The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

Thing is you're probably somewhat convinced that your own views are good and right. You might even think your own views are good and right for the whole world, that they'll do justice to everyone. Based on that you can come to the conclusion that you just wish for some strong leader to push through those "right" views and concepts, since you consider them to be absolutely just after all. Democracy in that moment may seem like an annoying thing that just stops the right things from happening.

Obviously that's all until the dictatorship starts to realize they can now do whatever they want and turn on you. But then it's too late.

Well, the idea is more about how best can resources be allocated efficiently and fairly. How do we discover the true value of a person's contribution to society and reward accordingly so that people have good information to decide what they do with their time and resource. If I'm getting paid really little, then I'll look for new ways to provide more value that people want to buy. So the competitive free markets are just operating as dynamic price discovery mechanisms to allow that kind of stuff.

With the example of a sudden labour supply glut willing to work for low wage, a few concurrent things start happening in a market correction.

1. It becomes more profitable to create and operate a restaurant than doing something else. The resulting price signal gets people making more restaurants instead of doing other things. Demand for labour inputs increase, labour supply becomes more scarce, and wages rise up again to some stable equilibrium point where profit margins are in line with overall risk and reward compared with other possible economic pursuits.
2. Those restaurant workers may start trying to up-skill or re-skill into other industries with higher paying jobs, reducing surplus. Especially if the current wage is below their desired standard of living.
   
3. If a restaurant underpays, exploits, or treats their employees badly, those workers can just leave for competing restaurants willing to pay higher and treat them better. There's market incentive to compete for supply of inputs.

Places like Hong Kong and post ww2 Germany are truly amazing examples of what can be achieved in short periods of time when people are able to freely self organise their economic resources. Comparing Germany and Britain post ww2 has always been one of my favourite examples - protectionist Britain suffered while free market Germany bloomed.

What tends to happen when government starts doing genuinely well intended lefty stuff like minimum wage, regulations, price controls etc. is price signal distortion. The insidious part being that the real costs of inefficient resource allocation are usually hidden in the form of opportunity costs. Giving you 4 cookies instead of 5 is less apparent a problem than giving you 5 cookies and then visibly taking 1 away.

Lefty market 'fixing' stuff generally stems from a misunderstanding of wealth as infinite paper money instead of the efficient organisation of current ammounts of finite capital and labour resources.

I'm the opposite. Left libertarianism confuses me a lot!

My understanding of libertarianism is that it stems from the kernel of self ownership. Everything else derives from that like property rights, immorality of aggression/coercion, one's freedom ending where another person's freedom begin, and voluntarism. So any entity that uses coercion is antithetical to Libertarian principles.

Left-libertarianism forces individuals to meet some pre-ordained social value that isn't derived from voluntary association. Then it tries to enforce it using compulsory taxation or threat of violence. It's not so much the ends but the means that worry me like trying to mix oil and water. It's a rather puzzling interpretation of self ownership and someone will have to better explain it to me because it seems inherently self-contradictory.

A right libertarian says: I don't presume to know what everyone should value, nor should any value be imposed because that infringes on another person's liberty. Instead, the activity of many underlying voluntary actions will necessarily produce a social good by definition, whatever it may be.

For example a sexist employer pays heavy competitive costs in the free market for exercising their prejudice. Bias against a talented female worker based on gender means she'll just go to a competitor who doesn't. Same with new female workers willing to compete for jobs by offering to work for less. Interestingly, when government gets into price controls with some kind of equal pay law, the sexist employer no longer gets competitively penalized for only hiring men because his competitors cannot hire the less experienced female workers who were otherwise willing to work for lower competitive wages. Well intended policy instituted through coercion usually always turns out with really perverse unintended results.

@stuart98
I'm not sure it's good to judge an idea by its lack of precedence (women's suffrage is a good example). Pragmatically, most libertarians trend towards limited government tasked solely with protecting property rights, enforcing contracts, preventing externalities, and preventing the use of force by others. Basically, government only holds the ladder steady so everyone can climb up it.

