The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

yes because it's so much healthier that 1% of the american population has like 60% of the total income of the countries population .... meanwhile 40% to 50% of the population have income far below to what they need to survive ... how very convincing


also weither or not the guy with one arm is worse than the guy with two arms means scrap when the former has as much a right to live than the latter

Nah, like i said peace treaties are unreliable constructs when it comes to Islam. Not only can they be easily rescinded at any time, but they never ever hold shariah law (god's law) hostage.

Peace treaties are only upheld when they are in the interest of the Islamic entity. Look up the islamic concept of taqiyya - concealing your faith as a matter of pragmatism and survival. After you gain power and no longer need a peace treaty to survive, then you over turn it as Mohammad frequently did. He prided himself on being a great deceiver as a self description.

As for what abu bakr said, he's not mohammad and he's not part of Islam as a codified set of beliefs. All he did was temporarily suspend islamic law that otherwise would permit those things. Whats funny actually is that this is the same guy who waged the first jihad of apostacy when Muhammad died and everyone was like "screw this, muhammad's dead so I'm going to try and escape from Islam'.

It's puzzling to me why you're so set on believing that Islam protects christians when observation of reality says everything of the opposite. The world would be a better place if that was true, but unfortunately it just doesn't pan out. Hard for the modern mind to understand, but egypt and the middle east were part of the roman empire and were originally westernised, developed, christian areas.

I used to think like this too, then i started actually questioning what I had been fed and looked at the logic and maths. Wealth isn't a fixed sum pie. Tell me, how did bill gates get so rich? Did he rob everyone in the world at gunpoint?

No. People valued his product more than the cost he was charging for it. Both the buyer and seller end up wealthier than before just as a matter of cold hard mathematics. If something wasn't worth the price, there wouldn't be a transaction and bill gates wouldn't get any money. Punishing a bill gates from getting rich is preventing everyone from getting wealthier. Just a matter of logic 101.

Same can be said of harry potter books. Buyers value the story experience more than the cash money they hold. JK rowling gets rich. Wealth when it is accumulated entirely through voluntarism is a signature of how much that person has benefited the lives of other people as a moral indicator.

*You misunderstood me with my one armed man analogy. A society hamstrung by big government using violence to coerce certain behaviours is akin to a man with only one arm. These socialist societie never outcompete more free societies that have smaller government footprints. Just as a matter of evolutionary natural selection, the smaller government societies will out compete the big government societies over the long term. Individuals certainly have a right to their own life - ideologies don't.

Your views are way too dreamy. Sorry, but I just don't believe that. Rich get richer, poor get poorer and if you don't do something about it you end up with quasi-slavery. You just exchanged the whip with money.

That will especially become very important in the next 100 years or so. Technology is advancing so rapidly now that it won't be long before large parts of the working population will really be replaced by robots. Without some socialistic ideas we'll quickly be separated into the small group of people who happen to have everything and the large group of people who have nothing and whose work is worthless anyway.

But I think we had that discussion before in this thread somewhere.

Also I don't understand your strong "islam is evil"-mantra. Christianity can be just as evil. It's all a question about how you interpret that stuff. It doesn't really matter what is written in any of those books. You can interpret them as a request from god to act as a saint or you can interpret them as a request from god to violate those infidels (or you interpret them as horribly boring fantasy books from thousands of years ago, as I do).

You just need to chose which part of the book to misinterpret. Both is constantly happening in Christianity as well as in the Islam. That's why separating religion from state is a good idea in the first place.

You talk so much of "competition". Natural selection is a pretty dire state. A state humanity tries to get rid of. You don't want limitless competition for who is rich and who is poor, because you will get losers in that process and those losers will basically have lost the game of life. And you don't want anyone to lose that game. At "best" loser at that game will just have a very miserable life. At worst they'll go insane start chanting religious blablabla and point a gun at you.

I'm gonna number these for future debate reference this way we can say "about #9" and then go on with our points about said topic.

we'll see. let me just color each one red for agreed and green for refuted and see just how bad I missed the target when trying to pin you.

alright.

