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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
George Papadopoulos, the Trump foreign policy aide who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, initially misled agents out of what he claimed was loyalty to President Donald Trump, according to a person with direct knowledge of the investigation.
Trump had publicly denied that there had been any contact between his campaign and Russian officials, and Papadopoulos did not want to contradict the official line, the source said.
“It’s all fake news,” Trump said of any alleged connections in January. “It’s phony stuff. It didn’t happen.”
Papadopoulos met with the FBI agents investigating those alleged ties shortly thereafter, and he later acknowledged that he lied during that meeting about the timing of certain contacts.
According to federal court filings, Papadopoulos initially claimed his contacts with a professor who had deep ties in Russia “occurred before” he became an adviser to the campaign.
“In truth and in fact,” the filings read, “the professor only took interest in defendant Papadopoulos because of his status with the Campaign.”
There are also lingering questions about the role Papadopoulos played in the campaign.
After the plea agreement was made public last month, Trump sought to distance himself from Papadopoulos, tweeting that “few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar.”
But the “low level volunteer” made several trips overseas throughout 2016, purportedly on behalf of the campaign, making appearances where he was introduced as a Trump adviser.
In April, he traveled to Israel to speak at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, an appearance arranged by the former Israeli ambassador to Greece. In May, he met in Athens with the president of Greece. In September, he met with officials at the British Foreign Office in London.
During inaugural festivities, Papadopoulos met with advocates for Israeli settlements, telling them “We are looking forward to ushering in a new relationship with all of Israel.”
In an interview with ABC News, Rep. Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat who serves on the House Intelligence Committee, said he believes Papadopoulos’s campaign credentials changed only when it became clear he was a political liability.
“You’re a senior foreign policy adviser until you do something that exposes the campaign,” Swalwell said, adding that he would like to know who paid for Papadopoulos’s globetrotting.
“It is certainly of deep interest to know whether the Russians were paying for any of Papadopoulos’s travel through Europe during his time with campaign,” he said.
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Has a write-in ever won an election of this size in the modern era ? Seems like it requires too much coordination and too much responsibility on the part of the voters.
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On November 11 2017 10:15 IgnE wrote:
Has a write-in ever won an election of this size in the modern era ? Seems like it requires too much coordination and too much responsibility on the part of the voters.
Lisa Murkowski in Alaska.
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A write in campaign would require that the guy running to either drop out or.otherwise not campaign anymore. It's not a real ask at this point. Gop is going to try to downplay this as much as possible and hope the L lets it blow over fast.
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The problem in this situation is that Alabama’s politicians don’t really see anything wrong with Roy hanging out with very young girls. To the point that they’re not really disputing the claims but rather appealing to religion (it was fine in the bible, why is it wrong here?), screaming “but liberals” (liberal conspiracy, she’s lying, she’s a Soros plant because who sits on this for 40 years) and splitting hairs over the definition of pedophiilia and ephebophilia (the alt-right special).
So a write election wouldn’t really work because Alabama is truly a really special place.
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On November 11 2017 10:22 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2017 10:15 IgnE wrote:
Has a write-in ever won an election of this size in the modern era ? Seems like it requires too much coordination and too much responsibility on the part of the voters. Lisa Murkowski in Alaska.
Alaska is small (population wise), but Murkowski is a lot harder than we would typically expect to work. Could get a lot of votes for Mer/cow/skee or any variation.
Problem for Republicans is any establishment effort to dislodge Moore is just viewed as typical establishment Republicans pushing out someone speaking their minds and there's not much grassroots effort in Alabama to replace Moore (at least not yet or likely).
On November 11 2017 10:24 Sermokala wrote:
A write in campaign would require that the guy running to either drop out or.otherwise not campaign anymore. It's not a real ask at this point. Gop is going to try to downplay this as much as possible and hope the L lets it blow over fast.
They are desperately hoping it's a L and trying to figure out how to make it that way without outright campaigning for the Democrat.
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Mike Lee knows he represents Utah right?
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The chief executive of Cambridge Analytica has confirmed that the UK data research firm contacted Julian Assange to ask WikiLeaks to share hacked emails related to Hillary Clinton at about the time it started working for the Trump campaign in summer 2016.
Speaking at a digital conference in Lisbon, Alexander Nix said he had read a newspaper report about WikiLeaks’ threat to publish a trove of hacked Democratic party emails, and said he asked his aides to approach Assange in early June 2016 to ask “if he might share that information with us”, according to remarks published by the Wall Street Journal.
Assange, WikiLeaks’s founder, has already acknowledged the approach by Cambridge Analytica and said WikiLeaks rejected the request. In Lisbon, Nix reportedly agreed that the overture had been rebuffed.
“We received a message back from them that he didn’t want to and wasn’t able to, and that was the end of the story,” Nix said at the Web Summit conference, according to the WSJ. He called the exchange “very benign”.
However, the contacts between Cambridge Analytica and WikiLeaks are of interest to investigators looking into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. The documents published by WikiLeaks in the summer of 2016 were later determined by US intelligence agencies to have been stolen by hackers working for Russian intelligence.
According to the Journal, citing emails and unnamed sources, Cambridge Analytica had sent employees to the Trump digital campaign headquarters and was in the process of finalising a contract with the campaign in early June of last year, apparently around the time Nix said he made the approach to Assange. It is not suggested that Cambridge Analytica made the approach at the Trump campaign’s request. The Guardian has contacted Cambridge Analytica for comment.