I think you might be thinking of the anarcho-libertarians who argue for even the privatisation of governmental force. The argument for private armies hasn't won me over though... yet .

/sorry for long post, i'm in a phase where i love thinking about this stuff.

ugh

that's not at all how it works. that's not how any of this work!

why would an imposition of leveling out the playing field only affect anything BUT the sexist negatively??

how'd you manage to paint him as a victim WHEN sexist??? and somehow we ignore the changes in him when the change comes along in favor of tunel-visioning on POOR POOR egalitarian employers who will be left with only men....... WHAT???

so there's so much less working women then men that there's a staggering shortage of them? are there even anything other than an equal number of working men and women? of qualified women and men?


your reasoning is oriented towards a bias : a belif making you state an unlikely outcome as the likely one.

I don't know why you chose this as your metaphor when it clearly doesn't go all the way to illustrating your point and so many other easier topics could have worked out of the box.

I'm just pointing all this out because on top of the rest of this drivel, it's gotten to a distasteful point.

I guess the worry is that the market just won't work out that "nicely" the completely unregulated market is seen kinda like natural evolution: Pretty brutal survival of the fittest. Many of the really poor might simply be so far behind that they can neither "open their restaurant" or "increase their skills" because they are busy working 80 hour weeks at a wage of 1$ dollar per hour to be able to eat and maybe not sleep under bridges.
If you have nothing except your unskilled workpower you're in a really bad spot and the competitive free market will not work in your favor. It'll crush you instead. The market itself becomes a very authoritive force that pushes you to do things that suck for you, but are the only available option that'll keep you at least alive.

The core idea of left liberterians is that to prevent that you need to provide a base line of support guaranteed for everybody. So you get time to not only work to pay your bills but also to improve on yourself to stay somewhat competitive in the market.
You can't provide people with freedom if the market pushes them around without a savety net.

EDIT:
Random extra thought: In the future more and more work will be done by computers, robotics gets better and better, etc. pp. It's quite possible that it's not that far away that even decently educated people will flat out lose a skill-comparison vs an off the shell machine. A machine that works 24 hours a day and never complains about low wages ever again.
Thus more and more people will be in a bad spot in a free market.

Mistaking the consequence as the cause, essentially.

It's not how it works in reality. The market as you describe would oversaturate, cut costs. Wages fall. As the surplus dies off, it takes collateral damage with it. In a new, post-correction market, wages stay low while profits increase due to increasing demands. The first to raise wages would be in a negative competitive position (more costs for same income).

The system doesn't work as neat as you say you will. Of course, everything has tradeoffs and it's a matter of whether you think those trade-offs are worth it. But suggesting that Libertarianism will lead to a perfectly self-regulating market is a pipedream.


By the way: a regulated market trades stability for inertia. a non-regulated market trades flexibility for safety. A post-war economy would be in dire need of flexibility to adjust to it's new reality. Not that regulation can't do the same thing, but it would require proper regulation, and well economy is a difficult thing to predict.

@cola_colin
Well if people are smart enough to know what to do as government, then they should be smart enough to act as entrepreneurs and 'fix' it within the market system. Market's definitely aren't perfect since we aren't perfect. It's more about choosing between the better of two imperfect systems. A market place of ideas where the best idea wins, or a corruptible error prone method that needs to be enforced with violence.

Markets don't act through coercion - they're just a bunch of possible choices for interacting with others. A person's freedom ends where another person's freedom begins. If I don't like what is being offered or the price it is being offered at, I can make it myself or spend my time doing something else .

Thanks for that explanation of left-libertarianism. Makes more sense but still seems contradictory like someone calling themselves a 'free slave'. The point of difference seems to be that people deserve things from others. Seems wrong for me to say I deserve x% of someone else's time and hard work. Taking someone's property at the barrel of a gun expands my freedom, but it's still a violation of someone else's (assuming they created their property without stealing from me).

