JASKN

(Disclaimer: I only know what I've read in your post, so maybe my conclusions aren't accurate in one way or another.)
Sounds like you need a "market correction" of life. You've been over-spending (parents' money), under-doing (haven't gotten the degree/learned all that much in school), and have unrealistic expectations (a desired "lifestyle" with no plan to support it).

You talk about a standard of living you want to maintain, but you don't want to attain it through traditional scholastic means, and you don't have many interests otherwise (such as entrepreneurial, or musician, or whatever). How, in real, planned-out terms, are you going to achieve that? Maybe Eiuol's suggestion is something you could do, computer work without schooling. But if the answer is, "I don't know," you at least have to allow that you won't have that standard of living while you figure it out; you can't expect your parents to keep paying for you to live up to their standards, which have been built over decades of work and savings. You also shouldn't expect yourself to be where your parents are at without putting in the decades of work yourself.

Another unrealistic expectation is that your get-by job in the meantime is going to be 100% wonderful, up to all of your highest standard of hopes to get out of working in life. Fact is, you don't run the business, and businesses will have problems. Those two things mean you will likely be frustrated sometimes. The important thing is to do a good job by your own standard, try to please the employer, and make money so that you can keep working toward whatever new aspirations you develop.

You've gotta reset your standards of what it means for you to live as a good person in your current life's reality. It seems like you're thinking ahead of your achievements. Try to re-evaluate your standards for yourself, and also everyone else and how they relate to you. It's a huge, horrible, monumental task, if indeed you've been judging everything in your life in unrealistic ways, but it has to be done to move forward on to actually achieving something. Your starting point has to be realistic for you to then build on that. "Focus on reality." You'll start feeling a little better about yourself and everything after doing this just one time. When it becomes a new habitual way of thinking and evaluating, and when you accomplish things that you think are good and realistic, you'll feel even better -- it will build on itself, and you'll no longer have that awful feeling of ennui. The hardest point is just starting out, as you feel worse now than any other time during the re-evaluating.

I sympathize with your dating efforts, not having been my favorite life activity either.

But, you've got the opposite attitude necessary to date successfully. That is, you're looking at everything from the negative. Yes, some of those questions are a little silly, but since you've taken the $30 (and all-around dating) plunge, why not make the most of them? Your goal is to meet a nice girl, right? So, for example, the influential person question is obviously just a conversation-starter, not something to be philosophically contemplated! The prostitute answer couldn't have been much worse on your end. Pets and kids are serious elements to consider in any relationship, as they take tons of time and money, and can be deal breakers. Etc.!

When I tried it, I had no success with dating sites. I never met someone I liked. BUT, I tried from the wrong approach. I was hoping the site would figure everything out for me, and I'd go on a date with someone expecting everything to be worked out already. In reality, the best you can hope for on a dating site is to get some of the very basic preliminaries out of the way: available, doesn't want kids, is attractive based on pictures online, and so forth. What you can't hope for is knowing how all of the subtleties that happen between two people will work out: oh, you love X musician AND have a recommendation I turned out to like, too? Oh, you smile more beautifully in person than I thought? Oh, you have a dry wit that didn't come across online, which I love? And so on. These and other things you can only find out in person. If the first date doesn't bring these things, no big deal. Get a new date! At least you don't need to get lunch or dinner that day anymore. No big loss.

I sympathize with your dating efforts, not having been my favorite life activity either.

But, you've got the opposite attitude necessary to date successfully. That is, you're looking at everything from the negative. Yes, some of those questions are a little silly, but since you've taken the $30 (and all-around dating) plunge, why not make the most of them? Your goal is to meet a nice girl, right? So, for example, the influential person question is obviously just a conversation-starter, not something to be philosophically contemplated! The prostitute answer couldn't have been much worse on your end. Pets and kids are serious elements to consider in any relationship, as they take tons of time and money, and can be deal breakers. Etc.!

