punk
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Posts posted by punk
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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?
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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.
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Oh yes they do. In fact that number must include rural docs, because it seems a bit small to me. But believe me: they earn it.
As just a small illustration - not that I think any of you doubt the above - a doctor must go through 4 years of undergrad (paying tuition), 4 years of med school (paying even more tuition), 3-5 years of residency (making basically minimum wage, given that they work 60-100 hours a week), and possibly additional years of fellowship before they start making that money.
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.
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I'm very interested in this issue, because I recently discovered that the average General Practitioner (we're talking about the kind of Doc you go see in a regular walk-in clinic) earns 100,000 GBP (or 200,000 USD) per year. I'm trying to figure out what exactly it is that makes Doctors leave the NHS. I mean, it's a terribly bureaucratic system and that has it's own problems, but as a Health Service, it isn't that bad. I'm just wondering if you have any sites that link to the factors that explain why there is this huge shift towards America, which has less regulation - is the actual working place itself better?
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.
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The other day I was watching "1968" with Tom Brokaw (sp?) on the History Channel and noted how many political leaders were assasinated or had an attempt made on them. I rememeber the movie Forest Gump had an ongoing observation about numerous leaders being assasinated or had an attempt made on them.
With so many people who hate Bush so much, I'm seriously suprised we haven't seen an attempt made on his life. Is it a sign of times?
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.
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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)
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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).
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Michael, Tenure, thanks. I'm glad you liked this one and I'm glad my posts get wider exposure here on Objectivism Online.
Punk, IIRC, Henry Hazlitt thought America would be better off with a parliamentary system so that a pure laissez-faire capitalist party could exist. Of course, in today's culture there's no guarantee it wouldn't end up being a joke like the Libertarian Party.
There are no guarantees of much in real life.
One could argue that the present system has become something of a joke.
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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.
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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.
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I do not think this is true. Their actions are currently being investigated by the U.S. State Department.
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.
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I would like to leave discussion of Blackwater USA aside for the moment, since I am presently uncertain of the details of their activities in Iraq.
With regards to a private security firm, I think that there are circumstances where they are legitimate in an ideal Capitalist society. Specifically, in situations where an individual wishes to protect some asset in the event that a government run police department is unable to respond in time. However, all of these security firms should operate under the premise that they cannot initiate force and that the government remains the final arbiter of force. In other words, such firms should not be permitted to act in place of the government or in opposition to the government.
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.
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There is a branch of mathematics in which this is not the case. It is called non-standard analysis or the theory of hyper-real numbers. See -Non Standard Analysis- by Allain M. Robert for a gentle introduction to the subject. This book is now available from Dover so it is not too expensive. There are more complicated treatises based on the theory of ultra-filters, but for people who are not professional mathematicians or graduate students in mathematics, Allain Robert's book is just fine.
When Isaac Newton invented calculus he based his results on the notion of infinitely small quantities that are not zero. Bishop Berkeley has a good time hitting on this idea. The Bishop referred to the infinitesimals used by Newton and Leibniz as "the ghosts of departed quantities". It turns out that Berkeley's criticism of the basis of calculus was right on the mark, but it was not until the 19th century when the limit concept was introduced to banish this embarrassment. But that is not the end of the matter. In the 1960's, the mathematician Abraham Robinson found a way of rigorously and logically justifying the concept of the infinitesimal and he invented a new branch of mathematics (theory of hyper-reals) to do this. It turns out that the reasoning of Newton and Leibniz based on infinitesimal quantities was really right, after all. And now you know the REST of the story.
Bob Kolker
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.
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So if I buy a lot and decide not to do anything with it for a couple of years, I don't own it?
IIRC the argument against "Native Americans" owning the land before Europeans came onto the scene was that they didn't recognize the right of property except sometimes as a collective "right".
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.
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The railroads in the 19th century in the great plains region was built on land stolen from the aboriginal tribes by the U.S. Army.
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.
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Saudi Arabia pegs whatever its currency is to the US dollar, which, as you know, is devaluing like crazy.
