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On February 17 2013 13:16 sam!zdat wrote:
Ah, yes, I've changed my mind now. Thanks. I was a bit confused before, but you've cleared everything up for me.
edit: Guys!! I've just realized!! We can't tax rich people, because then who will create the jobs????
Sure you can tax the rich. Just remember that the rich got rich because they contributed to society, politicians became politicians because they,,, they did something.. I cant remember atm.... Anyways, I would trust the rich guy to make my life better than a politician. When a person becomes rich, its because he provided society with a service we desired. Its a win-win situation.
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Sorry dude, I've known way too many rich people in my life for that argument to work with me
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On February 17 2013 13:42 sam!zdat wrote:
Sorry dude, I've known way too many rich people in my life for that argument to work with me
Well how did they get rich?
either they inherited it, or they earned it, or they were given it. As long as it wasnt on the backs of people actually doing work, then whats your problem with it? I would love examples.
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On February 17 2013 13:42 sam!zdat wrote:
Sorry dude, I've known way too many rich people in my life for that argument to work with me
Don't worry sam!zdat, I need people to buy my products so I have to make sure they have enough money to buy them, or maybe I should give them just a little less money so that they have to get credit from that bank I have a stake in, hmmm....
You see, the rich people really are providing everything the people want, products and the means to purchase them! What is it that you see in this picture that is so wrong 
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You know, now that I actually think about it, I have no idea what I have against rich people. Too bad I've been swept along by my shallow, kneejerk reactionism for so long! Hmm... time to reconsider my life.
edit:
hint: here's the rub
On February 17 2013 13:46 Dagan159 wrote:
As long as it wasnt on the backs of people actually doing work
The immediate producer, the labourer, could only dispose of his own person after he had ceased to be attached to the soil and ceased to be the slave, serf, or bondsman of another. To become a free seller of labour power, who carries his commodity wherever he finds a market, he must further have escaped from the regime of the guilds, their rules for apprentices and journeymen, and the impediments of their labour regulations. Hence, the historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
there is no reason to expect that a property rights conceptual regime born from an era of territorial domination and in-group control to work totally fault free in the modern world. lockean property justification is quite obviously post-hoc rationalizing of a pre-existing concept of what makes it okay.
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On February 17 2013 13:46 TotalBalanceSC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On February 17 2013 13:42 sam!zdat wrote:
Sorry dude, I've known way too many rich people in my life for that argument to work with me Don't worry sam!zdat, I need people to buy my products so I have to make sure they have enough money to buy them, or maybe I should give them just a little less money so that they have to get credit from that bank I have a stake in, hmmm.... You see, the rich people really are providing everything the people want, products and the means to purchase them! What is it that you see in this picture that is so wrong
In this scenario the "rich guy" controls his own business and how much money all people everywhere make?
The problem is education, Americans don't have enough. There are MILLIONS of engineering and tech jobs WAITING for people to fill them. But people are lazy, and hence we have an oversaturation of low tech jobs, this stops competition and drives down wages so that companies can remain competitive.
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In other words..same shit different day..standard
User was warned for this post
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On February 17 2013 13:20 sam!zdat wrote:Show nested quote +On February 17 2013 13:17 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On February 17 2013 13:02 sam!zdat wrote:
Do MBAs ever give answers to anything that don't suck? MBAs are trained to suck, that's what the letters mean. It's an entire culture of suck. That's why I think we should make a rule that MBAs have to get a real education, too. Don't worry! In the communist future, the real education will be free, and even MBAs can be educated people too!
MBA's try to answer economic questions after the philosophical questions have been answered. If you ask them the philosophical questions directly they'll just roll their eyes and ask each other "wtf was he going on about?!?" at the pub later on Sure. They just listen to the wrong philosophers and think that philosophy got solved in 18th century England, so they don't bother with the questions anymore  Life, Liberty, and Property! This is, however, an extremely philosophical answer! edit: and while we're on the topic, can we take a moment to lament the utter depravity visited upon the English language by the MBAs? You people have the worst neologisms ever, it makes my ears burn. seriously. business english causes me physical pain. I once did some editing work for a Korean girl who was working for microsoft, and her English was this terrible mix of unconjugated fragments and horrible nouns-become-verbs and verbs-become-nouns and the vaguest sort of corporate doubtetalk. It was horrifying.
yeah, we're awesome like that
On a more serious note - at some point you have to drop the philosophy and get to work. Or to put it another way - we have to accept our flaws and do the best we can.
But that's where the optimism should come in. A typical MBA won't give two shits why accounting rules are the way they are. So if you start, as an example, accounting for environmental degradation differently, the MBA will gripe and groan if it affects their business negatively - but as a whole they won't give two shits (or even try to understand it). They'll just plug the new data into Excel / SAP / Oracle / fucking QuickBooks and get back to work.
