It Must Be True · 12:25am Jun 8th, 2015
From the Writeoff Skype last night:
Titanium Dragon: God
Titanium Dragon: Why is there no ponies tommorrow?
foxy.e.: Because there is no god 0.0
Titanium Dragon: Are you saying you don't believe in me?
Quill Scratch: I do believe in Titanium Dragon! I do, I do!
foxy.e.: If you are God, TD, then where is the episode?
foxy.e.: Huh?
foxy.e.: HUH?
Titanium Dragon: Tch. Even I have only so much power over MA Larson. Probably because of contractual obligations to the other firm
foxy.e.: MA = Am backwards
foxy.e.: I am who I am
foxy.e.: MA Larson for Old Testament God
foxy.e.: With some of the episodes he has written, you can see how he was burning bush
Adrenaline: Wait, TD is God? No wonder he's so damn hard to impress.
midnightradiohotline: if TD is God, then who is Satan?
M1Garand8: CiG
Cold in Gardez: hey folks
For those of you who aren't familiar with the idiom, this was a clear case of speak of the Devil, and he shall appear.
Today must be a fun day for Horizon up here out on the trails; it passed the 90F mark today. I'm sure whatever elf he has been taking along with him is having a lot of fun. I had to go out and water the llamas twice today; that is a lot more literal than you probably think it is.
For those of you who don't know, Western Oregon is entirely populated by elves; the idea that any humans live on the west side of the Cascade Mountains is a blatant lie, our cities are all full of trees:
A picture of Portland, Oregon, the largest city in the state, showing off its true dominant lifeform - conifers.
In other news, I'm supposed to be playing D&D tonight, but it looks like the game was cancelled, so I think I'm going to see if I can't get something done.
Now what's that supposed to—
Oh.
In any case, if you're God and you live with elves, does that make you Santa Claus?
oh man I would love to play D&D with you bro it would be fun
I like a few of my trees more than my neighbors. One provides shade, the other disturbs me with obnoxious noise.
Last I checked, Eric Clapton still exists.
So the devil not only has the best rock musicians, but the best fanfic too?
Makes sense.
if you live in Oregon, then I live in your state's hat. Or maybe your state is my state's boot.
Perfect timing by CiG, lol.
I think I need better friends.
3130863 No, that makes him Manwë.
haha shit
I haven't been on Skype in like a week ;_;
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Aw.
Well, it is better than when I left for like, a month.
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I'm on everyday but I have no friends.
....
I'm sad.
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I'm sorry!
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Prove it.
Give me.... 20 dollars and I'll believe you.
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We're having a drought this year, but it is mostly confined to Eastern Oregon; Western Oregon is classified as "unusually dry", but only a portion of it is in a drought.
droughtmonitor.unl.edu/data/pngs/20150602/20150602_or_none.png
Yellow = dry, the darker colors indicate ever increasingly severe levels of drought.
Portland is over in the yellow portion, as is most of the population of the state.
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Yup!
It isn't actually because people are desperate, though; it is because people are greedy. Thieves steal stuff that's valuable. When the price of water goes up, it becomes more valuable to steal it.
The other thing is that a lot of water theft happens all the time but goes unnoticed because it isn't a big deal most of the time, but this year, water thieves are in the crosshairs due to scarcity, so more people are getting caught. Also, a lot of water theft just doesn't rise to the level of news; a farmer illegally irrigating their field is not really of interest to most city folk. Normally that isn't news, but this year, the press wants to make a story out of it.
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Ironically, US oil consumption is actually going down even as production goes up.
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Because everyone knows coal power is great, right?
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I sleep?
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It is, actually! Nuclear waste is an overblown problem. It actually isn't that big of a deal, which surprises a bunch of people.
The reality is that the main problem with radioactive waste is a combination of NIMBY and the fact that we're supposed to store it for 100,000 years. No one wants to put it in their backyard, and people are terrified of it. It isn't tremendously dangerous though.
I mean, the worst nuclear disaster in history killed 64 people. 64.
I'm not sure if anyone has ever died from actual nuclear waste from a reactor.
The worst coal mine disaster killed over 1,500 people. Air pollution from coal kills 13,000 people per year in the US alone.
By comparison, nuclear power is ridiculously safe.
Sadly, it is also expensive because you aren't allowed to externalize the costs as much.
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That's from UNSCEAR's numbers (The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation).
And no, the cancer concentration there isn't actually especially high. Indeed, radiation exposure there wasn't especially high for a large number of people; only about 300,000 people, most of whom were the people who worked on the plant, were exposed to levels significantly above background radiation.
There was a surge in incidence of thyroid cancer amongst young people, but because of intensive screening, very few people actually died of it; moreover, because of the intensive screening, they also picked up a lot of cases which wouldn't have been noticed.
The liquidators (the people who cleaned up the site) also approximately doubled their risk of lukemia, but nearby residents did not. That being said, doubling the rate is still quite low overall, and they almost all survived because we've gotten quite good at treating it, and the population has (obviously) been intensely monitored.
The problem is that people have this idea that radiation is terribly dangerous, but it is a lot less dangerous than most people believe it to be; the reality is that a lot of estimations about how many people die of radiation exposure is less estimate and more "completely made-up numbers". Monitoring of the survivors of Chernobyl - both displaced people and the liquidators - have failed to match with many earlier projections, and the reality is that there aren't actually any good models for them because the people at Chernobyl were exposed to low levels for a long period of time, rather than high levels for a short period of time, and it is now thought that the former is much less harmful than the latter - almost everyone who died from Chernobyl died in the 1980s, with a smattering of people dying since whose deaths can be attributed to ARS and other radiation exposure. Only 136 people ever developed radiation sickness from the disaster, of whom about a quarter died.
The latest overall eventual estimate from WHO circa 2008 is that ~4,000 people will eventually die of cancer as a result of the disaster, which would be an increase over the background cancer rate of 3-4%. However, it is unclear whether this will actually happen because there is no population to model Chernobyl after - it may well be nonexistent, as after the initial rise in cancer rates, they've failed to really notice significant differences. The problem is that the so-called Linear No Threshold model (LNT model) that they use is pretty questionable as it has never actually been demonstrated to be valid for low doses. Almost all of the projected deaths should be amongst the very large population which was exposed to only very low levels of radiation, and there's no evidence of this actually happening.
In any case, even if 4,000 people did eventually die prematurely from the disaster, it would be one-third of one year of deaths from coal pollution in the US alone every year for the worst nuclear disaster ever.
If advertising was a waste of money, people wouldn't do it.
Sort of. The really big digital highway billboards circa 2010 ate up about 30 households worth of power for year-round operation; modern ones are about 10 households of power per year. Solar powered billboards don't consume any net energy.
For them to consume as much power as households, there would have to be 12.3 million digital billboards in the US; there are only 500,000 billboards in the US, and in 2013 1% of those were digital. It is a drop in the bucket overall.
Residential and commercial power usage combined makes up only 10% of US energy consumption.
A lot of billboards on highways exist to try and get people to come to wherever - casinos, McDonalds, whatever. A lot of billboards are about telling people that business X exists and that you can pull off at exit Y to get there. They also sometimes advertise products.