There is speculation they'll dissolve the peg but we shouldn't speculate. Just react when it happens, if it ever does.
The telegraph is a weird paper always spurring rumors of quasi economic warfare by states against the US to make America feel pain.
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.
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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.
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This should be of interest to the Objectivist community. I was going through some old Wall Street Journal newspaper clippings this morning and I came across an advertisement from 2005 (not that long ago, so it's likely that little has changed) that read the following:
Kingdom Holding Company is a company led by His Royal Highness (HRH) Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, based in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Investments outside of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have been acquired and are held by HRH or by Trusts for the benefit of HRH and his family.
Those investments include:
Apple Computer, Inc.
Hewlett-Packard Company
Canary Wharf, London
Pepsi Co.
Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts
The Plaza Hotel, New York
Eastman Kodak Company
eBay.com
Amazon.com
Motorola Inc.
Proctor & Gamble
News Corporation
Priceline.com
Citigroup
Time Warner
Hotel George V, Paris
Disneyland Paris
Ford Motor Company
Fairmont Hotels & Resorts
Saks Inc.
et al.
Have a lovely day
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.
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As an individual, I want to watch teams that are comparable matched and offer tight, competitive play. If 10 of 30 teams are crap teams (comparatively speaking), I'm not going to want to watch their games no matter how many or how few series they play. But let me ask you this, how does NFL thrive and flourish so much on such a short schedule of games? Don't they match up against any other given team about once or twice throughout the whole season? Every football game played means A LOT; you can't really afford to lose any of them. One off game during regular season play is often far more devasting to your long term success. You can shrug off several bad regular season games in baseball and come back from it.
You mean like in football? I've never suggested that the number of times each team meets each other be shortened or lengthened. Fewer teams simply means a shorter overall season if the same number of series are played among fewer competitors. I don't think I'm alone in suggesting that perhaps baseball season runs a little long.
I don't know, how many times? What relevance does this have to my desire to see fewer, higher quality teams versus having more teams but with some who aren't very good?
Interest will improve if you are pretty sure going into the ballpark (or turning on the TV) that the competition between the teams is going to be top notch and close. I think this could be why the not-so-good teams have to "share revenue" with the better teams.
I think someone else said something similar; I'd like to see teams more dependent upon the market to determine which teams survive and which die off. Revenue sharing seems like welfare to me in that it allows less qualified teams to survive by leeching off the better teams letting them stick around longer than perhaps they should. Yes, I know it's up to the owners (I expect them to operate in their self-interest) to decide how to run things and that being the case they can win or lose fans accordingly.
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.
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I think you're right. There is an esthetic attraction to seeing different match ups. You often want to see different players and teams match up to see what the outcome will be. The same match ups can get boring. But, at the same time, you don't want to water down a league so that the level of play is sub par.
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.
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I tried to make a point here, but it seems to have gone unaddressed. To further clarify, I see no reason why 30 teams is inherently more interesting than 6 teams simply based on the number of teams. What is interesting is a number of quality teams competing whether it be 6, 10 or whatever. I hardly see why 30 teams is more interesting when quite of few of those teams aren't really that good.
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.
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That might be part of it. The main part is that some small market areas just can't support a MLB team(i.e. generate enough revenue) and the larger revenue clubs can outbid them on most players.
What do you mean "die"? It can be estimated beforehand how much revenue a team will generate based on population, income of the people, and common sense.
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.
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Actually you would end up with around 22(there's 30 now). I'm basing this on team payrolls each year and how often they make the postseason. If you look, you'll see that the top 2/3 teams on the payroll list, division winners are usually spread out almost evenly. The teams in the bottom 1/3 are flooded with crappy teams and they rarely make it to the postseason(except Oakland and Twins).
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.
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Hmmm, I'd always thought the film just answered the question:
What if Jesus had flying saucer and a killer robot named "Gort"?
Too Big to Bail
in The Objectivism Meta-Blog Discussion
Posted
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".