RichardGibbons

I love this response. Just unabashedly shout it from the rooftops: "Your data is irrelevant! The world is black or white. My ideology is far too important to be refuted by something as banal as reality!" No? He just told you you have no data. He's the kid from The Emperor's New Clothes. That kid's brilliant btw :) No, he didn't. For future reference, here's what a response would look like if he were telling me I have no data: "You have no data." His response was essentially, "If you think free markets don't work for healthcare, you therefore believe that free markets don't work anywhere. How on earth can you believe that free markets don't work anywhere? It's ridiculous to believe governments should be in charge of buying cars for anyone." To anyone thoughtful, that argument is akin to, "If you think that potatoes are tasty, then you must believe that anything that comes out of the ground is tasty! I can't believe you're suggesting we eat rocks. Can you imagine how hard a time we'd have swimming, if we'd had nothing but rocks to eat for a week or two?"

I love this response. Just unabashedly shout it from the rooftops: "Your data is irrelevant! The world is black or white. My ideology is far too important to be refuted by something as banal as reality!"

Mark Carney gets it.... http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38210169 The stateless corporations issue is an interesting one. Outside of a world-wide government, I'm not sure how you deal with that.

My fault. You're right. Sorry about that, Cardboard.

I disagree slightly. Theon had a hard path, but made a the wrong decision out of pride, and that proved his downfall. Theon was raised by Ned. He had more than a decade to learn what it is to be a good person. He had the chance to throw off his dad's influence and his nation's culture. But Theon's pride, his unwillingness to simply be Rob's trusted advisor, enabled his family to bait him into reverting to Greyjoy norms. That's not to say that cutting yourself off from your birth family, your culture, and your birthright over a point of principle would be easy. Heck, all the Libertarians on this board believe fervently in their beliefs, yet none of them has yet moved to Mogadishu despite it being the closest thing on earth to the Libertarian ideal. I'm merely saying that a choice did exist for Theon, even if it was a nearly impossible choice for him to make. And yeah, Joffrey was a douche.

Good point. And to be fair, I did learn (or perhaps remember) a couple interesting things from the whole Theon thing. Even if you wish the worst upon a character, when the worst happens, you find out it isn't at all what you want. And, a character might seem completely irredeemable one moment, yet turn completely sympathetic the next.

Yeah, the scene is certainly disturbing, but to me, it does it without being disgusting. For me, a better adjective is horrifying. I still find it beautiful. I see it as brilliant for several reasons. First, it evokes this horror (or disgust in your case), through a simple conversation, not through graphic images or violence. This isn't The Godfather, or A Game of Thrones. All the heavy lifting on the horror (and disgust) happens in the viewer's head, not on the screen. Second, in a sense, the extreme environmentalist is kind of right, his arguments logical (not in the killing kid bit, but rather the argument that if you truly care about the environment, having a kid is about the worst thing you can do). You can follow the guy's logic, and it is extremely uncomfortable walking that path. Third, to me, the directing and cinematography is excellent and beautiful. Fourth, it's concise and elegant. They have 2 minutes to tell a story, and, starting from nothing, they're able to elicit an overwhelmingly strong emotional and intellectual reaction in that short time frame. Every word and every movement contributes to the whole. Fifth, the whipsaw in the viewers impression of the environmentalist is awesome. You go from this "seems like a fine friendly fellow, caring about the environment and his fellow humans" to "this guy is an complete psycho". And at the end, you almost wonder whether he's a normal guy, except for this really extreme perspective when it comes to this one issue. Finally, the scene lingers. It's so simple--just a couple people having a mostly normal conversation in a bus station--but the ideas and visceral reaction lingers in your head for a while. (Like I saw this 2-minute clip probably six months ago, but was the first thing I thought of when you said "extreme environmentalist".) All that said, I can understand why many people would get nothing out of this scene but disturbance and disgust. It's a deliberately challenging scene. Well, pretty well every Holocaust movie I've seen didn't have the elegance and thoughtfulness of this scene, though many have the horror. The only comparable thing I can think from that set of work was , and even that relied heavily on the weight of what came before. That said, I find the Holocaust atrocious and depressing, and I don't seek out documentaries on atrocities committed by humans on other human beings, so I haven't actually seen that many such films. Therefore, I'm not really qualified to come up with a list of beautiful moments in films about atrocities--I'm inclined to take your word that there's not that much beauty there.

That said, I shouldn't be too flippant. I did ask why anyone believed the rich wouldn't be killed, and you gave me an excellent explanation. I appreciate you explaining your own point of view of how the world works, since I sincerely didn't understand why anyone would believe that you can increase wealth inequality to extreme levels, and not expect the vast majority to react in dramatic--and eventually violent--ways. Now I think I understand your point of view. Thanks.

LOL!

It's even worse than that--I also watch Game of Thrones. In that, there's a guy who repeatedly rapes his own barely pubescent daughters & granddaughters and, when they become pregnant by him, sacrifices the newborn boys. That's got to be an even stronger sign of my derangement, I think. (That said, I'm not a fan of anything in the last few seasons related to Theon/Reek. That storyline zoomed right past the point of thought-provoking entertainment to stop squarely in the middle of pornographic sadism, I think. Joffrey was about as far as they needed to take that kind of character. They didn't need Joffrey-squared in vivid high-definition.)

Umm, Syria? Lebanon? Iran?

Ah, I see. So nothing in the 21st century. Or 20th. Or 19th. Or 18th. Or 17th. Or 16th. Or 15th. You do have one from the 14th, though that one that was plagued by successive massive civil wars. Hmm.... I see where you're coming from.

Good response, Al--it's nice to see a thoughtful conservative comment on this topic.