I'd imagine billboards that advertise the sort of thing that you would pull off the road to visit are probably the most effective kind. If I'm hungry, and I see a billboard for a restaurant, that's probably more likely to divert me than anything else.
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It has major positive consequences for society. Increasing people's awareness of your product is a huge part of advertising and is a big social plus - being aware of a product you'd be interested in is a good thing, and making people aware of products they would like is both important and necessary.
Things which generate revenue are often good for society.
There are laws against false advertising.
The issue is that a lot of ads aren't actually false. A lot of ads rely on subjective, arguable things - can McDonalds say it serves good food? Of course it can! You may disagree that they serve good food, but a lot of people like their food.
There are some ads which are false. The entire herbal supplement industry should be shut down, for instance. But for a lot of everyday products - food, phones, video games, movies - the ads are not "false advertising". They may present the product in the best light possible - and they usually do - but that doesn't mean that the ad is lying to the consumer.
Define "inferior" and "superior".
And a lot of products are luxury goods, like Apple's products - they aren't better than their competitors' products, but they're meant to appeal to a certain sort of person and give a sense of being part of an elite. It is a type of conspicious consumption.
And as far as urban legends go, very few. Most urban legends don't have a basis in advertisement.
Why is encouraging people to buy a product a bad thing?
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The whole "addictive food" thing? It is a big lie.
But why did they create it?
Well, because they're fat and want to pretend like it is everyone else's fault that they stuff themselves with tons of food. They can't help it, they're addicts!
Not, you know, people who have problems with self control. Clearly not! Perish the thought that THEY are at fault!
It isn't really a conspiracy so much as people making excuses for their own personal irresponsibility. There's nothing in a McDonalds' hamburger which is any more addictive than what is found in any other hamburger.
Likewise, the idea that people have "destroyed" tastebuds is simply false. People become accustomed to different sorts of things - for instance, if you eat a lot of spicy food, you become more desensitized to it and can tolerate spicier foods. Same is true of most extremes. The body adapts to them.
The reason we make foods tastier today is because we can. Back in the day, spices were a major luxury item; today, they're readily available to the consumer, and we can use them much more often. Humans like good-tasting food, unsurprisingly; the reason that a lot of old food tasted bland is because it was bland. It isn't that people back in the day found it more palatable, it was that they didn't have a choice.
We can make better-tasting food today than we could in the past. Why wouldn't we? It is the good old days fallacy.
Generating new needs happens all the time. The Internet is a need now; people made do without it, but life is much better with it.
We have far more than enough resources to fulfill our needs.
This is incorrect and is based on a fallacy. Having the Internet is better than not having the Internet, but having high-speed Internet is better than having satellite or dial-up internet. Someone with only dialup Internet will be worse off than someone with high-speed Internet, but they're better off than someone without the Internet at all.
Obscuring your inferiority doesn't make you any less inferior.
The whole "everything is addictive" thing is a conspiracy theory which is very attractive to those who refuse to take personal responsibility. They aren't addicted to TV, they're just lazy. They can't deal with the idea that they are at fault for their own laziness, so they blame it on external forces, thereby denying their own culpability - and ironically, preventing themselves from fixing it because they're making excuses for themselves.
Most things aren't addictive in the sense of tobacco.
Not really, no. Most people just waste vast quantities of their time.
People have become increasingly accustomed to higher and higher levels of stimulation over time. Advertising is not a particularly good example of it, as it isn't that stimulating compared to many other things.
It certainly isn't oppressive; I live in a town of 50,000, but I don't feel oppressed by advertising at all when I go to big cities. Indeed, it is just kind of there and a part of the scenery. Of course, I constantly seek out stimulation.
I've never found this to be especially problematic, or indeed, even all that prevalent to be honest.
Well, duh! How do you think political causes gain adherents?
Also, anarchism is both complicated and stupid, which makes it attractive to a certain sort of person.
Who cares?
Culture changes over time. That's how it goes. We change our culture by behaving differently over time. The rebel image thing is attractive to people because they want to feel special, especially when they're not.
The solution is to not be weak.
And indeed, over time, we've found a cycle of advertisers improving their methods and people becoming increasingly resistant to them.
This is the opposite of what happens in real life. People actually become more resistant to ads the more frequently they're exposed to them. This is a long-term and well-known pheonomenon in the advertising industry; the reason ads have become increasingly sophisticated over time is because people have become increasingly more difficult to manipulate via advertisement. That's why we have such impressive modern marketing campaigns - we've gone through dozens of iterations.
Indeed, if you talk to people who do advertising, they'll tell you that people in advertising are losing the battle. Click rates on ads have been in long-term decline, as have general consumer responses to ads. People just don't respond to ads the way they used to. The reason Super Bowl ads have gotten so expensive is because they're one of the few ways to really interface successfully with customers. Ad rates in many areas have been in decline because there is increasingly inferior ROI on them.
That's how it goes. Advertising is, like everything else, a matter of how much value it is giving you for your money, and it has been struggling because people have become increasingly more sophisticated and less vulnerable to manipulation.
People do have the right to post billboards and other things. I understand some countries in Europe struggle with the idea of freedom, but here in the US, you're free to plaster your building with ads if you want to.
It isn't "shoving it in your face", it is displaying it where you can see. But just because something is advertised doesn't mean you have to buy it.
It is inferior and not as capable of catching my interest. If I see trailers for things, some of them will be more interesting than others. I'll look into those. I'm just not that likely to browse a catalog.
It is the same way on FIMFiction - in the long term, story views fall off.
Advertising isn't a bad thing.
If you can't sell the product there's no point in producing it in the first place. And no one is going to buy your product if they don't know it exists.
So what? If it is garbage, then it will be worthless and people will lose their money and be replaced by those who are better at it. That's capitalism.
Increasing awareness of a product is actually an enormous part of advertising. For some products, it is the most important thing. If you come up with a new product, increasing awareness of your product is a huge part of your advertising campaign. A lot of video games are about awareness of the new game.
For other products, it is about why you should buy the product over your competitors' products. Coca-Cola and Pepsi are good examples of this. The same is true of fast food chains - they want to make you hungry for their stuff over that of their competitors.
If people really were so easily manipulated by advertising as to have no real free will, then the idea of freedom is nonsense anyway. Anyone who is so susceptible to ads is hopelessly stupid and is incapable of living as a free person to begin with; the idea that you could simply remove advertising and make them free is nonsense. The problem is that the person isn't actually making decisions on their own, they're just regurgitating the environment. The idea of such a person being free is a bad joke.
If people are truly free, then ads don't matter - they're free to make use of them or not.
This is similar to the idea of preventing people from talking about political candidates - if ads really were the only thing that made people vote one way or another, then democracy is a farce to begin with as the people aren't actually making educated decisions, and won't in the absence of said ads, they'll just make their decisions on the basis of some other equally moronic critereon.
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YOU are saying that it is the responsibility of society to make sure that YOU are responsible, rather than it being YOUR responsibility to be responsible to society.
That is by its very nature shifting the blame. Responsibility for your actions lies on yourself. It makes sense - you're the one taking the actions, thus you are the one responsible for them. Indeed, society does not function if you don't make people be responsible for themselves.
