In 1495, Spain felt pretty ripped off... Yet for some odd reason it all turned out to be a good thing for human history
It turned out good when the technology was cheap enough for independent groups to go off and explore. We are not there yet, we've just started to have commercial orbital space travel, it will be sometime before colonization is viable.
Also important is votes are a volume activity. That's why running a campaign is expensive, and why groups like NRA, Christian Coalition, NAACP, are more influential than any corporation. Politics is now about representing specific groups because most people (those who participate at least) vote acording to what the group leadership tells them.
A last resort is the least desirable way of doing something
Just because it's the least desirable doesn't mean it isn't part of every process.
Care to back that up? Simply because you MIGHT iterate quickly does not mean you don't iterate.
I'm not sure how you think, but personally I choose to take all the information available to make a decision. Rather than evaluating each piece of information, I weigh each piece against the others. Information isn't "good" or "bad", it's all part of creating a complete picture.
In your example of Eugenics, there are a number of reasons that it isn't considered, it doesn't just have to do with the Nazi stigma. Yes most average people would immediately dismiss it for that reason, but for experts working in that field, the questions addressed by eugenics will still pop up no matter what it's called. The reason it isn't widely championed is there are ethical concerns in terms of interpretation (what is an undesirable trait), implementation (abortion, genetic engineering, etc), and just the overall impact on humanity (reduction of genetic diversity).
Indeed. I said filtering based upon the messenger should be considered a last resort. I never said anything about the frequency with which you'd have to use that last resort.
If you are always filtering to some level then it isn't a 'Last Resort', it's part of the overall process. Evaluating information is holistic, not iterative.
You read too much Nietzche if you really think that kindness, benevolence and sympathy are the great weaknesses of Western civ.
Excessive kindness is a weakness, because it creates further expectations. There are large numbers of people that lack independence and responsibility because they feel they are owed by society to take care of them. That's not to say we should just kick everybody to the curb, but we shouldn't go to the excess creating dependence. There's a difference between helping a person out when they are between jobs, and taking care of a person who doesn't have a job. In the case of the former you are helping a person return to become a contributing member of society, in the latter you provide the means for a person to decide not to contribute.
Dude. Have you SEEN who our President is? Do you remember the election results? It's almost EXACTLY like half the country took a crazy pill or something.
You probably will not be able to verify medical information you are given directly so the next best thing is to corroborate that information with other sources.
You still need to have some level of trust in the information, there is so much conflicting information how do you decide what is true or false? If you go by sheer amount of evidence provided then the thousands of emails and anecdotes I receive would tell me that male enhancement pills work. Now if you are trying to corroborate by looking at sources that do not have a vested interest, then you are in fact evaluating the messenger.
Speak for yourself. The only time I take the word of someone based upon their background is when it is the only feasible option or when the consequence if they are wrong is less substantial than the cost of independently verifying the information.
The time to independently verify is a huge cost, and can't always be accomplished. Unless you want to become an expert in every field out there and conduct your own studies, then at some point you need to accept information based upon a degree of confidence, and part of that process is evaluating the messenger.
An extreme example if George W Bush declared that we need to invade Syria because intelligence reports they are actively working on nuclear weapons to use against US targets, would you believe him? This is a case where the stakes are very high no matter which decision is made, but the corroborating information is not easily available. How else do you evaluate the information other than by evaluating the messenger?
You have just nailed one of the greatest flaws in typical human reasoning. Humans attempt to judge the source rather than information.
As others have pointed out it's not a flaw, it's a feature. There's too much information in the world that needs to be filtered. This process is especially useful for making decisions based on information from others. For instance, why do you go to a doctor to receive medical related information? There's no guarantee that the information the doctor gives you is correct, but we accept their background as a means to justify accepting the information they provide.
I think of discrimination as a human spam filter. When properly applied it can be helpful to filter good and bad information, when misapplied (to trivial factors such age, sex, race, etc) it makes the person ignorant.
If someone has important information, why does their age/gender/religion/culture matter?
