oh TF2.....*swoons*

You are the winner!

 

I started to say Bob the Builder until you said game.

So that would make you Mario.

Since when did Mario have a hardhat? Think relatively recent games that have been released.

I don't...I don't get it. 

I had that problem too, and I thought it was just me... that I was the only one, you know? But then I discovered "Cocaine" and my life turned itself back around in no time!

The old people need to be put to good use, don't ya know.

Soylent Green?

BIRTHDAY!

 

Capitalism is hardly fair, either. The idea is supposed to be "hard work = money" but that doesn't often play out, I think. That, and the system (and those at a given level) often manipulate those underneath to their own benefit without seemingly aware of any ethical concerns.

I think we ran out of Dilithium Crystals, Captain!


But yeah, very quiet.

You don't really believe that people with millions of dollars just have it sitting in their mattress, do you?  If the money is in a bank or investment fund of some sort, it's doing plenty of good for the rest of the nation.

True, people with a lot of money generally don't just keep it at home. But there are plenty of investments that DON'T help people. Sure, I could invest a million dollars in Microsoft and it would probably generate money for me, and giving them money would help them to pay their workers. (And their management staff...) And that's good, in the sense that it keeps their workers from being poor. But doing that doesn't get food into the hands of people who need it. At least not directly, or without enough speed to matter. And there's only so much money that needs to be invested...

Poor people don't hire other people to work for them.  Rich people do.  The more rich people there are, the more jobs there are.  The more jobs there are, the more it elevates the wealth of the rest of the citizens!.

Reagan said something similar. I believe it was called Trickle Down Economics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics

Interesting quote from the article:

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted that "trickle-down economics" had been tried before in the United States in the 1890s under the name "horse and sparrow theory": "if you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows."

And also check out the section on Gini index in this post.

Source please.  I can't believe that one in 10 people experience the risk of hunger given the myriad social programs already in place in this rotten fucking country that hates poor people.

I linked it in the author portion of the quote.

Wrong.  Employment is not a zero sum game.  If it's unethical to treat people like cattle, then surely you'd agree that it's unethical to GIVE people what they need. Of all the places that I've seen people treated like cattle, government programs is probably the primary example.

As a practice example for a new analysis technique:
(Note that 'A' means Axiom and 'P' means Proposition.)

A1: There are a finite number of jobs.
A2: There are a finite number of able-bodied workers.
A3: Nothing guarantees that the number of jobs are equal to the number of people.

A4: Humans have a basic set of rights.
A5: Of those basic rights, there is included a right to life. (And Speech, for later purposes.)

A6: Food and Water are essential for life.
A7: Food and Water are procured through the exchange of money and/or goods and/or services, or by harvesting a natural recourses. (I know in the end it's all harvesting, but I refer to a single individual. Also, I understand that force COULD be conceivably exercised to take from others, but this is supposed to be a "peaceful" system.)
A8: Natural Resources are becoming more and more scarce, as they become privatized. In order to reach a natural resource of food/water that hasn't been tapped, travel over great distances can be required.(At least in the US, but also in a broader sense.)

A9: Money is received in exchange for goods/services or as charity.

P1: Travel requires the exchange of money and/or goods and/or services to be feasible over a long distance.

Proof: Travel over a distance requires a supply of food/water, as is evident from A6, A7, and A8. Walking, while possible, is not conducive to long distance travel alone, but A8 stipulates that travel over great distances may be required, so transportation is also needed. Transportation relies on similar conditions as food/water. Because access to food/water may not be available through harvest, we must have money/goods/services. (A7)


P2: Food/Water cannot be harvested naturally in many cases and therefore requires the use of money.

Proof: A7 states that we have 2 ways to get food/water. The first case is money, while the second case is harvesting it. The second case is canceled out by A8 and P1, and we are left requiring money.


P3: Unfairly preventing access to the only means of exercising a right is an infringement on that right.

Proof: If someone were to tell you that you're not allowed allowed to speak, and pointed a gun at your head, it's self-evident that this is infringing on your right to free speech.  It is not said that someone refusing you the use of a typewriting is violating your rights, because you have other legal means of speech and therefore someone's typewriter isn't required. (Perhaps some people don't feel this way. I'm using a safer assumption, because it leads to the same result.)


P4: Not providing food for people is an infringement on their natural right to life.

Proof: If it's fair to refuse to allow someone access to food because they have many other ways of getting it legally, P2 shows that food requires money. Because of A1, A2, and A3, it is sometimes the case that a person will not have access to a job, by definition, as well as by circumstance. (Handicaps, Disabilities, etc...) Therefore, they don't have access to money. Because they don't have access to money, they don't have access to food, legally.



Note: Not entirely done with this experiment yet, but I didn't want it to be lost, so this is a "save" so to speak.

