punk

It strikes me though that whereas the Democrats basically end up advocating for welfare for the rich and the poor, the Republicans really end up advocating for welfare for the rich only, and none for the poor. This Republican policy really isn't going to solve any problems if, as we agree, the end result of the policy of "welfare for the rich", is that we end up with incompetent and corrupt corporations dominating large parts of the economy.

The same thing happened in the S&L scandal. The government essentially told people "Okay invest however you want, if you lose money will give the amount you lost out of taxes, otherwise you can keep the profits." I'd love to go to Vegas on a deal like that. This was one of the failings of Reagan-era deregulation. Regulation was a two-pronged thing, it allowed the government to limit how companies do business, while promising government support if things went South. Reagan eliminated the first prong, while effectively keeping the second in place. The consequences were predictable. Essentially the tax-payer is providing business with "loss insurance" without charging for the insurance itself, and not making anything on the gains. This is part of what Nader has been calling "socialism for the rich".

I was with you up until the part about demanding the Federal and State governments use their powers to force the people of Berkeley to do as they are told. I don't see how government compulsion in this area is consistent with laissez-faire principles. Boycott them, fine. But getting the government to punish them for this? The government shouldn't even be handing tax money back to them in first place (it shouldn't have been taxed to begin with). How can you morally justify using something like that as a weapon?

From a laissez-faire perspective one could argue that the more famous a president is, the more likely they are to be bad. A good laissez-faire president is unlikely to have done much that would merit going down in history (i.e. they spent less time interfering in things), and so such a president has been conveniently forgotten. On the other hand a president that gets into the history books beyond a footnote likely meddled in things, and so was probably bad. Thus the most famous president is a good candidate for the worst.

Well my wife is a general practitioner so I have some idea what they make, and I say $200 000 is on the high end of what they typically make.

I'll wager that most of the people moving are specialists and that specialists make more in the US than they do in those countries. I don't believe general practitioners typically make quite that much in the US.

Bush has spent much less time in public than other leaders, and when he speaks it is mostly at very controlled gatherings with attendance limited to people who largely support him. I don't know about other places, but when he has come to Portland to speak it is always with very little to no fanfare, and he speaks at some peculiar private venue. I recall his father came to Spokane WA and spoke in the open air in a large public place. Now there was an opportunity to shoot someone. The son would never do that. Some would argue this is simply to prevent him being confronted by protestors on camera, but it has the effect of severely limiting the ability of someone to shoot him.

What an appalling question: Can the area ever equal the perimeter? The correct answer is "No, never" for the simple reason that the perimeter is measured in (say) meters, and the area is measured in (say) meters squared. A (one dimensional) meter will never equal a (two dimensional) meter squared. Of course they want you to over look this and set: x*y = 2*(x+y) But (of course there must be an implicit length measurement "a" in this so it is really: x*y = 2*a*(x+y)

Don Quijote was to the old literature of chivalry about what Blazing Saddles was to the movie Westerns (i.e. it did such an admirable job of making fun of it where it had become ridiculous and formulaic that no one could really make them anymore). Don Quijote generally appeals to those who feel out of synch with society around them, and misunderstood by society. So it is a favorite among artists. It invariably tops book lists when the people surveyed are writers (a group that generally feels they are misunderstood by the rest of society).

There are no guarantees of much in real life. One could argue that the present system has become something of a joke.

This gets at one of the arguments for a more parliamentary system with a greater number of parties. If I'm (say) more fiscally conservative but pro-choice, I'm faced with the dilemma of voting fiscal policy with the Republicans and risking pro-life policy or voting pro-choice and risking liberal fiscal policy. If it was (say) a parliamentary system with 3 parties (for simplicity) I could vote for party X which (hypothetically) agrees with me, and votes with the Republicans on fiscal issues and with the Democrats for pro-choice issues. The problem with the two-party system is these big tents and this linking of certain policies together requiring a voter to buy the "package deal" as it were.

Realistically the US president can do whatever he wants with the military given the money he has on hand. Congress can choose to not fund a military action when the president runs out of money. If Congress really thinks the action was out of line, Congress can simply impeach the President and replace him with someone that will do what they want.

But the State Department isn't a law enforcement office. In fact, it appears the State Department investigation was prompted by the fact that no one seemed to be able to bring Blackwater employees before a court of law of some sort. The State Department can only cancel Blackwater's contracts. This is entirely different from a law enforcement body bringing criminal charges against particular employees.

The main problem with Blackwater is that they appear to be in some sort of nebulous legal limbo regarding judicial oversight. If employees of a private security firm commit a crime there has to be some body capable of holding them accountable. At present it appears that neither the Iraqi government, or the US government (through either military or civilian courts) is able to hold Blackwater employees to any sort of rule of law.

We must be clear that standard analysis ("normal" reals) and non-standard analysis (hyper-reals) sort of exist in parallel to each other. The mathematician can choose to work within standard analysis (then 0.99999... = 1.000...) or the mathematician can choose to work within non-standard analysis (so 1.0000... - 0.9999... = d, where d is an infinitesimal). It is simply a matter of the axiom system that is chosen. How does one choose an axiom system? Well if you are a pure mathematician, basically because you think it is interesting. If you are anyone else, you choose it because it is deemed appropriate to the problem you are working on. In a more modern viewpoint, one doesn't choose an axiom system as one chooses a topos. All topoi are equally "fundamental", and they all satisfy certain properties that all topoi have, but one topos or another might be better to work in given the problem. So does 0.9999... = 1.0000... or does 1.000... - 0.999... = d? That depends on the problem you are working on, and what works best for you.