A lot of people hate freedom because it means people are free to make choices they don't like.
Intelligence is mostly genetic; there's very little you can do to fix stupidity.
It is both harder to get viewers to engage with ads AND harder to get people who actually view the ads to buy something. It is both. It isn't about being louder or more obnoxious, but about getting people to engage. Louder and more obnoxious is actually a losing strategy.
Well, yeah. You're an authoritarian. You don't like liberty. You want other people to make the choices you feel are correct.
This is a good thing, actually.
Why should I care?
What does it matter?
Is it a big deal?
No. It isn't. You're getting worked up over something which is unimportant. This is unhealthy.
And indeed, it is bad for society. Caring about what other people are doing is precisely what leads to things like opposition to gay marriage. Why does it matter to anyone else? It shouldn't, so why should you stop them? It isn't hurting anyone.
Same with religion - why does it matter what religion your neighbor practices?
Why does it matter what someone else is saying?
An important part of freedom - and the reason many authoritarians hate freedom - is because they don't understand that freedom means the ability to make choices you don't personally approve of. It means the freedom to make "bad choices" or "wrong choices".
And part of that is shrugging off other people making choices you don't like and saying "It's your funeral."
If they want to plaster their walls with posters, so be it.
You don't understand freedom of speech at all.
Freedom of speech is the right to say things - it is not the right for anyone to care what you have to say.
Graffiti and shouting people down isn't freedom of speech - it is repressing the freedom of speech of others.
First off, YouTube is free.
Secondly, printing books costs a lot of money. You are saying that books aren't a part of freedom.
Most billboards are privately owned - in the US, almost all billboards are privately owned by landowners. They belong to the people whose land they're on. Stuff that's on the side of buildings is there by permission of the landowner.
You don't have the right to deface the property of others. Freedom means that other people are going to do things you don't like, and you don't have the right to cause them harm for doing what they want with their own property.
Well, then, earn enough money to buy your own place. It isn't anyone else's fault that you don't have money.
Where I live, most people own their own homes.
If other people being better off than you are makes you unhappy, you're a pretty lousy excuse for a human being and not a good thing to have in society.
I'd like to have more than I do, but I'm not unhappy because I'm not Bill Gates. Indeed, I'm pretty happy overall.
First off, very little advertising actually does this.
Secondly, it doesn't make people unhappy. I'm not unhappy. If it makes you unhappy, it means there's something wrong with you personally (as in, you're suffering from a mental illness), and you should try and address that via therapy. Most people are not made unhappy via advertisement. If people actually cared about thin models being everywhere, there would be fewer fat people in the world. Instead, half the developed world is overweight and a quarter is obese.
If emulating the world of advertising was really so strong, that wouldn't happen.
It does make people happier. People just know that there are greater heights to happiness today than were possible in previous eras. That's reality. A lot of people today live lives which are much better than many rich people did historically because of the awesome stuff we have available to the average man.
People are much less violent today than they were historically and are much better domesticated in part because of our better standards of living.
And yeah, just because you're better than someone in 1900 doesn't mean you're better than everyone else today; if you want a job today, they're going to hire the person they feel is best suited for the job. If that isn't you, too bad. You aren't owed a job. If you want to get a good job, you gotta be good, not merely average.
Neither. Anarchism is a internally inconsistent political philosophy which is utterly unworkable in real life, and ironically much of its membership is bizzarely authoritarian even while claiming to be for freedom. It is highly utopian but also bizzarely dystopian and a great deal of it is embedded in false ideas about how the world works.
A mental addiction is a compulsion to recieve a specific pleasurable stimulus. If it isn't a compulsion, it is not an addiction.
You know what the best way of curing an addiction is?
Quitting it cold turkey.
Lots of things are bad for you that aren't addictive.
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You can't just go out and build thorium reactors with present technology; you'd have to develop it. And while they sound awesome in theory, in practice there are a lot of complications which make them less desirable than they sound, including issues with fuel freezing, segregation of the fissile materials, and a host of other issues which make it a less-than-trivial thing to do. They're completely different from present-day reactors and have to be built completely differently, and it would basically be starting over on design for them.
Civilization requires structure. Large-scale society functions precisely because large numbers of people coordinate and do things together. We build rules to ensure that people don't infringe on each others' rights and try to maximize freedom. Indeed, it is worth noting that over time, the US has become an increasingly freer country despite having an increasingly large number of laws. Having a strong central government is helpful for coordination and making big projects happen.
The reason that people call anarchism a utopian philosophy is precisely because it is literally utopian: it assumes infinite resources.
That's not reality. People have to spend time making resources available. Lots of it. "Minimum voluntary work" would be north of 40 hours a week for everyone, and even then you'd still have as limited of resources as we have today. The US produces more resources than anywhere else in the world - do we have infinite resources? No. Everywhere else produces less and has less. And the US works a lot.
Indeed, the reason that capitalism works is precisely because it awards resources on the basis of how much you produce - the more you produce, the more resources you get. This leads to the most useful people getting the most resources, which means that we reward people for being better directly, and make it so that having more resources means that you have even more resources to produce even more resources.
All other systems are inferior to variations on capitalism because capitalism awards resources in a more efficient manner, and lets natural selection work for the system.
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The thing is, hierarchies are valuable and useful things. People actually naturally form pyramids - it is a part of innate human psychology. But it also happens to be a way of making useful things happen. Without hierarchy, it becomes very difficult to coordinate and get large projects done with large groups of people. Hierarchies are an efficient means of organization as it means that everyone only has to interact with so many other people, rather than trying to coordinate with an entire organization.
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Depends on your definition of "land", really.
Also, unusable. People live around Chernobyl today.
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I have looked at the statistics.
You're wrong.
IQ, the best measure we have of g, the general intelligence factor, has a heritability of between .5 and .8, with the best studies of adults suggesting a heritability of about .75. Adoption studies confirm this. And indeed, we see the very interesting property of IQ that the heritability of IQ actually increases over time; i.e. as an individual gets older, their IQ conforms more closely to that of their parents. Amongst small children, it is about .5, but amongst 18 year olds, it rises to about .75. This is the exact opposite of what you would expect from a trait which was strongly environmentally controlled, especially amongst adopted children - if it was strongly impacted by environment, you would expect to see the opposite trend, where it would correlate most closely amongst the youth and diverge over time with life experiences.
This suggests very strongly that intelligence - at least amongst people living in the developed world - is not only heritable, but highly heritable. Indeed, evidence suggests that our upbringing likely has no discernible effect on IQ.
This isn't terribly surprising if you think about it; that intelligence is genetically controlled is obvious when you consider that humans are vastly smarter than chimps, and that is obviously due to genetics. Most human traits are strongly genetically controlled, so it is hardly surprising that intelligence, being based on physiological differences in brain size and brain structure, among other things, would be, too.
Note that intelligence and income are indeed correlated, but this is likely the result of the opposite - i.e. it is not that being rich makes you smarter, but being smarter makes it more likely that you're rich. This is to be expected if you think about it - a lot of high-IQ professions pay well relative to low-IQ professions, and smart people are also much less likely to commit crimes.