Concept of minimum standard of living sounds nice but seems problematic to me. The arbitrarily defined standard of living 100 years ago was very different from today, as it will be different in another 100 years. Perspectives tend to get warped by the very free market system that brings about wealth and resource prosperity.

This isn't to say giving to the poor shouldn't be encouraged. I found it interesting to learn that the age of 19th century 'robber barons' actually saw one of the greatest outpourings of philanthropy. It's only the compulsory 'charity' that rubs me the wrong way with it's assumption that unrelated individuals are responsible for the action or inaction of others. Society can't function if that principle of universal responsibility is applied consistently.

'Magic' machine thought experiments are so awesome - I think they are actually good arguments for free markets. For example, clear price signals may incentivise me to make a machine that drastically reduces the cost of producing cars. Yes this causes car workers to become uncompetitive and they will be out of work, but the question is what is best for society as a whole. Is it better for everyone to forgo the benefit of e.g. $500 cars in order to shoulder the burden of car workers who want protection from temporary hardship? That's a lot of work people don't need to do in order to trade for a car.

In a more real world example, consider how agricultural innovations allow us to live as we do where only a small percentage of the population works to produce food. Historically, the vast majority of us like 90%+ would have been out in the fields. Those initially displaced farmers suffered temporarily, but when I look at what we have today in the developed world, I find what they ended up achieving with all the free time they had not farming.

I'd hardly call it distasteful. He laid out his thoughts in a clear and concise manner.

Yes true, it's more complex when you don't hold demand constant. That was a simplification on my part.

Bottom line though is you want an efficient allocation of resources. The value of something is best judged by a customer. There is no better way to deal with supply shocks.

The great depression is a good example of regulated markets causing great harm. Started because the fed didn't do anything to alleviate a contracting money supply under the gold system. Unemployment was actually showing a recovery under a free market system 8 months after the crash from 9% to 6% unemployment.

Then Hoover intervened with tariffs on imports and unemployment went up into huge double digits for the next decade. Surely if you protect the jobs of the American industries, that keeps the American economy healthy doesn't it? Nope.

FDR's new deal regulations came in with price controls, quotas, subsidies, tariffs, labour restrictions, farmers paid to destroy food etc. lots of crazy stuff that artificially restricted supply and it just continued going to hell.

***
@tatsujb
Sorry i may not have explained it right. Uncle Milty explains it a lot better than me, i think it's quite persuasive.

@elodea I'm sorry I cannot give this man ANY credit. his entire argument hinges on the idea (or should I say ideal...) that women are better/stronger at certain jobs then men (let's leave the versa out. that in and of itself is the sick root of the weed we're pulling at and if you can't see it then we've got a problem)

He's a dude raised in a generation that couldn't understand our own and vice versa and we for the most part aren't even able to tell because of prisms : https://forums.uberent.com/threads/the-murrica-politics-thread.70907/page-34#post-1128038

He can rationalize alot of his beliefs based on the "scientific" "knowledge" of the time. just as we rationalize alot of our own beliefs based on things that we don't know yet to be lies. but our whole knowledge base has drastically shifted as has our mindsets.

(let's put this aside for abit : despite all this he shuts down the possibility of things happening any other way than his random theory crafting based on his own disbelief. that's as credible as the's next guy's word. why's he special? there's no evidence at all here. We can shut down a big part of his claims with as simple a retort as : "History". well yeah we done did gave it a partial shot; go look at the results compared to his claims. Mr. ~1962 (that's the date around which I place that video) was wrong about 2016's shortcomings due to it's dire choices in near absolute defiance of his worst-case scenario)

Let's not leave that out . It's important not to hold reality hostage to ideology - that's what religion does. You gotta start moving beyond just comedy central as your primary source of information man.

Humour is really great at reframing a person's mind. Could be for good reasons like relieving stress, picking up chicks, defusing situations, getting people to consider new ideas. Or it could be for bad reasons like Pavlovian conditioning to associate good emotional feelings with certain ideas and bad emotional feelings with other ideas.

