus, zero sum game.
Also, I'm pretty certain that my desire of one day building an experimental yacht/barge to do experiments in electrical generation for seasteading will pretty much be a function of whether or not I can get the necessary materials and workmen to build it.
I'd point out there's another group working in economics that sees labor as an important and mandatory part of the economy, but they're not American: The Vatican. Oddly enough, they've done so in a way totally opposed to both capitalism and communism, claiming that the individual earning money to do charity is the basic unit of the economy, rather than the state or the corporation, both of which, in the words of Pope Leo XIII, "The great mistake made in regard to the matter now under consideration is to take up with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict."
I think it should be palpably obvious that the obvious is true, from a simple examination of the world around you, and of history. If the economy (let's use the right term, economics is an area of study) of the world as a whole is a zero sum game, then wealth in the world could not consistently increase.
I would in fact argue that wealth in the world, as opposed to wealth utilized by a single species known as homo sapiens, has in fact been noticeably decreasing due to mismanagement by said species. That species THINKS that wealth is increasing merely because of increases in efficiency, NOT because of actual increases in wealth.
If you define wealth as I do, as the number of atoms of usable elements available on the planet, then you'll quickly see what I mean.
I don't think the two curves have met yet, however, except in a few minor circumstances.
And as for your definition of mega businesses creating wealth through organization of people, capital, and knowledge, well, we've had a definition for that for quite some time now: fraud.
well, I have actually seen one option to Keynes that might work under even austrian theories:
Print expiring money.
A small city in Austria did this at the height of the great depression and it worked wonderfully well, until their central bank stepped on them for breaking the monopoly of printing money.
The trick to getting it to work efficiently is to tie the expiration to the inflation rate: the excess bubble money should be taxed at the same rate as inflation, even when it is stored in a bank account. If the economy is still deflationary, this taxation should be either 0 or a tax prebate at the deflationary rate.
The effect of this is to cut the cost of government projects to zero while allowing a bubble of inflation-free money out into the real world to put people back to work.
heck, the Ne'ah'kah'nie Tilamook have similar legends- only all of theirs are about the ocean disappearing over the horizon and then coming back to inundate several miles inland.
If you're going to live on a coast with a fault line, Tsunamis will happen.
Given the speed at which the Greenland Ice Sheet is now melting, we might see this paper confirmed within our lifetimes.
Not really- when reading the al Qaida link above, it made me wonder if a top-secret weapon today was smart dust.
In other words, who needs a network of spies if you can use a network of bluetooth-enabled robots less than a milimeter in diameter that stick to clothing?