Why should the infrastructure upgrades have been paid for by the developer (which really means, as you know, by the new homeowners via a bump in the price of their new houses)?
I take it you're talking about sewage, roads, electricity, new schools, et cetera. Thing is, these are all public resources. Everyone gets their indirect and in some cases direct benefit, not just the new homeowners, and everyone has a say in how they're used.
I mean, if you want only the new homeowners to pay for their water, new streets and traffic signals, schools, et cetera, then you logically ought to also give them permanent exclusive control of those resources. They should be able to gate off any road they build and charge non-residents a toll. If the highway has to be widened, they should have exclusive access to the new lanes. They should have exclusive rights to determine who gets into the new school, and what its curriculum is. The new fire company and new police officers should answer emergency calls only in the new development, et cetera.
No one really wants that, typically. The idea is that public resources are paid for by everybody, used by everybody, and controlled by everybody through the local government, and you don't even try to make sure costs and benefits are precisely equally distributed. You don't charge only the people who use a given intersection for the cost of the stoplight there, or only the people with kids in kindergarten for a new school roof. It's generally considered antisocial and self-defeating to Balkanize a town so that resources and responsibility are assigned to many different parties.
I've heard this kind of argument before, and what often underlies it is a rather shameful "pull up the ladder behind you" kind of attitude that doesn't want new neighbors to spoil the view, drive up property values (and taxes), or load up the schools. I find it unpleasant because it gives a totally unjustified advantage to whoever is first on the scene.
I just feel that in non-free markets it's pretty obvious that the invisible hand is not directing things. Visible ones are.
I don't think so. Just because visible hands are messing about with the market doesn't mean that the ordinary market forces aren't operating also. Gravity operates in a tennis game, even though the rackets are doing most of the moving of balls.
I guess I can't tell which is the cart and which is the horse.
There need not be a cart and a horse, a cause and an effect. It is entirely possible for free transactions to give rise to better information flow and vice versa. They can reinforce each other, much in the way good health and exercise do.
does the invisible hand gradually push us, apparently over the course of millenia, toward free society?
I would say not, no. Where we go over the course of millenia is determined by our biology. Our consciously-invented institutions have no significant effect. Over a much shorter time period, however, say a few centuries, then our consciously-invented institutions can have an effect, and make our lives more or less miserable. If we choose to maximize individual freedom and choice, then we will be wealthier, both as individuals and as a society.
Unfortunately, it does seem that when we become wealthier, we forget how we got there. We decide there are so many virtuous things that our wealth should be doing, but won't of its own free will -- end war, stop injustice, outlaw bad luck, make sure all the children are above average, whatever. Then we decide just a little constraint on our individual choices -- to make sure the Good Things get done -- won't harm, and off we go. By and by things fold up, and we're back to where we started. Or so it seems.
you seem to think that what Hezbollah did was trivial, yet this "trivial" hack enabled them to defend against a huge Israeli onslaught.
"Defend" in what sense? Put up some resistance? Sure, why not? Unless they're flat dead they're going to put up some resistance. The Israeli invasion could never be cost-free.
Is what they did trivial? If you mean what the article explicitly says they did (not what the article implies they did), then it's not so much trivial as plain obvious warfighting stuff, like aiming your rifle before you fire it. You wouldn't expect to read a breathless page-one story in a newspaper saying Hey! Those wily Hezbollah guys aimed their Kalishnikovs before firing them at the Israelis! Clever, no? No wonder they were able to resist the invasion so well...
I mean, everyone thought Israel would roll over Hezbollah...
And so they did. Don't recall hearing of any Israeli defeats, or even serious losses.
but Isreal had to move back.
Nah. Israel chose to terminate their invasion, for their own reasons, and at a time of their choosing. What were those reasons? I don't know, not having been present at the Cabinet meeting where it was decided, but if I had to guess, I'd say two possibilities: (1) they got word from Washington that they should, or (2) they accomplished whatever they'd wanted to do in South Lebanon. Their objectives are not likely to be entirely public, you know. Maybe they nailed someone they wanted to, or cleaned out a certain territory they wanted to, or whatever. Neither the Israelis nor Hezbollah are likely to talk about it.
No, of course I didn't mean each man is born free. I meant men in general.
And, yes, you are right governments arise from our free choice. I said that, too. It is perfectly reasonable to regard government as the most exploitive and coercive possible corporation. Imagine Microsoft (or the RIAA or your favorite corporate bogey-man) with guns and prison to enforce its will on you.
They do arise from a free state, yes. Why can't the invisible hand be trusted to correct their excesses? But who ever said it can't? It does, over time. That's why there is no longer a Soviet Union, why China has more entrepreneurs per square foot than ever appeared in Mao's worst nightmares, and why there are very few emperors and kings and despots with real power left. When people are free to choose their government over the long term by choosing to stay or choosing to leave (emigrate), then government does, indeed, become a market choice, and, willy nilly, we find that different types of governments do need to "compete" in a serious sense for the allegiance of "customers" (a.k.a. citizens).
How is the creation of governments by free actors different from the creation of exploitive corporations? Not by so very much, merely a matter of degree, but a qualitatively important degree. The key difference is that government is by definition in the business of coercive transactions, while corporations are in the business of free transactions. Unpleasant and annoying it may be, but you can always choose not to accept the Microsoft EULA. You can't not accept a ruling of the government that it is not legal to drive 56 MPH.
Except fairly recently, with such things as the Bill of Rights, we have taken it as given that government will normally use force to accomplish its goals, and that there are few or no limits on that force. We have taken it as equally given that business may not use force to accomplish its goals. That's the important difference. It's been blurred in places, at times, and when it's blurred so that corporations start to look like government, it's worse for people, and when it's blurred so that governments start to look like business, it's better.
