Thread: Should government be "business friendly?" Why?

Originally Posted by nonsqtr

Okay, part II. We were talking about "depletion of resources". Let's look at that from a market standpoint.

There's more known reserves now than ever before.

There's trillions upon trillions of cubic feet of methane in untapped reserves in North America alone, plus the oceanic methane ices.

There's uranium galore.

There's hydrogen, and more importantly, deuterium, for use in fusion. There's the ability to make He3, if we're unwilling to go to the moon to mine the stuff.

All the metals mankind has extracted are recyclable. Trees are renewable resources, when farmed correctly.

Food isn't a problem, not here in the US. Elsewhere is their problem, not ours.

There's rare earths in the US, the only stumbling block to extracting them are the environazi groups.

What is being wasted, what is irreplaceable, are the minds being trashed by a public school system pushing propaganda, not truth. Those minds may never be repaired or recovered for productive use. Many of them are now shitting in the nation's parks, whining about how someone else should pay their bills.

Now, my claim would be that merely "being alive" requires you to consume some resources. Food. Shelter. If you have a family, maybe you have to fend for them too - that's "more" resources, right?

You went to college before you learned somebody had to pay for food?

And maybe you're even responsible for some kinda "group" or something, like maybe you're a minister responsible for a congregation, or a CEO responsible for a company, or some such thing. Then that requires you to have even MORE resources available to you, and in those cases you're given the leverage to move mountains 'cause you need it, and you gotta be very careful how you move those mountains or they might end up on top of someone.

You talking about Mohammed?

You know Jesus' messy death was a record breaker, right?

This idea of population and population expansion, is a basic driver for the marketplace because it is the source of demand. When all the fads and trends and "products" are stripped away, there is still the core demand for food, shelter, clothing, the things people need to simply "exist".

You think maybe Malthus had to go to college before the basic facts of life became clear to him, too?]

Anyone who's wasted their time reading "The Population Bomb" must be struck by the 100% failure of every single one of Erlich's "predictions".

Therefore, we - society - are in BIG trouble when farmers can no longer make a living.

Are the shelves on your grocery store empty? You ever think maybe you should move out of Cuba? In the United States a fucking farm is a fucking business, and businesses fail, every damn year. Nothing special when a farm goes under. What happens is that, if the land is profitable, someone buys it and puts it back into production. If it's not profitable, it lies fallow or is sold for some other economic benefit.

You have a problem with the basic capitalist business functions in a free market?

And also, our world is such that very few people know how to plant vegetables anymore, or raise chickens - and god forbid you should actually have to kill one, OMFG... Chickens conveniently come from the grocery store, and um... conceptually.... the grocery store is "too big to fail" that way.

Let's guess....you've read Dies the Fire.

So now, in this little game, "competition" is the further stimulus for advancement, and basically what that means is you want to be richer than the next guy. Well... rich is a relative term, and most of us would be plenty happy with one Beemer instead of three,

The Mayor is happy with his 22 year old all-steel Chevy van gas hog. Who wants some stinking Nazi car?

and in reality there is some value in the concept that we should tax the shit out of people who feel the need to live extravagant lifestyles.

There is no value in discrimination, be it racial, sexist, religious, or monetary.

It's all based on fear, hatred and/or envy.

It's not surprising a Cafeteria Constitutionalist such as yourself espouses discrimination...which is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Lemme see, Warren Buffet, one of the richest people in the world, spends about 1 million dollars a year on private air travel, and that's for him and his entire retinue including whatever advisers he needs to take with him on a given day

And your jealous is not justification for shredding the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

YOUR freedoms are easier to suppress than Buffet's. That's something mature peope take into considerations.

[quote] - so like, if we have politicians presenting us with 30 and 40 million dollar bills for air travel, it seems to me we oughta be doing some checking.[quote]

Is Warren Buffet a politician?

Your logic is failing, miserably.

You want to demand accountability from politicians, demand accountability from politicians. Don't point to private citizens and whine that they have more money than you do.

The point being, that this little game of "competition" requires some oversight, it requires a referee or an umpire or something like that

Call it the Constitution.

- because without that, the players tend to go out of bounds.

Then the politicians need to be thrashed on a biannual basis. That's the solution. You can't even identify the problem, you're too wrapped up in your class warfare mania.

Did you hit your ceiling and get a lump on you head or something?

Maybe the game gets too real, the players take it too seriously, whatever - if the rules say they can't fight ON the board, they'll step off and do it elsewhere, and even though they're trying to be polite, the first guy who takes it on the chin is going to keel over and there goes the entire game board, along with all the pieces and the whole game. Boom, just like that.

And your solution is to paint over the parts of the board you dislike.

So, that's why we need the referee, and I mean, ideologically, what's really happening is that the competition leads to acceleration and amplification - those two phenomena are inherent in the game and will always be present - and the purpose of oversight is to introduce some damping so the resonances aren't allowed to fully develop.

The problem with you making metaphors is you don't know where they're going....which means nobody else does, either.

And that is, in fact, the logical and very obvious conclusion: those dangerous resonances can not be allowed to develop, because if they do, the entire game board will be destroyed, along with whatever game is in progress at the time.