You're an authoritarian leftist. Communists and anarchists frequently are, bizzare as that may seem, when both promote the idea of a society which is run by the people rather than a powerful centralized government.
Authoritarianism isn't necessarily about deference to a singular central authority in a physical sense - it may be deference to an authoritative idea, like a religious or philisophical ideal. A community without any leadership structure which stones people for violating their religious tenants is no less authoritarian than a community where there is a single person in charge who demands the same. Mob rule is not necessarily any less authoritarian than rule by a single person, and indeed, because of conformity effects, may be even worse.
Think about Maoist rebels who roll into towns in India and try "collaborators" in "People's Courts" and put them to death for supporting the government. These people are extremely authoritarian, but the authority in question is their cause.
Shouting someone down is to prevent someone from speaking - if someone is, say, giving a public speech, and people come along and act disruptive to prevent them from giving their speech, that's shouting people down.
How do posters prevent someone from speaking?
They don't.
You're jealous that you matter less than they do and are less important. But why should you be as important as a corporation? Corporations are big things which include thousands of people - are you as important as thousands of people?
It isn't surprising that large numbers of people are more important than smaller numbers of people. In fact, that's precisely what you'd expect.
That's what freedom of speech is all about. Freedom. You have the right to say what you want - you don't have the right to anyone caring. It is about the freedom to express oneself, not the right to a captive audience.
You're free to write whatever manifesto you want, but no one else is required to read it.
Freedom of speech is about having the ability to express, which gives others the option of listening. But listening isn't mandatory, and not everyone is equal. In fact, most people don't have anything worthwhile to say at all.
Uh, yes? They're all forms of mass media. A billboard honestly has quite a bit in common with books or YouTube - they're all about (at least potentially) communicating with large numbers of people simultaneously. And indeed, in alol three cases, you can't really interact with the person who produced the piece.
Throwing molotov cocktails and dropping bombs isn't actually very different at all - the only practical difference is effectiveness.
Physical violence is frequently used to enforce systemic oppression. If you physically assault people for disagreeing with you on a regular basis, that's an example of systemic oppression, because you're making it unsafe to disagree with you.
First off, this had nothing to do with anything I said.
Secondly: Is a homeless person who chooses to hitchhike across America, eat in soup kitchens, and not work, free?
I think it is difficult to argue that they're not. But at the same time, they live an inferior life to a more regimented person's lifestyle (or at least, most of society feels that they do) and many things are unavailable to them because they have no money.
Absolute freedom - in the sense that you don't have to do anything you don't want to do - is nonsense. In reality, everyone has to do things. Everyone has to work because sustaining life requires resources, and material goods require resources.
Is earning more money possible for most people?
Absolutely. Most people don't do anything close to their potential. I certainly don't, and I know almost no one who maximizes their economic output.
And yes, I do know what it means to be poor. It means you're not very valuable. That's what being poor is. Money is basically points in life - you gain them by doing things and you lose them to keep surviving. Money is a fraction of human lifespans. Money is productivity. People who are poor are people who don't produce much that others find valuable, people who lack unique traits that make them anything more but the basest cogs in the machinery of society.
I live in a town of about 50,000 people where there are more people with PHDs than who go to church on a weekly basis. Or more accurately, I live just outside of said town, on a few acres of land.
I have never poor. Chances are I will never be poor.
And that's a good thing.
Or, you know, happiness surveys are worthless.
If you ask someone how happy they are, and they think that misery with the odd bit of happiness is the best life there is, they'll say that they're very happy. If they know that isn't the case, they'll say they're less happy. But are they actually less happy?
If you do studies on people, they will say that they're happier after they become parents, even though they will rate their happiness lower if you ask them to rate their happiness.
Trying to rate happiness on a 1 to 10 scale is impossible if 1 and 10 mean different things for different people. If I define 10 as "the guy who doesn't have to work on Saturday and Sunday", and someone else defines happiness as "being so rich I never have to work at all", that's a very different idea of what maximum happiness is. The former person may rate themselves as an 8 as they can take off work on Sundays and the latter person may rate themselves as a 4, but that doesn't mean that the former person is any happier than the latter person.
That's the problem with measuring qualia. A better way of determining this is to look at chemistry.
As far as suicide goes - suicide is a cultural thing to some extent, and many of the countries with the highest suicide rates are poor - Guyana, Sri Lanka, Mozambique, Tanzania, Nepal, Kazakhstan, Burundi, Suriname, India, South Sudan, Turkmenistan, and Uganda all have very high suicide rates, even higher than the notoriously suicidal country of Japan. So does Russia. Indeed, if you look at the list of countries with the highst suicide rates, of the top 20, only Japan, Lithuania, Hungary, and Japan are developed nations, and Hungary is closer economically to Russia than it is to Japan.
That's like claiming you're addicted to water - you need to eat salt and consume calories and drink water to survive.
Everyone is addicted to breathing by your definition. That's not a particularly useful definition of addiction.
Yeah, but happiness comes from within.
Real life?
Economics?
It is, actually. All you have to do is stop.
A lot of people don't care enough to do so.
The idea that quitting cold turkey is hard is actually a bad thing - it is better to think of it as easy because it actually makes it easier to do precisely because it is all in your head.
The idea that people aren't compelled to work is utopian by definition, because it assumes that labor is free. It isn't. Indeed, the general idea of having a non-hierarchical society is nonsense, and the idea of how such a society would operate is itself quite utopian. Indeed, how would one create or enforce laws without a heirarchy? Police officers and specialization exists for a reason.
In any case: we do in fact have abundant resources. We also have scarce resources. These two facts are not contradictory.
Abundant means that resources exist in large quanities or are plentiful. Scarce means that resources are insufficient for demand.
These are both true at the same time, and understanding this is pretty key to economics. There are vast amounts of iron inside the Earth, but it takes resources (most notably, labor) to extract said resource from the ground. Iron doesn't do you any good as iron ore - it has to be mined, transported, and refined into the tool you need.
Time can be converted into other resources. It costs time to mine ore, or drill for oil, or whatever else.
And that time is limited - each person only has so much of it.
Realistically speaking, the limiting factor on how much iron we have is how much time and effort we're willing to spend digging it up, not how much iron there is in the ground.
The idea that capitalism assumes infinite resources is false. Indeed, quite the opposite - it assumes that resources are scarce. If we had infinite resources, then capitalism would be meaningless.
No it doesn't. FIMFiction is a hierarchy. Indeed, the internet is full of hierarchies. Most of them consist of only two levels - the site owner, and everyone else.
Right by default?
No.
Correct?
Yes.
Have you ever studied economics?
Because it doesn't seem much like you have.
I never said either of those things. That's all in your head~
I never said capitalism was beyond criticism. But the reality is that all systems will have people on the bottom. Capitalism simply is more efficient than most other systems at putting the right people on the bottom, because it makes your success more heavily dependent on your contribution.
The more directly you reward people for their contributions, the better a capitalistic system functions.
Yes.
And in any case, "think of the children" is a bad argument against free speech.
3151306
There's no evidence of this at all. Indeed, this is extremely questionable thinking. We've spent decades developing fusion power and it has not panned out, and indeed, by the looks of things, never will. Oh, we'll get FUSION POWER eventually, I'm sure, but the idea that it would be "clean" is apparently flawed - it makes the containment vessel itself radioactive, which kind of defeats half the point.
