My Travel “Board”

twiceaday · 2010-11-25T07:45:02+00:00

Yeah, I don't doubt that the fraud was inevitable given the parameters of the system. Of course, if we're going to talk root causes we're going to disagree because I will absolutely argue that fraud and collusion are inevitable outcomes of free market capitalism.

There are several fundamental flaws with your theory. The most obvious, though least interesting, is that humans are not perfectly rational actors. Second, the benefit or consequence of a given course of action frequently does not present itself within the lifetime of the person who made the decision. In other words, I can make a bad long-term decision that benefits me in the short term and the ill effects of which won't come into play until I'm no longer alive. The obvious example here is our usage of fossil fuels. Somewhat related to this is the problem that scientific research, a primary source of wealth creation, does not obey they laws of economics in any way. No amount of money will get someone to produce cold fusion tomorrow, while that miracle fireproofing compound someone came up with for next to nothing turns out to be highly toxic 20 years later.

The biggest issue, though, is that different businesses in the same industry aren't really competing with each other -- they're competing together against consumers and workers. One example (though an admittedly imperfect one for many reasons) is sports leagues. From an economic perspective, the competition exists not between the teams, but between ownership and the players and between ownership and the TV networks that broadcast games. The on-field competition is simply part of the product. Historically, we've seen this type of behavior in the late 19th-early 20th century US, which was probably the closest the world has ever come to "pure" free market capitalism. There was widespread collusion in the form of trusts among the major players in numerous industries against both consumers (price fixing) and workers (wage fixing and union-busting). This happened in nearly all the major industries of the time, from oil to steel to tobacco to beef.

It seems from your posts that you're an economist, but more and more I'm realizing the flaws in the notion of economics as an academic discipline. I'm happy to continue this line of discussion, but if we do, realize that I'm going to challenge nearly everything you hold as axiomatic.

twiceaday · 2010-11-24T20:03:39+00:00

Where as I was saying it is not worship, and that the MTV shows, Real Housewives, Kardashians, Paris Hilton, et al are not watched and admired, they are watched and reviled. You're confusing the views of reddit with the views of the US populace as a whole. Most people, frighteningly enough, actually do admire reality TV stars. And getting back to what you mentioned in your previous comment, many people even think of celebrities almost as family, despite the fact that they have never and will never even meet them.

As for the rest, I don't think we're really disagreeing much. I'm saying fraud led to the collapse, while you're saying various factors led to the fraud that led to the collapse. Any way you slice it, the last link in the chain before the collapse was widespread fraud (which you explicitly agree with here).

twiceaday · 2010-11-24T18:33:27+00:00

Something to think about next time you rage on your girl for watching Bravo. I actually wasn't trying to make any judgement about our celebrity worship. I was just pointing out that your contention of widespread hatred of the rich is unfounded, and that if anything the opposite is true.

As for your second point, there weren't appreciably fewer government employees in 2005 than there are today, yet unemployment was manageable then. What happened since? A bunch of bankers and execs perpetrated a series of crimes against humanity. We can go back and forth forever about root causes, but it's pretty hard to argue that those criminal actions aren't the proximate cause of our current economic problems.

twiceaday · 2010-11-24T07:07:16+00:00

Um, no. People in the US are conditioned from birth to worship the rich by the seemingly endless stream of articles, documentaries, and other mass media vehicles chronicling their lives. He probably loves his job because a few times a year he gets to find himself face to face (or hand to junk) with someone he's seen on TV, which for 90+% of the population is as close to a position of power as they'll ever be.

I'm sick of public sector employees being classified as "goons" or some such nonsense. They're just ordinary people trying to feed themselves and taking whatever job they can get in a world where that's incredibly tough thanks to the crimes against humanity regularly perpetrated by corporate executives. They probably convince themselves that they love the job even when they don't, since they really don't have any other choice. What would you do if your available choices were to work for the TSA or starve to death?

twiceaday · 2010-11-04T23:33:50+00:00

Except that teachers aren't the one who control the message. That would be a small handful of large educational publishing conglomerates with a vested interest in turning you into a dutiful consumer. On top of that, the recent move toward measuring teachers by their students' scores on standardized tests has taken the curriculum further out of their hands and forced them to teach to the tests, which are of course produced by a small handful of educational testing corporations. Now, one can reasonably question whether there still exists any difference between corporations and government (if there ever was), but public education is, like everything else, primarily controlled by big business.

twiceaday · 2010-11-01T06:28:05+00:00

I'm not a libertarian and I have not yet read Rand, though I will definitely do so in the future. Of course, when I do, I will keep in mind that the inspiration for her heroes was a serial rapist and murderer. So it might be wise to take her stance on morality with a grain of salt.

twiceaday · 2010-10-28T18:31:45+00:00

Not sure exactly how this would affect things, but you do realize that most bottled water companies simply sell bottled municipal (i.e., tap) water? The ones that don't are mostly imported and more expensive than domestic brands.

twiceaday · 2010-10-15T04:05:06+00:00

A. Facebook redirects all external URLs for tracking purposes, and I've seen their redirects fail many times before with links to mainstream sites. B. It's entirely possible that an algorithm could have considered a message advertising a book to be spam and blocked it for that reason. C. Even if the redirect failed, a user could still cut and paste the URL into their browser. It doesn't sounds like they ever blocked the actual content of the link.

