The Gaming Den

Anything that has a chance of increasing survival rates in the field is worth looking at. With hard armor, and today's tech, you might be able to fit a lot of tech into the suit that wouldn't have worked a few years ago.

Even a cooling system isn't impossible. A biomonitor and an auto-medkit? Better vision uprades with HUD. Etc...

Of course, it isn't cost effective.

IMO the military should be required to pay through the nose for injury and death until providing th best protection possible is cost effective. When dealing with game-rational greed, I can't come up with a better way.

Thoughts?

Quote from http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=16247

for injury and death

The problem with your logic is that the more severe condition incurs less cost on average, so it is the military's best interest to either avoid both conditions or to ensure death, and it is only for morale considerations that they can't do so via obvious means.

Josh_Kablack at [unixtime wrote:1168832097[/unixtime]]

for injury and death

The problem with your logic is that the more severe condition incurs less cost on average, so it is the military's best interest to either avoid both conditions or to ensure death, and it is only for morale considerations that they can't do so via obvious means.

It's always been in the military's best interests the ensure either death or unimpaired survival. The idea would be to require greater 'support' payments for greater injuries, making death the most expensive.
Of course, death is significantly more rare than terrible injury these days, thanks to great armored vests that don't save limbs.

Catharz wrote:IMO the military should be required to pay through the nose for injury and death until providing th best protection possible is cost effective. When dealing with game-rational greed, I can't come up with a better way.

Now you're talking about abandoning capitalism all together. I honestly wouldn't have a problem with that, but the people running things probably would.

The whole point of capitalism is that through intimidation, deception, and collective bargaining the people making a profit pay less for things than they are worth - that bit of shaved costs is where profit comes from.

So if an army can't defray the costs of a war by having the dead pay a disproportionate cost on their own, if a plastic bag company can't defray some of its costs by allowing others to absorb the costs of bag disposal and fossil fuel depletion - profits don't happen. And then, since the capitalist system has no other motivator, everything stops and society collapses.

If you want to make people pay fair costs for things then profit, by definition, cannot exist. Administrators and company presidents would just get a wage proportionate to the work they actually do - there'd be nothing left for stockholders and investment wouldn't happen.

Now, maybe we shouldn't be making disposable plastic dinner ware. I can see a very reasonable argument to that effect. Maybe we shouldn't be killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in foreign countries on false pretenses. Maybe we shouldn't be making new D&D books at the rate of three a month with no playtesting. Heck, I could say that virtually everything we're doing is something that we should not be doing. But as it stands, everything our nation produces or does is based on an extractive wealth system that at its core requires that things not be paid for by the people making the decisions.

I could definitely support a radical change in the way we do things. Pure capitalism destroyed New Orleans, invaded Iraq for nothing, and is steadily destroying our air, our land, and our water to the point where commercial fishing will end, Florida will sink, and the crops that feed our people with turn gray and poisonous.

Our system is not sustainable. It's hurting us very very badly. But it's the only system we have, and destroying it isn't something you sdo without a plan.

-Username17

FrankTrollman, sorry but I gotta disagree. We can sustain capitalism. You are trying saying that the only way to generate a profit is to cheat consumers or employees. No way: the best way to be successful if your a capitalist is simply to offer good deals at a fair price. The reason businesses will do that is because it works.

Population growth is showing no signs of slowing down, and economic growth is going to keep up with it (because as more people spend more on more products the money supply increases). The new century is going to be prosperous, and has more potentional to preserve nature and preserve peace than maybe any other time in history.

... just WOW, sometimes a posts naivety just boggles my mind.

Thats my mind boggling, right there, do you hear it?

Frank, here is my current belief:
The military, as a government institution, is already not Capitalist. It may try to operate in a similar way, but the entire point of having government institutions is do offer a degree of socialism in an otherwise capitalist system.

If we were talking about Lone Star than I'd agree with you.

