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On September 11 2013 07:16 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Assad has had foreign troops at his disposal for a while now and instead of finishing the conflict it has only created a stalemate.
Before though they weren't being used to directly increase the stability in the region. Now that he will have foreign troops backing him up keeping the peace against those "terrorists" he gains a huge propaganda victory. Not to mention hes already stood up to the strongest nation in the world and stared it down without a shot.
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On September 11 2013 08:27 DoubleReed wrote:Show nested quote +On September 11 2013 07:08 xDaunt wrote:On September 11 2013 07:06 farvacola wrote:
Calling it a win for Obama is just as stupid as calling it a loss. Every person who is not a democrat in the US who is unduly preoccupied with Obama "looking good" considers it a loss for Obama. No this is a win. Like you said, he has made himself look like kind of an idiot with all his "red line" talk and his goal for escalation of conflict. He was prepared to go into a massively unpopular war, which would have been terrible for him. This gives him a way out and defuses the situation. Even if it makes him look a bit silly, this is the best possible outcome he could have had.
I agree with everything you say here, except for calling this a "win." It's like saying that someone with a gangrenous foot "won" and beat his disease by cutting off his foot instead of losing his leg (or dying).
But enough, I don't want to break my own rule of avoiding arguments over semantics.
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On September 11 2013 07:19 sam!zdat wrote:Show nested quote +On September 11 2013 07:13 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On September 11 2013 06:51 sam!zdat wrote:
big corporations are just central planning without any democratic control. What is walmart if not a centrally planned economy? It's the repressed truth of capitalism that all large corporations are, internally, stalinist.
support yr local small businesses kids. By the same logic small businesses are centrally planned economies too, just smaller ones. I'm not sure what your point is, other than to attach negative connotations. that's just inane the point is that you think that you live in a world that is fundamentally different from this 'planned economy' you fetishize as your hate object, but guess what, you don't, it is all around you and it is called corporate america. I was at a bar in seattle the other day listening to two amazon employees talk about building communism (they did not use this word but I knew what they meant, even if they didn't). They were talking about computing probabilities of tomatos and such. They are going to plan the whole world with their skynet. Communism is coming, only it will be owned by jeff bezos. Does that make you feel about it?
Greater computing power and greater understanding of economics would make central planning easier. Hey, maybe when computing and economics knowledge become robust enough to truly simulate a free market without a free market, then perhaps communism will be possible  (without the loss of material wealth). It's interesting to think that the IT revolution of the 90s would have been an enourmous boon to central planners.
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On September 11 2013 08:36 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On September 11 2013 08:27 DoubleReed wrote:On September 11 2013 07:08 xDaunt wrote:On September 11 2013 07:06 farvacola wrote:
Calling it a win for Obama is just as stupid as calling it a loss. Every person who is not a democrat in the US who is unduly preoccupied with Obama "looking good" considers it a loss for Obama. No this is a win. Like you said, he has made himself look like kind of an idiot with all his "red line" talk and his goal for escalation of conflict. He was prepared to go into a massively unpopular war, which would have been terrible for him. This gives him a way out and defuses the situation. Even if it makes him look a bit silly, this is the best possible outcome he could have had. I agree with everything you say here, except for calling this a "win." It's like saying that someone with a gangrenous foot "won" and beat his disease by cutting off his foot instead of losing his leg (or dying). But enough, I don't want to break my own rule of avoiding arguments over semantics.
Yea, that analogy sounds about right to me. What would you call it instead of a win? Perhaps a 'least horrible loss'? Optimal failure? Shit minimizing outcome?
I'm kinda liking the sound of "Optimal Failure." I think we've all experienced those.
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On September 11 2013 07:19 sam!zdat wrote:Show nested quote +On September 11 2013 07:13 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On September 11 2013 06:51 sam!zdat wrote:
big corporations are just central planning without any democratic control. What is walmart if not a centrally planned economy? It's the repressed truth of capitalism that all large corporations are, internally, stalinist.
support yr local small businesses kids. By the same logic small businesses are centrally planned economies too, just smaller ones. I'm not sure what your point is, other than to attach negative connotations. that's just inane the point is that you think that you live in a world that is fundamentally different from this 'planned economy' you fetishize as your hate object, but guess what, you don't, it is all around you and it is called corporate america. I was at a bar in seattle the other day listening to two amazon employees talk about building communism (they did not use this word but I knew what they meant, even if they didn't). They were talking about computing probabilities of tomatos and such. They are going to plan the whole world with their skynet. Communism is coming, only it will be owned by jeff bezos. Does that make you feel about it?