Spending resources on something doesn't necessarily mean it will work. Indeed, we'd probably need to spend as much if not more money on developing thorium reactors as we spent on our present nuclear reactors to get them to work, realistically speaking.
A lot of R&D is on stuff that doesn't pan out. Thorium reactors seem cool, but whether or not they're actually practicable is unknown until we try and actually commercialize them.
Hardly.
Who enforces the laws?
Who makes the laws?
How do you coordinate large infrastructure projects?
How do you collect taxes?
How do you run your military?
Most anarchist systems reject the idea of private property as well, which is very anti-freedom.
Democracy doesn't actually have much to do with freedom anyway; freedom is more of an aspect of pluralism.
Any society will intrinsically work if everyone behaves in a perfect altruistic manner. Capitalism will actually work even better under these conditions because it will much more efficiently distribute resources, and thereby maximize their use and thereby maximize value. Anarchic and communistic systems will make less efficient use of their resources.
This is completely wrong.
First off, capitalism makes no assumptions about how many resources are available. Capitalism is a system wherein a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners who are seeking to make a profit, rather than by the state. How many resources exist is irrelevant. Indeed, capitalism doesn't assume that there are infinite resources.
Secondly, every attempt at building a system that did not rely on capitalism has failed. Every. Single. One.
The idea that capitalism is unsustainable is nonsense - capitalism has been the rule of the day for centuries, and arguably millenia. Communism didn't even last one century, and every attempt at anarchistic societies have failed within extremely short periods of time.
Indeed, the oldest countries in the world today are the UK and the US, both of which are capitalistic societies which are the most stable on the planet. This means that capitalism must therefore be the most sustainable system by any reasonable definition, because it has lasted the longest of any of them.
The circle of production and consumption is innate to all life - that's how life itself works. You consume resources, then reproduce, and your offspring consume resources, and then reproduce, ect.
This is called "reality".
The US's debt issues have nothing to do with capitalism. In fact, it is the exact opposite - the US national debt is because of socialism - it is entitlement programs which drive the national debt and national budget.
The idea that the government will shut down is silly, though - it won't. The government will still operate. The problem will be that the government will have to make tough choices about what to cut. Smart money is on cutting the social programs - socialized medicine, welfare, social security. Those are big budget items and all can be and frankly, will be cut (or taxes will go up). Most likely, they'll cut the budget over raising taxes if it got to the point where we couldn't borrow more.
Europe is struggling with this issue, too - people want the government to provide everything but don't want to pay the necessary taxes to do so.
Resources are limited.
Captialism is inherently better at acknowledging this reality and distributing said resources.
Money is merely a means of commodifying things. When we say that a house is worth $300,000, that's like saying that the house is worth 100,000 gallons of milk.
But most people don't need 100,000 gallons of milk. But 1,000 people might need 100 gallons of milk each over the course of a year.
What money allows us to do is to make it so that you don't have to barter with the person you want to do business with - you can do trade with third parties, and still exchange your goods for their goods, but indirectly, and in a manner more useful for everyone.
The idea of getting rid of money is thus utter nonsense. Money exists for a reason - it represents real-world concerns that don't go away without money. People who think that money is the problem don't understand the world at all - it is the resources that money represents which is the real problem.
You need to study economics.
The reason we didn't go to Mars is not because of little pieces of paper - it is because it would have cost us a ton of resources to do so, and people were unwilling to invest said resources into that endeavour. People instead wanted to spend resources on making poor people less poor.
And yes, that is quite literally where the money went. It was a huge waste of money as well, as it didn't fix the problem at all.
If you want to get rid of socialized healthcare and welfare and anti-poverty programs, you could go to Mars.
Do you want to do that?
Because that is literally the choice we have to make.
Without the space program, engineers instead go to work on other things, like, say, computers, airplanes, car design, drones, and the like.
It takes vast amounts of resources to produce what is necessary to go to Mars - engineering resources, specialized manufacturing resources, ect. And you're not spending those resources on doing other things. Going to Mars isn't free - it costs vast amounts of time.
I think going to Mars is a good thing, but you'd probably oppose cutting social welfare to do so.
You can submit all you want - you'll be wrong.
Yes, automation exists. And yes, we produce more with less these days - my old
magic dustnanocarbon factory could be operated by 10 people thanks to the power of automation. Farmers produce enormously larger amounts of food - one farmer produces enough food for 100 people nowadays.But now we want cars, and planes, and houses, and freeways, and nice lawns, and health care, and lawyers, and pedicures, and colorful cartoon shows.
The fact that we can do more with less doesn't mean that people don't need to work - it means that people can do things other than merely survive. Civilization occurred because we got to the point where people could provide food for multiple other people, allowing people to specialize and produce goods and services which didn't exist before and which made our lives better. Over time, as agriculture has become increasingly more efficient, our society has grown ever better and ever more sophisticated. And so it goes. Industry is being increasingly automated, which means we're moving into services more and more nowadays.
And even services are becoming increasingly better, so we can provide more and more specialized services. I can just pay someone money to draw art of my character or something. I can pay someone to produce a story or a video.
That's pretty sweet!
Pedicures and haircuts are older examples of the same sort of individualized services. Medical care is another example, though it also overlaps with industrial production in the form of vaccines, medical devices, medications, and suchlike.
And really everything ties in together - we have to eat food. We have to extract resources via mines and wells and other things. We have to process said resources. And then we have to put them to use.
People have ever better lives as a result of this.
The idea that robots are going to make it so people don't have to work is, thus, utter nonsense. We long since passed the point where survival was a major concern - we can produce food and shelter for society on only a fraction of our society's population. And yet we still work.
Why would robots change any of that? They don't change the underlying reality. We don't work because we need to to survive - we work because we need to in order to have a society that is nice. Merely surviving is quite easy. Having a computer and a car and a house is much more complicated and requires much more know-how - know-how and resources you don't possess.
That's how and why civilization works: everyone specializes and gains the ability to do some useful task, and then does it and produces goods and resources or provides services that everyone else needs. A guy who designs computer hardware and a neurosurgeon can't perform each others' jobs, and yet both provide specialized services which are important.
And by doing what we're good at, we all contribute to society and make the world a better place. We have neurosurgeons and computer hardware designers and writers and artists and video game programmers and police officers and astronauts precisely because most people don't need to do work merely in order to survive.
The thing is, as we automate more and more, what realy happens is that things which don't require human beings to do increasingly do not.
What happened when we improved agriculture? People who were formerly doing agriculture did work in cities. Eventually we ended up with tractors and fertilizer and people working in factories.
Same applies to factories - we move from there to having doctors and surgeons and computer programmers and restaurant chains and truck drivers. 70% of the US workforce is in the service industry today.
That's how it works. That's why the world keeps getting better and better. It isn't that we need to work less - it is that we have more. Our work goes further.
Learning useful skills is what it is all about. The more everything is provided for, the more individual services can be provided. Want a video made for yourself? Want some art just for you? That sort of thing becomes possible as society becomes increasingly efficient.