PhoneLobster at [unixtime wrote:1169252305[/unixtime]]... just WOW, sometimes a posts naivety just boggles my mind.

Thats my mind boggling, right there, do you hear it?

Is this related at all to the thread?

Who are you, the ghost of Milton Friedman? There's a lot wrong with your analysis, which isn't surprising because it's basically ripped from Capitalist Apologia 101. But let's frame by frame it:

420 wrote:Population growth is showing no signs of slowing down

Wrong. Population growth is slowing down, and has been slowing down for some time. In fact, most of the population growth of the last decade stems not from births, but from decreased deaths. With access to higher life expectancies, populations continue to rise for some time until they hit the new equilibrium point - but many parts of the world don't even have enough births to hit replacement rate.

For example: Singapore enjoys a birthrate of 1.19 children per couple. Its population is rising because those children are being born and people aren't dying to make room. But come on! The number of deaths is 1 per person. A couple is two people, so if they are having less than 1.2 kids between them... that means that when that generation shuffles off (as it eventually will), we'll be left with a much smaller population base. Now, that's the most extreme case, but it's really extreme. If trends continue, population will continue to rise on inertial grounds and then collapse precipitously as my own generation begins to cack frm old age (in somewhere between 80 and 100 years I hope).

The idea that somehow the need for constantly increasing resources is hardwired into the world and self evident is complete bullshit. We can very easily perceive the limits of what we need. Heck, we can foresee the limits of what we want. Demand is essentially finite. The number of mouths to feed is going to drop, not rise.

And the worst part is that the number of mouths to feed who will themselves be making bread will also fall as a percentage of the populace. The older generations are going to be bigger than the younger ones. It is literally going to be impossible to sustain a pay as you go system in the extremely near future. The elderly and sick, the non-workers will outnumber the young and healthy. What then?

The answer is: "Robots and Mass Production Techniques" - but that only solves the question of goods creation. Ultimately an equitable distribution system that allows the old to eat without providing service to the economy at large because they'll be fvcking old and the young will be feeding them.

because as more people spend more on more products the money supply increases

You got that backwards. The money supply is an abstraction. We add more money to the system in order to allow greater amounts of trade to happen. Sometimes that bites us in the ass (like when Speculators destroy the Thai currency), but generally it seems to work vaguely OK. However, to say that there is any natural process that causes people to decide to print more money and then print it is complete crazy talk.

No way: the best way to be successful if your a capitalist is simply to offer good deals at a fair price.

What? Seriously, do you have any idea about the history of Standard Oil? The best way to succeed in capitalism has never been to promote fairness or goodness. The very concept is absurd.

No. The best way to be a success in Capitalism is to run your business into the fvcking ground as hard and fast as you can. Then, because you've looted it for everything it's worth, you move on and put your money somewhere else. This is the story over and over again. It's the Neo-Liberalism Way, and it's very "successful" by the standards that it judges itself by: which is how much money it can extract from processes.

And that's the basic flaw in your ideal right there. The criteria by which a capitalist enterprise is judged successful or a failure is the amount of profit it generates. That is: the total amount of wealth that are paid for goods and/or services in excess of what those goods and services actually cost to produce. That's the entire point.

And that's why we're going to run out of Fish in the ocean in 2048. The fact is that Capitalists can make money anywhere. So there's no reason for them to cut profits down by embracing sustainability. If they take all the fish out now they can make a big pile of money now. And then... they can stop fishing because the investment money can be placed in any industry at all rather than constantly reinvesting it in fishing.

The reason that peasant farmers save some of their grain to replant is not because they make more money doing it that way - it's because they don't have the option of getting up and doing something else next year. Next year they'll be in the same land and they'll be farming the next crop in the rotation, and so on and so forth. But that's not a "problem" for Capitalists because it's all just theoretical money anyway. They don't literally plant and corn or haul any fish, they just finance projects each year. And there's no reason that they should finance the same project next year when they can just run the project into destruction for a few dollars more and then do something else.