When I tried it, I had no success with dating sites. I never met someone I liked. BUT, I tried from the wrong approach. I was hoping the site would figure everything out for me, and I'd go on a date with someone expecting everything to be worked out already. In reality, the best you can hope for on a dating site is to get some of the very basic preliminaries out of the way: available, doesn't want kids, is attractive based on pictures online, and so forth. What you can't hope for is knowing how all of the subtleties that happen between two people will work out: oh, you love X musician AND have a recommendation I turned out to like, too? Oh, you smile more beautifully in person than I thought? Oh, you have a dry wit that didn't come across online, which I love? And so on. These and other things you can only find out in person. If the first date doesn't bring these things, no big deal. Get a new date! At least you don't need to get lunch or dinner that day anymore. No big loss.

Objectivism as a philosophy doesn't say anything about gaming as such. It will only tell you how to judge gaming within the context of your own life. Is the activity benefitting you or not? Why, or why not? That sort of thing. You would have to use the philosophic principles for yourself and apply them to the activity of gaming.

Among some things you might consider might be: how much do you enjoy gaming, ie. how important is it to you? What kinds of values do gain from it (is it just a temporary distraction from other activity, or do you enjoy the social aspects, also?)? Is the rest of your life "in order?" Rather, is your life organized how you need it to be in order to enjoy gaming at the level which you would like to enjoy it?

While Objectivism does say something about the nature of existence, how one acquires knowledge, what general types of requirements are needed to live a happy life, and many other subjects directly related to broad life principles, for something as specific as gaming, you'll have to use those broad principles and figure it out as related to your own life, goals, needs, wants, and so on.

Not to burst your bubble, but I saw the "Idiots" bumper sticker on an actual Ohio'an car just last week, and a Google search gives me (among others?):


















and




But I didn't see "outgrow."

Just got back from seeing the movie.

I'm sorry to report that it is just bad. It is so bad that it may lead the intelligent but curious person to get the book just to make sense of how the movie is so bad. And since everything in the movie is so forgettable, the book's impending influence might make this theatrical release a net good thing.

Yes, the budget was low, yes, the time was constrained. Both of those show, a lot, and so my main question is: what motive did the producers have at all? It isn't a re-imagining which keeps the original spirit and essential elements intact. It isn't a literal re-telling. I guess I would call it a children's effort to execute a great theatrical masterpiece. It's like a bad stylist dressed a brilliant actress for her Oscars. Tried and true elements of storytelling aren't there. Rand's ideas are mishmashed. Great elements created by Rand are thrown out, like the book's great mystery itself! Galt is given away in the first five minutes, and given away blatantly in the final "scene," which is just a voiceover.

But now I'm starting to nitpick, which isn't necessary unless the movie almost hit the mark, and this one didn't come close.

The positives: The movie didn't completely warp Rand, and it seems to have bumped sales of the actual book, which is great.

The negatives: It doesn't come close to some of Hollywood's worst efforts, and doesn't deserve Rand's name.

True, but why does that matter to us? If China goes from producing 5 trillion to producing 15 trillion dollars worth of goods, and the US slowly sinks a trillion over a decade, we ought to be investing in companies in China and getting out of US investments.

I hope, for the sake of the US and the world, that they do something about their deficits. Are you optimistic about the US producing balanced budgets and reducing the debt before Asia stops buying their T-bills? I am skeptical that even balanced federal budgets will be accomplished within the next two years. Maybe after the election of a new president. But the US still has to worry about bailing out socialist states and cities like those in California in the near-term.
I live in Korea but I'm in contact with a lot of Chinese people too. If we view Korea as a more developed model of China's future then I'd have to disagree with your statement about environmental laws and labour laws. Korea is developed and they certainly don't believe in making environmental regulations so tight that oil refineries would not be opened in 30 years, like the US has done. In fact, Korea has some of the biggest oil refineries in the world. There is no environmentalist ideology here like there is in the US. There are leftists but there is an absence of the New Left. Being in Seoul is like a breath of fresh air, you know there are no beggars and drug addicts all over the streets like there are in the US in Canada? And that's in a city of 20 million. This is a developed country and there is almost no welfare and pension system. My Korean girlfriend's father works 6 days a week and comes in to the office Sunday mornings--and that's normal here, even for elementary school students.

