Oh, the startling realization that corporations use government collusion/ownership to enforce their power in countries where the government does maintain a reasonable monopoly over the use of force. Such an overwhelming insight! The point you're so skillfully missing is that all power, whether politically constituted or not, can be used to oppress people. That does not compute for Randroids, but power is power, whether it's in the marketplace or elsewhere.
I have a request to vote on some corporate stuff due to the shares I hold.
Right. Corporations offer a watered-down pay-to-play democracy for those rich enough. Now what about all the other people whose lives are affected by those corporations? They get some say in how government works. With megabusiness, they get none.
A good place to start for some not-too-numbers-heavy basic ideas would be John K Galbraith, The Affluent Society (or it might have been Almost Everybody's Guide to Economics -- they're dated, but they're focused on basic ideas of how economies work). John Galbraith (and to a lesser extent his son James) was a great writer of popular economics tracts, with reasonably middle-of-the-road politics (not one of the so-called "freshwater economists" that are typical of the hard-right, free-market-fundamentalist position that underlies a lot of our current government).
Having started there, you can look at some of Paul Krugman's work for again-popular treatments of more interesting problems; "The Return of Depression Economics" is a great book.
You also wouldn't go too wrong by lurking on some of the well-reputed economists' blogs; you'll pick up a fair amount by osmosis. Krugman's NY Times blog is good; Greg Mankiw's blog, and especially Brad DeLong. Like I said, you'll want a couple popular books under your belt, but from there since a lot of interesting economists these days are hip to the Internet and blog a lot, you can pick up a huge amount by watching them actually at work.
When you have a bit of background, you can also pick up an awful lot just by reading American history, too. Economists LOOOOVE to talk about the Great Depression; it was basically the equivalent of Einstein and Newton rolled into one for the field.
One more thing: you'll probably realize that there's a very major rift in the economics profession right now, divided between the so-called "freshwater economists" and "saltwater economists." With a little bit of reading you'll probably be able to identify which camp any given opinion falls into pretty quickly.
Anyway, hope this is helpful, it's vastly vague and incomplete, but at this point I don't even remember half of what I've flipped through at one point or another. Learning comes from everywhere:D
Interesting, but how does that relate to my dislike for socialist corporatism?
It provides a grounding in fact and analysis for what would otherwise exist as an uninformed prejudice. It provides a leg to stand on against the smug spear-carriers for the existing system who roll their eyes and say they too want to make the world better, but that you just don't understand because you've never given these things any real study... and maybe even gives you the chance to lay out a case on their own terms for why their understanding is flawed and the science itself needs to be changed. Really, it is very useful.
I'm not really sure what you mean by "socialist corporatism" (government-business collusion is more properly an element of fascism, though maybe you mean corporate welfare), but your critique will be much more trenchant if you read up on how economics works. (I'm saying this as someone who shares a deep distrust of corporate America and of the misuses of economic rhetoric and ill-bought power.)
If nothing else, economics (like many other subjects) gives you a vocabulary to describe your views in a way that other people will understand, and it helps sharpen them a lot too in the study.
they still don't have the power to suck $$$ from your wallet, or jail you, or draft you to die in Arghanistan.
Corporations have sucked plenty of money from people's wallets, in many cases without any hope of recourse (thanks to mandatory-binding-arbitration clauses in non-negotiable contracts; read Consumerist sometime). They cannot directly jail you, because we've done away with debtor's prison, but they have pet governments to do that job for them. To date no one in the US has been drafted to die in Afghanistan, because the people won't stand for it; but funny you bring up the wars, given the overwhelming involvement of private industry in the American way of war these days... not the very war itself, but a substantial part of the way it's being carried out, are greatly to the benefit of corporations like Bechtel and KBR. Corporations do all of those things, thanks to the undue power money grants over the government. (And lest you say that it's still government doing those things, let me preemptively point out that the corps would be quite happy to do them as well, only the government stands in the way of private armies and police forces. Read up on the East India Company's rule of India if you wonder what corporations are capable of without government restraint.)
For the rest, when was the last time you got to vote for a corporation's leadership? Yeah, I thought so. Therefore the corporation is the greater evil: it cannot even in principle be restrained by the popular will.