The new century is going to be prosperous...

...if we don't have the ocean rise up and claim Florida for its own. If we don't kill off the air renewing algae and end up living in the damned Space Balls universe, sure. I'm absolutely ositive that some people will be prosperous. Indeed, less people made more money in 2006 than ever in human history.

And indeed, the life expectancy of people in developing countries has risen by 2 years in the last 10. That's progress. But it's pathetic, and nowhere close to what we could achieve. By contrast, the life expectancy of women was 30 when the Bolsheviks took over in Russia, and it was 74 at the height of the Soviet Union's tyranical madness and powerful planned economy.

Hell, when Russia went Capitalist, their life expectancy dropped five years in five years (from 1989 to 1994). Capitalism can seriously damage your health.

---

So yeah, as our knowledge base continues to rise, we gain the ability to do more things. Our medicine, our food production, our hygene, and our transportation are all potentially better. And if we had a fair distribution system, we could actually get these advances to people almost immediately. And our life expectencies would sky rocket. We'd see a 44 year increase in life expectencies in developing nations in 50 years. We've done it before, it's not an unreasonable idea.

It just requires a planned economy. Capitalism has not, and will not deliver that kind of prosperity. It literally can't. But it can destroy the ozone layer, produce enough greenhouse gasses to melt Greenland, deplete wildlife worldwide at a rate never seen in the Earth's history, and seriously threaten the existence of humanity and life on Earth. It can do that, we know this because it is doing that right now.

-Username17

420 wrote:No way: the best way to be successful if your a capitalist is simply to offer good deals at a fair price. The reason businesses will do that is because it works.

Since this is essentially a gaming-oriented message board, consider this DnD analogy:

You've got a dungeon full of monsters (competitors) and loot (profits... which means loot, I suppose...). You want to get as much of that loot as you can. What's the best way to do it? Well, it's certainly not advisable to just walk in, kick down all the doors, and fight the monsters on their own terms. That's just going to get you eaten by a closet troll or a dragon or some other monster packing a full magazine of arbitrarium.

You need to fight as unfairly as possible, in the great tradition of military strategists and competitive gamers the world over, by brutally exploiting every advantage you can scare up and denying any to the monsters. Obvious mistakes in the applicable rules, differences in resources, so-called "cheap" tactics - these are your bread and butter. Ideally, you win so hard that the monsters are destroyed without ever even being in actual combat with you. To quote Sun Tzu, "to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting." That's what you're going for: winning without really fighting, since, if you actually fought, you might roll badly or something and risk losing.

Now apply this to capitalism, and think about what companies actually win hard, as opposed to just getting by. For reference, here's Fortune 500's list of the top 5 American companies in 2006:

1 Exxon Mobil (XOM)
2 Wal-Mart Stores (WMT)
3 General Motors (GM)
4 Chevron (CVX)
5 Ford Motor (F)

These are not companies that got to where they are today by offering a fair price - at least, not under any notion of fairness that I subscribe to (John Rawls is as good a starting point as any in this regard). Now, if you're starting from the capitalist paradigm, that's fine, because the competitive framework that it uses to justify itself is about winning. These companies won, and that makes them awesome according to this paradigm. However, you don't win by being completely and totally fair. You do what those rules that are enforced require of you, and are unfair whenever possible otherwise. That's how you win.

Nihlin wrote:However, you don't win by being completely and totally fair. You do what those rules that are enforced require of you, and are unfair whenever possible otherwise. That's how you win.

You also win by getting in bed with the government.

Maj wrote:You also win by getting in bed with the government.

Exactly right. Since the only rules that matter are the ones that are enforced, getting the enforcers to rule preferentially in your favor is, as they say, t3h w1n.