:/ ?

why the weird off-topic then? no agenda? certain?
hey I'm a fair man so I'll mark that green for repudiated.
1

wow. well dunno what to class this as since it went a different branch than elodea. you have to realize though it's by that logic that he justified saying they'd have less jobs they currently do. I'm guessing that's what you're also getting at since you put the accent on them being the ones to avoid those jobs. this may simply have been a case of semantic war. I'll label it red then. just curious; according to you in "for men" do the quotes marks make the claim ...better? alleviates it somewhat? hmm in retrospect it does. but really it should make you see the problem clear as day. that you should have to put quotation marks to alleviate any part of your statements should indicate to you that you shouldn't be making the statement in the first place. also that you already know what's wrong with it. Or do you only know what gets a reaction but never bothered to look into the why?
2

okay green. but two things. A : try varying the formulation only occasionally with : "men aren't special, they are just average everyday, and deserve to be treated like they're women" or does the statement become false to you then?

you "average everyday" the prophysystem, you *gives you a noggin*

B. just know that elodea isn't on your side there as he is standing as a self-proclaimed sexist and and the (far-fetched) claim that sexism isn't a bad thing.
3

askew parallels out the hoozaah but by and large validating this mantra. okay. red.
4

again with the teeeerrrrible botched open mindedness. brownie points plus a green label for effort though.
5

now I'm starting to think you don't actually know what the words human race mean... ....I'm ...I'm actually really holding my breath there.

I can't even label this one out of the dire need to know what you really meant by this.
(6)

okaaaaaaaaaaaay... red. but now I'm even more worried about the above
7

yup def red. also I can't help but point out : "such easy access to basic food funding and such" such what ? health care? yeah that's the thing you don't have? food for the homeless/jobless? it's called "resto du coeur" or some other european organisation. no food distribution for homeless/jobless in the u.s. by state. that means these chap gotta waits until a food collect or other charity is organized by a particular; which isn't a day-to-day and year-round thing.

nevermind the "roof for the night" which I also doubt you have on a state level operating with such a wide coverage as is the case in france.

no.
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part TWO

yes or not then?
doesn't seem clear to me. if by that what's implied is they are no there is no such thing and no measurable metric for a bias in cops towards blacks because it's the same case figures as when compared to non-cops then I'll mark you down for a red because that's literally what's written in my quote.
9
also the stats disagree with you there.

the farmers.....
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yay! another 300 years! and I only live 100 tops 50 if I'm a climate-change denier cuz I can only outwit Darwin so long so who CARES about my great-grand-kids and everyone living on earth then! fuckk em!
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so today we learned that the line in racism is drawn at asian (mostly japanese) culture. these guys are cool. but fuckk what I just said because really i'm just happy that's a GREEN !
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huh. nice.
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okey. red. just.... I HAVE to comment here ; "and the higher the ratio of armed citizens...." just how much higher do you want it to go exactly? no but really when did you last check how many guns there were in the U.S.? ......because it's kinda like that one mickey mouse movie you know where all the brooms are all working on getting enough soapy water an shitt... peep's gotta give a shitt about when the task's been fulfilled to a reasonable degree right? cuz there is such a thing as too much RIGHT?



(did I manage to stick that tune in your head? please tell me I did)
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well hey that's all I need. ..Still though..

I guess you didn't mean most I'll be a pal and call it refuted.
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part THREE

again weird-asss tangents.

ALSO. being "not a very good" president is now a metric of a country on par with GDP.
2018: in other news : Trump awarded superior president score to Obama's "not very good", the very prestigious "didn't do all the things he said he'd do" score ..... x'D oh wait.
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terrible piggy-bank-breaking life-dept-inducing accidents happen to everyone but HEY! no worries! those plus the rest of all medical care needed in a year come out as under 100$!
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and just for you : extra readability :

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I dunno man, I feel like for a "non-you" I pinned you and ...well ..by your own admittance the right pretty damn right terrible puns : (

When lecturing people on "where money goes and comes from", please don't make the obvious mistake of saying that authors get rich from the books that they sold. Authors get an absolutely indescribably tiny amount of money from each book sale.

JK Rowling made most of her money on licensing the story for merchandise and of course the movie phenomenon (as well as other things like the Harry Potter Experience in London, UK). She got her money from companies and shareholders, not the consumers directly. And even if these translations hadn't been wildly popular, she still would've received money upfront for licensing her valuable IP.

But hey your economics seems to ascribe to "the free market is perfect and inviolate, people only spend money on things that are logical and reasonable and everything is worth what it is paid for because it has to be because it's logical". It's a tautology, and the whole model collapses in on itself with a slight observation (which I just made). I dislike people who push the free market above all else; this is done to justify the rich getting richer and nothing else.