Representative Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee looking into possible Trump-Moscow collusion has said the committee had a “deep interest” in the relationship between Cambridge Analytica and WikiLeaks.
In an interview at the Web Summit, Nix rejected any suggestion of collusion with Russia.
“We did not work with Russia in this election, and moreover we would never work with a third-party state actor in another country’s campaign,” he said.
Robert Mercer, a Trump mega-donor, and his daughter, Rebekah, are major investors in Cambridge Analytica and Steve Bannon was a vice-president of the company before joining the Trump campaign and becoming the president’s chief strategist in the White House.
Cambridge Analytica’s website promises to help clients gain advantage over political opponents with its data analysts of US voter behaviour. It claims to hold up to 5,000 pieces of data on more than 230 million voters, to build a “psychographic” profile of targeted voters.
The company was hired to become part of the digital campaign, which was overseen by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and was paid $5.9m, according to the Federal Election Commission.
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Cambridge Analyticas is super fucked.
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I'm surprised Trump still hasn't tweeted about the Moore stuff (unless I've missed it). I wonder if he's torn between saying "I told you you should have picked Strange" and calling it "fake news." Or if someone muzzled him about it.
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On November 11 2017 08:30 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2017 08:25 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 04:30 KwarK wrote:On November 11 2017 04:14 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 03:22 IgnE wrote:On November 11 2017 02:06 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 00:41 KwarK wrote:On November 10 2017 15:25 mozoku wrote:On November 10 2017 13:52 KwarK wrote:On November 10 2017 13:50 mozoku wrote:
[quote]
This is literally nonsense. I barely know where to begin.
Suppose an hour's worth of labor chopping firewood produces $1 of firewood. The new guy creates $2/hr with whatever he's doing. He's twice as productive. If chooses to work the same amount of time, he gets twice as much stuff. That's literally the definition of proportional. How that's supposed to be disproportionate, I have no idea.
[quote]
??? I'm pretty sure fast-food workers are creating much less wealth than software engineers, successful investors, etc. I literally can't even imagine how society would exist if this statement were true. Why would capitalism even be efficient if this statement were true? What is your definition of "well correlated"? 0.99999999999999999??
[quote]
I'm not sure this is true at all. In fact, I'd lean towards not true if anything. Ever heard of an economy of scale? I work at a mega-scale tech company. I work 40-50 hrs/week, but my work influences thousands of people directly, and affects millions indirectly. Hell, the marginal cost of someone consuming my work is practically zero. Likewise, the marginal cost (in terms of other's time) of most of the stuff I consume is practically zero. That's how automation works, and is why we're fabulously wealthy compared to several hundred years ago. Why is the bartering village using dollars? Remove the dollars, try again. What objective system of valuation are you using to show that you're producing more value than the fast food worker from your day? Remembering of course that you're already justifying the getting more money than them by the fact that you create more value so you cannot complete the circle and use the more money to prove the greater value. Does it matter if they're bartering in gold, wood, virgins, or dollars? It's a trade they both agree to and the principles are the same. But I see the point that you're trying to make is that the efficient man's hour should, in principle, be worth no more than the inefficient man's hour if you don't care about productivity, and that productivity is independent of morality. However, the former statement is inherently incorrect because productivity and time are, by definition, linked, and a person's time has value in excess of that which can be determined monetarily. To simplify, let's assume they're both chopping lumber. The efficient man can simply choose to work 1/2 hour, have the same productivity, and keep the other 1/2 hour to himself. By nature of being more efficient (and his own efficiency is surely not intrinsically amoral), he's advantaged no matter what. Suppose, regardless of compensation, he only wanted to work 1/2 hour, and wanted to spend the other 1/2 hour with his kids. Are you going to argue that society is justified in forcing him to work the full hour? Or that they should discriminate against his good fortune by paying less for his lumber in the name of "equality"? That's certainly not a society I'd want to be a part of. I'm not saying anything of the sort regarding forcing people to work. No part of what I'm doing is advocating for societal change or the gulag. I'm saying that capitalism works as an effective tool for incentivising productive economic activity but that drawing moral conclusions regarding what you earned/own/deserve/created from the outcomes of a capitalist system is erroneous. It's very tempting to say "I'm paid twice as much money, therefore I earned twice as much" but what you earned is a moral judgement that capitalism makes no attempt to answer for you. I understand what you were trying to say. The problem is that productivity and time are directly dependent on each other, so the more efficient man literally owns the extra time his productivity has created (assuming you agree he should be free to use his time as he pleases). Whether or not you redistribute his present time or his past time is irrelevant from a moral perspective. Forcefully redistributing his wealth under any circumstances is equivalent to forced labor (perhaps a very small amount of forced labor, but a nonzero amount). Of course, everyone pretty much (including me) agrees that that if a second of forced labor at the end of a software engineer's workday can save millions of