Well...only if I can go ahead and point out that your pointing-out sentence is grammatically valid only through popular use. (You meant to say "..point out that that is not to what the fallacy refers," although popular usage certainly validates your actual sentence in colloquial speech.)
I'm hard pressed to see why you think the article does not contain a BTQ fallacy. The definition of such is to assume the thing under debate. The journalist writing the article assumed in his question that it had already been proven that Hezbollah had decrypted Israeli military radio, and the only remaining question was how it was done, which was not true. But by framing the question the way he did, he was able to suggest that the "I can't tell you" answer he got implied that it was in fact done, but the details could not be told. Seems like a straightforward BTQ fallacy to me. But perhaps you have some more detailed criticism that explains why it is not.
But you should add the people who wrote and published the story.
Journalist: Hey! Only I have access to these fascinating and scary facts. You need to pay for my work.
Editor and publisher: Worry! Fear! The world is too random and strange for you to understand yourself. Buy our paper to find out what craziness is happening that only we know about in advance, and to be told what it means.
The market always starts off free. Men are born free.
However, soon enough some clever bastard realizes it's easier to make a living telling other people what to do than making or growing stuff. So he says to the reg'lar folks: hey now, listen up, life isn't as hard as it is just because that's reality. Noooo, They(TM) are exploiting you, making your life harder than it has to be. But stick with me, friends -- lend me the strength of your numbers, a chunk of your cash, your vote, your service in my revolutionary army, et cetera, and we'll soon fix things up.
Then you get coercion (for the sake of the greater good, naturally) and the market is no longer free. Nor are the men. But that's homo sapiens for you. Like dumb oxen we always let the yoke be put on our necks when the shamans and shysters wave a tasty hatful of oats in our face.
But...won't he even more prefer to have his product be considered just a little bit more superior than it actually is? Arguably it's the market that lets him get away with nothing more than the actual truth.
But what if Dell, HP and Sony all use the same parts in their boxes, and all have a vested interest in bullshitting you?
Why, some bright young entrepreneur -- like Michael Dell himself, once upon a time -- will come along and realize he can make a killing in the PC market by exposing all the lies and selling boxes that don't have the fatal weakness.
These companies often scratch each others' backs, because they gain more from strengthening the industry as a whole, than they do by competing with each other, or by informing the consumer.
Er...have you actually worked for a company in a competitive industry, or been in business at all, or are you just speaking from pure theory? All the firms for which I've worked in the past twenty years have been viciously trying to slaughter their competitors all the time. Their sales forces disparage each other all the time. They watch jealously to see if the other guys have some minute advantage and quickly try to copy it or neutralize it or slander it as quickly as possible. They'd hire mercenaries to kill the other guys' employees and blow up their headquarters if it were only legal.
Look, if it were that natural for people to just all go along and do what's best for the group, we wouldn't be having a big discussion about global warming, would we?
Market forces do not work for long-range decisions.
So? Explain the colonization of the New World between AD 1500 and 1800, then. Or the rise of feudalism over the four centuries between the Roman Empire and Charlemagne the Great.
Trying to see a solution to something like the climate crisis within market economics should be taken as a sign of dangerous ideological monomania.
You're mistaking economics for an ideology. It's not. It's an anti-ideology. It's a way of explaining how the world actually works. Ideologies are a way of arguing how the world should work. Economics has nothing to say about how a "solution" to a climate crisis ought to be found (if we can even agree on what the "solution" is). It only describes what will actually happen if various "solutions" are implemented, which may or may not be what was intended to happen.
Hence I'm going to say you have it exactly backward: trying to find a solution to something like a climate crisis without paying attention to what economics teaches us is the way people behave is a sign of a dangerous attachment to ideology and a Peter-Pan-like belief that reality can be what we all wish it to be, if only we wish real hard. You might as well argue against paying attention to the laws of physics when designing spaceships because they're damn inconvenient sometimes.
Because people will pay high prices for information that proves to be correct.
Another way to put it is that actors in the free market never choose to supply accurate information of their own accord. It is forced upon them by the freeness of the market, which allows any competitor to sabotage them by exposing lies.
If Dell wants to bullshit you about what's inside their boxen, it won't work, not because Michael Dell has a conscience, but because HP and Sony would gleefully jump on the chance to expose the lie in the hopes of stealing Dell's market share.
You've got it backwards. It's not that accurate information exchange produces a free market, it's that a free market produces accurate information exchange. You find the worst lies and deceptions (including self-deceptions) in a non-free market, e.g. in a planned economy, or equivalently within a firm so large and generally successful that hiring and firing depend more on manager's impressions and prejudices than on actual success in the marketplace.
Gee, who gives a damn if they are reputable? Why would anyone ever take someone's word on something very important on sheer reputation? If I buy a car, I don't trust the salesman's word that all 5 gears work, even if it's a little old white-haired granny who sings in the church choir every Sunday, and the dealership donates 10% of their profits to saving the whales. I drive the damn thing myself to find out. No offense to the dealer and saleman and all, but important stuff can't ever be taken on pure trust.
I mean, why not read the CEI's papers and statements, whatnot, and examine them in light of the evidence you know, and peruse their logic? If the facts they present agree with the facts you know, and their logic is air-tight, then you agree with their conclusions, whether or not they are funded by Exxon or the Illuminati or the Devil himself.
On the other hand, if the facts they present are cock-eyed, and their logic mere Swiss cheese, then their conclusions are bogus even if they are funded by the Mother Theresa Institute, their chairman is a vegan who drives a hybrid, and all their reports are printed on recycled toilet paper with soy-based ink.