Just like colin said.

https://www.quora.com/What-percenta...movies-and-what-percentage-is-from-book-sales
She made a lot of money from selling books because she sold lots of them. She only made a small % of the total amount of money because she didn't invented the printer, she didn't organized a distribution chain, she didn't have the money to pay for the paper needed for millions of books... Many people helped her in the task of selling books and they did that for a price, a price JK agreed on.

Free market means: I produce it so I own it and I can do whatever I want with it. If I want something from someone else, we agree on trading our values freely and transparently. Is it that evil?

it doesn't matter how people become rich or how companies are able to grow ... what matters to me is why it became neccesary for a great number of people to work 2 or even 3 jobs and having no freetime whatsoever to barely survive ...
the standart should be every person to just need one job to survive get a decent flat or house he/she can call his/her own and be able to support his her family and not so long ago THIS was the case ...

ok bill gates and doods created pc and and software, awesome
some other people created recipes for popular drinks or food
others created differend kinds of usefull technology ...
... it's still other people that produce the stuff or maintain the proccess of its production ...
it's still others that cook and serve the food and drinks to you ...
it's others who take care for the sick
and old
heck it's other people who take care of your garbage and maintain your sewerage

just to name a few examples ...
should their work be any less worth than what they need to live ? Not every damn person needs to be rich ... a number of people don't even care about that but just to have a decent enough income to get through life ... not every person needs to be super aspiring to be the top manager of a company or the creator of the next big superhype product ... and that especialy shouldn't be a neccesaty to get through live ...



and i agree with @cola_colin considering how todays contracts are made it feels like people are no longer treated as human beings but instead their own kind of product, mere objects and modern slaves lured by mere paper and pieces of metal ... you tell me the average person is worth just this? screw (anti-)society then ... i mean it's in the word itself that a group of people should treat each other socialy working toghether (and it's so horribly far off in a number of places)

And even with the ability to have come up with that- Bill Gates still supports higher taxation on the rich.

"According to America’s richest man, the sequester targets discretionary spending programs such as education, infrastructure and research and this is something to worry about as the U.S. is compromising its “values” in its approach to reducing federal spending.

Gates is not the only advocate of taxing the super-wealthy; he’s joined by thesecond richest man in America Warren Buffett who’s calling to “stop coddling the super-rich,” and by President Barack Obama who argues that “Warren Buffett’s secretary shouldn’t pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett.”

Buffet says that in 2010 he paid a federal tax bill of $6,938,744 — including the income tax as well as the payroll tax, which is only 17.4% of his taxable income and a lower percentage than was paid by the other people in his office whose tax burdens ranged from 33% to 41%.

Buffett also recognizes that some investment managers who earn billions from daily labour are getting “extraordinary” tax breaks because when they classify their income as “carried interest” they get a 15% tax rate bargain. Others of America’s richest earn most of their wealth from capital gains, which some billionaires don’t end up identifying as taxable income."

As well as second riches man in the US advocates for it.

First, survival is a term often thrown about without any thought of its definition. The poor today are immeasurably richer than the rich of 100-200 years ago thanks to free market innovation. Government didn't invent oil refining, they didn't invent electricity, they didn't invent the computer, they didn't invent the cars and trains, they didn't invent telecommunications, they didn't invent medicine, they didn't invent art.

I don't think you understand the absolute squalor and destitute poverty that 99%+ of our ancestors lived in not so long ago doing back breaking work dawn to dusk 7 days a week. Life expectancy was less than half what we have now, and when crops failed millions would starve.

Second, most places are not true free markets. The US financial system is rigged to the bone, government spending is off the charts, tariffs block global trade, and crony capitalism dominates both main and wall street. The hidden cost of all this government intervention and waste contributes massively to lost potential job growth. It's literally a matter of cold hard mathematics, not feelings and emotions.

Third, you forget about the millions and millions of Chinese on the flip side who have been lifted out of the literal dirt as a result of free trade. Are you really saying it's moral to keep them in absolute destitution?

The economic argument for socialism or free markets is kinda boring tbh. This debate ended a few decades ago - all you have to do is look at the world as it is.


@cola_colin
Automation merely shifts the demand for labour into different areas. There is no need for permanent redistribution or UBI. Machines need to be designed, created, maintained, updated, improved, and there needs to be incentive to do so. Their products also need to be shipped, marketed, and value added. You are also forgetting that prices are dynamic. If someone has a machine that produces 1 billion bananas in one second at the press of a button, the purchasing power of a banana decreases compared to all other goods and services. i.e. Society can buy more bananas without performing any more work. Who doesn't want free bananas.