Obviously there's all kinds of flaws with denying first sale -- for instance, if the company sold me the right to use the disc, what's to stop them from insisting that I return their property (the disc itself)? I don't own it, I didn't get a right to possess it, and if the right they sold me is useless without it, too bad for me...
sadly, the law rarely runs as fast as common sense.
With hundreds of millions of years of evolution, are there any systems in the human body that are dependent on the pulse to function properly?
For most of those millions of years of evolution, the answer was "all of them," because the only alternative... meanwhile we don't have a very big sample of pulseless-but-alive people. We'll probably find out more as time goes on.
Refugee's are supposed to goto the nearest safe country but because of Britain's great welfare scheme many are traveling all across Europe and then sneaking into the UK. The majority of these refugees are men who are escaping the horrors at home but feel its ok to leave mums, wives and children back home.
Do you know how hard it is to get even one person out of the kind of country which would qualify one as a refugee? And, sorry, but Britain's welfare system isn't that much better than other EU countries'.
Religion is bad, primitive religion is worse, and there is every reason for Westerners who value personal freedom to keep out religious enemies just as they would reject political enemies (religion is merely superstitious politics).
I think that's going to be a hard sell in a country that has Established a closely-related desert-sheepherder religion.
To the extent that you allow a population of social primitives into your home, they will make it over in the image of the societies they left
Right. Because most people who emigrate to the Western democracies usually do so because they're soooooo totally jazzed about the society they grew up in. And you know, once a savage, always a savage, no such thing as acculturation, amirite?
Obviously you don't want to sit back and let anybody who wants to, come in and run around in your country practicing honor killings and tribal warfare; but that's why you have laws. People who won't obey your laws get deported. People who are obeying them are doing just fine, and their kids will be as British as the Queen. (who, let's face it, was a johnny-come-lately not so so long ago...)
I find it highly unlikely that every soldier in the Confederate Army knew every Union soldier personally. Obviously, people kill close relatives and loved ones all the time, so familiarity is not sufficient to prevent killing; but it's psychologically a lot more difficult. I've heard (though anecdotally) that in still-existing hunter-gatherer societies, when people encounter strangers, they sit down and try to figure out whether or not they're related and in what way, to decide if they're going to kill each other...
Is that like Riddick? Sometimes you need evil to fight evil?
More like, sometimes you need to know what you're talking about to know what you're talking about.
Economists' predictions are quite often politically motivated rubbish, and the advanced mathematical models are usually the result of a scientistic quantification-fetish that doesn't really reflect reality. But the general understanding of supply and demand, the effect of money supply, the perception of value and its influence on human behaviors... there's a lot of useful knowledge that people have accumulated by looking closely at how people negotiate the allocation of scarce resources, and it's worthwhile to study it (if not to immediately rush off and become a technical currency trader or something).
NCLB tests are worthless. I know, I've worked on them. The primary reason those test results are used is because they are politically appealing -- as you say, "how do you tell whether teachers are doing a good job?" That response encapsulates it all: you've given up caring whether the metric is valid or any good; there's a political requirement that the result be measured, so people become quite happy to apply whatever metric is available, even if it's attempting to measure something it cannot possibly measure.
I also think you're grossly underestimating the nature of good memorization (the kind that comes from learning). You can jam random numbers and symbols and facts into your brain and not come away knowing anything other than how to give the right response when poked in a certain way. But knowing, learning, means that you don't memorize facts; you memorize first principles, from which facts naturally or easily follow. The designer doesn't try to send the entire cathedral, just the blueprints.
Children do not fucking need longer exposure to the indoctrination of the socialist and corporatist SCUM invading our US society.
You are grotesquely undervaluing the importance of a grasp of (salt-water) economics. Anyone who wants to avoid being indoctrinated needs to understand economic concepts, so they can tell when they're being misled and lied to.
Er... I don't know that I'd describe what appears to be a six-room house as a McMansion. I mean, they've got one room for each of the kids, one for the parents, a living room with a TV, and a kitchen. We've never seen anything else. While it's not the smallest house on the block, a 4Br/0Ba* could probably be had for a fairly reasonable price, considering that the father has a job as a nuclear engineer.
