I object to your faulty epistemology. Atheists assume hell does not exist because there is no evidence (the rational ones) or just because (the irrational ones). As a negative cannot be proven, so it cannot be known to be true.
I'm not redefining anything--read any economics textbook from the time of Adam Smith (hint: 230 years ago) on. It will tell you exactly what I said: that a free market is a market which meets certain specific conditions, particularly transparency and mobility--and that when those conditions are met the market can be modelled in a convenient mathematical fashion.
The ones who changed the definition were the Republicans--you'll certainly get me to agree that their ideology is falling on its face because they promoted a conditional conclusion to the status of axiom and repeated it until they were blue in the face without ever actually understanding it. The republicans are to the free market what the Soviet Union was to socialism--a gross perversion derived from a lack of intellectual rigor.
Your Orwellian effort to claim that I am rationalizing an ideology that I was criticizing is bizarre.
I'm burning all of the mod points I just used to say this:
Laissez faire is a policy. 'Free market' is a mathematical model.
Repealing Glass-Steagall did NOT make the market more free.
'Free market' does not refer solely to the absence of government regulation it refers to the mathematical assumptions that the model is based on:
1)Full transparency--all buyers and sellers know and understand exactly what they are buying and selling.
By repealing Glass-Steagall and not regulating CDOs the government actually decreased the transparency of the market making it LESS free.
2)Full mobility of goods -- this is the one that government regulation usually interferes with by compartmentalizing and breaking markets in goods and labor.
The argument behind the 'free market' as a policy goal is that the model is maximally efficient--we get the largest amount of goods and services from a particular quantity of resources. However, LAISSEZ FAIRE != FREE MARKET, mostly because of the transparency point. In the 1800s, this was less the case than it is to day, owing simply to the radical change in the sophistication of our technology since that time--most people don't understand how the things they buy work, and are completely unqualified to judge whether the products they buy are any good--which is a massive decrease in transparency. Add in the nature of modern advertising, a practice which is inherently designed to decrease transparency and you have a situation that is far more complicated than the old intellectually bankrupt ideologies would have you think.
The only reason Bush wouldn't have tried this is because he couldn't come up with an argument that explained how this would fight terrorism. Kiddie porn was never a focus of his.
Although (and this is the only reason why I maintain Andrew Jackson was worse than Bush) he actually stopped doing things if the Supreme Court told him to knock it off--he didn't give a fuck about following the Constitution, but even he wasn't willing to tell the Supreme Court to fuck off.
Uh, not that many places mapped with street view? Try again sherlock. I haven't found a place in Los Angeles yet that isn't (not that I was trying to, but every place I've checked is there). I know it's the same in SF, and I assume most major cities in the US.
If only there was some kind of precise mathematical law that explained how magnetic fields vary with distance, we wouldn't have to resort to hand-waving 'well, I don't think that'--otherwise known as blowing smoke out of a smelly orifice.
Contrary to popular belief, 'sense' is not a biologically meaningful unit. Arguing about the number of senses is like arguing about the number of races. It's meaningless.
You didn't present reasoning, you presented unsubstantiated statements.
unless perhaps you could point to examples in my posts here in this thread where I have used insults
You argue like a small child, but perhaps you can do better
If that's not an ad hominem, I don't know what is. Though I'm sure you'll take that statement as an opportunity to claim that I must not know what one is, so save yourself the accumulate carpal tunnel damage.
No, the rich would not love socialized medicine, because (as I said) it isn't about money, it is about control. If you look at Republican policies, you will find one underlying current: cheap labor. Republicans these days are all 'cheap labor conservatives.' Every single policy can be analyzed in terms of it's impact on the labor market. Republican policies have the almost universal effect of depressing the price of labor.
With socialized medicine, people would be less afraid of losing their jobs, and therefore, less under the control of the rich. That is the entire reason conservatives oppose socialized medicine. Beyond a certain level, wealth does nothing for an individual except give them the ability to limit the freedoms of others.
All of this is opinion, and unsubstantiate opinion at that. Sure you CAN analyze every republican policy in terms of its effect on the labor market. I can also analyze every piece of literature with a marxist critique, doesn't make it meaningful or relevant to do so however (though in both cases it is SOMETIMES meaningful and relevant).
Your claim that it isn't about money, it's about control is conjecture. Unless you are part of the secret cadre of rich people trying to keep everyone else down. The claim that conservatives oppose socialized medicine because they would lose control is wild conspiracy fantasy. Now, I'm sure there are some people, in particular certain politicians, some health care executives, for whom that might be the case, but you have no support (at least, you didn't give any) for the claim that it is true of all. Most importantly, it's not how most of them view their own position--of course, that could just be cognitive dissonance, but self-interpretation is as important as anything else. Conservatives oppose socialized medicine because it will, in general, be more expensive (under the mathematical assumptions of neo-classical economics, grab any microecon textbook for more details, which as I state below unfortunately do not correspond well to reality). Of course, the response to that is: more expensive than what? and for whom?