Read the article very, very carefully, bearing in mind that since it's written by a journalist it might as well have been written by the Hezbollah PR 'n' Propaganda team.
What the article actually says about 'hacking' Israeli military radio communications is merely this:
Using technology most likely supplied by Iran, special Hezbollah teams monitored the constantly changing radio frequencies of Israeli troops on the ground. That gave guerrillas a picture of Israeli movements, casualty reports and supply routes.
So what precisely did Hezbollah do? Sounds like they merely verified that there was radio traffic on certain frequencies, and that it came from Israeli units, and then they were able to do a little direction-finding on it to verify where it came from. Look, imam! Funky radio traffic in the Bekaa valley that sounds like the usual gibberish exchanged between Israeli armor and base -- I'll bet there are Israeli tanks on Route such-and-such!
Well, gosh, big deal. Any amateur could do as much as easily. It's not right brilliantly clever to deduce when you get a lot of chatter on military frequencies in a certain neighborhood that there are military operations afoot in it. I mean, Hezbollah probably got as good or better "intelligence" about Israeli movements just by taking reports of survivors who counted the number of tanks that rolled over them.
Did Hezbollah actually decrypt communications, which would be an intelligence coup? Your logic argues pretty persuasively that they did not, because if they had they would have kept it a deep dark secret. In fact, they would have done their best to avoid drawing attention to their radio-interception program, lest it start the Israelis thinking. They -- or rather their Iranian paymasters -- would not have countenanced boasting about the operation to a damn fool journalist who would embellish it with wild speculation about 'hacking' secret Israeli radio messages.
Nor does the article actually manage to get anyone who might have known to say otherwise. It merely attempts to imply that they might have said it, or something like it. Hence statements like this:
The official refused to detail how Hezbollah was able to intercept and decipher Israeli transmissions.
A nice example of the old 'begging the question' fallacy, such as in the question 'Have you stopped beating your wife yet?' Maybe the official refused to "detail" how Hezbollah was able to decipher Israeli transmissions because, in fact, they weren't able to.
Or this:
But a former Israeli general, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Hezbollah's ability to secretly hack into military transmissions had "disastrous" consequences for the Israeli offensive.
"Israel's military leaders clearly underestimated the enemy and this is just one example," he said.
Hmmm....wait a minute, the direct quote only says the military leader underestimated Hezbollah. And what's the mysterious 'this' to which the general refers, which is an example of the underestimation? Interception and radio direction-finding? Or actual decryption? We don't know. The journalist implies, in the previous sentence, that 'this' means 'hacking' into military transmissions, and that this means interception and decryption. But does it?
If the anonymous general were willing to be quoted saying quite plainly: "Ayup, Hezbollah decrypted our most secret communications, damn 'em," then you can bet your last dollar the journalist would have used that very juicy quote. The fact that he didn't use that quote, or one like it, means he couldn't get it. And I'm sure he tried very hard, with all the artful questions he could. The general just wasn't willing to say those words. Because, almost surely, they would have been false.
In short, I think the odds are good that this is just another journalist whoring for Hezbollah, 'cause it makes a scary exciting man-bites-dog story.
Is there an alternative to this "Brain Exercise" game...?
Read Jane Eyre or Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton? Play tennis, golf, ping-pong? Learn to play the ukelele? Study Latin? Get together with friends to play bridge and argue politics?
It seems hardly surprising that playing video games is better than simply allowing your brain to rot. But I'd be equally surprised if playing video games is better than the more obvious and traditional ways to stay active as you age.
I dunno...I heard Hawking give a real physics seminar (at Berkeley, circa 1988). I don't mean the popular gee-whiz First Five Minutes Of The Universe kind of thing. Now, I'm not a doofus when it comes to physics -- I took courses in quantum field theory and sat in on a GR class -- but I wasn't a cosmology graduate student. From that perspective, Hawking's talk stopped making much sense about 90 seconds after it started, except for brief lucid moments in the middle.
I mean, fair enough. He was talking to experts, and I was a competent amateur only. But what I'm saying here is: where he piddles around is so far out on the frontier of what's known in cosmology that unless you are qualified to piddle around there yourself it may well be a bit like a horse overhearing two math professors discussing calculus. Not actually all that enlightening.
(And if you are competent to piddle around with GR and cosmology, you've got more serious ambitions than being fetching Hawking's coffee and listening to his ruminations in the bath.)
Um...they made the equipment they needed to make things? Got out the anvil and hammer and used it to forget...the anvil and hammer? Kind of magical thinking, isn't that?
Rich is when you owned the land.
Hmm. So how did the rich enforce their "ownership"? Remember, we're talking about before the rich stole all the poor's money, because I'm trying to get you to explain where the poor people's money (that the rich later stole) came from in the first place. So in that past long-ago day the rich don't yet have all the money to buy weapons, hire soldiers, set up courts they control, et cetera. All they've got is land, which I guess they can't farm or anything (because you're saying it's the poor who provide for themselves by raising crops and making things themselves: the rich provide for themselves by stealing stuff). Also, you've mentioned the poor people are really good with craftsmanship. (I guess the rich aren't, since they need to steal money to buy stuff, while the poor can just make it themselves.) If the poor can make a plow, hoe, tools to dig ore and forge iron, they should have no trouble making sharp swords and armor. So how did the rich enforce their ownership of the land?
Ooookay. So, where did the poor get the equipment needed to farm the land and make shit out of natural resources? Takes at least a plow and draft animals to farm, at least a sharp metal knife to carve wood furniture. Lots more equipment is needed to dig iron ore out of the earth, smelt it into steel, hammer it into interesting shapes, and assemble machines. Where did the poor get all that expensive stuff?