We can even do a simple scientific test comparing the level of automation today vs 100 years ago. We're vastly better off, and people have adapted to different skills and professions. This isn't a matter of opinion or 'dreamy' ideology as much as it is a matter of fact.

I don't want to go over islam vs christianity again. People who are genuinely interested can do the research themselves. Discussing around the usual "all religions are the same, they can all be evil or peaceful in same amounts' etc. is just anti-reality and can only stem either from a lack of understanding or an act of willfull self deception. If you think you can interpret "turn the other cheek" into something violent, and "strike off their hands and feet" into something peace loving, then i don't know... that's your business shrugs.

As for competition, imagine if one guy said "hey we should buy a tractor to help us farm" and another guy said "nah I'm going to do it by hand". Are you really going to say we should steal from the tractor guy and give to the manual labour guy instead of sitting back and allowing competitive price signals to tell everyone what the best idea for producing food is?

Your frame of winners and losers is silly. Voluntary transactions are by definition win win, but anyway I went over that before already. I'm an absolute loser compared to Tiger Woods because i'm not as productive, doesn't mean i have the moral justification to steal from him.

As for the 1% of people who are born totally incapable of providing for themselves, you don't need a massive state that makes up like 50% of GDP. Did you know that about 1/7th of the US economy is already tied in some way to voluntary charity and non-profit activity? Honestly, it's ironic to say all this stuff about capitalism being inhumane and treating everyone like a slave. I think i have more faith in humanity than you guys do.

@squishypon3
If warren buffet wants to give more money to government and thinks that is a better investment than anything else out there he's entirely free to do so. Why do we need socialism again?

If there was nothing to buy from government and no social advantages accrued from virtue signalling, I doubt he would be saying the same. Rather, he'd be going out there investing and creating his own private schools and other such services. And maybe, just maybe if public education wasn't an over regulated and protected industry, people like bill gates and warren buffet could actually competitively do what they say they want to do.

Competitive education, sure- because that has worked for colleges.

And the reason for socialism is while people in the minority such as Bill Gates or Warren Buffet who care to make these donations of money. Many large business owners simply won't to the same effect- and they use various tactics to avoid what taxes they do have!

Correlation does not equal Causation. You can look at any one country and try to answer why people live their as good as they do and you'll quite often find lots of detailed answers that have not all that much to do with how socialistic their system was. Or sometimes you find that their attempt at some socialism was screwed over in the cold war when the US decided to destroy them for being to close to the evil USSR.
History is a lot more complicated and the success or not success of "how much socialism should you have" can't be explained by just looking at the current state. Too much irrational stupidity has gone into the current state. Most often countries that are bad off today got screwed over by the wars of yesterday (most commonly the cold war and before that the area of colonialism) and not by their current political system.
What the USSR or DDR or similar nations attempted also wasn't exactly what I am advocating.
Many of the really-nice-to-life-in countries like Germany already do a lot of socialistic things and they're on the more-or-less right way.

Machines will be able to do that. No joke.
By the end of this century you will have one of two outcomes:
A) We've thrown ourselves back into the stone age
B) We're living in a world were a computer program can substantially outperform a human in any task. Even in tasks such as "make me a Hollywood blockbuster movie at the click of a button"

Being optimistic I'd hope for B. But you better hope you either have a somewhat socialistic system by then or whoever happens to own that computer program owns the world and has no more need for other people except as customers. Customers who have no own source of income however will be pretty miserable. And you don't have any income when all you can do is outmatched by the evil guy who presses a button.

Okay let me take the role of the person who owns that machine. Assume we have an unregulated free market.
I'll swarm the market with bananas. Until all other banana producers are out of their job. Poor them.
Now that I have a monopoly I'll stop my machine for a while. No more bananas. Everyone was so used to them and now nobody has them anymore and nobody produces them anymore. Poor everyone.
Just before anybody can start producing bananas again I switch on the machine again. But now I sell at whatever is the highest price that people are willing to pay. Oh and don't you dare try to build up a bananas production elsewhere. With all the money I get from my instant bananas I am buying up all the ground previously used for banana production. If you start a banana production elsewhere expect me to come over and give out bananas cheaper than yours to screw you and then buy up your production to close it.

Monopolys are great aren't they? Especially when a completely unregulated market lets me as the fortunate owner of that machine screw over everyone.

Too much. Which is funny cause in the topic of religion our roles are reversed: I have faith that people can be nice even if some parts of their religious books are not. You don't.