You mean like North Korea, Iraq under Hussein, Saudi Arabia? I've read some history. From what I recall, there were quite a few states over quite a big time period. Maybe even more than I can count on fingers and toes. So can you help me out a bit, since it's so obvious to you, and you're clearly so well read? Which state do you consider stable, with big inequality, that you consider the best role model to compare your nirvana to?

Don't be short with Cardboard, DooDiligence. I actually enjoy this reasoning. It's kind of like, "I don't understand why you're annoyed that I drugged you so I could extract one of your kidneys to sell on the black market. I'll give you half the profit--that's money in your hand, today! People can live for years on one kidney, and besides, if I had extracted both, you'd be far more likely to die."

Just out of curiosity, why do you think this will save the wealthy from the poor people with guns? Or is it kind of like, those who pay taxes can choose for those taxes to go toward locking up or digging graves for any poor people who are upset that a tiny fraction of the population controls everything?

I enjoy it. Not as much as Black Mirror, but that's a high bar. Nevertheless, be warned, Utopia is frequently graphically violent (not in a deliberately gratuitous way, but rather because it depicts extreme characters and extreme circumstances, and when those things combine, violence is frequently the only way the story can possibly play out.)

Correct, but for a couple minor changes, in bold:

When I see this phrase, I think of this scene from Utopia. This 2 minute scene--so beautiful in such an unusual way--was enough to persuade me to watch the entire show. :)

I think it's pretty reasonable if you are over the age of 50, and either don't have kids, or don't really care about them or anyone else on the planet. Why does it matter to you if you'll likely be dead by the time that billions start perishing as a consequence of global warming? Money today is what matters, not the survival of future generations. (Besides, it gives you a really nice answer to the Fermi Paradox.)

FWIW, Canada already has this system, essentially. The obvious downside for the USA is it removes one degree of checks and balances. RE: "vote based on the leader's stated positions". It would be interesting seeing how this would work in practice, certainly better than disenfranchising all the poor people. (Why the heck don't the rich understand that if you constantly and persistently abuse all the poor people, they will shoot you. Like, dead. Is it really that hard a concept to understand? Do they really have this intense desire to replicate the French and English Revolutions? Those things don't end up well for anyone.) It would be very nice if there were some way to this sort of "stated position" vote as an adaptive test, so each question refine which candidate best represented people's positions. I think both Republicans and Democrats would be horrified by the outcome (because their stated positions probably wouldn't actually be popular enough to win elections), but it would certainly be an interesting experiment to try. One interesting result might be that you could get, for instance, an anti-spending party aligned with progressive social values. Of course, the biggest challenge here, like any polling, would be figuring out the questions. It's clear from numerous referendums that, when it comes to politics, politicians will deliberately chose confusing questions in cases where, with a clear question, the electorate would be likely to vote against the politicians' desires. So, there would have to be a good way to ensure that the questions actually made sense to a normal person.

This is outcome-oriented thinking that I strongly recommend against. Don't think of fire insurance as a waste of money, even if your house didn't burn down.

The average apartment price (not my preferred statistic, but it's hard to find median price) is $562K. The median household income is around $76K, so that makes a 7.4 times multiple. I'd guess an average 2-bedroom apartment would rent for around $2000/mo. So if you assume the average apartment is the average 2 bedroom (which I imagine it's not), you're getting a 4.3% unlevered return on a rental, before you factor in taxes, depreciation, and special assessments. In 2002, that average apartment was sub $200K. It first broke $400K in 2007, and a year ago was just under $500K.

The interesting thing about IP is that it's a total fiction, a very weak artificial monopoly, and China's really shown that. I think there's substantial value in protecting IP, but I also think if US went too hard placing a too high a value on IP during trade negotiations, they'd find everyone abandoning that fiction pretty quickly, resulting in trade wars that would be bad for everyone. Re: "we no longer need allies to fight the communists": Most of the west is allies with US, and therefore they don't need a huge military. If they are no longer allies, I wouldn't expect them to continue to have a small military, and it would be foolish to expect USA to get better treatment at that point. It isn't that long since Germany, Italy, and Japan took over much of the world. Encouraging everyone to massively increase their military to sizes where they become a real threat to the USA, and encouraging them to ally instead with Russia and China seems like a really stupid strategy.

For the same reason you pay for people who don't exercise enough, eat too much, drive poorly, don't go for periodic preventative check-ups, smoke, drink alcohol or coke, ski, box, canoe, eat bacon, play football, hike, collect garbage, donate blood, work as a nurse, doctor, or other hospital worker, work in mines and other heavy industry.... In both the US and Canada, because it is essentially an insurance model, everyone pays for the negative decisions of everyone. The fact that some people like to have sex with different people get checked for STDs doesn't seem that different than me eating bacon and needing to get cholesterol checked occasionally. Also the bigger issue to me is what that "abuse" costs, and it's a bit silly for us to argue about it without a good understanding of the costs. My SWAG would that there's about 10 million people between the ages of 20 and 40. Say 5% of those swap partners a lot, and of those, 10% go to the doctor quarterly to get tested at a cost of $100. Then the total cost would be $20M, which doesn't seem like that bad a deal. Isn't a heart attack from eating too much bacon running in the tens of thousands? You don't need many of those to exceed $20M. (I imagine AIDS is pretty expensive to treat too, though.) They also pay for round-the-clock security for the Prime Minister, because we think it's a good idea to keep him not dead and functioning effectively. If you're going to suggest "not fair" examples, it would be much more persuasive if it weren't the leader of the entire country. (Like say, his wife and kids, who would also probably jump the queue. That would be an awesome political controversy. :) ) That said, my goal would never be total fairness. Naively striving for absolute fairness is pointless--we need to be practical, not live in fairy tales. My goal is to reduce the effects of luck in life, so the people who work the hardest have the best possible chance to get ahead.