Also...um...I forget why we're calling these people "poor" when you're saying they were all successful farmers and artisans. I thought a rich man is what you'd call a successful Stone Age farmer or artisan. What made the "rich" different from the "poor" back then?
When you've living at (or below) subsistence level, $2 can make a hell of a lot of difference as to what goes in your shopping basket.
I'm sorry, but I find this highly unlikely. It sounds like a purely theoretical argument by someone imagining how things should work, rather than someone who's been there talking about how they actually do. I've been poor. There was a time when my family lived on food stamps and hand-me-down clothes from cousins. We ate a lot of beans and mystery meat. Going to the movies was a big deal and maybe we did it every few months or so. We had a television, but it was an 11" black-and-white job with the knobs busted off and a coat hanger for an antenna. Sometimes you had to hold the antenna to keep the picture from flopping around. My bed was an Army surplus bunk.
But if buying a $3 bulb instead of a $1 bulb would make a $10 difference over the next year, we'd have done it. It's not that hard to save up the extra $2. I can't imagine anyone not living in a cardboard box under a bridge who can't find $2 if he needs to.
Your argument, which I'll caricature as aw, those poor folks can't scrape up the capital, is very popular among the "helping" class. But I've never found it popular among the actual genuine poor. They feel -- heck I feel, having been there -- patronized. Just because you're poor doesn't mean you're an idiot and can't figure out how to finagle things so you can take advantage of a smart choice, even if it does mean you have to scrape up a little more capital up front.
If you were talking about finding the downpayment to buy a house in Southern California or the Bay Area, maybe you'd have a point. Although, even in that case, I know folks who started out poor who nevertheless figured out how to do it by discipline, patience and good planning.
Well, see, that just sucks. I accept that incandescent bulbs, being cheap pieces of crap, are, well, cheap pieces of crap. If I stick one in and turn the switch and it immediately goes *fzzt* and burns out because the guy making it fell asleep at the switch, it's no biggie. Out it goes, waste of 75 cents, and in goes a new one.
But if I just searched the stores to find a swirlie and paid $3 for it, it's a lot more irritating when this happens. Maybe this is part of the problem. We look at incandescent bulbs as commodity riff-raff, as semi-disposable as rubber bands, which you might or might not save after each use. Swirlies don't fit into that category, given that they're harder to find and not as cheap. Yet they don't seem to have the higher reliability of more carefully made things, like cameras. They're somewhat in-between. Not reliable enough to make you think you're investing in something well-made and lasting, but not cheap enough to make you think of them as semi-disposable throw-away paper towel tech. This is sort of the "sweet spot" of how not to sell merchandise.
Okay, I apologise if the post isn't totally coherant, as it is being composed at 1:00am.
No need, my friend. It's a very cogent argument, and very well expressed.
I do not think I disagree with you very much at all, if you will permit me to add that our primary sources for what people or cultures are like should be factual accounts of what happened, if they exist. I do agree that reading Hemingway adds important depth to one's understanding of the Spanish Civil War, or reading Isherwood adds a lot to one's understanding of Weimar Berlin, but only after you've got the basic facts of what happened in your head. If you know nothing about those times, your impression is not very good. Reading only Slaughterhouse Five to learn about the Second World War would give you an absurdly skewed view. And, if you must choose -- this is really my only point -- I think the factual resources are always better.
I'm not quite sure the ancient epics fit in the same category as modern art, because they were very consciously intended to convey historical truth as well as entertain and propagandize. Art isn't quite the same when it must be society's memory, too. It's also not quite true that all we have of Mycenaen Greece is Homer. There's archaeology, too. Can we agree that you can learn a lot from all of a society's preserved shards?
Nevertheless, on the whole I think you've made a persuasive argument for calling what's-her-name's work on Star Trek some kind of scholarship, or at least saying it could be, if done right. So, you win.
But...parenthetically, what I find odd is that the ability to be witty or make your partner laugh seems a good deal more valued by women than by men. That is, being witty and amusing is a big asset in a man but less valuable in a woman. (I'm aware there are plenty of anecdotes pointing both ways -- so I sure hope there aren't 12 replies saying 'But I'm not like that, and neither is my girlfriend' -- but in general this seems to be the case.)
What's up with that? Why would women value the quality of being amusing more than men?
Sure I have. But I don't think this contradicts me. Remember, this book is unusually written, as interleaved first-person narratives. Zeb starts off talking, and he (not Heinlein as the omniscient narrator) is wowed by Deety's boobs. Later on, Deety narrates and says how she thinks Zeb is a real hunka hunk o' burnin' love, et cetera.
What Heinlein is doing is showing us how these people think about each other, and, yeah, they tend to notice each other physically. He felt intellectuals need not fail to get all steamed up about each other's parts.
But I think that's quite different from your generic supermarket paperback, where Miss Lyons the governess is introduced largely with a physical description mentioning her high, proud breasts and flashing eyes. If she says anything clever it happens paragraphs later, if at all. Heinlein in this book says how Zeb thinks about Deety's hooters. It's different. For one thing, he also tells us how Deety feels about 'em, and of course she doesn't feel the same.
And besides, Deety isn't described only or even mostly in terms of her tits. The first thing Zeb notices about Deety is that she says amusing, clever things and dances the tango beautifully. Then he looks down her dress. Well, fair enough. If I was dancing with a hot woman, that's about how I'd do things, too.
Slashdot Mirror
A reasonable point, except...
Why should the infrastructure upgrades have been paid for by the developer (which really means, as you know, by the new homeowners via a bump in the price of their new houses)?