Getting rid of money doesn't change reality, it merely makes things vastly more inconvenient.
Moreover, many things require specialization, and specialization requires vast amounts of training. And many things - like neurosurgeons - are only needed infrequently, by a tiny fraction of the population. Thus you only have a tiny number of them because they require a huge amount of training - and thus, resources - and they occupy themselves by serving a huge population, of which only a small number actually need them. Most people never require the services of a neurosurgeon, but we need neurosurgeons in society.
It is only a society like ours which can have neurosurgeons.
First off, we have efficient electrical motors. In fact, electrical motors are extremely efficient. The problem with electric cars is not motors, it is energy storage. Gasoline is ridiculously energy dense. In fact, we had electric cars in the early 1900s, but they were vastly inferior to petrol cars. Nowadays, batteries have finally started to catch up to ICEs in some ways, which has made them feasible again.
Secondly, electric cars aren't quite as awesome as they seem. The problem mostly comes from the fact that energy comes from somewhere, and "somewhere" is frequently coal. Which means that what you're really doing is driving a coal-burning car, albeit indirectly. Obviously, this isn't actually that great for the environment. A lot of people don't understand this. If you produce your power via, say, nuclear power, then your car is nuclear powered, and thus much cleaner. A hydro powered car (from hydro dams) is better still.
Thirdly, we already have smart cars here in the US. They already exist. They're driving on our roads right now. They'll be widely commercially available by 2020.
Natural selection is almost tautological in nature; it is how reality functions.
3151734
Laws are necessary for all societies.
Taxes existed before money did, and your system suggests that 100% of your income is taxed as it is all taken by other people.
Structure is necessary for large projects.
And as far as the military goes... seriously?
Militaries are entirely necessary. See also: Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, China, all rebel groups everywhere. Militaries create stability.
Really sounds like you're trying to create a society that I could conquer inside a week.
3152015
Here's the thing:
Complaining about people having negative stereotypes about anarchism is fine.
If, however, you do that while simultaneously talking about how you should be able to talk back by defacing billboards, it becomes very difficult to take you seriously.
The ultimate stereotype of anarchists - political anarchists - is that they are tremendously naive about how the world works, and are very self-interested and self-serving, often without recognizing themselves as such.
Civilization is a choice, and many anarchists seem to the rest of society to be uninterested in making that choice.
I had a boss once who was a nice guy, but he voted republican. I wanted to know why. His answer was that he didn't want to live in a cave. I thought that was unfair at the time.
And yet, I have to acknowledge now that there are many on the left whose suggestions about how society should be run would lead to everyone living in caves.
And he was right.
You talk about freedom, but you don't understand it. You get upset by other people exercising their freedom in a way you don't like. And you shut off disagreement.
When you talk about negative conceptions of anarchists, does it ever even occur to you that at least some of their criticisms might be valid?
Have you ever taken a course in economics? If not, you might want to consider doing so before you complain about the structure of the economic system.
If you don't understand how a thing works, and complain about it, you aren't being particularly helpful.
I'm sorry if I seemed condescending, but you seem fundamentally angry that you aren't as important as other people. You dehumanize corporate entities without regard for the fact that corporations themselves are run by people, don't seem to care much for landowners despite them, too, being people, and you don't seem to understand why it is that society operates in the way that it does.
Why is it that you think that communism failed?
Why is it that every anarchic experiment has failed?
And do you think that people who are actually successful who view such ideas as bad might have some vision on it?
I would recommend against debating politics in comments sections on FIMFiction in general - you will seldom get much of a good response - but when you complain about how anarchists are looked down on, and then epitomize the reasons why people don't like them, you're even less likely to get a positive response.
3152468
I was talking about the advertising thing.
You don't even understand what economics is.
Economics is the study of how people use resources.
If your ideals don't match with reality, your ideals are wrong. As was said a long time ago, "You have the right to your own opinions, but you don't have the right to your own facts."
Studying economics has nothing to do with capitalism; communist societies also had economies. All societies have economies. Economics is understanding how those economies function.
I am somewhat familiar with psychology. I've taken one class in it and done some independent study. Scientific psychology is actually quite fascinating, but a lot of folks confuse pop psychology with what might be called "real" psychology, and are very susceptible to swallowing things which aren't really true. Psychology is a field rife with nonsense, unfortunately, being a soft science, and a lot of people who study psychology are utterly worthless at it. A lot of psychological studies are extremely shoddily done, even more so than in other fields of science. And there is an awful lot of applied psychology which is, frankly, a sham.
The actual science of psychology is really awesome, but it is a terrible field at the moment. If you aren't very good at statistics and sussing out questionable science, you're very likely to believe things that aren't true - and sadly, many psychology programs do a terrible job of teaching science, which is part of why the field is a mess.
I've never actively studied pedagogy (the study of teaching), so all I know are some various random scattered things that I've happened to pick up. I've only read a small number of papers on pedagogy (like about learning styles or the lack thereof, though most of those were really more psychology papers), though I've read papers on the efficacy of some programs, such as Head Start (which is, alas, worthless).
What would be some examples of pedagological studies that you feel were interesting?
They called themselves both. The CPSU was the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; they called themselves communists and adhered to Marxist-Leninist type ideas. The Communist Party of China also calls itself such.
The anarchists in Spain made use of pre-existing infrastructure and still lost the civil war. They also murdered a lot of people and burned a lot of buildings. And saying that they "weren't primitive" when, well, it is Spain, which is hardly at the forefront of civilization.
What major discoveries were made there?
What great things were accomplished?
Their main legacy was giving Spain over to Franco because they couldn't win militarily. Doesn't speak well of their efficacy.
Capitalism is more reflective of societal contributions than other systems which have been attempted.
It isn't a fallacy at all. Empirical evidence is the most important kind of evidence; if it actually, really works in real life, then that's evidence of success. If it doesn't, that's evidence of failure.
You are saying that reality doesn't matter. You have the right to your own opinions, but you don't have the right to your own facts. That something actually works tells you something.
And indeed, all of the most successful societies in the world are capitalistic. The longest-lasting countries are all capitalist. Every instance of anarchism has failed rapidly.
That says something.
For the record, yeah, Monday was pretty sweltering hiking. It does help that (as a rule of thumb) you lose 3-5 degrees Fahrenheit for each 1000 feet you climb, but Monday was still a 2000-foot climb from the pass to Timberline Lodge, in the high 80s, in direct sunlight. Mostly on sand-dune volcanic chuff tread. Slooooooooog.
Tuesday was pretty amazing though. Clouds rolled in. High 60s. Amazing scenery.
When I came back down to California, it was threatening to break 100 in the Central Valley.
3153431
Wow!
Well, I'm glad you didn't end up frying too much on your hike - I hope you didn't escape that fate just to sizzle back home.
I hope you enjoyed our trees!
3153723
There are fundamentally two major branches of economics - macroeconomics, the study of entire economies, and microeconomics, which is the study of individual behavior and small organizations and markets.
Microeconomics includes supply and demand, elasticity, consumer choice, production theory, costs of production, competition, monopolies, oligopolies, market structure, game theory, labor economics, welfare economics, ect.
And you say this without having studied it at all.