My experience with Chinese people and knowledge of China leads me to opinions about that country similar to Korea. When people apply for a job in China they ask how many days they can work not how many holidays they will get. There are 500,000 engineers graduating every year in China and these people don't go on ski trips on the weekends, they want to work. Even if they up the regulations a bit, who are they going to lose out to? Maybe Bangladesh and India in select cases, but you can't build a steel mill in those places as fast as you can in China and those countries have pitiful infrastructure. You can open a major factory in 6 months in China--think about the time it would take in the US.

Why should the Chinese emulate Europe and the US when they have Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan to look to full of Chinese people? Arguably, those are the examples that originally sparked a change in the minds of some Chinese political leaders.

China's regulation is location based. That is, you can move from one place to another and they will have different laws about production. China's economic success comes from the fact that they established free trade zones, financial zones and special economic zones throughout the country and then millions of people moved to these places. People moved to freedom in their own country, yet large amounts of people are still poor farmers in areas that are virtually the same as 30 years ago politically speaking. This structure, in my opinion, does not lead to overarching environmental or labour laws which will apply to everyone. They have had those labour and property laws in place for a long time--they are still in existence outside the cities that were allowed to develop.

This political structure means that hundreds of millions of people are still economically unfree, while those who have migrated to places such as Shenzhen (20 million in a couple decades) are able to enjoy economic freedom. Hundreds of millions of people are currently restricted by a system of registration called the Hukou system which does not allow them to leave the countryside. There is major political pressure in China to abandon this system. Newspapers recently broke with the government and published articles en masse promoting the disbanding of this system. If it is abolished it means adding hundreds of millions of people to the economic machine of China. It would be like the collapse of communism to another 300-600 million people. Whatever regulations are likely in some industries in China as they become more affluent will never touch the economic growth potential of freeing 300-600 million new people. I think this system will be reformed and therefore I have high hopes for continued economic growth in China.

ZSorenson, Great post.

I agree that countries like China will not overtake the U.S. in per-capita wealth unless their is a big enough change in the ideologies of both. While it is easy to see the U.S. drifting further toward statism, the most likely multi-decade process is a flow and ebb that makes this a slow process. Already, there is widespread public reaction against deficits, health-care and so on. It is almost impossible to see China not becoming more statist in areas where they currently have opened up completely. For instance, as standards of living improve, there are bound to be more calls for environmental laws, product safety laws, and all sorts of other regulation. People there look to the U.S. and Europe and see rich countries that have a plethora of regulations and yet are far richer than they are. Barring some surprise collapse and revolution, it is reasonable to expect China to become more open on things like press-freedom and even foreign-exchange control, while it also becomes more statist in the nitty-gritty of regulating production.

The only thing I disagree on is the idea that "if the economy is bad enough, all that will happen". I agree that if things get bad enough in the U.S. (e.g. Social-security problems even more looming than today, inflation more threatening, etc.) there will be more impetus for action. However, very often politicians can use a crisis to spiral the country into ever-worse policies. That is the story in countries like India that enacted a few statist policies after independence, and then continued with bad policies that made the situation ever worse, for more than one generation. The big issue is this: what intellectual argument will win out when the U.S. is finally faced with a situation far more serious than today?

Great post. I hope you're right.
In my post, I was thinking of a multi-generational process, not something that's going to happen in a decade or so. China might well overtake the U.S. in total wealth and production within its current generation, but not in per-capita terms. I doubt the U.S. will balance its budget anytime this decade. I think the odds are that the U.S. won't go anywhere in a hurry, but will move from government stimulus mini-bubble to government stimulus mini-bubble, with each cycle becoming less convincing. Despite this, passing the U.S. in per-capita terms is going to be virtually impossible to a single generation of Chinese. For instance, the Taiwanese have been at this far longer and they're still below the U.S. in per-capita terms. (Aside: I don't think folk in the U.S. quite recognize how much real capital their forefathers created.)