Bringing this back to the Catharz's original point: since the government is automatically in bed with itself, it might be tricky to create the sorts of penalties that would actually stick. Also, you could possibly wind up in oddball situations where the military tactic most likely to succeed in a given situation involves more death and dismemberment than you can afford in penalties.

That said, creating incentives to protect troops and penalties for failing to take reasonable protective action seems awesome. I'm at a loss to think of a way to do it, personally, but please point out any proposals you've come across.

Not to be too nit-picky, but I would hardly use Ford and GM as role models of powerful organizations. Both are seriously struggling currently, and actually it was because of what 420 noted. They're losing market share to Toyota because that organization is known for high quality/customer satisfaction while, for some strange reason, people just don't like exploding gas tanks and dynamically unstable vehicles during tire blowout. Go figure.

People want high quality, reasonable delivery time, with the features that they want at a fair (note that I don't say lowest) price. (what some people would define as a "good deal")

Changes in market share aside, Ford reported $177 billion in revenue in 2006 with $2 billion in profit, according to the Fortune 500 article I linked, making them #5 in total revenue among American companies. That makes them a powerful company. GM hasn't reported a profit since 2004, but they still reported nearly $200 billion in revenue. That's not a trivial number compared to the U.S.'s estimated 2006 GDP of $13 trillion. As for the other top 5, Exxon, Wal-Mart, and Chevron are certainly not complaining.

As for Toyota, many would dispute the fairness of those prices. Suffice to say, they have profited greatly from a decidedly unfair playing field, both past and present.

This is actually all tangentially on topic, since it deals with the notion of fairness with regards to economic exchange. So, let me do some nitpicking of my own: what's a fair price? Is it simply the auction price, or are there other considerations, such as total social costs?

Consider the "fair market value" of a soldier's life. In purely free market terms, calculating the worth of a soldier's life begins with the sum of the salary you needed to offer to attract and retain the soldier (assuming you don't use a draft), the cost of training the soldier, and the soldier's upkeep costs in equipment and supplies. That's your total investment up to this point. However, a lot of that is essentially setup cost not specific to any one soldier - you're spending a lot on building all manner of infrastructure. What you really care about when setting a market value for something like this is the incremental or marginal cost, and that's really disturbingly low.

Soldiers, in this sense, are extremely cheap - in fact, they're one of the cheapest parts of the equation. I seriously make more as a Ph.D. student than a lot of these people, and I'm not going to even pretend that makes sense with regards to my notion of fairness.

In this calculus, the cost of a dead soldier is simply the cost of the replacement, and that's pretty small overall (but see the endnote). So, really, if you're using the same notion of fairness for paying off the families of dead soldiers that you seem to be using for a fair car price, then those families won't get much at all. In terms of carrots and sticks, there isn't much reason at this point for a rational gameplayer to put troop preservation high on the priority list: so long as troop numbers can be maintained, you're good to go.

That's not the notion of fairness I prefer to use, though, and I don't think it's the notion of fairness being used by Catharz. Instead of "fairness as what you can get away with without really blatant coercion," I prefer "Justice as Fairness" (Rawls again). I'd like to see a situation where some bare minimum of social justice is involved.

How big a stick is needed? Is our current stick, composed of both tangible and intangible factors, big enough to do the job? That depends on how you feel about the casualty reports, both dead and wounded.

At the end of the day, regardless of politics, the fact remains that young men and women die in wars. In the face of this fact, I think you want a rational gameplayer to put troop conservation very, very high on the priority list. Is that the case now? Personally, I'd say the evidence points to "no." If not, can we change it? I hope so. What would changing it mean in the big picture? I can't offer more than idle speculation on that point, so I'll defer to Frank and Catharz.

----------

Note:
If you're curious about the actual compensation for U.S. soldiers in the current combat theaters, here you go: In 2007 soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan will get the premiums for the first $400,000 of their Servicemember's Group Life Insurance paid for them by the government. That's up substantially from previous years. There are additional death benefits beyond that life insurance, which you can read about at the above link.