See, I disagree about homework. I think a lot of it is stupid, but at the same time, if you want to improve skills, you have to practice them. Math homework is like playing scales on your trombone -- it's boring and tedious, but if you want to sit down and do the scales right, you'd better practice them, same as you'd better practice your times tables.
And of course, homework that's about reading the lessons, well, it's reading. There is obviously a point to having a student read a schoolbook.
Now, work that keeps students up to all hours of the night and destroys their sleep habits is probably self-defeating. But drills are useful in maths, foreign languages, mathematically-based sciences...
Agreed -- I think I'm too far removed from the situation to be well-informed about it (and hadn't looked too closely at the article when I supplied it, since again I can't really judge its accuracy). However, from reading the comments, I saw enough on both sides to make that part also seem inconclusive -- with people claiming to be Iranian citizens or otherwise representative of Iranian public opinion giving reasons to disbelieve Ahmadinejad's claims.
What's most worrisome to me is the extent to which Khamenei has hitched his wagon to Ahmadinejad by certifying the election results; will that mean that he won't be as effective a check on the hothead, because his own position has been weakened? Let's hope not...
No, Israel is not a dictatorship. But it is theocratic in some respects, see e.g. the restrictions on marriage rights of non-Orthodox Jews. For that matter, the very definition of Israel relies upon religious criteria for full citizenship (if not, the country would be majority-Palestinian). It is an intentionally religiously-defined country, albeit democratic.
Israel has not stated its desire to annihilate Iran, but it has proven its desire to absorb Palestinian land (and some political groups have openly expressed a disbelief in the existence of any sort of Palestinian identity, and possibly also the desire to wipe them out if they did exist).
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, the startling realization that corporations use government collusion/ownership to enforce their power in countries where the government does maintain a reasonable monopoly over the use of force. Such an overwhelming insight!
The point you're so skillfully missing is that all power, whether politically constituted or not, can be used to oppress people. That does not compute for Randroids, but power is power, whether it's in the marketplace or elsewhere.
I have a request to vote on some corporate stuff due to the shares I hold.
Right. Corporations offer a watered-down pay-to-play democracy for those rich enough. Now what about all the other people whose lives are affected by those corporations? They get some say in how government works. With megabusiness, they get none.
Thanks, hope you enjoy & that you don't find it a waste of time! Hit me up sometime and let me know how it goes.
Do you have any suggested reading for me?
A good place to start for some not-too-numbers-heavy basic ideas would be John K Galbraith, The Affluent Society (or it might have been Almost Everybody's Guide to Economics -- they're dated, but they're focused on basic ideas of how economies work). John Galbraith (and to a lesser extent his son James) was a great writer of popular economics tracts, with reasonably middle-of-the-road politics (not one of the so-called "freshwater economists" that are typical of the hard-right, free-market-fundamentalist position that underlies a lot of our current government).
Having started there, you can look at some of Paul Krugman's work for again-popular treatments of more interesting problems; "The Return of Depression Economics" is a great book.
You also wouldn't go too wrong by lurking on some of the well-reputed economists' blogs; you'll pick up a fair amount by osmosis. Krugman's NY Times blog is good; Greg Mankiw's blog, and especially Brad DeLong. Like I said, you'll want a couple popular books under your belt, but from there since a lot of interesting economists these days are hip to the Internet and blog a lot, you can pick up a huge amount by watching them actually at work.
When you have a bit of background, you can also pick up an awful lot just by reading American history, too. Economists LOOOOVE to talk about the Great Depression; it was basically the equivalent of Einstein and Newton rolled into one for the field.
One more thing: you'll probably realize that there's a very major rift in the economics profession right now, divided between the so-called "freshwater economists" and "saltwater economists." With a little bit of reading you'll probably be able to identify which camp any given opinion falls into pretty quickly.
Anyway, hope this is helpful, it's vastly vague and incomplete, but at this point I don't even remember half of what I've flipped through at one point or another. Learning comes from everywhere :D
P:
I mean have you ever heard of a used book store?
Yeah, it's called a library.
GP:
So how many people will flame me without getting that I am kidding or even bothering to read this line?
Well, there's one down, plus three mods (do they count?)
Interesting, but how does that relate to my dislike for socialist corporatism?