So you are saying that even if a well-defined group of people use a well-defined section of land for farming they don't have any ownership of it unless they also have a certain notion of property. So you can just move in and take it from them? The point was the old uninhabited region scenario: Suppose a group of people come across such a region. Does the first person who says "Hey its all mine!" now own it? No, they claim ownership by putting work into it. If someone improved the land and then sold it to you and then you neglected it, that is one thing. If no one ever used the land for anything, I have trouble seeing how anyone could have claimed ownership in the first place. If a person can claim ownership simply by saying "this belongs to me", then certainly North America belonged to the indigenous peoples, and it was stolen. If one must put work into the land to claim ownership, then, for the most part, it was perfectly reasonable for Europeans to stake claims to lands in North America by putting the land to cultivation, or by building train tracks on it.

While I do think a case can be made that in some cases land was stolen from aboriginal tribes that were farmers and had cultivated the land in question, I don't see where any case can be made that the groups in the plains region had put the land to any use. Thus there were no "owners" in that area. One must do something to improve the land to claim ownership.

This wouldn't be the first time currencies pegged to the dollar have been set free to float. We can look back at the end of the Bretton Woods system when (effectively) most currencies were pegged to the dollar. Back then the underlying commodity to the pegged system was gold. The end result was that a dollar was worth less in gold than it had been when the system was in place. Effectively the problem was that the intrinsic value of a certain amount of gold was worth more than than the intrinisic value of a dollar it was supposed to exchange for. France noticed this and started exchanging its dollars for gold. The end result is that the currencies were left to float. Probably something similar is happening between the dollar and oil. In the past this has probably effectively meant that the wealth lost to the Saudis to the US in the process was effectively the money the Saudi regime was paying to the US to make sure it stays in power. If the Saudis end the system they are basically saying that the wealth effectively paid to the US for "services rendered" (i.e. the US commitment to prop up the Saudi regime) is too expensive for them. They'd rather have the money in pocket and take their chances on their own with respect to being overthrown. The end result for Americans is that gas is going to be much more expensive. But on the other hand the US will have no implicit commitment to help out the Saudis and can take whatever policies to their kingdom that it chooses to take.

You need traffic rules, otherwise there'd be gridlock and nobody would be able to get anywhere. Even a privatized highway system would consist of rules that drivers would have to obey with the eventual consequence (for failure) of being banned from the roads. I can see an argument for privatization of roads. But if the argument is against traffic laws altogether? Well that isn't going to happen, not matter who owns the roads. You don't like speed limits? Well I suspect privatized roads would have speed limits, and probably more since they would want to minimize wear and tear on the road so as to maximize profits.

Well it should be obvious to everyone that the Saudi family has extensive holdings in the US. The fact is, the US buys oil in dollars. Now dollars are nothing more than pretty pieces of paper until they come back to the US and buy something. Heck if the Saudis wanted to sell oil for pretty pieces of paper that they then kept in a vault or burned (i.e. never returned to the US), that'd be great, print more! So the Saudis have to return their dollars to the US in order to acquire something of more tangible value.

This isn't about you. This is about owners of teams trying to make as much money as possible. I don't think what you are advocating is anywhere near as profitable as what they are doing now. I imagine though, that if you and those that agree with you are willing to shell out $1000 a seat for every game (and you all promise to go to all the games), then they might be willing to oblige you.

This all pretty well sets up the problem at hand: Let us imagine we are the owners of the top team in baseball: 1. Our primary goal is to make as much money as possible 2. This means we need enough teams to compete with so that we can play as many games as possible without the audience losing interest (and thus dropping ticket sales) 3. We also want the games to be close enough so the audience doesn't lose interest (and thus drop ticket sales) It could well turn out that the audience is willing to tolerate more subpar teams in the interest of variety, and prefer this to a handful of really good teams with teams playing each other a lot. In that case it is in our best interest to make sure those subpar teams continue from season to season, so we subsidize them. The end result might turn out to be that we net more money subsidizing a few subpar teams than we do by keeping all our money and letting those teams disappear.

As a business, you want each team to compete in as many series as possible. The fewer teams, the fewer competitors, so if you want many series, you have to have each time playing other teams in multiple series in regular play. This is just inherently less interesting than if each pairing of teams in a series only occurs once in regular season. Seriously, if for any two teams you have 4 to 7 games in a series, how many times does one really want to watch the same two teams play? Interest (and thus ticket sales) is going to fall off if you have to have teams playing each other over and over in the regular season.

We both know in the real world people act in spite of common sense. There's nothing stopping a city that thinks a MLB team will generate revenue from hiring a consulting firm that will confirm their expectations, and then putting together everything they need to have a team only to find out the firm only gave them the numbers they wanted.

If I understand correctly, this would basically be saying there just aren't enough good players to go around. The idea, I think would be that a given population only produces a certain number of good players. So by letting teams die we let the market find the right number of teams to suit the available pool of players.