I take it you're talking about sewage, roads, electricity, new schools, et cetera. Thing is, these are all public resources. Everyone gets their indirect and in some cases direct benefit, not just the new homeowners, and everyone has a say in how they're used.
I mean, if you want only the new homeowners to pay for their water, new streets and traffic signals, schools, et cetera, then you logically ought to also give them permanent exclusive control of those resources. They should be able to gate off any road they build and charge non-residents a toll. If the highway has to be widened, they should have exclusive access to the new lanes. They should have exclusive rights to determine who gets into the new school, and what its curriculum is. The new fire company and new police officers should answer emergency calls only in the new development, et cetera.
No one really wants that, typically. The idea is that public resources are paid for by everybody, used by everybody, and controlled by everybody through the local government, and you don't even try to make sure costs and benefits are precisely equally distributed. You don't charge only the people who use a given intersection for the cost of the stoplight there, or only the people with kids in kindergarten for a new school roof. It's generally considered antisocial and self-defeating to Balkanize a town so that resources and responsibility are assigned to many different parties.
I've heard this kind of argument before, and what often underlies it is a rather shameful "pull up the ladder behind you" kind of attitude that doesn't want new neighbors to spoil the view, drive up property values (and taxes), or load up the schools. I find it unpleasant because it gives a totally unjustified advantage to whoever is first on the scene.
I just feel that in non-free markets it's pretty obvious that the invisible hand is not directing things. Visible ones are.
I don't think so. Just because visible hands are messing about with the market doesn't mean that the ordinary market forces aren't operating also. Gravity operates in a tennis game, even though the rackets are doing most of the moving of balls.
I guess I can't tell which is the cart and which is the horse.
There need not be a cart and a horse, a cause and an effect. It is entirely possible for free transactions to give rise to better information flow and vice versa. They can reinforce each other, much in the way good health and exercise do.
does the invisible hand gradually push us, apparently over the course of millenia, toward free society?
I would say not, no. Where we go over the course of millenia is determined by our biology. Our consciously-invented institutions have no significant effect. Over a much shorter time period, however, say a few centuries, then our consciously-invented institutions can have an effect, and make our lives more or less miserable. If we choose to maximize individual freedom and choice, then we will be wealthier, both as individuals and as a society.
Unfortunately, it does seem that when we become wealthier, we forget how we got there. We decide there are so many virtuous things that our wealth should be doing, but won't of its own free will -- end war, stop injustice, outlaw bad luck, make sure all the children are above average, whatever. Then we decide just a little constraint on our individual choices -- to make sure the Good Things get done -- won't harm, and off we go. By and by things fold up, and we're back to where we started. Or so it seems.
you seem to think that what Hezbollah did was trivial, yet this "trivial" hack enabled them to defend against a huge Israeli onslaught.
"Defend" in what sense? Put up some resistance? Sure, why not? Unless they're flat dead they're going to put up some resistance. The Israeli invasion could never be cost-free.
Is what they did trivial? If you mean what the article explicitly says they did (not what the article implies they did), then it's not so much trivial as plain obvious warfighting stuff, like aiming your rifle before you fire it. You wouldn't expect to read a breathless page-one story in a newspaper saying Hey! Those wily Hezbollah guys aimed their Kalishnikovs before firing them at the Israelis! Clever, no? No wonder they were able to resist the invasion so well...
I mean, everyone thought Israel would roll over Hezbollah...
And so they did. Don't recall hearing of any Israeli defeats, or even serious losses.
but Isreal had to move back.
Nah. Israel chose to terminate their invasion, for their own reasons, and at a time of their choosing. What were those reasons? I don't know, not having been present at the Cabinet meeting where it was decided, but if I had to guess, I'd say two possibilities: (1) they got word from Washington that they should, or (2) they accomplished whatever they'd wanted to do in South Lebanon. Their objectives are not likely to be entirely public, you know. Maybe they nailed someone they wanted to, or cleaned out a certain territory they wanted to, or whatever. Neither the Israelis nor Hezbollah are likely to talk about it.
No, of course I didn't mean each man is born free. I meant men in general.
And, yes, you are right governments arise from our free choice. I said that, too. It is perfectly reasonable to regard government as the most exploitive and coercive possible corporation. Imagine Microsoft (or the RIAA or your favorite corporate bogey-man) with guns and prison to enforce its will on you.
They do arise from a free state, yes. Why can't the invisible hand be trusted to correct their excesses? But who ever said it can't? It does, over time. That's why there is no longer a Soviet Union, why China has more entrepreneurs per square foot than ever appeared in Mao's worst nightmares, and why there are very few emperors and kings and despots with real power left. When people are free to choose their government over the long term by choosing to stay or choosing to leave (emigrate), then government does, indeed, become a market choice, and, willy nilly, we find that different types of governments do need to "compete" in a serious sense for the allegiance of "customers" (a.k.a. citizens).
How is the creation of governments by free actors different from the creation of exploitive corporations? Not by so very much, merely a matter of degree, but a qualitatively important degree. The key difference is that government is by definition in the business of coercive transactions, while corporations are in the business of free transactions. Unpleasant and annoying it may be, but you can always choose not to accept the Microsoft EULA. You can't not accept a ruling of the government that it is not legal to drive 56 MPH.
Except fairly recently, with such things as the Bill of Rights, we have taken it as given that government will normally use force to accomplish its goals, and that there are few or no limits on that force. We have taken it as equally given that business may not use force to accomplish its goals. That's the important difference. It's been blurred in places, at times, and when it's blurred so that corporations start to look like government, it's worse for people, and when it's blurred so that governments start to look like business, it's better.