Same with, say, an industrial production engineer - just change the accounting and they'll adjust.
Just make the real, philosophically significant (does this sentence make grammar sense?!?!) stuff work and they'll do the rest.
The sad thing is that, from my perspective, it's almost that simple. Though at the same time getting down to the brass tax of "how much is mother Earth worth on my spreadsheet?" is impossibly difficult 
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On February 17 2013 13:52 Dagan159 wrote:Show nested quote +On February 17 2013 13:46 TotalBalanceSC2 wrote:On February 17 2013 13:42 sam!zdat wrote:
Sorry dude, I've known way too many rich people in my life for that argument to work with me Don't worry sam!zdat, I need people to buy my products so I have to make sure they have enough money to buy them, or maybe I should give them just a little less money so that they have to get credit from that bank I have a stake in, hmmm.... You see, the rich people really are providing everything the people want, products and the means to purchase them! What is it that you see in this picture that is so wrong The problem is education, Americans don't have enough. There are MILLIONS of engineering and tech jobs WAITING
That's not education, that's training.
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On February 17 2013 13:53 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On February 17 2013 13:20 sam!zdat wrote:On February 17 2013 13:17 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On February 17 2013 13:02 sam!zdat wrote:
Do MBAs ever give answers to anything that don't suck? MBAs are trained to suck, that's what the letters mean. It's an entire culture of suck. That's why I think we should make a rule that MBAs have to get a real education, too. Don't worry! In the communist future, the real education will be free, and even MBAs can be educated people too!
MBA's try to answer economic questions after the philosophical questions have been answered. If you ask them the philosophical questions directly they'll just roll their eyes and ask each other "wtf was he going on about?!?" at the pub later on Sure. They just listen to the wrong philosophers and think that philosophy got solved in 18th century England, so they don't bother with the questions anymore Life, Liberty, and Property!
That's why the universal MBA answer is "it depends"!
This is, however, an extremely philosophical answer! edit: and while we're on the topic, can we take a moment to lament the utter depravity visited upon the English language by the MBAs? You people have the worst neologisms ever, it makes my ears burn. seriously. business english causes me physical pain. I once did some editing work for a Korean girl who was working for microsoft, and her English was this terrible mix of unconjugated fragments and horrible nouns-become-verbs and verbs-become-nouns and the vaguest sort of corporate doubtetalk. It was horrifying. yeah, we're awesome like that On a more serious note - at some point you have to drop the philosophy and get to work. Or to put it another way - we have to accept our flaws and do the best we can. But that's where the optimism should come in. A typical MBA won't give two shits why accounting rules are the way they are. So if you start, as an example, accounting for environmental degradation differently, the MBA will gripe and groan if it affects their business negatively - but as a whole they won't give two shits (or even try to understand it). They'll just plug the new data into Excel / SAP / Oracle / fucking QuickBooks and get back to work.
Yeah, totally. I understand. I like to talk shit about MBA because I'm angry that they rule the world, but that's just the point! MBAs are useful, capable people who do shit that I would be terrible at! But I don't think they should be the ones deciding how we should regulate the environment, because they're fundamentally uninterested. But they DO! They decide how to regulate the environment, SO THAT IT WILL PLUG IN NICELY INTO EXCEL! That's backwards. Sometimes you have to drop your work and get to philosophy!
Though at the same time getting down to the brass tax of "how much is mother Earth worth on my spreadsheet?" is impossibly difficult
The problem is you think that's a sensical question... Mother Earth is not worth a number, Mother Earth is Momma
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Impossibly difficult? It is the most precious commodity second only to our own existence. Point made however, MBA'S want money of course. A world that is profit driven..is profit driven. We shouldn't expect the mindless drones to think otherwise. The problem are human beings. Concepts such as power, and greed are the ideas which are ever constant and ultimately likely to be our downfall.
No human being is better than another. We may have better skills than another (A grandmaster sc2 player compared to a bronze sc2 player), but that is entirely different then being better than another human being.
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On February 17 2013 13:49 sam!zdat wrote:You know, now that I actually think about it, I have no idea what I have against rich people. Too bad I've been swept along by my shallow, kneejerk reactionism for so long! Hmm... time to reconsider my life. edit: hint: here's the rub Show nested quote +On February 17 2013 13:46 Dagan159 wrote:
As long as it wasnt on the backs of people actually doing work Show nested quote +
The immediate producer, the labourer, could only dispose of his own person after he had ceased to be attached to the soil and ceased to be the slave, serf, or bondsman of another. To become a free seller of labour power, who carries his commodity wherever he finds a market, he must further have escaped from the regime of the guilds, their rules for apprentices and journeymen, and the impediments of their labour regulations. Hence, the historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.