Which brings me to another point: ideology is stupid. While, generally speaking, as an economics major I find the analysis in favor of market structures much more mathematically compelling, we don't actually have free market structures. Homo sapiens is poorly suited to free markets, and in general seem to act to subvert them as much as possible (the classic slashdot drum in this department would be Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior, for example). Really, the failures of neo-classical economics are the same as the failures of communist economic theory--fundamentally wrong assumptions about human nature.
I could go on all day, but I have more important things to do, like go oppress some poor people.
Do you think these people are talking about asking 8% less sale price in Africa, which would support your argument, or do you think they're selling them at half price, or even 1/10th, which could not possibly support your argument ?
I wasn't saying that it was a fact that they could sell all of their products at such low prices and still be profitable, what I was saying is that it was NOT NECESSARILY a fact that they would go under if they did. My position was one of skepticism pending proper analysis.
Your analysis was overly simplistic (spherical cow stuff, which is fine however for the sake of argument), but I think generally on the mark. The big thing you ignored (which cannot be examined easily or simplistically and would probably require access to a lot of internal Pfizer data to do meaningfully) is the potential for cost restructuring and reorganization of their business model. Drug research does not have to be done the way it is, there are other potentially cheaper ways (which make debatable trade-offs in terms of time to market, safety risks, etc.)
As for oil profits, the oil giants do not make massive profit margins, but they are slightly above average compared to the Fortune 100 (Exxon in particular was at 11%, the highest of the private oil companies). I forget the numbers (I had done an article on the subject, but lost all my data in a hard drive failure a few months back). The big thing with oil is that the majority of the world's oil isn't even available to private oil companies, it is in the hands of state-run oil companies in Russia, Venezuela, Mexico, etc. Most of the money we spend on gas does not go to any of the public oil companies, except at the refinery level (which refinery margins have been fairly steady at around $0.30 per gallon of petrol for the last ten years, and the retail margin fluctuates from -$0.05 to $0.10 per gallon, i.e. it is sometimes a loss to the pumping station).
You're forgetting that price discrimination is (within a single market anyway) generally illegal. The airlines go to hilarious lengths to try and get away with it--which results in things like buying a longer-haul ticket with a layover at your actual destination sometimes being cheaper than buying a ticket to that actual destination.
Your argument holds no water whatsoever. You use only insults and appeals to emotion to back it up. You present your own assumptions as facts, without evidence or supporting reasoning of any kind. Perhaps you are capable of better, and you simply let your emotions overwhelm you. You argue like a small child, but perhaps you can do better. Please, by all means, back up your hypothesis with something substantive.
There is no reason that they will kill the company necessarily.
They will only kill the company if they were selling the marked down pills at a loss (on an average cost, not marginal cost basis). If the discounted pills were still sold above the average per pill cost, then the company still makes a profit on the pills that are re-imported to rich countries.
He wasn't accusing him of making up Popperism, he was accusing him of not understanding Popperism.
Popper's view of science was Theory-> Prediction -> Test, If True Repeat, If False Start Over. The idea that populations evolve via natural selection has gone through this many times. The idea that speciation results from accumulated adapatations has not been directly tested as much, but it has been tested (notably, the E. Coli population that evolved to metaboise a citrate complex--the inability to metabolise citrate is how we identify E. Coli as being E. Coli).
Now the problem with testing the speciation part of the theory is the time-scale required (really the number of generations required). As I said, it has been done with bacteria. It should be possible to do with short life-span insects (fruit flies). Isolate two populations and subject them to significantly different food supplies, temperature conditionts, etc. After 25,000 generations, see if they can interbreed. Repeat. If you get two populations that cannot interbreed anymore, then BY DEFINITION you have two separate species. The problem again, is that such an experiment requires decades--but the problem is not one of popperian unfalfsifiability (how's that for a trip to the jargon factory?)
I'm glad that you manufactured a mind-set which I at no point indicated.
My point wasn't the results of my estimates, my point as that the post I was replying to should have tried something more useful than petulant name calling, as coming up with order-of-magnitude estimates is trivial.
Slashdot Mirror
I object to your faulty epistemology. Atheists assume hell does not exist because there is no evidence (the rational ones) or just because (the irrational ones). As a negative cannot be proven, so it cannot be known to be true.
What the hell?