Well...only if I can go ahead and point out that your pointing-out sentence is grammatically valid only through popular use. (You meant to say "..point out that that is not to what the fallacy refers," although popular usage certainly validates your actual sentence in colloquial speech.)
I'm hard pressed to see why you think the article does not contain a BTQ fallacy. The definition of such is to assume the thing under debate. The journalist writing the article assumed in his question that it had already been proven that Hezbollah had decrypted Israeli military radio, and the only remaining question was how it was done, which was not true. But by framing the question the way he did, he was able to suggest that the "I can't tell you" answer he got implied that it was in fact done, but the details could not be told. Seems like a straightforward BTQ fallacy to me. But perhaps you have some more detailed criticism that explains why it is not.
I agree 100%.
But you should add the people who wrote and published the story.
Journalist: Hey! Only I have access to these fascinating and scary facts. You need to pay for my work.
Editor and publisher: Worry! Fear! The world is too random and strange for you to understand yourself. Buy our paper to find out what craziness is happening that only we know about in advance, and to be told what it means.
The market always starts off free. Men are born free.
However, soon enough some clever bastard realizes it's easier to make a living telling other people what to do than making or growing stuff. So he says to the reg'lar folks: hey now, listen up, life isn't as hard as it is just because that's reality. Noooo, They(TM) are exploiting you, making your life harder than it has to be. But stick with me, friends -- lend me the strength of your numbers, a chunk of your cash, your vote, your service in my revolutionary army, et cetera, and we'll soon fix things up.
Then you get coercion (for the sake of the greater good, naturally) and the market is no longer free. Nor are the men. But that's homo sapiens for you. Like dumb oxen we always let the yoke be put on our necks when the shamans and shysters wave a tasty hatful of oats in our face.
Good point.
But...won't he even more prefer to have his product be considered just a little bit more superior than it actually is? Arguably it's the market that lets him get away with nothing more than the actual truth.
But what if Dell, HP and Sony all use the same parts in their boxes, and all have a vested interest in bullshitting you?
Why, some bright young entrepreneur -- like Michael Dell himself, once upon a time -- will come along and realize he can make a killing in the PC market by exposing all the lies and selling boxes that don't have the fatal weakness.
These companies often scratch each others' backs, because they gain more from strengthening the industry as a whole, than they do by competing with each other, or by informing the consumer.
Er...have you actually worked for a company in a competitive industry, or been in business at all, or are you just speaking from pure theory? All the firms for which I've worked in the past twenty years have been viciously trying to slaughter their competitors all the time. Their sales forces disparage each other all the time. They watch jealously to see if the other guys have some minute advantage and quickly try to copy it or neutralize it or slander it as quickly as possible. They'd hire mercenaries to kill the other guys' employees and blow up their headquarters if it were only legal.
Look, if it were that natural for people to just all go along and do what's best for the group, we wouldn't be having a big discussion about global warming, would we?
Market forces do not work for long-range decisions.
So? Explain the colonization of the New World between AD 1500 and 1800, then. Or the rise of feudalism over the four centuries between the Roman Empire and Charlemagne the Great.
Trying to see a solution to something like the climate crisis within market economics should be taken as a sign of dangerous ideological monomania.
You're mistaking economics for an ideology. It's not. It's an anti-ideology. It's a way of explaining how the world actually works. Ideologies are a way of arguing how the world should work. Economics has nothing to say about how a "solution" to a climate crisis ought to be found (if we can even agree on what the "solution" is). It only describes what will actually happen if various "solutions" are implemented, which may or may not be what was intended to happen.
Hence I'm going to say you have it exactly backward: trying to find a solution to something like a climate crisis without paying attention to what economics teaches us is the way people behave is a sign of a dangerous attachment to ideology and a Peter-Pan-like belief that reality can be what we all wish it to be, if only we wish real hard. You might as well argue against paying attention to the laws of physics when designing spaceships because they're damn inconvenient sometimes.
"Climate is what we expect. Weather is what we get."
(Robert Heinlein, I believe)
Because people will pay high prices for information that proves to be correct.
Another way to put it is that actors in the free market never choose to supply accurate information of their own accord. It is forced upon them by the freeness of the market, which allows any competitor to sabotage them by exposing lies.
If Dell wants to bullshit you about what's inside their boxen, it won't work, not because Michael Dell has a conscience, but because HP and Sony would gleefully jump on the chance to expose the lie in the hopes of stealing Dell's market share.
You've got it backwards. It's not that accurate information exchange produces a free market, it's that a free market produces accurate information exchange. You find the worst lies and deceptions (including self-deceptions) in a non-free market, e.g. in a planned economy, or equivalently within a firm so large and generally successful that hiring and firing depend more on manager's impressions and prejudices than on actual success in the marketplace.
Gee, who gives a damn if they are reputable? Why would anyone ever take someone's word on something very important on sheer reputation? If I buy a car, I don't trust the salesman's word that all 5 gears work, even if it's a little old white-haired granny who sings in the church choir every Sunday, and the dealership donates 10% of their profits to saving the whales. I drive the damn thing myself to find out. No offense to the dealer and saleman and all, but important stuff can't ever be taken on pure trust.
I mean, why not read the CEI's papers and statements, whatnot, and examine them in light of the evidence you know, and peruse their logic? If the facts they present agree with the facts you know, and their logic is air-tight, then you agree with their conclusions, whether or not they are funded by Exxon or the Illuminati or the Devil himself.
On the other hand, if the facts they present are cock-eyed, and their logic mere Swiss cheese, then their conclusions are bogus even if they are funded by the Mother Theresa Institute, their chairman is a vegan who drives a hybrid, and all their reports are printed on recycled toilet paper with soy-based ink.