If there's a cap and no incentive for a rich person to invest his money in another venture, then you're going to stifle economic growth.  Do you think Howard Hughes would have bought TWA and designed and developed transcontinental aircraft/flights if he couldn't have gained from it?

Hughes would have plenty to gain, and it would be quite a bit, but it WOULDN'T be like what we have currently, at least if it was done properly.

I'm not sure I follow.  Are you suggesting that your common working man is too rich or has too many assets?

I'm not sure how you reached that conclusion. What I was trying to express was that people often jump to the extreme of getting rid of a monetary system entirely, and I was saying that we wouldn't HAVE to do that, we could simply remove, or try to remove, the flaws that are part of the system.

I meant that we could impose limits on personal wealth and property, and it WOULDN'T get rid of people's incentives, which is partly shown because we already limit some of the things that people buy. (Usually for concern about health effects.)


As an aside:

US Gini index is 45.
Canada: 33.1
UK: 36.8

I've included both the source, and an explanation. Suffice it to say, 45 is pretty bad, without comparing it to others. (Scale of 0 - 100, with 0 being the best)

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html#Econ
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/docs/notesanddefs.html#2172

Profession?  At the top end of the scale, I don't think you could define "professions".  What profession is "Rich motherfucker"?

It would depend on their source of income.

Alright, so I work in retail. (You can already imagine I've had several fun experiences.)

A woman comes in looking to get some pictures developed, and wants to take advantage of a free picture CD with a coupon. Alright, simple enough. So she uses the digital picture machine to create the order, and we start the process to make the CD.

Now apparently, she's already tried this a day or two before, so she's a little pissed at this point, and she's in a rush to pick up a pizza. (Or something, the main idea is that she's extremely impatient.) Well it's taking a few minutes for who knows what reason. (It was supposed to be only... 50 prints or so. At one point she says 150 though, so perhaps she did more.) Eventually, it asks for you to put the CD in, and that's simple enough. A little while later, an error pops up.

Now by this point I've already had to call the manager over a few times because I have no idea how the machine works, and while I was sure it was simple enough, I didn't want to fuck up this person's order. So he's walking to check out something a supervisor brought to his attention, and I call him to see if he could check out the error. The woman starts calling him too, but it sounded like she was calling a little kid.

In the time it takes him to check out whatever he was checking out, she's gotten impatient enough that she just hits the "Ok" button that is at the bottom of the error message. It took him... not even a minute to get over here, and she was just so impatient that she closed the error. I didn't even get a chance to really look at it, because I figured it would still be up when he got there. Of course, I couldn't even describe the error, and by this time you could easily see she was pissed.

Greatest thing about this little encounter? She probably blames us (or me specifically) for it, when it was clearly a STUPID idea to close the error. At the very least, she should have just left the machine alone.

^^^ yeah that was it. Sorry, I've been out of town for the past couple of weeks.

Xolik I went through every single one of your posts using Ctrl + F, because Chris still hasn't fixed the search function!

That was just luck and Google.


Also, welcome back!

No one would have any incentive to work in those states, and there wouldn't be any money.

Often used as an argument against Socialism and Communism. But I think there's a flaw with it. I'm not sure that Socialism and Communism require that we get rid of money. (Marx might even say explicitly "Get Rid Of Money!", but I'm tweaking his theory a bit, so bear with me please.) Also, I'm not entirely sure we need to use money as an incentive, but that's a separate issue.

What about a sort of hybrid between Capitalism and Communism? (I'm not sure Socialism qualifies...)

Basically, this hybrid would need to perform the following tasks:

1) Protect Personal Property (Central to Capitalism)
2) Provide Motivation For Production
3) Protect The Worker
4) Not Allow Large Concentrations of Wealth (For Anyone, Including Government Workers)
5) Provide Minimal Living Conditions For All


I'm sure there's more/less.


Also, an interesting idea my teacher mentioned to me having heard it from someone. If there's no personal property, it's hard to perform acts of charity.

Actually, I've heard it said that Communism wasn't exactly the end, that there was something after it. (I'm not sure what. *Shrug*)


Anyway, as far as I know Marx assumed that the natural order to communism (and what lay beyond, I guess) was that we would eventually get to Capitalism, THEN Socialism, THEN Communism. The idea was that after a while, people would realize the rich were simply fucking them over constantly and getting away with it and decide to do something about it, but colonization and globalization seems to have at least delayed this process. (I don't think Marx ever gave a time table, but even if he did he DIDN'T forsee globalization or the effects it would have on his process.

Interestingly, China and Russia both, as far as I know, skipped a few steps and went to "Communism." (I use "" because, for Russia at least, it was Lennon's version of Communism, NOT Marx's)


But yeah, I agree with some socialist ideas, at least partly. Libraries are a nice example. This debate is often ignored because "Commies are bad!"

I love technology.

In Soviet Russia, Technology Loves You. (*Shrug* With all the inane posts recently...)