That 150k to 400k increase is certainly an improvement. I didn't know about that.

Nihlin at [unixtime wrote:1169278941[/unixtime]]Changes in market share aside, Ford reported $177 billion in revenue in 2006 with $2 billion in profit, according to the Fortune 500 article I linked, making them #5 in total revenue among American companies.

Then check out this article:
http://www1.pressdemocrat.com/apps/pbcs ... /701070381

Article wrote:
But lately, blue is the only word for the malaise surrounding Ford, which is rapidly seeing its position in the industry and in its hometown eroded by its failure to combat foreign competition.

This year, Ford expects to permanently lose its grip on second place in the American market to Toyota.

As many as half its blue- and white-collar employees have decided to take voluntary buyouts from a company where jobs were long seen as lifetime guarantees.

Ron Cimino, 44, used to regret not landing a job at Ford, where his father worked for 52 years.

Turned down in 1984 because he lacked a master's degree, Cimino, of Dearborn, wound up starting his own import-export business.

"I'm glad I didn't end up working at Ford," he said. "I never thought I'd say that."

To be sure, General Motors and Chrysler have their own problems that are weighing on the city. But Ford's troubles, arguably, are felt more acutely in Dearborn.

Ford is woven more into the fabric of Dearborn, with the Ford name on office buildings, museums, high schools and highways, as well as the football stadium, Ford Field, which opened downtown in 2002.

In November, Ford disclosed it had pledged nearly all its assets, including the trademark on its 100-year-old logo, as collateral against $25 billion in loans needed to fund its restructuring.

So in essence Ford has mortgaged itself to get 25 billion in loans to turn thing around. Not the healthiest of companies by a longshot.

That makes them a powerful company. GM hasn't reported a profit since 2004, but they still reported nearly $200 billion in revenue. That's not a trivial number compared to the U.S.'s estimated 2006 GDP of $13 trillion.

Sales are nice, but at the end of the day it is all about profit. You can be the industry leader in sales, but if you are taking a loss to do so, you're not going to last long as an organization.

I deal with GM (engineering) on a regular basis. The last thing that they are thinking is that they are the giant in the industry. Frankly, they're keep wondering whether they're going to have jobs tomorrow.

As for Toyota, many would dispute the fairness of those prices. Suffice to say, they have profited greatly from a decidedly unfair playing field, both past and present.

I'm sure stuff like this happens, as I'm sure the Big Three have goten similar advantages with dealing with suppliers that work in the same way. However I was thinking of the end consumer as to price. Heck, even with this, Toyota is often not the lowest cost for automobiles.

Finally, Toyota has been putting up assembly plants in the US. The Corolla that I own was assembled in California, and a few years ago they set up a plant here in southern Indiana. And it isn't just sub-suppliers content that is all Japanese - I know that my company has recently gotten Toyota business and they aren't Japanese.

At any rate, all I'm noting is that Ford and GM are the last candidates to be considered the "evil empire." They're barely limping along.

Notes: The life expectancy in the US dropped last year.

Ford still made money last year.

Their shareholders and execs made five hundred times the salary of an average employee.

No one is saying they're the evil empire - the health of a specific company is irrelevent to the CEOs, they make money either way, and will just part out the company and be the CEO of another company.

-Crissa

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1169255566[/unixtime]]
So yeah, as our knowledge base continues to rise, we gain the ability to do more things. Our medicine, our food production, our hygene, and our transportation are all potentially better. And if we had a fair distribution system, we could actually get these advances to people almost immediately. And our life expectencies would sky rocket. We'd see a 44 year increase in life expectencies in developing nations in 50 years. We've done it before, it's not an unreasonable idea.