starving children (not realistic but making an extreme example to illustrate my point), it's morally justifiable to make the guy work the extra second. But the fact is it that's it's still a moral tradeoff that's being made. The software engineer has a true moral grievance (in some sense) in claiming that the arrangement is unfair to him--which stands in contrast to what you're asserting. You are really going down the wrong tracks here with "forced labor" and "moral grievance." Capitalism operates on "forced labor." It uses that "free labor" that is forced by necessity to take the market wage. You should really just abandon this whole line of thought. This is independent of my point. Life doesn't exist without "forced labor." We'd starve to death. You can complain to Mother Nature it it makes you feel better. Pure capitalism is a system that, at the very least, doesn't result in forced labor beyond what Mother Nature requires of us. You can choose simply choose not to trade (i.e. be a self-reliant hermit). Granted, that's not a very convincing argument when any sort of reasonable utility/freedom conversion rate of introduced, but nobody really argues for pure capitalism either. As I've argued since the beginning, the morality of taxation is about tradeoffs. You and KwarK are the ones arguing raising taxes is essentially infinitely justifiable if efficiency isn't a concern. You're still not understanding my argument. My argument is that the amount of money you get is output by what is essentially a black box. It's not just "put work in, get money out", lots of people work very hard and don't get shit, others don't work and get more money than they could spend. Taxes are a component of the internal mechanism of that black box. That's not an argument, that's just an attempt at obfuscation. You very clearly said "capitalism is merely efficient; those who profit from it have no moral claim to their rewards." To which I refuted because time and productivity are, by definition, related. Either you acknowledge that someone's time has non-monetary value (as you've reasonably implied this entire discussion) and thus you cannot raise taxes on wealth without infringing on one's personal freedom to their own time, or you maintain the not only obviously silly but contradictory position that time's value is purely monetary, but efficient capitalism is not the best way to value one's time, while acknowledging it's the most efficient way to run an economy (that runs by efficiently allocating people's time). I don't know what this new point you're trying to make is. "Your income function is complicated, and taxes are part of it. That makes raising taxes on the wealthy morally justified." ??? And you're even assuming the already refuted point "1 hour = 1 hour" to make this new, confusing argument. So if I'm gifted a pile of money, let's say $10,000,000 And I invest it in a moderate investment that yields 1.5% ($150,000/yr) I'm working harder/more efficiently than any fire fighter, police officer, teacher, Marine, etc... Right? Or maybe capitalism allows people to get rich without doing any work whatsoever?
Being gifted money is outside the realm of an economic system.
You'd want to look at the genesis of that $10MM, and figure it the person who earned it did something productive enough to warrant the $$.
Ex. Person purchases unused land, turns it into a vineyard that is now worth $10MM. Is that fair? Yeah.. it kind of is.
After that person dies someone inherits the vineyard. Someone has to own it, and since it is still productive it generates income for the inheritor and society (taxes, consumption).
The inheritor part certainly feels less fair. Though everyone working in the US inherits some of the previous generation's legacy and that probably feels unfair to people in poorer countries too. No perfect solutions at the extreme to solve.. it's a balancing act.
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On November 11 2017 11:34 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2017 08:30 GreenHorizons wrote:On November 11 2017 08:25 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 04:30 KwarK wrote:On November 11 2017 04:14 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 03:22 IgnE wrote:On November 11 2017 02:06 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 00:41 KwarK wrote:On November 10 2017 15:25 mozoku wrote:On November 10 2017 13:52 KwarK wrote:
[quote]
Why is the bartering village using dollars? Remove the dollars, try again.
What objective system of valuation are you using to show that you're producing more value than the fast food worker from your day? Remembering of course that you're already justifying the getting more money than them by the fact that you create more value so you cannot complete the circle and use the more money to prove the greater value. Does it matter if they're bartering in gold, wood, virgins, or dollars? It's a trade they both agree to and the principles are the same. But I see the point that you're trying to make is that the efficient man's hour should, in principle, be worth no more than the inefficient man's hour if you don't care about productivity, and that productivity is independent of morality. However, the former statement is inherently incorrect because productivity and time are, by definition, linked, and a person's time has value in excess of that which can be determined monetarily. To simplify, let's assume they're both chopping lumber. The efficient man can simply choose to work 1/2 hour, have the same productivity, and keep the other 1/2 hour to himself. By nature of being more efficient (and his own efficiency is surely not intrinsically amoral), he's advantaged no matter what. Suppose, regardless of compensation, he only wanted to work 1/2 hour, and wanted to spend the other 1/2 hour with his kids. Are you going to argue that society is justified in forcing him to work the full hour? Or that they should discriminate against his good fortune by paying less for his lumber in the name of "equality"? That's certainly not a society I'd want to be a part of. I'm not saying anything of the sort regarding forcing people to work. No part of what I'm doing is advocating for societal change or the gulag. I'm saying that capitalism works as an effective tool for incentivising