I'm not saying that economics is a great field - macro in particular is pretty well known to be full of garbage. But a lot of economics is fairly well known and understood, and a lot of fundamental concepts in economics - such as the understanding of what money fundamentally is - are uncontroversial.
The problem with macroeconomics is mostly that it is fundamentally extremely difficult if not impossible to do macroeconomics experiments; economists are limited to gathering real world data, but such experiments frequently lack important things like controls.
This is why microeconomics is much better understood - experimentation is easier, and there's a lot more data with fewer confounding factors.
Montessori schools have never been demonstrated to improve student outcomes.
It isn't true, though. Obviously the Montessori people will claim it will because they want money, but controlled studies have failed to demonstrate that Montessori students do better than children who attend public schools.
China is a communist country. It holds communist ideals and is run by the Communist Party of China. They switched from a planned economy to the modern socialist market economy because, as they noted, the planned economy didn't work - it was inefficient and not very functional.
The Chinese, for all their faults, are practical.
They had communistic ideals. The fact that they were unable to make their countries "truly" communistic, according to the end-goal state of communism (i.e. common ownership of the means of production and statelessness) after more than half a century of work suggests rather strongly that communism is untenable.
Land is capital. Tools are capital. A computer is capital. A projector can be capital.
And rent isn't blackmail.
Always? No. But it is indicative. If they were really so productive, why did they fail?
Anarchism is inherently weak.
And yet the communists themselves still lost. Losing to losers is all the more sad.
And yet, this claim is not corraborated in any way by reality.
The cold, harsh reality of why anarchism and communism don't work is very simple: they rely on things which are false to be true.
The biggest one? People are not equal.
What makes us unequal is not class, though, but intrinsic worth. A factory worker or farm laborer is just less valuable than an engineer or a neurosurgeon. Engineers and neurosurgeons can provide much more value to society and require much more training, and are much less replacable. An engineer or neurosurgeon can act as a factory worker or farm laborer if need be, but not vice-versa.
This is reality. It isn't a matter of opinion. It is objectively observable in the world. We see how much value people produce, and we see how hard it is to replace them, and how much demand there is for what they do relative to the supply of said labor.
Communism can never work because it relies on the idea that all people are equal when in reality they're not. Most people are, in fact, worthless. They aren't capable of taking responsibility for themselves because they don't want to, and simply don't.
All you have to do is look at the obesity rates in developed nations to see this fact.
The US sees it as being its obligation to make the world a better place and takes steps to do so. It may not always succeed, but it does try.
Much of Europe is uninterested in being responsible in the way that the US is, but they feel free to whine about it incessantly.
Responsibility is the recognition that just because something isn't your fault doesn't mean that you don't need to deal with it.
Killing people isn't intrinsically bad; it is situationally bad. Killing people is occaisionally a correct choice in an orderly society.
The Nazis developed numerous technologies while at war with the two most powerful countries on the planet.
Ah, but not everyone is equally productive.
You're wrong, though. Increasing capital IS good. The more capital you have, the more production you have, and thus the more stuff you have. Stuff is good; it improves quality of life.
I was speaking of surviving countries. Many primitive cultures existed in an almost unchanged state for extremely long periods of time, but they all eventually fell.
I will also note that capitalism arose because capital became much more pertinent. If you're a hunter-gatherer, the only real "capital" is land and tools, and the tools at the time were pretty primitive and plentiful, and you didn't get any real benefit out of having a thousand spears. Land, likewise, was pretty limited in how much use you could get out of a lot of it.
Over time, we became increasingly better at leveraging capital, which meant that capital became more important.
Those were mercantilist societies, which were the precursor to modern capitalism. Vast amounts of money were exchanged by these civilizations. Mercantilism eventually gave way to industrial capitalism, which gave way to modern capitalism.
Also, these states were not tremendously stable; England, for instance, was a monarchistic state, but it had a bloody transfer of power about once per century. The modern UK only has existed since the Glorious Revolution, or arguably the Acts of Union, depending on your point of view, and it is the oldest continuous government in the world, dating from either 1688 or 1707. The US is the second oldest, dating from 1775, though you could debate that San Marino is older than the US, depending on whether or not you count their conquest by the Nazis as changing their government or not.
I think you should read this paper by Isaac Asimov.
Modern society is not perfect. However, I think it is very unlikely that in a society like our own, there is a system which is better than some variation of capitalism - numerous folk have tried and failed.
3153910
Might makes stability and safety. The US being mighty is why there hasn't been a World War III.
I have, in fact, done both. I was QA in a nanocarbon factory and I tended to blueberries one summer back in college.
If you don't have enough factory or farm workers, an engineer or neurosurgeon can step in for them. The reverse is not true.
Factory workers are dependent on engineers for their livelihoods; without the engineers, the factory workers are nothing, because their work is dependent on others creating it for them.
Ah, but they can. That's the trick! They have more valuable skills so they shouldn't be required to do so (society works better if they don't), but they absolutely can indeed produce food.
Communism is basically a substitute religious belief for many of its adherents.
It is rather more complicated than that. A lot of it has to do with culture. The so-called culture of poverty is linked to this idea.
Not at all. Obesity is caused by people not caring enough to take care of themselves.
And no, Scandinavia does not use a social market system, and no, they aren't wealthier than the US is. Norway is comparable only because of resource extraction, the other two are lower, and all have tiny populations.
It isn't meaningful. I'm familiar with the events. They are heavily idealized by anarchists. America is a classless society, and indeed, classlessness has increased over time.
The alternative would be to view yourself as irresponsible and having to acknowledge that the US is propping you up.
The reality is that the US protected Europe during the Cold War, and continues to do so today.
The reality is that the US propped up Europe during World War II.
The reality is that the US funded the rebuilding of Europe after World War II.
Without America, you'd all be speaking German or Russian.
The US would like it if Europe took some responsibility for itself, but they refuse. They'd rather make the US carry the burden and then whine at them.
Whine whine whine.
Why isn't the US dealing with ISIS?
Why isn't the US going to Mars?
Why isn't the US stopping these people?
Why is it the US's job?
Because the Europeans are unwilling to take responsibility.
The world is a small place. Everywhere is connected to everywhere else. That's reality. Only the worst, most selfish kind of trash doesn't care about what is happening elsewhere in the world, especially when so many of them are happy to whine about all the illegal muslim immigrants from the failed states in the Middle East and North Africa, complain about how they're overwhelming them when they're only a tiny minority compared to Mexican immigration in the US, and complain about how the US needs to do something about it and complain when the US does so.
Arrogant?
The US isn't arrogant. Arrogant means that you have an exaggerated sense of one own's importance. But let's face reality here: the US went to the Moon. The US rebuilt Europe after World War II, and protected it during the Cold War. The US has a big military which has to serve as the world's police. That's the world we live in today.
To acknowledge these facts does not make us arrogant. We may be arrogant in other ways, but well, let's face it - Europe has a bad track record with the US.
After World War I, the US didn't want to punish Germany. The moronic Allies did. We then got World War II as a result.
The US opposed colonialism and protected the Americas from European interference.