Yeah, though the problem is that you'll probably get significanlty less technological and medical advances in a socialist or similarly "equal" economy, because people just dont' have as much incentive to innovate. Capitalists are constantly working on new products to compete with everyone else, because it will make them more money. However once you start equalizing pay and removing incentive to "get ahead", then you will see significantly less emphasis on development of new things, because you can sit on your ass, learn nothing and do what you always did to make your money or you can work your ass off to create something. But in either case, the lazy ass and the creative hard worker are getting the same pay.

So why bother making anything at all?

Technological advancements generally are not made by societies, they're made by individuals, that means you need to have individual based rewards to people who may make new innovations.

Now I'm not saying capitalism is necessarily good, I'm just saying that other systems have lots of flaws too.

Random Casualty wrote:Yeah, though the problem is that you'll probably get significanlty less technological and medical advances in a socialist or similarly "equal" economy, because people just dont' have as much incentive to innovate.

This particular argument has been around for a long time, and the statistics just don't support it at all. I mean sure, the flatter the economy, the less difference between "success" and "failure", the less incentive for success, right? Well, no. Success is apparanetly its own incentive, or so history shows us.

People have made your argument against such programs as "not hanging all the vagrants (Henry VIII)" or "providing public education systems (Abraham Weaver)" or "allowing women and commoners to read (Choe Manri)". And honestly, every time these voices have been ignored and egalitarian principles put forth instead the results have been an immediate increase in scientific knowledge and application.

Let's consider some examples:

• Korea The Golden Age of Korea began essentially when Sejong the Great flaunted the Confucionist demands of the Chamber of Worthies and introduced a phonetic script that could be taught to the peasantry and removed restrictions of class from the civil service. Indeed, the greatest inventor of the age was Jang Yong-sil, who was common born and under the regime of the previous king would not have been allowed to read or work for the government.
  
  Soviet Union We all know the mistakes of the Soviet Era, but let's face it: in 1917 they took over a country where the predominant mode of shipping was horse drawn cart. And before living memory ended they had won the Space Race (launching the first orbital sattelite in 1957, the first dog in space in 1957, and the first man in space in 1961 - the 1969 Moon Shot was a face saving measure by the US begun after the race to space was already over).
  
  Italy When the oppressive restrictions on the common man were terminated following the plague, it ushered in a renaissance so massive in scale that we call it "The Renaissance".

But hey, you don't have to go to historical data available al over the whole world from every corner of the globe, let's talk about right here in the United States. The Human Genome was completed by employees of a public university, not the private company. Indeed, the work done by Celera is virtually worthless. The big star of the entire Genome experience is David Haussler, a man who spent months with little sleep thrusting his hands into ice water when he couldn't code anymore - for the reward simply of making sure that the public benefitted from the genome project.

Or heck, let's consider a recent visit to UCSC by a guy from Advanced Cell Technology in which he candidly said that they want to collaborate on research... because essentially his company is too busy patenting shit to actually get any research done.

Privatization generates no additional research that you can trust. When you transfer research burdens to private companies the total research goes down because each company knows that they could make more money squeezing blood from whatever stones they have right now - and since the people who call the shots can always just pull their money out and go elsewhere the long-term viability of any company is not needed.

---

Fundamentally, there is absolutely no reason to believe that your analysis is correct. There is no evidence that more egalitarian societies reward those who contribute to the public good less. There is no reason to believe that providing shelter, education, and food to more people creates less philosophers and scientists. There is no historical precedence for people who are working for the public good to be less loyal than those whose only incentive is monetary.

In short: your theory is interesting, but rather obviously factually incorrect.

-Username17

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1169503367[/unixtime]]
Fundamentally, there is absolutely no reason to believe that your analysis is correct. There is no evidence that more egalitarian societies reward those who contribute to the public good less. There is no reason to believe that providing shelter, education, and food to more people creates less philosophers and scientists. There is no historical precedence for people who are working for the public good to be less loyal than those whose only incentive is monetary.

Well I think it's basic human nature.