productive economic activity but that drawing moral conclusions regarding what you earned/own/deserve/created from the outcomes of a capitalist system is erroneous. It's very tempting to say "I'm paid twice as much money, therefore I earned twice as much" but what you earned is a moral judgement that capitalism makes no attempt to answer for you. I understand what you were trying to say. The problem is that productivity and time are directly dependent on each other, so the more efficient man literally owns the extra time his productivity has created (assuming you agree he should be free to use his time as he pleases). Whether or not you redistribute his present time or his past time is irrelevant from a moral perspective. Forcefully redistributing his wealth under any circumstances is equivalent to forced labor (perhaps a very small amount of forced labor, but a nonzero amount). Of course, everyone pretty much (including me) agrees that that if a second of forced labor at the end of a software engineer's workday can save millions of starving children (not realistic but making an extreme example to illustrate my point), it's morally justifiable to make the guy work the extra second. But the fact is it that's it's still a moral tradeoff that's being made. The software engineer has a true moral grievance (in some sense) in claiming that the arrangement is unfair to him--which stands in contrast to what you're asserting. You are really going down the wrong tracks here with "forced labor" and "moral grievance." Capitalism operates on "forced labor." It uses that "free labor" that is forced by necessity to take the market wage. You should really just abandon this whole line of thought. This is independent of my point. Life doesn't exist without "forced labor." We'd starve to death. You can complain to Mother Nature it it makes you feel better. Pure capitalism is a system that, at the very least, doesn't result in forced labor beyond what Mother Nature requires of us. You can choose simply choose not to trade (i.e. be a self-reliant hermit). Granted, that's not a very convincing argument when any sort of reasonable utility/freedom conversion rate of introduced, but nobody really argues for pure capitalism either. As I've argued since the beginning, the morality of taxation is about tradeoffs. You and KwarK are the ones arguing raising taxes is essentially infinitely justifiable if efficiency isn't a concern. You're still not understanding my argument. My argument is that the amount of money you get is output by what is essentially a black box. It's not just "put work in, get money out", lots of people work very hard and don't get shit, others don't work and get more money than they could spend. Taxes are a component of the internal mechanism of that black box. That's not an argument, that's just an attempt at obfuscation. You very clearly said "capitalism is merely efficient; those who profit from it have no moral claim to their rewards." To which I refuted because time and productivity are, by definition, related. Either you acknowledge that someone's time has non-monetary value (as you've reasonably implied this entire discussion) and thus you cannot raise taxes on wealth without infringing on one's personal freedom to their own time, or you maintain the not only obviously silly but contradictory position that time's value is purely monetary, but efficient capitalism is not the best way to value one's time, while acknowledging it's the most efficient way to run an economy (that runs by efficiently allocating people's time). I don't know what this new point you're trying to make is. "Your income function is complicated, and taxes are part of it. That makes raising taxes on the wealthy morally justified." ??? And you're even assuming the already refuted point "1 hour = 1 hour" to make this new, confusing argument. So if I'm gifted a pile of money, let's say $10,000,000 And I invest it in a moderate investment that yields 1.5% ($150,000/yr) I'm working harder/more efficiently than any fire fighter, police officer, teacher, Marine, etc... Right? Or maybe capitalism allows people to get rich without doing any work whatsoever? Ex. Person purchases unused land, turns it into a vineyard that is now worth $10MM. Is that fair?
It obviously is not
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On November 11 2017 11:34 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2017 08:30 GreenHorizons wrote:On November 11 2017 08:25 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 04:30 KwarK wrote:On November 11 2017 04:14 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 03:22 IgnE wrote:On November 11 2017 02:06 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 00:41 KwarK wrote:On November 10 2017 15:25 mozoku wrote:On November 10 2017 13:52 KwarK wrote:
[quote]
Why is the bartering village using dollars? Remove the dollars, try again.
What objective system of valuation are you using to show that you're producing more value than the fast food worker from your day? Remembering of course that you're already justifying the getting more money than them by the fact that you create more value so you cannot complete the circle and use the more money to prove the greater value. Does it matter if they're bartering in gold, wood, virgins, or dollars? It's a trade they both agree to and the principles are the same. But I see the point that you're trying to make is that the efficient man's hour should, in principle, be worth no more than the inefficient man's hour if you don't care about productivity, and that productivity is independent of morality. However, the former statement is inherently incorrect because productivity and time are, by definition, linked, and a person's time has value in excess of that which can be determined monetarily. To simplify, let's assume they're both chopping lumber. The efficient man can simply choose to work 1/2 hour, have the same productivity, and keep the other 1/2 hour to himself. By nature of being more efficient (and his own efficiency is surely not intrinsically amoral), he's advantaged no matter what. Suppose, regardless of compensation, he only wanted to work 1/2 hour, and wanted to spend the other 1/2 hour with his kids. Are you going to argue that society is justified in forcing him to work the full