Why does anything matter, including education, confidence, height, clothes, etc? It comes down to trying to determine if you believe somebody has important information. We have to internally decide whether the person is believalbe or not based on whatever cues we given. Typically this is done based on our previous experiences and over time we build up a database and naturally use them to fill in gaps of knowledge and make assumptions. This is why social engineering works so well, it plays upon widely accepted expectations of human interaction.
stockholders losing sight of the big picture when evaluating individual business units
I tend to give investors more credit, its not they lose sight of the big picture, it's that the big picture is murky at best. Is MS losing hundreds of millions of dollars on the Xbox good or bad, it's hard to say in the context of the overall company. That also brings up another good reason to split up the company, which is to try and get a return on an investment. For example, MS has invested a lot of money on Xbox & associated software. If in the future the MS just doesn't feel it's in their best interest to keep pouring money in, rather than liquidate or just close down, it might be advantagous to spin-off. This would give the business unit autonomy and flexibility to possibly be successful. The spin-off might abandon the hardware and become a game software developer/publisher. Something like "Halo DS", could allow the spin-off to be viable, where it couldn't have been under direct MS management. Of course MS would still be a majority shareholder and stand to gain from the spin-off
Properly managed, a single organization can be of any size and any complexity. Good management will implement organizational decentralization as necessary, and as a corollary will also integrate management of operating units at appropriate decision-making levels to ensure optimum efficiency (management-speak would insert the bullshit word 'synergies' here).
It could happen, but it is very difficult to manage. Sometimes 'synergy' turns out to really be a handicap for individual business units. It is difficult to justify to stockholders decisions by individual business units that directly work against other business units. For example, people are advocating Sony electronics and Sony music be split, since the electronics business unit is hurt by DRM and other restrictions to try and protect Sony music. They could pretend to be different companies, but if for some reason the music unit starts to slip (even if there are gains in electronics), shareholders will ask what the electronics unit is doing to help.
There are also regulatory, tax, and other reasons that it might be advantageous to split a company up.
A sport is a competitive activity where skill, ability , and strategy determine the victor
Perhaps that could be said about football (futbol) which tends to be more heavily dependant on raw athletic ability and individual play, but american football is heavily based on strategy, and skill. My definition of a sport: "A competitive activity where participants try to achieve a goal, and prevent the opponent from achieving the goal"
This would include the major sports, at the same time eliminating competitive activities such as golf, bowling, darts, etc - which I would classify as exhibitions of skill
You are delusional if you think ESPN would not survive a la carte; or are you being sarcastic? Sarcasm doesn't translate very well over the Internet, you know. Also, MTV would have no problem surviving (unfortunately).
The previous poster was pointing out that ESPN & MTV, also throw in CNN, were considered risky efforts because they targetted "niche" markets.
Sorry if I gave that impression. That's not the case. What I'm arguing against isn't a person or a country building reserves. I'm arguing against he overdoing it. After the point were security and flexibility have been reached, accumulating more for the sake of it is utterly useless.
We are in agreement then.:)
And that's why the government must not tamper with interest rates: because the interest rate is precisely the means by which a person can judge whether borrowing money is a good idea or not.
That leads to a vicious cycle. If money becomes scarce, the interest rate will rise, since the economic risk is higher, and as you point out less money will be lent out and available.
They'll believe they're prospering, and the government will believe it's making the economy run, when in fact it's only creating a bubble of misdirected investments that will at some point bust, showing to all how badly allocated all that money has been.
The same problem occurs in the free market, only in an uncontrolled fashion.
The key to economic success isn't an increase in liquidity through artificial means, but an incentive to saving money, so that an accurate natural interest rate develops and money can be optimally allocated through borrowing.
Given history that doesn't always work either. External forces are always at play that can disrupt natural cycles. In fact government can be one of those forces, which is why central banks are given some autonomy.
When Keynesians try to "solve" the bubble/bust cycle by flooding the market with printed paper and thus tampering with the interest rate, they're in fact creating the very bubble that will bubble in future.