The US does indeed act out of humanitarian interests. In fact, it is one of our major driving forces. Why do you think we called it Operation Iraqi Freedom? The US really wanted Iraq and Afghanistan to become western-style pluralistic democracies. The US may be naive in some ways, expecting people to understand pluralism, but their hearts were in the right place.
Do you not recognize the contradiction of quoting Orwell, where he claims the anarchists were supported, and complaining about the anarchists not being supported?
America is enormous. The abandoned decaying housing is not in places where people want to (or often should) live. It is not in places where there are jobs. Thus, the fact that there are homeless people and empty houses doesn't matter because they're not in the same place and they're not in a place where the homeless people want to be or should be.
The other issue is a lack of responsibility. Many homeless people just aren't very responsible, so putting them in charge of a piece of property doesn't work out. A lot of homeless people are mentally ill or have other issues which interfere with their ability to lead healthy, productive lives.
It is not a simple solution. There are lots of empty beds in many homeless shelters in the US, despite the fact that they're readily accessible to people, because some fraction of homeless people aren't interested in taking charity or living that way, or because they're unwilling to obey the rules (such as, say, not using drugs or committing crimes) necessary to dwell there.
Waste is inevitable, and it is actually a perk of capitalistic society - waste is intrinsically punished in capitalistic societies.
You know what systems are really terrible about waste? Communistic systems! Wastage in such systems is enormous. In fact, this is one of the biggest flaws with communistic economies - they're tremendously wasteful. This is because they misallocate resources and don't allocate resources on the basis of merit. Indeed, a truly communistic system is incapable of doing so on a broad scale due to the lack of centralized authority.
Things are generally a bit more complicated than this, and people accuse many things of being this when other factors are at work.
It is true that some things are designed in this way, but many things accused of operating in this way don't actually do so.
Owning a house and doing nothing with it is not a way to earn money. Owning a house and renting it to someone else is something you can earn money with.
Blackmail is making unjustified threats to force a person to acquiesce to their demands.
Requiring people to pay rent in order to live in a place is not blackmail. The person who owns the place spent money building or purchasing the place, as well as money on upkeep and property tax; in return, for allowing people to live there or use the space, they ask for money. If you want to use someone else's property, you have to compensate them for its use, because it belongs to them.
You don't have the right to other people's property. You don't have the right to other people's wealth.
There's a word for people who believe that they have the right to other people's property: theives.
There's a word for people who believe that they have the right to have other people work for them without remunerating them: slavers.
Both are human garbage.
Indeed! Isn't that interesting? The most stable countries in the world are the US and the UK, both capitalistic pluralistic democracies with advanced economies.
Reciprocal altruism is an evolutionarily stable strategy. Altruism is not. That's reality. Cold, harsh reality.
Someone who does not produce anything of value is indeed objectively worthless - in fact, they're worse than worthless, they actually make everyone else's lives worse, as they consume resources without giving anything in return.
Because this is the easiest way to be, allowing this to happen gives advantage to those who fail to work, which makes society a worse place for everyone.
A society in which everyone is required to be useful is a better society than one in which it is not the case; a society where everyone is useful produces more and has more power and is generally a better place.
What you contribute to society determining what you get both encourages people to produce things which are useful to others as well as resulting in more efficient distribution of resources - the people who make best use of resources should be given more resources because they use them more efficiently and thus produce more for everyone.
Actually, it is quite the opposite - people who don't do useful work actually enter into psychological and indeed often physiological decline, while active people tend to remain healthier, both physically and psychologically. Being required - feeling necessary - actually is healthy for people. We're social animals, and we're actually hardwired to feel better when we're being socially useful.
People who don't produce things of value are indeed worthless.
We could just shoot them. Do you like that alternative better?
No?
Here's reality: they are leeches.
We long ago decided that it was wrong to force people to work for other people without compensation. This is known as slavery.
If you say that everyone else should give you food and shelter without you doing anything in return, you are acting like a slaver - you are saying you are entitled to their work without giving them anything in return.
Slavers are bad people.
You are not entitled to other people's hard work.
You are not entitled to other people's belongings.
The world doesn't owe you a thing.
The justice system does not push people on the bottom down. If you commit crimes, you're garbage. You show a fundamental lack of respect for other human beings. You thus are punished by society for being a bad person.
We don't let people starve on the streets.
Incorrect!
This is one of the Big Lies.
Sorry.
The US has done this. We changed our system because we did studies and found out that, lo and behold, doing this does not actually make people more productive, it lowers productivity.
Indeed, studies have shown that such lowers workforce participation and results in decreased productivity as people choose not to work.
Scandinavia has less problems with this than most other places do because they are a culturally and ethnically homogenous society which has a strong cultural work ethic. Indeed, the idea that you are garbage if you don't work is key to making stuff like that work.
Or you could look at it the opposite way: homeless people are failures in life who were unable to cope with the demands of society, and thus basically dropped out of it. It is not surprising that such people would be worthless - if you weren't worthless, you wouldn't have been homeless to begin with.
Everyone in our society is given a free education through the end of high school. That is capital right there.
This has nothing to do with the law of conservation of energy.
Civilized societies operate on the principle of reciprocal altruism. We all produce things that others make use of. We specialize so that we can produce things that others cannot, and exchange those high-quality goods for other high-quality goods we lack the skills or time or inclination to produce ourselves.
Uh, no. That's not what the paper was saying.
The point of the paper is that we get progressively less wrong over time. That is not to say we're right, but we get closer and closer to reality.
Anarchy still has to deal with all of the same realities of limited supply and capital and all that jazz.
Reality does not go away because of your ideals.
This is why anarchy and communism don't work - they reject reality in favor of what they want to be true.
Reality doesn't care what you belive. It cares what is so.
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The US's goal in invading Iraq was replacing a rather unpleasant dictatorship with a pluralistic westernized democracy. It isn't a secret - Dick Cheney literally wrote about his motivation in doing so on a website before he was even vice president.
America believes that if everyone shares our ideals of freedom and pluralism that the world will be a significantly better and safer place for everybody, and a great deal of our foreign policy is encouraging other countries to embrace our ideals.
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The US dismantled Al Qaeda pretty well, the Taliban lost power in Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein was taken out in Iraq. These weren't good people and bad things were happening there; people just didn't care about what was going on there because it was out of sight, out of mind. People are happy to ignore inconvenient realities.
Violence isn't a bad thing. Sometimes, people need to die. That's how the US saved Europe. I don't hear you guys complaining about the US using violence to shut down Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan.
It is easy to ignore governments murdering their own people.
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You mean the people who were in charge of Europe's former colonies that the US had to go in and help clean up?
And really, the US did not put most of these folks in charge; in fact, hardly anyone has been attacked by the US after we put them into power. People also falsely claim that the US is responsible for many things which the US isn't actually responsible for, and also forgets more complicated political situations (such as the fact that the Shah of Iran being installed in power was actually the UK's fault, and done at the UK's behest after they pressured the US).
If the US could casually overthrow countries' leadership covertly, Castro would not be in charge of Cuba. Indeed, a quick look at the CIA's track record reveals that it is impossible for it to have done many of the things which are claimed because they simply lacked the necessary competence.
Moreover, Germany, Japan, and South Korea all had governments installed by the US, and all of those countries are very nice places now.