hour? Or that they should discriminate against his good fortune by paying less for his lumber in the name of "equality"? That's certainly not a society I'd want to be a part of. I'm not saying anything of the sort regarding forcing people to work. No part of what I'm doing is advocating for societal change or the gulag. I'm saying that capitalism works as an effective tool for incentivising productive economic activity but that drawing moral conclusions regarding what you earned/own/deserve/created from the outcomes of a capitalist system is erroneous. It's very tempting to say "I'm paid twice as much money, therefore I earned twice as much" but what you earned is a moral judgement that capitalism makes no attempt to answer for you. I understand what you were trying to say. The problem is that productivity and time are directly dependent on each other, so the more efficient man literally owns the extra time his productivity has created (assuming you agree he should be free to use his time as he pleases). Whether or not you redistribute his present time or his past time is irrelevant from a moral perspective. Forcefully redistributing his wealth under any circumstances is equivalent to forced labor (perhaps a very small amount of forced labor, but a nonzero amount). Of course, everyone pretty much (including me) agrees that that if a second of forced labor at the end of a software engineer's workday can save millions of starving children (not realistic but making an extreme example to illustrate my point), it's morally justifiable to make the guy work the extra second. But the fact is it that's it's still a moral tradeoff that's being made. The software engineer has a true moral grievance (in some sense) in claiming that the arrangement is unfair to him--which stands in contrast to what you're asserting. You are really going down the wrong tracks here with "forced labor" and "moral grievance." Capitalism operates on "forced labor." It uses that "free labor" that is forced by necessity to take the market wage. You should really just abandon this whole line of thought. This is independent of my point. Life doesn't exist without "forced labor." We'd starve to death. You can complain to Mother Nature it it makes you feel better. Pure capitalism is a system that, at the very least, doesn't result in forced labor beyond what Mother Nature requires of us. You can choose simply choose not to trade (i.e. be a self-reliant hermit). Granted, that's not a very convincing argument when any sort of reasonable utility/freedom conversion rate of introduced, but nobody really argues for pure capitalism either. As I've argued since the beginning, the morality of taxation is about tradeoffs. You and KwarK are the ones arguing raising taxes is essentially infinitely justifiable if efficiency isn't a concern. You're still not understanding my argument. My argument is that the amount of money you get is output by what is essentially a black box. It's not just "put work in, get money out", lots of people work very hard and don't get shit, others don't work and get more money than they could spend. Taxes are a component of the internal mechanism of that black box. That's not an argument, that's just an attempt at obfuscation. You very clearly said "capitalism is merely efficient; those who profit from it have no moral claim to their rewards." To which I refuted because time and productivity are, by definition, related. Either you acknowledge that someone's time has non-monetary value (as you've reasonably implied this entire discussion) and thus you cannot raise taxes on wealth without infringing on one's personal freedom to their own time, or you maintain the not only obviously silly but contradictory position that time's value is purely monetary, but efficient capitalism is not the best way to value one's time, while acknowledging it's the most efficient way to run an economy (that runs by efficiently allocating people's time). I don't know what this new point you're trying to make is. "Your income function is complicated, and taxes are part of it. That makes raising taxes on the wealthy morally justified." ??? And you're even assuming the already refuted point "1 hour = 1 hour" to make this new, confusing argument. So if I'm gifted a pile of money, let's say $10,000,000 And I invest it in a moderate investment that yields 1.5% ($150,000/yr) I'm working harder/more efficiently than any fire fighter, police officer, teacher, Marine, etc... Right? Or maybe capitalism allows people to get rich without doing any work whatsoever? Being gifted money is outside the realm of an economic system. You'd want to look at the genesis of that $10MM, and figure it the person who earned it did something productive enough to warrant the $$. Ex. Person purchases unused land, turns it into a vineyard that is now worth $10MM. Is that fair? Yeah.. it kind of is. After that person dies someone inherits the vineyard. Someone has to own it, and since it is still productive it generates income for the inheritor and society (taxes, consumption). The inheritor part certainly feels less fair. Though everyone working in the US inherits some of the previous generation's legacy and that probably feels unfair to people in poorer countries too. No perfect solutions at the extreme to solve.. it's a balancing act.
Georgian (the economist, not the country) taxation of land does something about this inheritance problem without punishing someone for doing productive things on that land. In fact it encourages it. That would be a solution that people from all political sides should be able to live with, provided they agree that effort on an individuals part is what should count in a society.
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On November 11 2017 11:34 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2017 08:30 GreenHorizons wrote:On November 11 2017 08:25 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 04:30 KwarK wrote:On November 11 2017 04:14 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 03:22 IgnE wrote:On November 11 2017 02:06 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 00:41 KwarK wrote:On November 10 2017 15:25 mozoku wrote:On November 10 2017 13:52 KwarK wrote:
[quote]
Why is the bartering village using dollars? Remove the dollars, try again.