Sure, you will have people who research stuff just for purely scientific value, but you also have people who have a need to be better than others. Some may want fame, some may just want exorbitantly expensive goods and a mansion. It's basic human nature to want to get ahead. It's basically part of who we are. We naturally compete for everything. Women, jobs, fame, glory, whatever. But competition needs some kind of prizes, otherwise people may just stop competing.

I mean look at it this way. Imagine you'd get the same job and pay regardless of whether you studied hard in college or slacked off. Is there really any incentive for you to work your ass off? Some people might have a rigid work ethic that makes them still work, but a great percentage of people are going to say,"screw it, I'm partying every night." Because that's just human nature. Rewards and consequences are good. Remove those and the majority of the population stops caring if they do a good job or not. If the sales clerk and the doctor both make the same wage, why would anyone want to waste all that time studying to be a doctor when they can go become a salesman with a high school education?

Most people really don't want to work. They work because it puts food on the table. If you offer them a way to earn more money and possibly retire earlier or enjoy more perks, like vacations, they may take it. If you reward their hard work with the same crappy salary you're offering high school drop outs, then they'll feel under appreciated and probably leave your equal country for a place that actually rewards people with talent.

Socialism is awesome if you're at the bottom of the ladder, but totally sucks if you're skilled at what you do.

Look, people get rewarded whether they screw off or not.

Really.

Do people get paid based upon their work at school?

...Not really. There's a minor connection of pay to schooling; but there's a higher corrolation between your schooling and your parent's pay. There's an even strong corrolation between your pay and your parent's pay.

Those who earn the top 1% work the least hours.

Look, the amount of hard work you put in have less impact in your total lifetime earnings than who your parents were, what clubs you were in during school, and who you know during your productive years.

So...

...Why work hard?

-Crissa

RC wrote:Well I think it's basic human nature.

That's wonderful. But you do realize that you're just talking out of... nothing, right? You've got no facts, no figures, no historical precedent. It just "makes snse" to you that if things were done a different way that things wouldn't work as well.

And you're wrong.

Now, truth be told the thing you're talking about is probably a real effect, it just doesn't matter. Let's say for the sake of argument that making things more egalitarian really does demotivate some people to succeed. Maybe that really causes some science, some achievments to not get made that might have been otherwise.

But on the other side, a more egalitarian society allows people who would otherwise be stuck working to feed themselves in a hand-to-mouth existence down in the coal mines to go to school and learn about physics and possibly contribute to the study of chemistry. This is known to be a real effect, we can watch it happen, it's measurable.

And the fact is that the second effect, the one where absolutely more people can be researchers is a much bigger effect than the first one where maybe less people want to be.

Real historical data tells us that a more egalitarian society takes us from scythes to sattelites in 40 years. Real historical data tells us that a more stratified society can prevent the disclosure of Mendel's Genetics for 40 years.

I don't know how you'd measure the "common sense of Random Casualty" where people who are guaranteed a meal and a roof might just decide to not contemplate the great questions of the universe - but I know damn well that the other effect, the one where the more stark the economic disparity exists the less people have opportunities to succeed and explore, is much larger than what you're talking about could possibly be.

-Username17

I'd point out that the only reason that Soviet Russia accomplished all that is because Stalin starved off it's populace in his zeal to industrialize. Yeah, if you pull all the peasants off the farms and stick them in factories, production will go up. Everyone will starve to death, but more guns will be produced. Great system. Real wonderful. I'll stick with capitalism, thanks.

Now, I won't deny that removing unfair restrictions on the common people leads to progress. However, I don't see capitalism as an unfair system. Some have money, some do not. But the people who have money earned it (or their parents did, etc...), and as such the people who don't have money have no claims on the proceeds of those who do. And I have grave reservations about anyone who would set themselves up as arbiter over who should be robbed and who rewarded.