Your logic is false, read the above comments.

Hm. This ends up looking very much like a rock'n'roll band.

The Bangles?

You can practice hard for six years and just about the time you're ready to hit the road someone decides to go get married or somethin', and it's like, "sorry, you need to find a new guitar player". Here, you can play the game and be just about ready to win, and BOOM, the entire board gets knocked out of the water

Yeah, too bad the Constitution wasn't being followed so a man had a single unchanging set of rules to learn.

and you have nothing to show for all your hours of investment and your superior gamesmanship. So I'm pretty sure, that it's in everyone's best interests to guarantee that these fatal disruptions never happen. And that is possible. That math says it's possible, and the history of our political system would tend to point to the same conclusion - it is possible.

Apparently it isn't happening "right now", and um... the real question is whether we care or not.

yes, some of us care.

We're the libertarians.

Originally Posted by nonsqtr

Well, lemme see, I have a minute.... let's think about the concept "the only winning move is not to play".

In our economic system, we have this thing called "creation of wealth", but in my eyes that's a euphemism, a... platitude. It's not real, it derives from a MODEL which in my opinion is a "partial model" in the same sense that Newton's physics is a "partial model" of a more general Einsteinian universe which is probably even a partial model of something even bigger.

This thing called "creation of wealth", what it really is, is depletion of resources.

I mean, you kind of have to lift your head out of flatland to see the higher-dimensional view, but look at what's happening - you have a bunch of actors called "humans" engaged in this game of "wealth creation", each individual does it and then they aggregate in clusters to multiply their power and "profit", and the net result on a planetary scale is the depletion of oil, copper, iron, natural gas, LABOR.... every single resource that's available is being "consumed" to some degree by this game.

So, the longer-term view is that the game can proceed for a little while, but eventually the entire gameboard encounters a phenomenon of starvation, or more accurately "depletion of resources", and in that event the entire game sort of "slows down". Hm, well, the actors are clever so they keep inventing new substitutes and new ways of doing things, so like, they invent plastic to replace the brass, and that creates an entire new industry that "creates wealth" for the players and keeps the game going for a while, but what's really happened is that the oil is being depleted at a faster rate, and therefore in effect the current intensity of the game is "borrowed" against its future sustainability.

Now, the model I would propose in this space, is allocentric. That term derives from the science of optics, and it refers to the difference between the actor's view and an external observer's view. The actors own view is "egocentric", meaning relative to self, while the view of an external observer is "allocentric", meaning it may or may not involve the same coordinate system. It may involve an external coordinate system, like for instance Cartesian 3-space with an "origin" that's conveniently located someplace so things can be measured. Or it may be a more complex coordinate system involving higher-dimensional "embeddings" in the same way the Einsteinian 4-dimensional universe "embeds" what we ordinarily perceive as our 3-space.

So like, I'm suggesting that the current state of the science of economics is kinda Newtonian in nature, it's... "primitive". We don't fully understand what the heck it is we're doing. We're attempting to manipulate a very complex system, and we have to make plenty of assumptions to do that, and that's where I come in - I look at the assumptions, and scratch my head, and go, "hm... are you sure about that?"

So, okay, now let's consider this on a different plane for a minute. Let's say, we're in the system, it just "is", here we are, each of us has... y'know... 80 years or somethin', to do what we can with it - so now, if your motives are to live a comfortable life and engage as much as possible and "use" the system for that purpose, and if you're reasonably clever in the way you do it, you can pretty much "extract wealth" and use it to accomplish your goal. In doing so, you KNOW that you're depleting the resources of the entire game board, and basically your value system is such that your comfort is more important than the long term sustainability of the game.

On the other hand, if you were kind of "responsible for the game and game board", like, if you were some kinda umpire or referee or something, you'd be very interested in longer term sustainability, and your head would in kind of a different place. You'd probably be placing a great deal of emphasis on space travel and related technology, because space travel means expansion, and expansion means new resources. And new opportunities, and new ways of "Creating Wealth", meaning new ways of keeping the game going. And all that assumes we "like" the game, and many people do, it seems to be a pretty agreeable game much of the time.

So, when I look around, I don't SEE the emphasis on the space program, right? It's just not there. The mentality of "let's steward the game and the game board" would suggest that this should be one of the FIRST places to look for the evidence that a certain model is or isn't being applied - and I mean, we can look for others. The whole idea of "conservation" of our most important resources isn't exactly happening, is it? Oil would be the prime example of course, our foreign policy seems to be to "restructure" entire nations in favor of the oil trade, so it seems like we care about using a lot of oil and we don't care much about limiting that use.

All right, so all that is context, and I gotta take a break, but I mean, we can look at the options for how "not" to play this game, and what other games might be available, and how to change the rules of this particular game (assuming we really like it and want it to continue) - and all this, is very high level political stuff, right? It takes us into the "theoretical" very quickly.

I'm quoting this post to bookmark it. There are several points I'd like to consider and respond to. I always appreciate your insight, but my attention span and other demands get in the way of longer posts sometimes.