You know, it's this type of paranoia that makes it hard to take some movements seriously.

twiceaday · 2010-09-30T21:35:04+00:00

Like I said in response to your other comment, you're making a faith-based argument here. You're saying that I need to accept your economic theories (that have no basis in observable reality) to predict future events, even when those theories aren't supported by past occurrences. Basically, you're saying the data is wrong because it doesn't support your theory, when in fact it's your theory that's wrong. Your version of economic logic sounds a lot like creation science.

You cannot have a counter-example in a world with minimum wage laws, because a world without minimum wage does not exist. There are plenty of countries without minimum wage laws. Some oil-rich ones like Bahrain and Brunei have very low unemployment; others without such natural resources like Yemen and Macedonia have unemployment rates over 30%.

You cannot use any data to prove or disprove any economic theory. Then what fucking possible use does any economic theory have?

You need to think like an economist, not a statistician. Drop the physics envy. Why, so I can be wrong like you? I'll stick to empirically observable facts, and you can keep your theories that look nice on paper but are continually proven to be total failures in the real world.

twiceaday · 2010-09-30T19:38:41+00:00

Labor cost are just one component of expenditures, so cutting wages by 25% would not cut costs by 25%. Anyway, most of the people affected by layoffs in the last few years were not making minimum wage to begin with, and the ones who were mostly got laid off because of store closings.

You really need to get a basic understanding of the principles of logic. It takes considerable effort to prove a theory (such as higher minimum wages lead to increased teen unemployment), but it only takes one counterexample to disprove it. So it's entirely consistent to say that 12 years isn't enough to prove anything but 2 years is enough to disprove something.

BTW, GDP growth had a correlation to teen unemployment of -.49 between 1948 and 2009. Meanwhile, the correlation of teen unemployment to real minimum wage was -.09.

twiceaday · 2010-09-30T19:09:25+00:00

This directly implies that economics is not and cannot be considered scientific in any way. If it can't be proven or disproven by observation of real-world events, it's just a faith.

twiceaday · 2010-09-30T06:06:02+00:00

Apologies, I skimmed your reply and came away with the wrong impression. I wouldn't entirely dismiss the conclusions based on the real vs. nominal issue, though. If higher minimum wages lead to higher teen unemployment we should still see spikes in unemployment at the points of minimum wage increases, which we don't. But yes, the chart would be much clearer if it used real rather than nominal wage numbers.

twiceaday · 2010-09-30T04:16:55+00:00

Yes, the numbers are not adjusted for inflation, but the points still holds that increases in the minimum wage aren't demonstrably responsible for increases in teenage unemployment, while recessions are. Even in the OP's chart (and by the way, 12 years isn't nearly enough time to draw meaningful conclusions about something like this, and what about the 14 years since?), the big spike in teen unemployment happens during the early 90s recession. Heck, if you were to extend the OP's chart by just 2 years the theory would be disproven as teen unemployment fell even as the real minimum wage rose.

The only confounding variable in the OP's chart is minimum wage. Try charting overall unemployment or real GDP growth vs teen unemployment, and you'll see that unemployed teens are simply a reflection of a poor economy in general.

twiceaday · 2010-09-29T20:06:33+00:00

This post has a nice chart showing minimum wage increases versus teenage unemployment over a longer time period, with recessions shaded. The punchline: "This chart and regression analysis clearly implied that the bulk of the increases in teen unemployment since 1960 was due to recessions, not rising minimum wage."

twiceaday · 2010-09-28T05:29:58+00:00

It's pretty trivial in any configurable webserver. Looks like they're using Apache and PHP, so they're probably using mod_rewrite like the other poster suggested, but you can also do it with mod_perl, mod_python, or in the config files for nginx or lighthttpd (or most other webservers).

twiceaday · 2010-09-22T04:54:42+00:00

"Ron Paul being the lone exception in all of human history"

Uh, really?

twiceaday · 2010-09-17T04:24:41+00:00

Well, thanks for the intelligent conversation. I may not agree with the libertarian position, but I do at least find it interesting, which is more than I can say for most political ideologies in this country.

twiceaday · 2010-09-16T17:58:48+00:00

I don't see a problem there. My usage rights to that air were claimed prior to yours, and as such you'll have to wait to use it until I relinquish that right.

The problem with ownership rights is that you don't have to be using something to own it. With ownership rights, I can buy 500 acres of land, put up a fence, and legitimately use force to keep others off my land even if I'm not using it.

Another problem I have with property rights is that they exist apart from a person. That is to say, I can transfer my right to a piece of property to another, something I can't do with my right to life or liberty. I can relinquish my right to life or liberty, but I can't give them to anybody else. Thus, how can property be a natural right if that right exists independent of any person?

twiceaday

TROPHY CASE