There is unfairness in the current system, true. This is not an artifact of capitalism, it's an artifact of statism. You have corrupt politicians with limitless power, 'eminent domain' to steal property from the poor for the benefit of those who bribe the government, numerous freedoms lost in the name of 'security', and a god-awful complex taxation system in which 50% of the population pays 96% of the taxes. None of this has anything to do with capitalism; it has to do with political corruption in the high places and a steady erosion of constitutional rights; things solved by political reform, not economic reform. Capitalism is an excellent system, when it's not hampered by government; left alone, it ensures progress (refer to the Industrial Revolution if you disagree).

Endovior at [unixtime wrote:1169873126[/unixtime]]

There is unfairness in the current system, true. This is not an artifact of capitalism, it's an artifact of statism. You have corrupt politicians with limitless power, 'eminent domain' to steal property from the poor for the benefit of those who bribe the government, numerous freedoms lost in the name of 'security', and a god-awful complex taxation system in which 50% of the population pays 96% of the taxes. None of this has anything to do with capitalism; it has to do with political corruption in the high places and a steady erosion of constitutional rights; things solved by political reform, not economic reform. Capitalism is an excellent system, when it's not hampered by government; left alone, it ensures progress (refer to the Industrial Revolution if you disagree).

Wow. You have no idea what you are talking about. Previous to about 1935 (when the government started to regulate industry significantly for the first time) there were depressions about every 20 years. This was because capitalism is a horrible system that, left to its own devices, will polarize wealth to a hideous degree, so that a tiny minority have all the money, power, and resources. The Industrial Revolution was the worst time in American history for the average person.

As the the rest, of course 50% of the population pays 96% of the taxes. They also own pretty much everything. They disproportionally benefit from the rule of law, and government programs. The fact they aren't paying 100% of the taxes is what is odd.

Endovior wrote:I'd point out that the only reason that Soviet Russia accomplished all that is because Stalin starved off it's populace in his zeal to industrialize. Yeah, if you pull all the peasants off the farms and stick them in factories, production will go up. Everyone will starve to death, but more guns will be produced.

What part of "Life Expectency Increased" did you not understand?

Stalin killed a lot of people. A whole lot of people. And a lot of the people he killed were for no damn reason. I'm not going to defend that, because I don't like the guy, I don't support those policies, and I don't think that even helped. And yet, despite the large number of people shot, the people starved to death, the people deported to ice flows in Yakut... less people died over all.

People starve all the time. Some of them right here in the United States. And when Stalin took over, there was not enough food being made to feed everyone. When he was done, there was. Because the socialist distribution system and industrial production system are more efficient and produce more.

So the set up is so efficient that right through having a mad man in charge of the government who is busy having millions of lives sacrificed for political reasons - that the total deaths can nonetheless go down. Holy shit.

Life Expectency really is the last fvcking word here. If life expectency goes from 30 to 74, you're doing something right. Whatever else you're doing wrong - something is going amazingly right. In fact, the number of things you're doing wrong (expressed as earlier deaths) are outnumbered by the things you are doing right (expressed as later deaths).

So obviously there are lessons to be drawn there. There are things they did that we should be doing right now. I'm saying that we should have a planned economy, socialized healthcare, and a guaranteed distribution of minimal food and housing. The current administration agrees that we should take some ideas from the Soviet Union, but they want to institute distant prison camps for political opponents, political officers in charge of information distribution and public loyalty, increased executive powers, and judicial torture. That's just where we disagree I suppose.

I think that the lessons that the Bush administration appears to be taking from the USSR are actually the things that held it back, the things its successes were in spite of.

-Username17

I feel ignored here.

Does anyone else know that 1% of the good ol' US of A owns a majority of the GDP?

And the reason that 50% pay 96% of the taxes is because the other 50% don't make enough money to do more than feed themselves? (30% definitionally don't make enough to feed themselves, but do manage somehow.)

How about that the top 10% don't pay more taxes than the next 40%? How is that even balanced when they own most of the money in the country?

Capitalism requires that there be people starving, thrown away by the system. Requires that inefficiency.

-Crissa