I'm not redefining anything--read any economics textbook from the time of Adam Smith (hint: 230 years ago) on. It will tell you exactly what I said: that a free market is a market which meets certain specific conditions, particularly transparency and mobility--and that when those conditions are met the market can be modelled in a convenient mathematical fashion.
The ones who changed the definition were the Republicans--you'll certainly get me to agree that their ideology is falling on its face because they promoted a conditional conclusion to the status of axiom and repeated it until they were blue in the face without ever actually understanding it. The republicans are to the free market what the Soviet Union was to socialism--a gross perversion derived from a lack of intellectual rigor.
Your Orwellian effort to claim that I am rationalizing an ideology that I was criticizing is bizarre.
I'm burning all of the mod points I just used to say this:
Laissez faire is a policy. 'Free market' is a mathematical model.
Repealing Glass-Steagall did NOT make the market more free.
'Free market' does not refer solely to the absence of government regulation it refers to the mathematical assumptions that the model is based on:
1)Full transparency--all buyers and sellers know and understand exactly what they are buying and selling.
By repealing Glass-Steagall and not regulating CDOs the government actually decreased the transparency of the market making it LESS free.
2)Full mobility of goods -- this is the one that government regulation usually interferes with by compartmentalizing and breaking markets in goods and labor.
The argument behind the 'free market' as a policy goal is that the model is maximally efficient--we get the largest amount of goods and services from a particular quantity of resources. However, LAISSEZ FAIRE != FREE MARKET, mostly because of the transparency point. In the 1800s, this was less the case than it is to day, owing simply to the radical change in the sophistication of our technology since that time--most people don't understand how the things they buy work, and are completely unqualified to judge whether the products they buy are any good--which is a massive decrease in transparency. Add in the nature of modern advertising, a practice which is inherently designed to decrease transparency and you have a situation that is far more complicated than the old intellectually bankrupt ideologies would have you think.
The only reason Bush wouldn't have tried this is because he couldn't come up with an argument that explained how this would fight terrorism. Kiddie porn was never a focus of his.
Although (and this is the only reason why I maintain Andrew Jackson was worse than Bush) he actually stopped doing things if the Supreme Court told him to knock it off--he didn't give a fuck about following the Constitution, but even he wasn't willing to tell the Supreme Court to fuck off.
Coal bare. I think he would resent being associated with bears, the number one threat to America.
*pumps his shot gun*
I strongly advise you find another way to phoneticize Coal-bare. Bears are the number one threat to America.
Lies and slander
Uh, not that many places mapped with street view? Try again sherlock. I haven't found a place in Los Angeles yet that isn't (not that I was trying to, but every place I've checked is there). I know it's the same in SF, and I assume most major cities in the US.
If only there was some kind of precise mathematical law that explained how magnetic fields vary with distance, we wouldn't have to resort to hand-waving 'well, I don't think that'--otherwise known as blowing smoke out of a smelly orifice.
Contrary to popular belief, 'sense' is not a biologically meaningful unit. Arguing about the number of senses is like arguing about the number of races. It's meaningless.
yeah, but try typing on your laptop with your fingers just inches away from a hard drive...
You give the government too much credit.
20 lashes. Let the self-flagellation commence!
For about ten minutes in 1789.
I'm only 154 in dog years.
I live in the Valley.....*sob*
You didn't present reasoning, you presented unsubstantiated statements.
unless perhaps you could point to examples in my posts here in this thread where I have used insults
You argue like a small child, but perhaps you can do better
If that's not an ad hominem, I don't know what is. Though I'm sure you'll take that statement as an opportunity to claim that I must not know what one is, so save yourself the accumulate carpal tunnel damage.
No, the rich would not love socialized medicine, because (as I said) it isn't about money, it is about control. If you look at Republican policies, you will find one underlying current: cheap labor. Republicans these days are all 'cheap labor conservatives.' Every single policy can be analyzed in terms of it's impact on the labor market. Republican policies have the almost universal effect of depressing the price of labor.
With socialized medicine, people would be less afraid of losing their jobs, and therefore, less under the control of the rich. That is the entire reason conservatives oppose socialized medicine. Beyond a certain level, wealth does nothing for an individual except give them the ability to limit the freedoms of others.
All of this is opinion, and unsubstantiate opinion at that. Sure you CAN analyze every republican policy in terms of its effect on the labor market. I can also analyze every piece of literature with a marxist critique, doesn't make it meaningful or relevant to do so however (though in both cases it is SOMETIMES meaningful and relevant).