The federal reserve was actively raising interest rates to reduce money supply during the dot-com bubble. This helped reduce the amount of capital lost in failed investments
So, the answer is: even if people don't want the pain, it's desirable, because otherwise it's just pushing the pain to a future date, when it'll be much worse
I would argue that proper management of the money supply would just dampen the spring of growth-recession. The booms are not as large, but at the same time the busts aren't so bad.
It's a roughly linear growth, not this crazy up-down-up-down we experience nowadays.
Growth is always crazy up-down, the difference is in how big the swings are.
You're correct, of course. But as I see this, it is a even stronger reason for an absolutely strong gold standard, to the point of being constitutionally "unabandonable" even in war times: because it discourages wars.
But it could have the opposite effect, because the fastest way to grow your economy is to acquire more gold. Instead of oil, war would occur over gold reserves.
The meatspace equivalent to RAM-recording is to require conversations to be taped and those tapes to be produced.
I would say the meatspace equivalent is to take crimescene photographs. There may or may not be something there, but at least you've taken a "snapshot" so that the information isn't lost over time
You have a few conflicts in your reasoning, and also don't seem to include time valued functions such as borrowing in your analysis.
Money makes what would otherwise be a barter system more efficient in that it makes everyone save time by not having to construct by themselves a chain of "who wants what" to be able to make deals, but that's it.
You treat efficiency as a minor advantage. The ability to store goods & services in a readily tradeable value unit is essential to a functioning modern society. It also allows time flexibility in trade with regards to time, specifically borrowing and saving.
Remove completely all kinds of money, be them paper or metals, and you still have a market obeying the exact same rules and suffering from the exact same shortcoming when tampered by government.
Remove all kinds of money from the market and you will have some new form of money develop. Money doesn't change the rules, it is a natural extension.
Back to the point of liquidity being vital. Saving & borrowing are important tools for economic growth. If there is insufficient liquidity for facilitating exchanges, you will have economic panic. Also, since money is a scarce resource, if there is insufficient liquidity to meet demand it's value will increase. This will cause a further decrease in supply as people hold money. People won't be able to borrow, and debts become more costly.
Everything in this regards is nothing more than markets self-regulating, and a global deflation would be exactly that: the global market self-readjusting prices due to offer and demand
I agree. The question is do people want to deal with the pain of these self-adjustments? Such self-adjustments have lead to things like mass unemployment, revolutions, etc. Governments tend to choose monetary policy that is geared towards stability rather than the more natural path for economic growth (boom-bust cycles).
When you look at what is actually being exchanged, then you have the real balance of trade, and it's always perfectly balanced. The goods and services that came out from a country have been exchanged by the goods and services that entered that country.
If you support a gold standard or any hard currency then reserves are essential, since that is how you back the currency. Even with fiat currency, reserves are useful as value stores. They can be used to finance expensive endeavours like wars, without collapsing the internal economy by just printing more money.
The similarity of one can be made by way of promises ("I promise you that if you provide me this right now for less than you would require otherwise, I'll provide you something tomorrow for less than I would require otherwise"), which money in the end is
But money can more readily be exchanged than promises. Exchanging promises is very complex, because it requires confidence. I trust you, but somebody else may not, so I cannot trade your promise to me.
Getting back to the point of why a gold standard doesn't work. The goal of using a gold standard is to maintain stability of the monetary supply by preventing governments from over-printing. This is essential for smooth running commerce, which makes it a goal of government during normal times (more commerce = more tax revenue). But if you look historically at countries that were on the gold standard, when war breaks out, governments abandon it. The reason to have a hard currency goes away, because govenrment control of a fiat currency during stable periods mimics it; and during crisis it is abadoned anyways.
I'm not going to say our voting process is problem free, but it seems to have a lot less problems then what exists in the US system.
The US is a litigious society, I would expect in any close election you would have the parties arguing what does and doesn't count as a vote eventually getting the courts involved - remember "hanging chads."