Read the article very, very carefully, bearing in mind that since it's written by a journalist it might as well have been written by the Hezbollah PR 'n' Propaganda team.
What the article actually says about 'hacking' Israeli military radio communications is merely this:
Using technology most likely supplied by Iran, special Hezbollah teams monitored the constantly changing radio frequencies of Israeli troops on the ground. That gave guerrillas a picture of Israeli movements, casualty reports and supply routes.
So what precisely did Hezbollah do? Sounds like they merely verified that there was radio traffic on certain frequencies, and that it came from Israeli units, and then they were able to do a little direction-finding on it to verify where it came from. Look, imam! Funky radio traffic in the Bekaa valley that sounds like the usual gibberish exchanged between Israeli armor and base -- I'll bet there are Israeli tanks on Route such-and-such!
Well, gosh, big deal. Any amateur could do as much as easily. It's not right brilliantly clever to deduce when you get a lot of chatter on military frequencies in a certain neighborhood that there are military operations afoot in it. I mean, Hezbollah probably got as good or better "intelligence" about Israeli movements just by taking reports of survivors who counted the number of tanks that rolled over them.
Did Hezbollah actually decrypt communications, which would be an intelligence coup? Your logic argues pretty persuasively that they did not, because if they had they would have kept it a deep dark secret. In fact, they would have done their best to avoid drawing attention to their radio-interception program, lest it start the Israelis thinking. They -- or rather their Iranian paymasters -- would not have countenanced boasting about the operation to a damn fool journalist who would embellish it with wild speculation about 'hacking' secret Israeli radio messages.
Nor does the article actually manage to get anyone who might have known to say otherwise. It merely attempts to imply that they might have said it, or something like it. Hence statements like this:
The official refused to detail how Hezbollah was able to intercept and decipher Israeli transmissions.
A nice example of the old 'begging the question' fallacy, such as in the question 'Have you stopped beating your wife yet?' Maybe the official refused to "detail" how Hezbollah was able to decipher Israeli transmissions because, in fact, they weren't able to.
Or this:
But a former Israeli general, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Hezbollah's ability to secretly hack into military transmissions had "disastrous" consequences for the Israeli offensive.
"Israel's military leaders clearly underestimated the enemy and this is just one example," he said.
Hmmm....wait a minute, the direct quote only says the military leader underestimated Hezbollah. And what's the mysterious 'this' to which the general refers, which is an example of the underestimation? Interception and radio direction-finding? Or actual decryption? We don't know. The journalist implies, in the previous sentence, that 'this' means 'hacking' into military transmissions, and that this means interception and decryption. But does it?
If the anonymous general were willing to be quoted saying quite plainly: "Ayup, Hezbollah decrypted our most secret communications, damn 'em," then you can bet your last dollar the journalist would have used that very juicy quote. The fact that he didn't use that quote, or one like it, means he couldn't get it. And I'm sure he tried very hard, with all the artful questions he could. The general just wasn't willing to say those words. Because, almost surely, they would have been false.
In short, I think the odds are good that this is just another journalist whoring for Hezbollah, 'cause it makes a scary exciting man-bites-dog story.
...yro ho ho!
Is there an alternative to this "Brain Exercise" game...?
Read Jane Eyre or Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton? Play tennis, golf, ping-pong? Learn to play the ukelele? Study Latin? Get together with friends to play bridge and argue politics?
It seems hardly surprising that playing video games is better than simply allowing your brain to rot. But I'd be equally surprised if playing video games is better than the more obvious and traditional ways to stay active as you age.
I dunno...I heard Hawking give a real physics seminar (at Berkeley, circa 1988). I don't mean the popular gee-whiz First Five Minutes Of The Universe kind of thing. Now, I'm not a doofus when it comes to physics -- I took courses in quantum field theory and sat in on a GR class -- but I wasn't a cosmology graduate student. From that perspective, Hawking's talk stopped making much sense about 90 seconds after it started, except for brief lucid moments in the middle.
I mean, fair enough. He was talking to experts, and I was a competent amateur only. But what I'm saying here is: where he piddles around is so far out on the frontier of what's known in cosmology that unless you are qualified to piddle around there yourself it may well be a bit like a horse overhearing two math professors discussing calculus. Not actually all that enlightening.
(And if you are competent to piddle around with GR and cosmology, you've got more serious ambitions than being fetching Hawking's coffee and listening to his ruminations in the bath.)
Um...they made the equipment they needed to make things? Got out the anvil and hammer and used it to forget...the anvil and hammer? Kind of magical thinking, isn't that?
Rich is when you owned the land.
Hmm. So how did the rich enforce their "ownership"? Remember, we're talking about before the rich stole all the poor's money, because I'm trying to get you to explain where the poor people's money (that the rich later stole) came from in the first place. So in that past long-ago day the rich don't yet have all the money to buy weapons, hire soldiers, set up courts they control, et cetera. All they've got is land, which I guess they can't farm or anything (because you're saying it's the poor who provide for themselves by raising crops and making things themselves: the rich provide for themselves by stealing stuff). Also, you've mentioned the poor people are really good with craftsmanship. (I guess the rich aren't, since they need to steal money to buy stuff, while the poor can just make it themselves.) If the poor can make a plow, hoe, tools to dig ore and forge iron, they should have no trouble making sharp swords and armor. So how did the rich enforce their ownership of the land?
Ooookay. So, where did the poor get the equipment needed to farm the land and make shit out of natural resources? Takes at least a plow and draft animals to farm, at least a sharp metal knife to carve wood furniture. Lots more equipment is needed to dig iron ore out of the earth, smelt it into steel, hammer it into interesting shapes, and assemble machines. Where did the poor get all that expensive stuff?