It provides a grounding in fact and analysis for what would otherwise exist as an uninformed prejudice. It provides a leg to stand on against the smug spear-carriers for the existing system who roll their eyes and say they too want to make the world better, but that you just don't understand because you've never given these things any real study... and maybe even gives you the chance to lay out a case on their own terms for why their understanding is flawed and the science itself needs to be changed. Really, it is very useful.
I'm not really sure what you mean by "socialist corporatism" (government-business collusion is more properly an element of fascism, though maybe you mean corporate welfare), but your critique will be much more trenchant if you read up on how economics works. (I'm saying this as someone who shares a deep distrust of corporate America and of the misuses of economic rhetoric and ill-bought power.)
If nothing else, economics (like many other subjects) gives you a vocabulary to describe your views in a way that other people will understand, and it helps sharpen them a lot too in the study.
they still don't have the power to suck $$$ from your wallet, or jail you, or draft you to die in Arghanistan.
Corporations have sucked plenty of money from people's wallets, in many cases without any hope of recourse (thanks to mandatory-binding-arbitration clauses in non-negotiable contracts; read Consumerist sometime). They cannot directly jail you, because we've done away with debtor's prison, but they have pet governments to do that job for them. To date no one in the US has been drafted to die in Afghanistan, because the people won't stand for it; but funny you bring up the wars, given the overwhelming involvement of private industry in the American way of war these days... not the very war itself, but a substantial part of the way it's being carried out, are greatly to the benefit of corporations like Bechtel and KBR. Corporations do all of those things, thanks to the undue power money grants over the government. (And lest you say that it's still government doing those things, let me preemptively point out that the corps would be quite happy to do them as well, only the government stands in the way of private armies and police forces. Read up on the East India Company's rule of India if you wonder what corporations are capable of without government restraint.)
For the rest, when was the last time you got to vote for a corporation's leadership? Yeah, I thought so. Therefore the corporation is the greater evil: it cannot even in principle be restrained by the popular will.
And people complain about socialism limiting freedoms...
Obviously there's all kinds of flaws with denying first sale -- for instance, if the company sold me the right to use the disc, what's to stop them from insisting that I return their property (the disc itself)? I don't own it, I didn't get a right to possess it, and if the right they sold me is useless without it, too bad for me...
sadly, the law rarely runs as fast as common sense.
With hundreds of millions of years of evolution, are there any systems in the human body that are dependent on the pulse to function properly?
For most of those millions of years of evolution, the answer was "all of them," because the only alternative... meanwhile we don't have a very big sample of pulseless-but-alive people. We'll probably find out more as time goes on.
Refugee's are supposed to goto the nearest safe country but because of Britain's great welfare scheme many are traveling all across Europe and then sneaking into the UK. The majority of these refugees are men who are escaping the horrors at home but feel its ok to leave mums, wives and children back home.
Do you know how hard it is to get even one person out of the kind of country which would qualify one as a refugee?
And, sorry, but Britain's welfare system isn't that much better than other EU countries'.
Why, because they're white, of course. *eyeroll*
Religion is bad, primitive religion is worse, and there is every reason for Westerners who value personal freedom to keep out religious enemies just as they would reject political enemies (religion is merely superstitious politics).
I think that's going to be a hard sell in a country that has Established a closely-related desert-sheepherder religion.
To the extent that you allow a population of social primitives into your home, they will make it over in the image of the societies they left
Right. Because most people who emigrate to the Western democracies usually do so because they're soooooo totally jazzed about the society they grew up in. And you know, once a savage, always a savage, no such thing as acculturation, amirite?
Obviously you don't want to sit back and let anybody who wants to, come in and run around in your country practicing honor killings and tribal warfare; but that's why you have laws. People who won't obey your laws get deported. People who are obeying them are doing just fine, and their kids will be as British as the Queen. (who, let's face it, was a johnny-come-lately not so so long ago...)
Trade ideally is a win:win-situation.
Ideally.
Regrettably, it has not always been conducted in a manner consistent with this ideal...
Clearly it should've said "Your mommy ain't your mommy, but your mommy don't know." ...waitaminute...
I find it highly unlikely that every soldier in the Confederate Army knew every Union soldier personally.