Elodea your example on "if something is simple to produce with a machine then prices can be sof incredibly small, good for people who want bananas" is so damn flawed- why? Because that's not how business works...

Have you no idea of the razor industry? How cheap they are to build and send out and how high their mark ups are? Who cares if it's cheap to produce when I can sell it for whatever high price I like since I've got a group of other razor companies working with mine (oh but don't worry, we're not the same company... No monopoly involved!) To make sure prices never really go down.

4750%

Or that case of that business guy who bought up the rights on some medical something used to treat something related wih HIV infections. He bought up the rights on the one tool that kept those people healthy and soon after the price went up by ... I forgot. Something like 10000% or so. Completely insane. He got screwed over by the hatred of the world but in an unregulated markt that's exactly the problems you get. And quite often nobody notices enough to get angry enough to stop it.

That's awesome. I'm going to go and start my own razor company and undercut the lot of them and make millions

Sigh, you guys need to start your own business or at least speak to business managers about how they are run. In most industries profit margins are around 5-10%. I don't know much about the shaving business, but the last time i went to the store there was cheapo bundles of 50 disposable ones and higher priced branded ones. As with most other products, branding carries a premium as a signal of quality and people who want to pay that premium do so. They cover lower volumes and as such have higher overhead per unit costs. I would also not be surprised if a significant part of the costs come from compliance with safety regulations. If companies can undercut each other for a customer's business, that's exactly what they do.

The only source of monopoly is government intervention. You absolutely cannot create a sustainable exploitative monopoly over the mid to long term in a purely voluntary environment. Name just one lasting exploitative monopoly that has arisen as a result of an unregulated free market. There isn't one, and i've looked pretty dahm hard. Whenever a monopoly is exploited, great incentive is created to use substitutes or compete.

Anyway, let's stick with this pharmaceutical example because it's incredibly hilarious what happened. It's a great case study showing why the free market is vastly superior than 'regulatory measures'.

Martin Shrekli creates Turing Pharma and buys an FDA approved anti-malarial drug called Daraprim for $55m from Impax Laboratories. We can get into how the FDA stifles drug development where costs have increased ~four fold to something ridiculous like $2.6 billion per drug. Where 50% of in-development drugs get canned because of cost/benefit and not because of safety or efficacy. How research and development profit reinvestment has gone from 50% to 15%. We can also talk about how this artificial regulatory pressure is causing pharmaceuticals to rely on selling more of their current drug to stay viable. How this creates profit incentive to hook more and more people onto an array of already developed drugs for substantial periods of time instead of developing a new wonder drug. Anyway, that's another story.

So he gets Impax to significantly tighten the supply of the drug (a profit loss for them which is compensated as part of the $55m paid), and on Sep 17 2015 he makes his move and Turing Pharma jacks the price up from $13.50 to $750. What's even more funny about this is actually that patients don't really feel this cost because of co-payments

The free market responds instantly. He receives strong public criticism and his company's goodwill is demolished. No one present or future will want to be associated or do business with him. The market gave a strong signal without any need of regulatory compulsion that the price was too high and the company was not operating in the interests of it's customers.

A few weeks later on 22 October, Imprimis Pharmaceutical enters the market as a competitor with their own substitute drug at $1 a pill which puts an end to Shrekli's plan and he most assuredly made a very big loss. This is how free markets operate. Price signalling and competitive entry works, not because of any sense of altruism, but because there is something to gain in doing so.
http://www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...-pill-after-turing-price-hike-outrage-n449661

Imprimis gets a PR win. They grow their market share, they further their company mission statement, they grow their goodwill and network of physicians who will more likely recommend their drugs over others.

Let's look at the regulatory side. How long did it take for bureaucracy to respond to this price hike and effect a 'correction'? The answer may surprise you - they never did. They didn't need to. Instead they go after him for unrelated securities fraud sometime mid December as part of a political pony show. such tough, many strong, very muscle, w0w!

I guess a random example I just thought of in an after thought isn't a good example. Although I in fact stated myself that that case didn't end all that bad.

You're ignoring any real arguments though. Most cases aren't as ridiculous as that one.

EDIT:
Just to make clear I am not even arguing to take away all your free market. I am mainly arguing to provide a social security and some control over monopolies or high risk stuff that can affect the whole economy. Like the financial market collapse of 2008. That was a big failure of the free unregulated market. How are you going to argue that away?
From how I see it is just a question of time until the next crash of that magnitude will happen.