What objective system of valuation are you using to show that you're producing more value than the fast food worker from your day? Remembering of course that you're already justifying the getting more money than them by the fact that you create more value so you cannot complete the circle and use the more money to prove the greater value. Does it matter if they're bartering in gold, wood, virgins, or dollars? It's a trade they both agree to and the principles are the same. But I see the point that you're trying to make is that the efficient man's hour should, in principle, be worth no more than the inefficient man's hour if you don't care about productivity, and that productivity is independent of morality. However, the former statement is inherently incorrect because productivity and time are, by definition, linked, and a person's time has value in excess of that which can be determined monetarily. To simplify, let's assume they're both chopping lumber. The efficient man can simply choose to work 1/2 hour, have the same productivity, and keep the other 1/2 hour to himself. By nature of being more efficient (and his own efficiency is surely not intrinsically amoral), he's advantaged no matter what. Suppose, regardless of compensation, he only wanted to work 1/2 hour, and wanted to spend the other 1/2 hour with his kids. Are you going to argue that society is justified in forcing him to work the full hour? Or that they should discriminate against his good fortune by paying less for his lumber in the name of "equality"? That's certainly not a society I'd want to be a part of. I'm not saying anything of the sort regarding forcing people to work. No part of what I'm doing is advocating for societal change or the gulag. I'm saying that capitalism works as an effective tool for incentivising productive economic activity but that drawing moral conclusions regarding what you earned/own/deserve/created from the outcomes of a capitalist system is erroneous. It's very tempting to say "I'm paid twice as much money, therefore I earned twice as much" but what you earned is a moral judgement that capitalism makes no attempt to answer for you. I understand what you were trying to say. The problem is that productivity and time are directly dependent on each other, so the more efficient man literally owns the extra time his productivity has created (assuming you agree he should be free to use his time as he pleases). Whether or not you redistribute his present time or his past time is irrelevant from a moral perspective. Forcefully redistributing his wealth under any circumstances is equivalent to forced labor (perhaps a very small amount of forced labor, but a nonzero amount). Of course, everyone pretty much (including me) agrees that that if a second of forced labor at the end of a software engineer's workday can save millions of starving children (not realistic but making an extreme example to illustrate my point), it's morally justifiable to make the guy work the extra second. But the fact is it that's it's still a moral tradeoff that's being made. The software engineer has a true moral grievance (in some sense) in claiming that the arrangement is unfair to him--which stands in contrast to what you're asserting. You are really going down the wrong tracks here with "forced labor" and "moral grievance." Capitalism operates on "forced labor." It uses that "free labor" that is forced by necessity to take the market wage. You should really just abandon this whole line of thought. This is independent of my point. Life doesn't exist without "forced labor." We'd starve to death. You can complain to Mother Nature it it makes you feel better. Pure capitalism is a system that, at the very least, doesn't result in forced labor beyond what Mother Nature requires of us. You can choose simply choose not to trade (i.e. be a self-reliant hermit). Granted, that's not a very convincing argument when any sort of reasonable utility/freedom conversion rate of introduced, but nobody really argues for pure capitalism either. As I've argued since the beginning, the morality of taxation is about tradeoffs. You and KwarK are the ones arguing raising taxes is essentially infinitely justifiable if efficiency isn't a concern. You're still not understanding my argument. My argument is that the amount of money you get is output by what is essentially a black box. It's not just "put work in, get money out", lots of people work very hard and don't get shit, others don't work and get more money than they could spend. Taxes are a component of the internal mechanism of that black box. That's not an argument, that's just an attempt at obfuscation. You very clearly said "capitalism is merely efficient; those who profit from it have no moral claim to their rewards." To which I refuted because time and productivity are, by definition, related. Either you acknowledge that someone's time has non-monetary value (as you've reasonably implied this entire discussion) and thus you cannot raise taxes on wealth without infringing on one's personal freedom to their own time, or you maintain the not only obviously silly but contradictory position that time's value is purely monetary, but efficient capitalism is not the best way to value one's time, while acknowledging it's the most efficient way to run an economy (that runs by efficiently allocating people's time). I don't know what this new point you're trying to make is. "Your income function is complicated, and taxes are part of it. That makes raising taxes on the wealthy morally justified." ??? And you're even assuming the already refuted point "1 hour = 1 hour" to make this new, confusing argument. So if I'm gifted a pile of money, let's say $10,000,000 And I invest it in a moderate investment that yields 1.5% ($150,000/yr) I'm working harder/more efficiently than any fire fighter, police officer, teacher, Marine, etc... Right? Or maybe capitalism allows people to get rich without doing any work whatsoever? Being gifted money is outside the realm of an economic system. You'd want to look at the genesis of that $10MM, and figure it the person who earned it did something productive enough to warrant the $$. Ex. Person purchases unused land, turns it into a vineyard that is now worth $10MM. Is that fair? Yeah.. it kind of is. After that person dies someone inherits the vineyard. Someone has to own it, and since it is still productive it generates income for the inheritor and society (taxes, consumption). The inheritor part certainly feels less fair. Though everyone working in the US inherits some of the previous generation's legacy and that probably feels unfair to people in poorer countries too. No perfect solutions at the extreme to solve.. it's a balancing act.
Creating inheritance taxes is just asking for large loopholes to be found. Telling people that when they die they can't give their wealth to whomever they want, and that the government should get a cut, is absurd.
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On November 11 2017 08:30 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2017 08:25 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 04:30 KwarK wrote:On November 11 2017 04:14 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 03:22 IgnE wrote:On November 11 2017 02:06 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 00:41 KwarK wrote:On November 10 2017 15:25 mozoku wrote:On November 10 2017 13:52 KwarK wrote:On November 10 2017 13:50 mozoku wrote:
[quote]
This is literally nonsense. I barely know where to begin.
Suppose an hour's worth of labor chopping firewood produces $1 of firewood. The new guy creates $2/hr with whatever he's doing. He's twice as productive. If chooses to work the same amount of time, he gets twice as much stuff. That's literally the definition of proportional. How that's supposed to be disproportionate, I have no idea.
[quote]
??? I'm pretty sure fast-food workers are creating much less wealth than software engineers, successful investors, etc. I literally can't even imagine how society would exist if this statement were true. Why would capitalism even be efficient if this statement were true? What is your definition of "well correlated"? 0.99999999999999999??