Your claim that it isn't about money, it's about control is conjecture. Unless you are part of the secret cadre of rich people trying to keep everyone else down. The claim that conservatives oppose socialized medicine because they would lose control is wild conspiracy fantasy. Now, I'm sure there are some people, in particular certain politicians, some health care executives, for whom that might be the case, but you have no support (at least, you didn't give any) for the claim that it is true of all. Most importantly, it's not how most of them view their own position--of course, that could just be cognitive dissonance, but self-interpretation is as important as anything else. Conservatives oppose socialized medicine because it will, in general, be more expensive (under the mathematical assumptions of neo-classical economics, grab any microecon textbook for more details, which as I state below unfortunately do not correspond well to reality). Of course, the response to that is: more expensive than what? and for whom?
Which brings me to another point: ideology is stupid. While, generally speaking, as an economics major I find the analysis in favor of market structures much more mathematically compelling, we don't actually have free market structures. Homo sapiens is poorly suited to free markets, and in general seem to act to subvert them as much as possible (the classic slashdot drum in this department would be Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior, for example). Really, the failures of neo-classical economics are the same as the failures of communist economic theory--fundamentally wrong assumptions about human nature.
I could go on all day, but I have more important things to do, like go oppress some poor people.
Do you think these people are talking about asking 8% less sale price in Africa, which would support your argument, or do you think they're selling them at half price, or even 1/10th, which could not possibly support your argument ?
I wasn't saying that it was a fact that they could sell all of their products at such low prices and still be profitable, what I was saying is that it was NOT NECESSARILY a fact that they would go under if they did. My position was one of skepticism pending proper analysis.
Your analysis was overly simplistic (spherical cow stuff, which is fine however for the sake of argument), but I think generally on the mark. The big thing you ignored (which cannot be examined easily or simplistically and would probably require access to a lot of internal Pfizer data to do meaningfully) is the potential for cost restructuring and reorganization of their business model. Drug research does not have to be done the way it is, there are other potentially cheaper ways (which make debatable trade-offs in terms of time to market, safety risks, etc.)
As for oil profits, the oil giants do not make massive profit margins, but they are slightly above average compared to the Fortune 100 (Exxon in particular was at 11%, the highest of the private oil companies). I forget the numbers (I had done an article on the subject, but lost all my data in a hard drive failure a few months back). The big thing with oil is that the majority of the world's oil isn't even available to private oil companies, it is in the hands of state-run oil companies in Russia, Venezuela, Mexico, etc. Most of the money we spend on gas does not go to any of the public oil companies, except at the refinery level (which refinery margins have been fairly steady at around $0.30 per gallon of petrol for the last ten years, and the retail margin fluctuates from -$0.05 to $0.10 per gallon, i.e. it is sometimes a loss to the pumping station).
You're forgetting that price discrimination is (within a single market anyway) generally illegal. The airlines go to hilarious lengths to try and get away with it--which results in things like buying a longer-haul ticket with a layover at your actual destination sometimes being cheaper than buying a ticket to that actual destination.
Your argument holds no water whatsoever. You use only insults and appeals to emotion to back it up. You present your own assumptions as facts, without evidence or supporting reasoning of any kind. Perhaps you are capable of better, and you simply let your emotions overwhelm you. You argue like a small child, but perhaps you can do better. Please, by all means, back up your hypothesis with something substantive.
Pot, meet kettle.
There is no reason that they will kill the company necessarily.
They will only kill the company if they were selling the marked down pills at a loss (on an average cost, not marginal cost basis). If the discounted pills were still sold above the average per pill cost, then the company still makes a profit on the pills that are re-imported to rich countries.
More likely he was depressed because of a serotonin reuptake anomaly.
WRONG.
This is macroevolution. That genetic trait (or rather the lack of it) is how we identify E. Coli as being E. Coli and not some other species.
He wasn't accusing him of making up Popperism, he was accusing him of not understanding Popperism.
Popper's view of science was Theory-> Prediction -> Test, If True Repeat, If False Start Over. The idea that populations evolve via natural selection has gone through this many times. The idea that speciation results from accumulated adapatations has not been directly tested as much, but it has been tested (notably, the E. Coli population that evolved to metaboise a citrate complex--the inability to metabolise citrate is how we identify E. Coli as being E. Coli).
Now the problem with testing the speciation part of the theory is the time-scale required (really the number of generations required). As I said, it has been done with bacteria. It should be possible to do with short life-span insects (fruit flies). Isolate two populations and subject them to significantly different food supplies, temperature conditionts, etc. After 25,000 generations, see if they can interbreed. Repeat. If you get two populations that cannot interbreed anymore, then BY DEFINITION you have two separate species. The problem again, is that such an experiment requires decades--but the problem is not one of popperian unfalfsifiability (how's that for a trip to the jargon factory?)
I'm glad that you manufactured a mind-set which I at no point indicated.
My point wasn't the results of my estimates, my point as that the post I was replying to should have tried something more useful than petulant name calling, as coming up with order-of-magnitude estimates is trivial.