Are you quoting Marx? Anyways, It seems your/marx's chief argument is you devalue the factory owner, and glorify the factory workers. People are paid the amount their work is worth. By their nature, an owner will pay a worker the minimum amount, and in cases where there is no learned skills, there is no way for workers to make themselves more worthwhile. By their nature, these jobs suck. They are routine, uninspiring, and dont pay shit. This is why continued growth is such a great thing, we possess the technology to eliminate most of these jobs, but to do so we require people capable of operating advanced machinery. We are severely lacking in these types of people, their rarity creates demand, and so these jobs pay very well. According to Marx, it is nearly impossible for a hard working, driven person to ascend to the bourgeois, and that simply isnt true. There are innumerable examples of people rising to the very top from modest beginnings, eg, Mark Cuban.
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On February 17 2013 13:58 Broly wrote:
Impossibly difficult? It is the most precious commodity second only to our own existence. Point made however, MBA'S want money of course. A world that is profit driven..is profit driven. We shouldn't expect the mindless drones to think otherwise. The problem are human beings. Concepts such as power, and greed are the ideas which are ever constant and ultimately likely to be our downfall.
No human being is better than another. We may have better skills than another (A grandmaster sc2 player compared to a bronze sc2 player), but that is entirely different then being better than another human being.
No human is better than another? This is a rediculous statement. I dont really care how you measure a human beings worth, but in relation for benefit for society, ill take Bill Gates over Dorner every single time. Greed is not an inherantly evil concept, there are just evil ways of fulfilling this desire. However, if you try to fulfill this desire with evil means, that usually means you are taking from somebody else, and they are probably going to threaten that "most precious commodity."
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On February 17 2013 13:57 sam!zdat wrote:Show nested quote +On February 17 2013 13:53 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On February 17 2013 13:20 sam!zdat wrote:On February 17 2013 13:17 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On February 17 2013 13:02 sam!zdat wrote:
Do MBAs ever give answers to anything that don't suck? MBAs are trained to suck, that's what the letters mean. It's an entire culture of suck. That's why I think we should make a rule that MBAs have to get a real education, too. Don't worry! In the communist future, the real education will be free, and even MBAs can be educated people too!
MBA's try to answer economic questions after the philosophical questions have been answered. If you ask them the philosophical questions directly they'll just roll their eyes and ask each other "wtf was he going on about?!?" at the pub later on Sure. They just listen to the wrong philosophers and think that philosophy got solved in 18th century England, so they don't bother with the questions anymore Life, Liberty, and Property!
That's why the universal MBA answer is "it depends"!
This is, however, an extremely philosophical answer! edit: and while we're on the topic, can we take a moment to lament the utter depravity visited upon the English language by the MBAs? You people have the worst neologisms ever, it makes my ears burn. seriously. business english causes me physical pain. I once did some editing work for a Korean girl who was working for microsoft, and her English was this terrible mix of unconjugated fragments and horrible nouns-become-verbs and verbs-become-nouns and the vaguest sort of corporate doubtetalk. It was horrifying. yeah, we're awesome like that On a more serious note - at some point you have to drop the philosophy and get to work. Or to put it another way - we have to accept our flaws and do the best we can. But that's where the optimism should come in. A typical MBA won't give two shits why accounting rules are the way they are. So if you start, as an example, accounting for environmental degradation differently, the MBA will gripe and groan if it affects their business negatively - but as a whole they won't give two shits (or even try to understand it). They'll just plug the new data into Excel / SAP / Oracle / fucking QuickBooks and get back to work. Yeah, totally. I understand. I like to talk shit about MBA because I'm angry that they rule the world, but that's just the point! MBAs are useful, capable people who do shit that I would be terrible at! But I don't think they should be the ones deciding how we should regulate the environment, because they're fundamentally uninterested. But they DO! They decide how to regulate the environment, SO THAT IT WILL PLUG IN NICELY INTO EXCEL! That's backwards. Sometimes you have to drop your work and get to philosophy! Show nested quote +Though at the same time getting down to the brass tax of "how much is mother Earth worth on my spreadsheet?" is impossibly difficult The problem is you think that's a sensical question... Mother Earth is not worth a number, Mother Earth is Momma
Pfffffffffffffffffftttttttttttttttttttt! Too generous! Just find an MBA student who is good at what he / she does and do all your group work with him / her :p
As to the "drop your work and get to philosophy" comment - that works until the next date:
"so what do you do for a living?"
"yeah I stopped working until I could figure out how to account for mother Earth in excel."
"so ... you're unemployed?"
.....................................................................................................................................................
If you have an answer to that I'm all ears!
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How ridiculous is it? If we accept the fact that we aren't better than anyone else, disregard adeptness in particular fields/industries (i.e. My SC2 example), then we have a society were individuals make decisions like Dorner/ Gates, then you could judge their morality if you wanted. THEN, you come to argument of whether or not they are truely good or bad? Was it just they made bad decisions? Dorner? Or are they truely inherently bad or good?