[quote]
I'm not sure this is true at all. In fact, I'd lean towards not true if anything. Ever heard of an economy of scale? I work at a mega-scale tech company. I work 40-50 hrs/week, but my work influences thousands of people directly, and affects millions indirectly. Hell, the marginal cost of someone consuming my work is practically zero. Likewise, the marginal cost (in terms of other's time) of most of the stuff I consume is practically zero. That's how automation works, and is why we're fabulously wealthy compared to several hundred years ago. Why is the bartering village using dollars? Remove the dollars, try again. What objective system of valuation are you using to show that you're producing more value than the fast food worker from your day? Remembering of course that you're already justifying the getting more money than them by the fact that you create more value so you cannot complete the circle and use the more money to prove the greater value. Does it matter if they're bartering in gold, wood, virgins, or dollars? It's a trade they both agree to and the principles are the same. But I see the point that you're trying to make is that the efficient man's hour should, in principle, be worth no more than the inefficient man's hour if you don't care about productivity, and that productivity is independent of morality. However, the former statement is inherently incorrect because productivity and time are, by definition, linked, and a person's time has value in excess of that which can be determined monetarily. To simplify, let's assume they're both chopping lumber. The efficient man can simply choose to work 1/2 hour, have the same productivity, and keep the other 1/2 hour to himself. By nature of being more efficient (and his own efficiency is surely not intrinsically amoral), he's advantaged no matter what. Suppose, regardless of compensation, he only wanted to work 1/2 hour, and wanted to spend the other 1/2 hour with his kids. Are you going to argue that society is justified in forcing him to work the full hour? Or that they should discriminate against his good fortune by paying less for his lumber in the name of "equality"? That's certainly not a society I'd want to be a part of. I'm not saying anything of the sort regarding forcing people to work. No part of what I'm doing is advocating for societal change or the gulag. I'm saying that capitalism works as an effective tool for incentivising productive economic activity but that drawing moral conclusions regarding what you earned/own/deserve/created from the outcomes of a capitalist system is erroneous. It's very tempting to say "I'm paid twice as much money, therefore I earned twice as much" but what you earned is a moral judgement that capitalism makes no attempt to answer for you. I understand what you were trying to say. The problem is that productivity and time are directly dependent on each other, so the more efficient man literally owns the extra time his productivity has created (assuming you agree he should be free to use his time as he pleases). Whether or not you redistribute his present time or his past time is irrelevant from a moral perspective. Forcefully redistributing his wealth under any circumstances is equivalent to forced labor (perhaps a very small amount of forced labor, but a nonzero amount). Of course, everyone pretty much (including me) agrees that that if a second of forced labor at the end of a software engineer's workday can save millions of starving children (not realistic but making an extreme example to illustrate my point), it's morally justifiable to make the guy work the extra second. But the fact is it that's it's still a moral tradeoff that's being made. The software engineer has a true moral grievance (in some sense) in claiming that the arrangement is unfair to him--which stands in contrast to what you're asserting. You are really going down the wrong tracks here with "forced labor" and "moral grievance." Capitalism operates on "forced labor." It uses that "free labor" that is forced by necessity to take the market wage. You should really just abandon this whole line of thought. This is independent of my point. Life doesn't exist without "forced labor." We'd starve to death. You can complain to Mother Nature it it makes you feel better. Pure capitalism is a system that, at the very least, doesn't result in forced labor beyond what Mother Nature requires of us. You can choose simply choose not to trade (i.e. be a self-reliant hermit). Granted, that's not a very convincing argument when any sort of reasonable utility/freedom conversion rate of introduced, but nobody really argues for pure capitalism either. As I've argued since the beginning, the morality of taxation is about tradeoffs. You and KwarK are the ones arguing raising taxes is essentially infinitely justifiable if efficiency isn't a concern. You're still not understanding my argument. My argument is that the amount of money you get is output by what is essentially a black box. It's not just "put work in, get money out", lots of people work very hard and don't get shit, others don't work and get more money than they could spend. Taxes are a component of the internal mechanism of that black box. That's not an argument, that's just an attempt at obfuscation. You very clearly said "capitalism is merely efficient; those who profit from it have no moral claim to their rewards." To which I refuted because time and productivity are, by definition, related. Either you acknowledge that someone's time has non-monetary value (as you've reasonably implied this entire discussion) and thus you cannot raise taxes on wealth without infringing on one's personal freedom to their own time, or you maintain the not only obviously silly but contradictory position that time's value is purely monetary, but efficient capitalism is not the best way to value one's time, while acknowledging it's the most efficient way to run an economy (that runs by efficiently allocating people's time). I don't know what this new point you're trying to make is. "Your income function is complicated, and taxes are part of it. That makes raising taxes on the wealthy morally justified." ??? And you're even assuming the already refuted point "1 hour = 1 hour" to make this new, confusing argument. So if I'm gifted a pile of money, let's say $10,000,000 And I invest it in a moderate investment that yields 1.5% ($150,000/yr) I'm working harder/more efficiently than any fire fighter, police officer, teacher, Marine, etc... Right? Or maybe capitalism allows people to get rich without doing any work whatsoever?
In addition to what bNoHo said, it's not hard to imagine at all that $10M capital investments should create enough value in enabling somebody in the world to create a useful enough product/service that it enables ~3 firefighters worth of work to be replaced each year.
There's two main things I notice that tend to trip people when they're trying to determine the value of someone's work (usually in a complaint that someone else makes too much): 1) they don't take into account the difficulty of replacing someone (i.e supply) and 2) they don't understand that someone performing even 1% better than the next best replacement in a role where they control a billion dollars of resources means they're creating $10,000,000 in value. Hence why executives, Wall Street investors, etc. are paid so much.