I don't know much about China, but I compare it to India. It's true that India is a far slower-moving political system. However, the attitudes you describe about working hard and so on are very similar. Yet, I see attitudes changing among Indians of my generation who are now well to do. I see more pro-environmentalism, more willingness to spend the money they earn (not a bad thing), a desire that their children not be sent to schools that stress academics over everything else (a mixed thing). This generation is happy to have the government increase welfare slightly, but not too much. The work-ethic of the current generation is unchanged. However, I wonder if their kids and grandkids will be the same: having been born into a more comfortable life. I guess my point is that one sees a pro-work ethic playing out, but it is not really supported by a strong pro-work, pro-individual philosophy (i.e. not any more pro-work, pro-individual than the so-called "Protestant ethic"). Rather, people have an approach that one has to do what one has to do, despite the moral ideal. With comfort, I fear, there also comes the ability to indulge in the recommendations of their underlying morality.

The U.S. reached its current political ideology slowly: probably starting with the progressives/populists in the late 1800's. If these countries turn toward more welfare and more environmental regulation, it'll be a multi-generational process. Given human volition, it's hard to say which way things will go. For instance, seeing stagnation, higher structural unemployment, etc. the U.S. could go further toward more government control of the economy as the solution, but I think that's less likely than the opposite: a growing voice that says we cannot afford so much government and have to bite the bullet and pull back.

China and India of the 1970's had held back a huge resource in the form of people not allowed to produce freely. Allowing these people increased freedom has resulted in huge growth rates. However, once people have used these freedoms to grow at unnaturally fast rates, the next generational is left with more normal growth rates that have to come from increased productivity. Already today, we see the Chinese economy increasingly supported by government stimulus rather than by the removal of restrictions. I think the odds are that China will hit a major downturn in the next decade as investments have to be written off and books readjusted. It will be interesting to see how China reacts to that.

This is the weakest link. Developing Asia puts so much of their would-be savings in American debt because they lack critical financial infrastructure. And that's only the beginning of their problems.

A lot of growth in China for example is fueled by government policy (not optimal investment), including monetary manipulations. Plus, a lot of the excess savings come from selling to America.

America is far and away the high-tech powerhouse in the world. Fareed Zakaria, even, in his book called The Post-American World, concedes that the upper level higher technical education occurs overwhelmingly in America.

This isn't good news for the 25% poorest in America, but is bad news for the 75% poorest in China.

Peter Schiff makes the same mistakes as other economists by not looking far enough beyond the 'status quo'. In this case there's this assumption that Asia is some miracle. It's not. It has a high population, and is 'behind' the industrialized world. It's capitalizing, that's all. And it's capitilizing so that American can by consumer goods at a discount. In other words, we're paying for their miracle (and then they don't have anywhere to put the savings gained by lower-than-American-wages-workers except into our debt). All it has to do is capitalize up to the levels of the West, and its magic growth will freeze. And it won't be able to reach that point as Communist. I can't even imagine the level of malinvestment in China, let alone the ongoing cultural implications of a dependence society (no matter what number have the entrepreneurial spirit).

Of course, America only has until Gen X reaches levels of upper management (20-30 more years), until we've completely lost our edge. By then, I predict a good percentage of our skilled labor will be people comfortable moving back to native India, or Korea, etc.

If America drops the Wagner act and the minimum wage, fixes Social Security and Medicare to flow like a leaky faucet, abolishes the income tax (who cares what replaces it - so long as it isn't VAT), repeals all drilling and energy production bans, and goes back to the days before the Federal Reserve system, then in less than a decade I'd predict we'd storm FAR ahead of anybody else.

In terms of 'cultural infrastructure': we'd have to introduce school choice, as well as end federal grants - totally - in the education system. Art, science, medicine, only 'depend' on federal dollars because we've created them too. And that 'dependence' breeds a lot of art, science, and medicine that doesn't optimally benefit the economy.

And if the economy is bad enough, all that will happen. Short of being 'that bad', I can't see how anyone else would move ahead of the US - unless they too liberalized.

And that's where Objectivism comes in. America's 'edge' is built out of its government's history economic laissez-faire policies, and the frontier ethic of its people. This ethic means: a population forced to accept reality. If someone else can do that, then that's where the economy will thrive.