5. It takes some massive dose of revisionism to call it some spread of communism in the first place, when it was just a country (two, if you count Korea too), that just wanted to reuni
Korea (1950), Vietnam(1954 - started by kicking the French out of the North)... oh don't forget Cuba(1959). That doesn't include the numerous armed conflicts with communist revolutionaries (Indonesia, Colombia, etc.) I'm not saying the US was correct in the assumption that the spread of communism was being centrally orchestrated by Russia; but it is understandable where they might come up with that idea.
Even Israelis are unhappy with their so called "democracy".
In that case the same can be said about all democratic nations. You'll find groups everywhere that do not feel like they are part of the democratic process, so the democracy is "broken"
This is why many classic economists believe gold should be (again) the global currency. Although its available quantity increase over time, it's at an almost fixed rate, outside of any and all governments desire to change its pace. A return to the gold standard would then be able to solve these 3 problems
And lead to the destruction of many economies due to lack of liquidity. You also have the potential issue of localized booming markets (eg China) causing global deflation.
But this doesn't make sense either. The "richness" of a country isn't in how much paper bills or tons of metal it has stored. It is in its productive (goods and services) output. The more a country produce things others are interested in, the more it profits from its efforts.
The richness of a country is not just what it produces, but also what it can acquire through trade. That's why countries stockpile tradable resources such as gold, dollars, and more recently the euro, rather than just any piece of paper or metal.
War exists because people allow themselves to become tools, components in a vastly larger entity called a State, or a religion, or some other organized body (maybe someday soon, a corporation)
People organize themselves into a larger entity for self preservation, war is an extension of that organization.
Conversely, the more decentralized and egalitarian we make our institutions, the less we depend on and support huge authority structures, the less likely those institutions will be to drag us into war.
Iraq is a perfect example of decentralized institutions and parties fighting - the various militias are not centrally controlled. The reason there was no civil war before was because a very strong central body kept potential threats in check. Also, how do you define egalitarian? Part of the reason there are large scale conflicts is because of philisophical differences between people - such as the definition of "equal."
Slashdot Mirror
I think it also makes sense to look at who funded colonization. Much of it was done by private groups and corporations, not government.
I'm not sure how you think, but personally I choose to take all the information available to make a decision. Rather than evaluating each piece of information, I weigh each piece against the others. Information isn't "good" or "bad", it's all part of creating a complete picture.
In your example of Eugenics, there are a number of reasons that it isn't considered, it doesn't just have to do with the Nazi stigma. Yes most average people would immediately dismiss it for that reason, but for experts working in that field, the questions addressed by eugenics will still pop up no matter what it's called.
The reason it isn't widely championed is there are ethical concerns in terms of interpretation (what is an undesirable trait), implementation (abortion, genetic engineering, etc), and just the overall impact on humanity (reduction of genetic diversity).
That's not to say we should just kick everybody to the curb, but we shouldn't go to the excess creating dependence. There's a difference between helping a person out when they are between jobs, and taking care of a person who doesn't have a job. In the case of the former you are helping a person return to become a contributing member of society, in the latter you provide the means for a person to decide not to contribute.
The time to independently verify is a huge cost, and can't always be accomplished. Unless you want to become an expert in every field out there and conduct your own studies, then at some point you need to accept information based upon a degree of confidence, and part of that process is evaluating the messenger.
An extreme example if George W Bush declared that we need to invade Syria because intelligence reports they are actively working on nuclear weapons to use against US targets, would you believe him?
This is a case where the stakes are very high no matter which decision is made, but the corroborating information is not easily available. How else do you evaluate the information other than by evaluating the messenger?
For instance, why do you go to a doctor to receive medical related information? There's no guarantee that the information the doctor gives you is correct, but we accept their background as a means to justify accepting the information they provide.
I think of discrimination as a human spam filter. When properly applied it can be helpful to filter good and bad information, when misapplied (to trivial factors such age, sex, race, etc) it makes the person ignorant.
It comes down to trying to determine if you believe somebody has important information. We have to internally decide whether the person is believalbe or not based on whatever cues we given. Typically this is done based on our previous experiences and over time we build up a database and naturally use them to fill in gaps of knowledge and make assumptions.
This is why social engineering works so well, it plays upon widely accepted expectations of human interaction.