If you want to compare because of there contribution to society, that is simply relative. Gates is not better then Mother Teresa, The Dhali lama, or this guy I know named Joe down the street. Joe is just as relevant and significant as Bill Gates or whoever you want to compare him too. Gates may have the fortune, recognition, or whatever, but that isn't the point. IF we accepted this approach, then we are all on the same ground. We may perform different functions/jobs in society, We may also enjoy different things, but that changes nothing. We are all necessary, if we choose to be. Alas not everyone is going to think this way, probably because they want things like power, or they frankly aren't concerned. They may care but they don't want it to ruin there weekends or whatever the hell it is they do.
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@Jonny Mother Earth can't be accounted for in Excel. We can draw boundaries and allocate resources however we see fit, but there is no final solution.
Some chose to be unemployed, hermits, reclusive people in Alaska and other places. That is there decision, money isn't the answer for everyone. A few find it quite...trivial. In the end it is just currency to exchange goods and services.
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On February 17 2013 14:14 Dagan159 wrote:Show nested quote +On February 17 2013 13:58 Broly wrote:
Impossibly difficult? It is the most precious commodity second only to our own existence. Point made however, MBA'S want money of course. A world that is profit driven..is profit driven. We shouldn't expect the mindless drones to think otherwise. The problem are human beings. Concepts such as power, and greed are the ideas which are ever constant and ultimately likely to be our downfall.
No human being is better than another. We may have better skills than another (A grandmaster sc2 player compared to a bronze sc2 player), but that is entirely different then being better than another human being. No human is better than another? This is a rediculous statement. I dont really care how you measure a human beings worth, but in relation for benefit for society, ill take Bill Gates over Dorner every single time. Greed is not an inherantly evil concept, there are just evil ways of fulfilling this desire. However, if you try to fulfill this desire with evil means, that usually means you are taking from somebody else, and they are probably going to threaten that "most precious commodity."
The greed's the frame shift. Talk about high profits, talk about rampant poverty, and we're already in greed is bad and kills the poor. If we're all born equally human, why is it that some of us get to reap the benefits of a comfortable living and some can only dream of the chance?
Utopia is not something for this world, it's a fantasy. We're motivated by our own interests, our own attachments. What I would do for my own family does not fully extend to the guy that lives across my street, and even less of that favor would be to someone thousands of miles away. So stuck with this situation, what's the best of the worst? Letting people pursue their own careers, letting them trade what they do best to whatever buyer, turns out to do better for the public interest at large than other systems tried thus far. The societies that largely get consigned to poverty are exactly those that affect to work all things for the society at large and not for themselves.
I am very much opposed to the kind of policy seeking to punish rich people and the companies they run for their greed, pretending to be in the business of altruistically giving it to the poor, but really concerned with holding and increasing their own personal power and wealth. It's not from that CEO's benevolence that he gives jobs to thousands or millions, its out of his own self interest. It's not like the government has a track record of doing better at less cost.
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Just want to repost this since it was the post that somehow derailed everything to the full philosophic discussion:
Raising minimum wage
Here's a brief read on modern minimum wage impact findings. Looks promising for advocates.
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On February 17 2013 14:34 Broly wrote:
How ridiculous is it? If we accept the fact that we aren't better than anyone else, disregard adeptness in particular fields/industries (i.e. My SC2 example), then we have a society were individuals make decisions like Dorner/ Gates, then you could judge their morality if you wanted. THEN, you come to argument of whether or not they are truely good or bad? Was it just they made bad decisions? Dorner? Or are they truely inherently bad or good?
If you want to compare because of there contribution to society, that is simply relative. Gates is not better then Mother Teresa, The Dhali lama, or this guy I know named Joe down the street. Joe is just as relevant and significant as Bill Gates or whoever you want to compare him too. Gates may have the fortune, recognition, or whatever, but that isn't the point. IF we accepted this approach, then we are all on the same ground. We may perform different functions/jobs in society, We may also enjoy different things, but that changes nothing. We are all necessary, if we choose to be. Alas not everyone is going to think this way, probably because they want things like power, or they frankly aren't concerned. They may care but they don't want it to ruin there weekends or whatever the hell it is they do.
Why would you disregard adeptness? If Gates creates a great product, and billions of poeple enjoy the benefit of it, then I have no problem saying that he is indeed worth more than a person who does not do anything remarkable. Neither is good nor bad, one just has more worth to society. We are not all necessary. There are some drugged out hobos having an orgy in a old car under a bridge, and it honestly doesnt matter to anyone if they are there or not. I'm not sure what you are arguing for. Please tell me why I or anyone else should care about Joe as much as someone who has directly influenced my life.
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EPT