really sami
really
do you really think you're so much smarter than everyone else that they're just going to accept it when you babble like this
characterizing the planning of a large corporation or any business as akin to the planning of a control economy is not only dishonest it's stupid
a centrally planned economy doesn't try to control for variables, it tries to control the variables themselves
a business trying to control all variables is not possible and not even attempted unless you are 100% vertically integrated and have a monopoly on the supply chain (let's say you own a steel company and also own the transportation routes to your factories and own the mines your ore comes from. if you owned all the transportation routes and all the mines your competitors couldn't even try to vertically integrate) and have a monopoly on the retail market, which is 1) impossible and 2) illegal. not even US steel or standard oil had such a stranglehold on all aspects of the market.
apple tries to increase and gauge consumer demand for its products, it doesnt predetermine what consumer demand should be and then produce ipads according that predetermination.
what it makes me feel about it is you should stop saying ridiculous things like you're some freshman in 2nd semester econ full of piss and vinegar after you spent your 1st semester swallowing whole everything your marxist english professor pontificated about
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On September 11 2013 07:13 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On September 11 2013 06:51 sam!zdat wrote:
big corporations are just central planning without any democratic control. What is walmart if not a centrally planned economy? It's the repressed truth of capitalism that all large corporations are, internally, stalinist.
support yr local small businesses kids. By the same logic small businesses are centrally planned economies too, just smaller ones. I'm not sure what your point is, other than to attach negative connotations.
I don't see anything beyond sputtering, "But corporations can be evil too!" Corporations are neutral entities. They make money by selling products and services that people want to buy at the price offered. They attract investors with how well they make profits and otherwise run their company. They neither carry the force of law nor can compel you to purchase their goods and services. You don't check under your bed for corporate boogeymen just seething at the prospect of exploiting consumers.
You're making quite a logical leap calling a private-sector company stalinist.
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jonny saying that small companies are smaller versions of big companies is like saying my family is a small version of a nation state, or like saying a breeze is a smaller version of a hurricane. it's stupid and inane and you know it. You obviously know nothing of the dialectical law of the transformation of quantity into quality and need to go read your engels. Or, like, just think about what you are saying. Small businesses are completely different things, they are parts of a community, corporations just suck capital away to the cayman islands. Plus corporations give rise to all kinds of banality of evil problems and bureaucratic violence that are less of an issue when you are dealing with people you actually know and with whom you have a real human relationship.
shrubbles yes IT is a game changer, I am not kidding when I say amazon is building communism only it will be privately owned. Which means we are full circle and building a palace economy like in the old days. Which means we need to make like the argives and discover private property again (because I maintain that our society does not have private property, and I think it's hilarious you need a marxist to tell you this, the point of private property is that people take direct unmediated responsibility for it, and our society could not be further from private property for that reason, because everything is owned through six degrees of mediation. Private property my red red ass)
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Okay, saying that "there is no private property" in our current system is incredibly provocative. I simply must hear an explanation.
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On September 11 2013 09:15 xDaunt wrote:
Okay, saying that "there is no private property" in our current system is incredibly provocative. I simply must hear an explanation.
a bunch of dialectical nonsense that fails to adequately describe either property or what he means by six degrees of mediation or any of the rest of it
maybe in 1% dirty soiled inherited oil money world you can call up 8 400$-hr lawyers to go to work 'mediating' someone out of their private property even if you really have zero claim to it but in the real world no private property is a bit more solid
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Sam will tell you that the 1% are real, like the wolf lol.
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On September 11 2013 09:10 sam!zdat wrote:
jonny saying that small companies are smaller versions of big companies is like saying my family is a small version of a nation state, or like saying a breeze is a smaller version of a hurricane. it's stupid and inane and you know it. You obviously know nothing of the dialectical law of the transformation of quantity into quality and need to go read your engels. Or, like, just think about what you are saying. Small businesses are completely different things, they are parts of a community, corporations just suck capital away to the cayman islands. Plus corporations give rise to all kinds of banality of evil problems and bureaucratic violence that are less of an issue when you are dealing with people you actually know and with whom you have a real human relationship.
What you are saying is inane, though I don't think you know it (which is pitiful). Walmart is no more an entire economy than a small business is as influential as a large one.
If you want to complain that I've purposefully avoided context, than complain to yourself as well, because you have avoided context too.
You still haven't said what your point was. Or was it just negative connotations as I've speculated?
The rest of what you wrote here is "blah blah big is evil, small is good, blah blah." Just empty dogma. Nothing more.
Edit: (because I maintain that our society does not have private property, and I think it's hilarious you need a marxist to tell you this, the point of private property is that people take direct unmediated responsibility for it, and our society could not be further from private property for that reason, because everything is owned through six degrees of mediation. Private property my red red ass)
If you understood why you wouldn't disagree with me so much.
Edit 2: and how.