But who will do that? Japan - until recently the 2nd largest economy - succeeded because they worked really really hard, and that hard work was spent copying the lessons learned by the American 'cowboys'. China has many times over the population of Japan, so only a small portion of it needs to industrialize to overtake Japan. There's no recipe for success there, in the long run.

But the world was destroyed economically in the 1940's, and since then there are three economic stories: 1) Rebuilding (only lasts so long) 2) A little technology (computers, barcodes, shipping containers) 3) Billions of people living in collectivism, conquered by the West, forced to learn its legal institutions, liberated from Imperialism for a couple of decades (before the institutions are unlearned).

So what we need is a return to the 1820-1920 era of American economic policy. That's what 'made' the industrial revoultion.

But returning to that period means returning to a time when people didn't think about certain things. These economic/social concepts, of the 20th century, have to be rejected in order to have long-term global economic health:

- Economic Equality
-'We're all in it together' protectionism (there is no 'guardian' of the market, just a referee)
- The idea that nobody is ever supposed to suffer in society.
- The presumption that man has some God-like ability to know and impose a moral order of some kind on his fellow man.

**That's my opinion, and I don't count as an official Objectivist. Objectivism as a philosophy would offer the idea, I think, that knowledge, therefore morality and volition, are possessed ONLY on an individual level. So politically AND economically, the whole concept of 'social policy' is contradictory to man's nature. There's no good 'social order' he can establish over others, and there's no economic way for it to work. So you need to reject 'social policy'. Man can only destroy himself, or other men, if he tries something like that.

I think that the 1940's, imperialism before that, and the millenia of barbarians and warlords before that destroyed mankind's productive success much MORE than modern liberal democratic 'social policy', and so the latter appears to have been successful. But we're finding out that it isn't in the long run. We've never bothered to see if laissez-faire works, because we concluded that it wasn't fit due to its lack of a controllable 'social policy'.

Also, Objectivist epistemology has a lot to offer economic science. I happen to think that the poor do not, in fact, have their 'share' of wealth distributed to the rich. Instead, their 'share' is distributed to the future, where everyone is richer.

This future involves inventions that change the productivity of the economy in a way that is not expressed in the present-day total 'share'. Objectivism fundametally understands the open-ended nature of concepts, and can therefore 'handle' epistemologically the idea that a share of wealth today can corresponding to a greater share of wealth tommorrow - even when today's 'share' is 'distributed' to the 'rich'.

Austrian economics fails to 1)Reject the political idea of social policy and 2)Properly conceptualize wealth creation (through induction it arrives at the proper conclusion, but fails to provide an epistemological basis, hence the inability to reject social policy).

That's a Sunday night for you. Apologies for the disorganization. I can't really see how this fits together coherently. It's just a bunch of ideas relevant to the topic, listed one after the other. Use what is interesting or useful, and do not worry about the rest.

Totally uncalled for and outright rude. Also, your reasons against facebook are other people complaining about something you don't understand, and privacy issues over keeping things you can only imagine private. And it is obvious to me at least that this thread doesn't represent all internet users, probably your acquaintance/friend base, and definitely my acquaintance/friend base.
Because I am in the mood to argue over something trivial (and because you were rude): according to internetworldstats.com, (facebook and possibly internet numbers have likely increased since):

344,124,450 estimated population for Northern America in 2010.
266,224,500 Internet users as of Jun 30/10 and 77.4% penetration rate.
149,054,040 Facebook users on August 31/10, 43.3% penetration rate.

Totally uncalled for and outright rude. Also, your reasons against facebook are other people complaining about something you don't understand, and privacy issues over keeping things you can only imagine private. And it is obvious to me at least that this thread doesn't represent all internet users, probably your acquaintance/friend base, and definitely my acquaintance/friend base.
Because I am in the mood to argue over something trivial (and because you were rude): according to internetworldstats.com, (facebook and possibly internet numbers have likely increased since):

344,124,450 estimated population for Northern America in 2010.
266,224,500 Internet users as of Jun 30/10 and 77.4% penetration rate.
149,054,040 Facebook users on August 31/10, 43.3% penetration rate.