#freetatsufrompropaganda

Let's try some logic statements:
Premise A: Differences between two objects give rise to different advantages and disadvantages when they are applied to the same task.
Premise B: A long screwdriver is physically different from a short screwdriver
Conclusion: Long screwdrivers and short screwdrivers have different advantages and disadvantages when they are applied to the same task.

Premise A: Differences between two objects give rise to different advantages and disadvantages when they are applied to the same task.
Premise B: A man is physically and mentally different from a woman
Conclusion: Men and women have different advantages and disadvantages when they are applied to the same task.

Let's evaluate Premise B with quick google searching

Men staggeringly stronger than women. MMA is divided into genders for a reason.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhanes/nhanes2011-2012/overview_g.htm


99% of on-site construction workers are men
https://www.ucatt.org.uk/women-construction

Men are taller than women
http://genderedinnovations.stanford.edu/methods/sex.html

Men have different intelligence distributions than women. Men are more dumb and more smart, women cluster more to a mean.
http://personal.lse.ac.uk/kanazawa/pdfs/PAID2011.pdf

Men have more grey matter (information processing), women have more white matter (connectivity and networking)
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050121100142.htm

Women dominate people related jobs. In the US,
90% Nursing.
80% teaching and social work.
70% counselling, HR, tax, psychologists.
60% accounting (this one i can vouch for personally)
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/pink-collar-jobs-dominated-by-women-2015-2

Men have more spatial intelligence e.g. better hand eye co-ordination
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081217124430.htm

Men are better at mathematical reasoning, women are better at verbal reasoning
http://web.stanford.edu/~niederle/NV.JEP.pdf

SAT scores continue showing mathematical, verbal, written differences between genders across all racial groups
https://www.aei.org/publication/201...gh-school-boys-are-better-at-math-than-girls/

15% of engineers are women
https://www.asme.org/career-educati...e-students/engineering-still-needs-more-women

Men more likely to occupy higher IQ spaces by 2:1. IQ may not necessarily mean general intelligence, but it shows there are specific mental differences depending on whatever IQ is testing for.
http://www.us.mensa.org/learn/about/demographics/

*insert more here*

rekt

I can't help but feel that is because a very deep prejudice that our society keeps carrying around. When little boy are told you're "good at math" and girls are told "you're good at languages" and then the kids proceed to fall victim to a self fulfilling prophecy. Young children especially are really easy to influence like that.
And then they grow up, boys good at math, girls good at languages and conclude: Yep it's true. I'll tell my children that and get them toys that match their strengths as well to help them develop their strengths.

So I wonder how many studies may actually not research who is better at what, but who is prejudiced into a specific group based on studies just like that.

Now obviously there are some things that, over the average at least, men are biologically better at. Like being strong. But that's about the only thing I'd be somewhat sure about. And even there I know woman who definitely are much stronger than I am, so if you were to go and tell all little girls: "Girls are stronger than boys and are good at hard working tasks" and all boys: "Boys are not as strong as girls, but are really good at other stuff", you'd probably get a considerable change and someone might conclude that men are just not very strong compared to woman.

Pretty much this.

Just look at the prevalence of women in the STEM fields. If half the female stereotypes were true they should easily outcompete men. But they don't.

Why? Just walk into a toy store and you know. Girls: Pink, pink, pink. Dolls. Boys: large variety of toys, colors and themes. Despite the fact that boys play with dolls too, they just don't call em that.

A big part is simply motivation and expectation, or lack thereof. There are differences between men and women, but it's questionable how far this is genetic and how far this is cultural.

I'm sorry but that's rich coming from a FOXnews junkie.

You got in late on this thread but that alone doesn't justify thinking I'm a man standing only as tall as my comedy central references (I happen to have written a ratio near 99% text to YT links in this thread alone so...). ....I know saying all this is pointless since you already know and you were only saying this as a derogatory statement but since you put on a show of believing it to camouflage it I'm pretty much condemned to wasting 15% of my answer deflecting this.

I'm also saddened that this wasn't accompanied by you ignoring or denying the inherent sexism but rather embracing it.