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On September 11 2013 09:03 DeepElemBlues wrote:
a centrally planned economy doesn't try to control for variables, it tries to control the variables themselves
controlling for variables is nonsense.
any control system seeks having some variables converge toward some reference.
whether you rely mostly on feedback or feedforward depends on which system it is you want to control and the reference.
it is pointless to talk about without defining the system and reference. i'm pretty sure you guys would have a hard time coming to an acceptable reference.
edit:
a big coorporation is not a linear system, you can not just simply downscale it to a small one... you linearize around a fixed point, the dynamics of a linearized non-linear system can be extremely different depending on the fixed point. usually you expect them to be very different (why make the distinction if not).
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On September 11 2013 09:15 xDaunt wrote:
Okay, saying that "there is no private property" in our current system is incredibly provocative. I simply must hear an explanation.
I'm guessing he means things along the line of 'a corporate owner has limited liability, therefore does not own all the liability and therefore the owner does not own all the property as the liability is part of it' and other financial / legal constructs. Assuming that's what he's on about, he's both correct and shallow (as there's more to the story).
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On September 11 2013 10:02 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On September 11 2013 09:15 xDaunt wrote:
Okay, saying that "there is no private property" in our current system is incredibly provocative. I simply must hear an explanation. I'm guessing he means things along the line of 'a corporate owner has limited liability, therefore does not own all the liability and therefore the owner does not own all the property as the liability is part of it' and other financial / legal constructs. Assuming that's what he's on about, he's both correct and shallow (as there's more to the story).
I don't want to put words in his and presume what he is saying. However, I will note that the concept of "property rights" is far more complex than one would think at first blush.
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Obama is giving the type of speech that a plaintiff's lawyer would give at a personal injury trial.
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Sam, you can't use words like Stalinist to describe a corporation, because corporations have contexts with which they live in. Words like capitalism and communism describe those contexts. Corporations compete with one another, and they interact with one another in the market economy. That's what affects their incentives and decisions and stuff. The whole idea of all these things is try to get the right incentives.
Saying that corporations are "internally stalinist" is pure nonsense. It's like saying imagination is delicious.
And what's hilarious is that you somehow just said that a family comparing to a nation state is ridiculous. You just did the same thing!
And what you're saying about corporations is the same kind of inanity used to describe governments. "Big governments are bad while small governments are good." While scale is incredibly important to understanding the way things work, this is simply inaccurate. (Not to mention that there are private corporations where the workers own shares of the business). Besides, corporations only suck capital away to the cayman islands because our government lets them.
And honestly, small businesses are capable of terrible business practices too. They just do terrible things on a smaller scale.
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On September 11 2013 10:04 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On September 11 2013 10:02 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On September 11 2013 09:15 xDaunt wrote:
Okay, saying that "there is no private property" in our current system is incredibly provocative. I simply must hear an explanation. I'm guessing he means things along the line of 'a corporate owner has limited liability, therefore does not own all the liability and therefore the owner does not own all the property as the liability is part of it' and other financial / legal constructs. Assuming that's what he's on about, he's both correct and shallow (as there's more to the story). I don't want to put words in his and presume what he is saying. However, I will note that the concept of "property rights" is far more complex than one would think at first blush.
I don't want to presume what he meant either, but that's the guess I made when I said what I said about what he said 
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On September 11 2013 10:06 DoubleReed wrote:
Sam, you can't use words like Stalinist to describe a corporation, because corporations have contexts with which they live in. Words like capitalism and communism describe those contexts. Corporations compete with one another, and they interact with one another in the market economy. That's what affects their incentives and decisions and stuff. The whole idea of all these things is try to get the right incentives.
Saying that corporations are "internally stalinist" is pure nonsense. It's like saying imagination is delicious.
And what's hilarious is that you somehow just said that a family comparing to a nation state is ridiculous. You just did the same thing!
And what you're saying about corporations is the same kind of inanity used to describe governments. "Big governments are bad while small governments are good." While scale is incredibly important to understanding the way things work, this is simply inaccurate. (Not to mention that there are private corporations where the workers own shares of the business). Besides, corporations only suck capital away to the cayman islands because our government lets them.
And honestly, small businesses are capable of terrible business practices too. They just do terrible things on a smaller scale.
I don't think much capital gets sucked away to the Cayman Islands so much as it goes there to get repackaged. But that's a small quibble from me
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I don't think he made his case. For those of us that have been paying attention, besides the "We don't do pinpricks" part the President made essentially the same arguments that we've been hearing for the last week and a half. I guess we'll see if he manages to move enough of the people that haven't been paying attention to get congress to do what he wants if it comes to that.
Also, is it just me or did he make a slippery slope argument and then discount the slippery slope argument made against action? I'm more than happy to be dissuaded from that notion, but it at least sounded that way to me.
On a purely speech writing note, the President needs better speechwriters. You could hear where they basically lifted the portion of the speech that was going to be about convincing us to tell our congresspeople to vote for action and replace it with the bit about the diplomatic developments. That section just sounded so out of place.
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Yeah, that was very much a bipolar speech. Not a good one at all. I'm not even really sure why he gave it at this particular point in time.
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EPT