The easy fix here would be to just sign up for facebook.

The easy fix here would be to just sign up for facebook.

Of course you will be disappointed if you are looking for more out of the experience than is to be expected.
A person who you are having sex with is still a person, who you will connect with (or not) in one way or another. Almost no (sane) person wants to have sex with total strangers. It would be almost like having sex with nothing. You have to either know something about the person, or project in some way (the latter not being recommended since it is likely a fib), since sex is between two people with minds each. This also shows that no sex is meaningless, for good or bad, and it also implies that one has to judge the other person in some way. But it does not indicate what judgements are going to lead to (morally) good sex (and good sex itself).

The falsehood here is the dichotomy: the most meaningful sex imaginable between two lifelong lovers (who have presumably spent a very long time together already in order to achieve this kind of sexual fulfillment), or the worst, most deplorable sexual encounter, such as vengeance-sex with someone you already hold in contempt as a way to destroy a third party (or one's self). There is many-a-kind of sex, and the "only proper sex" is not just the former scenario.

To Krattle: Quoting Rand is not an argument. How do you explain the countless positive sexual encounters people have with those who are not, or do not turn out to be, "highest value" lifelong mates?

This would be the base of all disagreements between Objectivists about sex. You're just making an assertion here. Since you haven't yet had any sex yourself, I'm not sure how you're drawing this sweeping conclusion.
I have noticed that the loudest mouths on the "sex only with One-And-Only/Lifelong-Spouse/Single-Lover" side of the sex debates are those who have not even tried the other side! Those who live the other side tend to argue that sex is a response to values, not just a person's highest values.

I disagree that one should follow government road rules, in principle at least. Government-controlled roads is an illigitimate arrangement that can yield only convoluted "agreements" with its "customers" over its usage. Which otherwise pro-free-market-roads advocate can decide which rules would otherwise be legit for private roads? How could he tell for sure, and why wouldn't he just be advocating instead the removal of government control?

As far as changing the roads as they are now: how do we change these rules? Not by taking our business elsewhere, but through a lengthy, costly law-changing process that is not likely to yield results due to the state revenue conflict of interest. Not to mention, the results would still be illigitimate by definition: how would we know they were the right free-market rules? The government runs the roads with revenue in mind, from the speed limit to the suspension procedures, not with safety or a customer's interests in mind. Why would someone advocate following these rules with that in mind?

The only (moral) solution is to use one's best judgement concerning safety, while doing one's best not to get caught when that judgement contradicts current laws. I recognize that properly illegal activities happen on the road, such as property and life damage or endangerment, but those should already be covered under separate laws.

My answer to the OP: the reason for your suspension largely determines the morality of your trying to do anything you can to minimize the negative outcome. "Speeding" isn't the same as driving drunk or too asleep to notice anything, isn't the same as a hundred legitimate reasons for not paying a ticket (leading to suspension). A suspension could be acquired due to five cops with nothing better to do than decide that you didn't stop at a stop sign (two points multiplied by six instances: twelve-point suspension), followed by six judges (or six of the same judge) upholding it. You may have actually stopped all of those times, but these particular government employees are dishonest, and the expense of fighting it is too great (time, court costs, uncertain outcome). Do those condemning the OP know something like this happens, frequently? Or how about the countless fees associated with the BMV (more baseless government mandates concerning the roads), not to mention (government-forced) insurance premiums spiking.

I do not see how the OP is wrong for trying to minimize these escalating, dishonest, baseless side effects of government road laws. It IS easy to get caught up in government-bashing when one first discovers its real evils, but I think this is a case of legitimate bashing. The volunteer's attitudes and beliefs are a side-issue to whether one should follow laws which cannot be proven to be right. Do I understand correctly those condemning the OP? That the only proper solution to improper government control and laws is to follow them until they can be changed within the system? What if it is impossible for an individual to change the system for another ten years? Should he just suffer those years? What if it is speculative that the system will ever be changed?