That also brings up another good reason to split up the company, which is to try and get a return on an investment. For example, MS has invested a lot of money on Xbox & associated software. If in the future the MS just doesn't feel it's in their best interest to keep pouring money in, rather than liquidate or just close down, it might be advantagous to spin-off. This would give the business unit autonomy and flexibility to possibly be successful. The spin-off might abandon the hardware and become a game software developer/publisher. Something like "Halo DS", could allow the spin-off to be viable, where it couldn't have been under direct MS management. Of course MS would still be a majority shareholder and stand to gain from the spin-off
There are also regulatory, tax, and other reasons that it might be advantageous to split a company up.
My definition of a sport: "A competitive activity where participants try to achieve a goal, and prevent the opponent from achieving the goal"
This would include the major sports, at the same time eliminating competitive activities such as golf, bowling, darts, etc - which I would classify as exhibitions of skill
That leads to a vicious cycle. If money becomes scarce, the interest rate will rise, since the economic risk is higher, and as you point out less money will be lent out and available.
The same problem occurs in the free market, only in an uncontrolled fashion.
Given history that doesn't always work either. External forces are always at play that can disrupt natural cycles. In fact government can be one of those forces, which is why central banks are given some autonomy.
The federal reserve was actively raising interest rates to reduce money supply during the dot-com bubble. This helped reduce the amount of capital lost in failed investments
I would argue that proper management of the money supply would just dampen the spring of growth-recession. The booms are not as large, but at the same time the busts aren't so bad.
Growth is always crazy up-down, the difference is in how big the swings are.
But it could have the opposite effect, because the fastest way to grow your economy is to acquire more gold. Instead of oil, war would occur over gold reserves.
You treat efficiency as a minor advantage. The ability to store goods & services in a readily tradeable value unit is essential to a functioning modern society. It also allows time flexibility in trade with regards to time, specifically borrowing and saving.
Remove all kinds of money from the market and you will have some new form of money develop. Money doesn't change the rules, it is a natural extension.
Back to the point of liquidity being vital. Saving & borrowing are important tools for economic growth. If there is insufficient liquidity for facilitating exchanges, you will have economic panic. Also, since money is a scarce resource, if there is insufficient liquidity to meet demand it's value will increase. This will cause a further decrease in supply as people hold money. People won't be able to borrow, and debts become more costly.
I agree. The question is do people want to deal with the pain of these self-adjustments? Such self-adjustments have lead to things like mass unemployment, revolutions, etc. Governments tend to choose monetary policy that is geared towards stability rather than the more natural path for economic growth (boom-bust cycles).
If you support a gold standard or any hard currency then reserves are essential, since that is how you back the currency. Even with fiat currency, reserves are useful as value stores. They can be used to finance expensive endeavours like wars, without collapsing the internal economy by just printing more money.
But money can more readily be exchanged than promises. Exchanging promises is very complex, because it requires confidence. I trust you, but somebody else may not, so I cannot trade your promise to me.
Getting back to the point of why a gold standard doesn't work. The goal of using a gold standard is to maintain stability of the monetary supply by preventing governments from over-printing. This is essential for smooth running commerce, which makes it a goal of government during normal times (more commerce = more tax revenue). But if you look historically at countries that were on the gold standard, when war breaks out, governments abandon it.
The reason to have a hard currency goes away, because govenrment control of a fiat currency during stable periods mimics it; and during crisis it is abadoned anyways.
I'm not saying the US was correct in the assumption that the spread of communism was being centrally orchestrated by Russia; but it is understandable where they might come up with that idea.
The richness of a country is not just what it produces, but also what it can acquire through trade. That's why countries stockpile tradable resources such as gold, dollars, and more recently the euro, rather than just any piece of paper or metal.
Iraq is a perfect example of decentralized institutions and parties fighting - the various militias are not centrally controlled. The reason there was no civil war before was because a very strong central body kept potential threats in check.
Also, how do you define egalitarian? Part of the reason there are large scale conflicts is because of philisophical differences between people - such as the definition of "equal."