Also...um...I forget why we're calling these people "poor" when you're saying they were all successful farmers and artisans. I thought a rich man is what you'd call a successful Stone Age farmer or artisan. What made the "rich" different from the "poor" back then?
Unfortunately for the rich eventually the poor ran out of money
Where'd the poor get the money in the first place? Did God print it up and distribute it to everyone equally on the Seventh Day? Just wondering.
When you've living at (or below) subsistence level, $2 can make a hell of a lot of difference as to what goes in your shopping basket.
I'm sorry, but I find this highly unlikely. It sounds like a purely theoretical argument by someone imagining how things should work, rather than someone who's been there talking about how they actually do. I've been poor. There was a time when my family lived on food stamps and hand-me-down clothes from cousins. We ate a lot of beans and mystery meat. Going to the movies was a big deal and maybe we did it every few months or so. We had a television, but it was an 11" black-and-white job with the knobs busted off and a coat hanger for an antenna. Sometimes you had to hold the antenna to keep the picture from flopping around. My bed was an Army surplus bunk.
But if buying a $3 bulb instead of a $1 bulb would make a $10 difference over the next year, we'd have done it. It's not that hard to save up the extra $2. I can't imagine anyone not living in a cardboard box under a bridge who can't find $2 if he needs to.
Your argument, which I'll caricature as aw, those poor folks can't scrape up the capital, is very popular among the "helping" class. But I've never found it popular among the actual genuine poor. They feel -- heck I feel, having been there -- patronized. Just because you're poor doesn't mean you're an idiot and can't figure out how to finagle things so you can take advantage of a smart choice, even if it does mean you have to scrape up a little more capital up front.
If you were talking about finding the downpayment to buy a house in Southern California or the Bay Area, maybe you'd have a point. Although, even in that case, I know folks who started out poor who nevertheless figured out how to do it by discipline, patience and good planning.
Well, see, that just sucks. I accept that incandescent bulbs, being cheap pieces of crap, are, well, cheap pieces of crap. If I stick one in and turn the switch and it immediately goes *fzzt* and burns out because the guy making it fell asleep at the switch, it's no biggie. Out it goes, waste of 75 cents, and in goes a new one.
But if I just searched the stores to find a swirlie and paid $3 for it, it's a lot more irritating when this happens. Maybe this is part of the problem. We look at incandescent bulbs as commodity riff-raff, as semi-disposable as rubber bands, which you might or might not save after each use. Swirlies don't fit into that category, given that they're harder to find and not as cheap. Yet they don't seem to have the higher reliability of more carefully made things, like cameras. They're somewhat in-between. Not reliable enough to make you think you're investing in something well-made and lasting, but not cheap enough to make you think of them as semi-disposable throw-away paper towel tech. This is sort of the "sweet spot" of how not to sell merchandise.
Okay, I apologise if the post isn't totally coherant, as it is being composed at 1:00am.
No need, my friend. It's a very cogent argument, and very well expressed.
I do not think I disagree with you very much at all, if you will permit me to add that our primary sources for what people or cultures are like should be factual accounts of what happened, if they exist. I do agree that reading Hemingway adds important depth to one's understanding of the Spanish Civil War, or reading Isherwood adds a lot to one's understanding of Weimar Berlin, but only after you've got the basic facts of what happened in your head. If you know nothing about those times, your impression is not very good. Reading only Slaughterhouse Five to learn about the Second World War would give you an absurdly skewed view. And, if you must choose -- this is really my only point -- I think the factual resources are always better.
I'm not quite sure the ancient epics fit in the same category as modern art, because they were very consciously intended to convey historical truth as well as entertain and propagandize. Art isn't quite the same when it must be society's memory, too. It's also not quite true that all we have of Mycenaen Greece is Homer. There's archaeology, too. Can we agree that you can learn a lot from all of a society's preserved shards?
Nevertheless, on the whole I think you've made a persuasive argument for calling what's-her-name's work on Star Trek some kind of scholarship, or at least saying it could be, if done right. So, you win.
No argument here.
But...parenthetically, what I find odd is that the ability to be witty or make your partner laugh seems a good deal more valued by women than by men. That is, being witty and amusing is a big asset in a man but less valuable in a woman. (I'm aware there are plenty of anecdotes pointing both ways -- so I sure hope there aren't 12 replies saying 'But I'm not like that, and neither is my girlfriend' -- but in general this seems to be the case.)
What's up with that? Why would women value the quality of being amusing more than men?
Sure I have. But I don't think this contradicts me. Remember, this book is unusually written, as interleaved first-person narratives. Zeb starts off talking, and he (not Heinlein as the omniscient narrator) is wowed by Deety's boobs. Later on, Deety narrates and says how she thinks Zeb is a real hunka hunk o' burnin' love, et cetera.
What Heinlein is doing is showing us how these people think about each other, and, yeah, they tend to notice each other physically. He felt intellectuals need not fail to get all steamed up about each other's parts.
But I think that's quite different from your generic supermarket paperback, where Miss Lyons the governess is introduced largely with a physical description mentioning her high, proud breasts and flashing eyes. If she says anything clever it happens paragraphs later, if at all. Heinlein in this book says how Zeb thinks about Deety's hooters. It's different. For one thing, he also tells us how Deety feels about 'em, and of course she doesn't feel the same.
And besides, Deety isn't described only or even mostly in terms of her tits. The first thing Zeb notices about Deety is that she says amusing, clever things and dances the tango beautifully. Then he looks down her dress. Well, fair enough. If I was dancing with a hot woman, that's about how I'd do things, too.