The point of me saying we need to focus on the Women work > Men work ideal was not to divert from the Men work > Women work one.

BOTH are sexist. and they DO NOT annul one another.

I was taking it step by step because I though you might take the claims together as an opportunity to chant they're no longer sexist anymore and I had the intimate conviction that laying out that saying Women work > Men work is already sexist on it's own would make that crystal clear to you.

I'll admit I'm honestly shocked.

there is no difference between a man and a women's capabilities save the maternity leave. there's no job in first world countries that allow such a physical over-investment so as to justify the small physical strength and endurance gap that exists between men and women as a eventual indicator that men are better than women in a significant manner at jobs once meaned.

even if that where the case where, then, do you draw the opposite conclusion from? You yourself admit the paradigm fails if the two equations aren't even.

aside from that physical jobs are nowhere near enough of a percentage to tip the scales in the manner you claim :

so where else would these mutual offsets be coming from?

If the term "inferior" upsets you then in what way(s) are men overall "more competent" than women and in what way(s) are women more competent then men.

specifically. let's stop beating around the bush here. I've used more different types of screwdrivers to this day then you will in your lifetime.



all your stats point mostly to physical traits. the mental traits difference (that are indeed recognized differences I admit I'm not unaware of these) are incredibly uncorrelated with being able to carry out any job nor the proficiency at said jobs.

Math is reputably the most influential part of being an analyst/developer yet reputably in the high spheres of these jobs/talents women have always held a central role and that's despite being shunted out.

the ancestor to the computer (post the technology for it to exist) more importantly code was an endeavor partaken in and spearheaded by Ada Lovelace as a random tidbit. at the time women were still basically property.

Just imagine what we could have accomplished today without people back in the day and to this day defending sexism like you are.

just so we're clear on this. sexism isn't a bad word according to what you say. it's exactly defined by Milton Friedman's and your beliefs.

The belief that there is a inherent difference (be it meliorating or not) in women's competences is a stereotype :


you think I've got nothing backing my presence on a forum? that I couldn't handle this debate? how dare you insinuate that. You're on.

Yep! I think we are agreed that there are definitely more factors at work than just biology. It's just my perspective tends to shortcut through that by simply taking what's at hand and letting society do what it want on the cultural back end. I mean in the sense that if an employer is looking for an applied physicist, you don't really try and distinguish between nature and nurture looking at a candidates excellence. Biological difference -> cultural treatment difference -> different set of strengths and weaknesses

It's interesting though how women tend to dominate chemistry and biology, so it's not really some anti-stem indoctrination against women. I think there's a component that is related just to how women naturally choose in the same way that young girls prefer talking while young boys prefer sports and rough and tumble. It makes sense evolutionarily anyway if you are temporarily disabled for significant periods of time with a baby, you tend to favour co-operative survival strategies.

The strength thing i think is without a doubt. There's data that shows top level female athletes rank in the 25th percentile compared to just normal average men. And I remember another study that showed a pretty marked difference in gender strength at same weight classes (women have more body fat obviously). Kinda lazy atm to look up the sources again.

Testosterone is a helluva drug =D.

Sexy pictures of @xankar attached, peruse at your leisure






@xankar a few years ago


@xankar in his youthful prime


A current picture of @xankar

there is no choice influenced by biology.

what the hell is this bullshit.

Then explain twins who were separated early on in life and yet coincidentally choose similar... Everything? And does this mean you believe sexual attraction isn't biological? Ooh or gender identity?

You're opening a can o' worms here you might not want to @tatsujb

https://lornareiko.wordpress.com/20...o-were-separated-at-birth-what-are-they-like/

Edit: Saying all decisions are completely influenced by biology is of course crazy, but to pretend like it has zero factor at all? Crazy just so.

Statistical anomalies? Biological features of a person sure have a profound effect, but they're still only one factor among many.

Well of course. As I'd said in my post it's definitely not all that dictates your choices- but to say it has no impact is crazy.