None of these points (including GH's) have anything to do with what I was debating with KwarK about though.
On November 11 2017 12:20 Paljas wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2017 11:34 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On November 11 2017 08:30 GreenHorizons wrote:On November 11 2017 08:25 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 04:30 KwarK wrote:On November 11 2017 04:14 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 03:22 IgnE wrote:On November 11 2017 02:06 mozoku wrote:On November 11 2017 00:41 KwarK wrote:On November 10 2017 15:25 mozoku wrote:
[quote]
Does it matter if they're bartering in gold, wood, virgins, or dollars? It's a trade they both agree to and the principles are the same.
But I see the point that you're trying to make is that the efficient man's hour should, in principle, be worth no more than the inefficient man's hour if you don't care about productivity, and that productivity is independent of morality. However, the former statement is inherently incorrect because productivity and time are, by definition, linked, and a person's time has value in excess of that which can be determined monetarily.
To simplify, let's assume they're both chopping lumber. The efficient man can simply choose to work 1/2 hour, have the same productivity, and keep the other 1/2 hour to himself. By nature of being more efficient (and his own efficiency is surely not intrinsically amoral), he's advantaged no matter what. Suppose, regardless of compensation, he only wanted to work 1/2 hour, and wanted to spend the other 1/2 hour with his kids. Are you going to argue that society is justified in forcing him to work the full hour? Or that they should discriminate against his good fortune by paying less for his lumber in the name of "equality"?
That's certainly not a society I'd want to be a part of. I'm not saying anything of the sort regarding forcing people to work. No part of what I'm doing is advocating for societal change or the gulag. I'm saying that capitalism works as an effective tool for incentivising productive economic activity but that drawing moral conclusions regarding what you earned/own/deserve/created from the outcomes of a capitalist system is erroneous. It's very tempting to say "I'm paid twice as much money, therefore I earned twice as much" but what you earned is a moral judgement that capitalism makes no attempt to answer for you. I understand what you were trying to say. The problem is that productivity and time are directly dependent on each other, so the more efficient man literally owns the extra time his productivity has created (assuming you agree he should be free to use his time as he pleases). Whether or not you redistribute his present time or his past time is irrelevant from a moral perspective. Forcefully redistributing his wealth under any circumstances is equivalent to forced labor (perhaps a very small amount of forced labor, but a nonzero amount). Of course, everyone pretty much (including me) agrees that that if a second of forced labor at the end of a software engineer's workday can save millions of starving children (not realistic but making an extreme example to illustrate my point), it's morally justifiable to make the guy work the extra second. But the fact is it that's it's still a moral tradeoff that's being made. The software engineer has a true moral grievance (in some sense) in claiming that the arrangement is unfair to him--which stands in contrast to what you're asserting. You are really going down the wrong tracks here with "forced labor" and "moral grievance." Capitalism operates on "forced labor." It uses that "free labor" that is forced by necessity to take the market wage. You should really just abandon this whole line of thought. This is independent of my point. Life doesn't exist without "forced labor." We'd starve to death. You can complain to Mother Nature it it makes you feel better. Pure capitalism is a system that, at the very least, doesn't result in forced labor beyond what Mother Nature requires of us. You can choose simply choose not to trade (i.e. be a self-reliant hermit). Granted, that's not a very convincing argument when any sort of reasonable utility/freedom conversion rate of introduced, but nobody really argues for pure capitalism either. As I've argued since the beginning, the morality of taxation is about tradeoffs. You and KwarK are the ones arguing raising taxes is essentially infinitely justifiable if efficiency isn't a concern. You're still not understanding my argument. My argument is that the amount of money you get is output by what is essentially a black box. It's not just "put work in, get money out", lots of people work very hard and don't get shit, others don't work and get more money than they could spend. Taxes are a component of the internal mechanism of that black box. That's not an argument, that's just an attempt at obfuscation. You very clearly said "capitalism is merely efficient; those who profit from it have no moral claim to their rewards." To which I refuted because time and productivity are, by definition, related. Either you acknowledge that someone's time has non-monetary value (as you've reasonably implied this entire discussion) and thus you cannot raise taxes on wealth without infringing on one's personal freedom to their own time, or you maintain the not only obviously silly but contradictory position that time's value is purely monetary, but efficient capitalism is not the best way to value one's time, while acknowledging it's the most efficient way to run an economy (that runs by efficiently allocating people's time). I don't know what this new point you're trying to make is. "Your income function is complicated, and taxes are part of it. That makes raising taxes on the wealthy morally justified." ??? And you're even assuming the already refuted point "1 hour = 1 hour" to make this new, confusing argument. So if I'm gifted a pile of money, let's say $10,000,000 And I invest it in a moderate investment that yields 1.5% ($150,000/yr) I'm working harder/more efficiently than any fire fighter, police officer, teacher, Marine, etc... Right? Or maybe capitalism allows people to get rich without doing any work whatsoever? Ex. Person purchases unused land, turns it into a vineyard that is now worth $10MM. Is that fair? It obviously is not
Sarcasm? I don't see why making money off a vineyard is any less legitimate than any other type of work.
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I definitely believe Juanita. The difference between Trump and Bill is that Republicans received full notice of Trump's behavior, which actually includes pedo behavior. They now must elect a pedo to the Senate as well.
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EPT