Obviously, people kill close relatives and loved ones all the time, so familiarity is not sufficient to prevent killing; but it's psychologically a lot more difficult. I've heard (though anecdotally) that in still-existing hunter-gatherer societies, when people encounter strangers, they sit down and try to figure out whether or not they're related and in what way, to decide if they're going to kill each other...
Is that like Riddick? Sometimes you need evil to fight evil?
More like, sometimes you need to know what you're talking about to know what you're talking about.
Economists' predictions are quite often politically motivated rubbish, and the advanced mathematical models are usually the result of a scientistic quantification-fetish that doesn't really reflect reality. But the general understanding of supply and demand, the effect of money supply, the perception of value and its influence on human behaviors... there's a lot of useful knowledge that people have accumulated by looking closely at how people negotiate the allocation of scarce resources, and it's worthwhile to study it (if not to immediately rush off and become a technical currency trader or something).
NCLB tests are worthless. I know, I've worked on them. The primary reason those test results are used is because they are politically appealing -- as you say, "how do you tell whether teachers are doing a good job?" That response encapsulates it all: you've given up caring whether the metric is valid or any good; there's a political requirement that the result be measured, so people become quite happy to apply whatever metric is available, even if it's attempting to measure something it cannot possibly measure.
I also think you're grossly underestimating the nature of good memorization (the kind that comes from learning). You can jam random numbers and symbols and facts into your brain and not come away knowing anything other than how to give the right response when poked in a certain way. But knowing, learning, means that you don't memorize facts; you memorize first principles, from which facts naturally or easily follow. The designer doesn't try to send the entire cathedral, just the blueprints.
To be fair, most of the agricultural work happens around planting and harvest time -- i.e., the stuff on either side of summer break...
Children do not fucking need longer exposure to the indoctrination of the socialist and corporatist SCUM invading our US society.
You are grotesquely undervaluing the importance of a grasp of (salt-water) economics.
Anyone who wants to avoid being indoctrinated needs to understand economic concepts, so they can tell when they're being misled and lied to.
Er... I don't know that I'd describe what appears to be a six-room house as a McMansion.
I mean, they've got one room for each of the kids, one for the parents, a living room with a TV, and a kitchen. We've never seen anything else. While it's not the smallest house on the block, a 4Br/0Ba* could probably be had for a fairly reasonable price, considering that the father has a job as a nuclear engineer.
*yeah, have you ever seen them show a bathroom?
See, I disagree about homework. I think a lot of it is stupid, but at the same time, if you want to improve skills, you have to practice them. Math homework is like playing scales on your trombone -- it's boring and tedious, but if you want to sit down and do the scales right, you'd better practice them, same as you'd better practice your times tables.
And of course, homework that's about reading the lessons, well, it's reading. There is obviously a point to having a student read a schoolbook.
Now, work that keeps students up to all hours of the night and destroys their sleep habits is probably self-defeating. But drills are useful in maths, foreign languages, mathematically-based sciences...
Agreed -- I think I'm too far removed from the situation to be well-informed about it (and hadn't looked too closely at the article when I supplied it, since again I can't really judge its accuracy). However, from reading the comments, I saw enough on both sides to make that part also seem inconclusive -- with people claiming to be Iranian citizens or otherwise representative of Iranian public opinion giving reasons to disbelieve Ahmadinejad's claims.
What's most worrisome to me is the extent to which Khamenei has hitched his wagon to Ahmadinejad by certifying the election results; will that mean that he won't be as effective a check on the hothead, because his own position has been weakened? Let's hope not...
it usually causes a physiological response
Well, um, yes, that's the idea.
No, Israel is not a dictatorship. But it is theocratic in some respects, see e.g. the restrictions on marriage rights of non-Orthodox Jews.
For that matter, the very definition of Israel relies upon religious criteria for full citizenship (if not, the country would be majority-Palestinian). It is an intentionally religiously-defined country, albeit democratic.
Israel has not stated its desire to annihilate Iran, but it has proven its desire to absorb Palestinian land (and some political groups have openly expressed a disbelief in the existence of any sort of Palestinian identity, and possibly also the desire to wipe them out if they did exist).
It's a couple of months old so it might have been superseded, but here (by way of Nate Silver).