Newgrounds.com — Everything, By Everyone.

The old system uses BC (Before Christ) and AD (latin for year of our lord) and the new system uses BCE (before common era) and CE (Common Era). There's been a big push to switch over to the BCE/CE system, but it seems like BC/AD has been holding its ground. For example, wikipedia still uses BC.

In my opinion, the traditional system isn't perfect, but the new system makes no sense. Using the birth (estimate) of Jesus isn't going to please everyone, but at least the labels are accurate. In what way are the years after 0 uncommon and the years before 0 uncommon? The most obvious answer is that Christianity has made western civilization "common", but if that's the case than using BCE/CE doesn't move us any father from euro-centrism.

I don't really understand their response to the officer's comment. By pointing out ways for women to reduce their likelyhood of getting raped, he was not condoning rape nor was he saying that the women had an obligation to wear conservative dress. It seems like they may have misunderstood his comments.

For example, I could point out that driving on New Year's morning is somewhat unsafe since drunk driving is more common that morning. That wouldn't be condoning drunk driving or telling people that it is their responsibility to not drive on that morning. It is merely pointing out that one can reduce the risk of being hurt by a drunk driver.

At 6/10/11 01:29 AM, SadisticMonkey wrote:

At 6/8/11 04:22 PM, pt4me2014 wrote: I strongly believe that college is a good investment. Their are experinces that college will give you that you will miss out on if you go straight from high school into the adult world.

like being in debt up to your eyeballs and stuff, or getting skilsl relevant to actually working

seriously, if you take a college course in something that isn't going to be directly helpful in you getting a job, at this point in time, you're a complete fucking moron

In some ways I envy the Art History majors at my school. They get credit for traveling to fun places like France and Italy and they spend a lot of their class time visiting museums and talking about what paintings they like. They also get to talk about interesting subjects with rich and interesting people who spend their free time collecting expensive pieces fo art. I doubt they ever have to pull an all-nighter or give up on having fun to go study.

For the Art History majors who can get good careers, it's a pretty sweet deal. However, if you can't land an elite career than you're pretty much screwed. For the children of the rich and connected, this isn't a big deal. But for a middle class guy like me who needs to take debt to go to school, it's unthinkable. I have to study a practical subject.

At 6/4/11 11:26 PM, SmilezRoyale wrote: I'm just curious, do the income stats for college graduates adjust for IQ? Do they adjust for the fact that some students who go to college are possibly more intelligent, creative, and/or productive than the average individual and so would probably earn more anyway even if they did not go to college?

No, that isn't taken into account. However, in my experience, it doesn't make that much of a difference. Dumb college students get hired to great jobs all the time, since getting a high GPA and passing an interview usually does not require very high intelligence. On the other hand, I've never seen a firm willing to hire a smart high school student onto a professional career track (even though they're probably willing to hire a college grad with an irrelevant major). Even if the high school grad performs exceptionally well in their low level career track (say, as a sales associate at Wal Mart), it won't matter. Low level career tracks almost never promote to professional career tracks and bosses aren't really looking for intelligence in their low level staff, anyway.

At 6/4/11 09:53 PM, poxpower wrote: I think it's pretty pointless to average out all colleges and careers.

There's highly useful degrees and highly shit ones. For instance my sister went to optometry school for 5 years and is starting on a 5 figure income at 23. That program has 100% placement.

That's a good investment.

No, I think that averages are useful, even if they don't tell that much to above-average students. You might also notice that I left out students who went to graduate school.

I have no idea what optometry school is. If it's an undergraduate program, than it's pretty good if most of its students are earning 100k+ after graduation. It's also probably really competitive, and not all that relevant to the students who are borderline academically and not sure if they want to go to college.

At 6/5/11 04:17 PM, adrshepard wrote: From actually looking at the job growth statistics for Pennsylvania (maybe its similar in other states) You should at least get some college education because that's where the vast majority of job growth will be. Even if you only got an associates degree you would have a huge advantage over someone who only went to high school.

I think that this is true. A lot of places won't even consider you if you don't have some kind of a college degree.

I don't think the question is if you should go to college, but what you should study at college. It's very easy to spend a huge sum of money on a BA because you're interested in the subject only to find out you've severely limited your career path. Stay away from the humanities if you're more concerned with career preparation than intellectual enrichment. Do not be taken in by fascinating literature and philosophy courses.

I used to agree with this, but now I think that it is not always true. There are a handful of very good jobs for students with humanities/liberal arts degrees at banks, consulting firms, hedge funds, business analysis and think tanks. In terms of exit opportunities, pay, and experience, they are stronger than pretty much all technical/engineering jobs. However, realistically, they are only accessible to students who go to top 10ish schools or have connections before going to school.

I want to approach this question concretely and with the average student in mind. I will also focus on finding means and expected values rather than variances to keep the amount of calculation manageable and easy to read. As of late it has become popular for people to throw out figures like "college grads earn one million more over their lifetime" or "many college grads are underemployed and can't pay back their huge debt" to show that college is either a good investment or a bad investment.

A few preliminary assumptions:

-The interest earned on debt and investments are both 5%. This is erring on the side of going to college, since the stock market has historically earned more than 5% and many private student loans have interest rates greater than 5%. I'll also assume that college grads aren't using a special federal loan forgiveness program.

-I only want to look at 4 year colleges. I'm too lazy to look up the 2 year numbers and I don't know if the transfer stats are well documented.

-I'll use average salaries. This overestimates returns for both groups since salaries go up over time.

-The best way to measure the quality of an investment is its total lifetime return assuming that all returns (including salary) are invested. Of course in reality one doesn't invest their salary, one spends it on things, but I don't think that this affects the comparison. For either side, no matter how much money you have, spending X amount of money in any given year should have an equal impact on total lifetime return. I don't have an accounting background, but this approach makes sense to me. If any accountants want to weigh in, that would be awesome.

So without further ado let's get thing started. Person A doesn't go to college after high school. Workers with only a high school salary earn 33k on average and have a 10% unemployment rate. This works out to an average salary (for all HS grads) of 30k. Normally one might work for about 40 years, but someone who doesn't go to college can work for 4 extra years. So this works out to 44 years of income with an average income of 30k. This works out to a total return of $4,761,004.68 (remember that you'd never actually see this amount of money). If we use 10% interest, it's $17,742,020.

Person B decides to go to college after high school. There are two cases: they either graduate or they don't graduate. The average 4-year institution 6-year graduation rate is only about 60%. For those who do graduate, let's use 4.5 years as the average time to graduation (source gives 4.3 for private schools and 4.8 for public schools).

So let's work on the assumption that person B doesn't graduate. The average "some college, no degree" income is 37k and their average unemployment rate is about 9%. So for all "some college" people the average income is 34k. Let's assume that our dropout has gone to school for two years before dropping out, for lack of a better statistic. The average tuition at 4 year schools is 20k (not looking at cost of living because it needs to be paid whether one goes to college or not) so this person has paid 40k in tuition before they enter the job market after 2 years. This person can work for 42 years. The total return works out to $4,517,773 for 5% interest. It's $17,917,623 with 10% interest.

Let's instead say that our student graduates after 4.5 years. He pays a total of 90k in tuition and works for 40 years. But in return, he has an average income of 54k and a 5.4% unemployment rate. So the actual average income for all college grads is 51k. This works out to a total return of $5,869,828 for 5% interest and $19,929,442 for 10% interest.

So combine that with our graduation rate statistics and we arrive at the following expected values:

Using 5% interest

No College

$4,761,004

College

$5,329,006

Using 10% Interest

No College

$17,742,020.

College

$19,124,714.

Conclusion

In short: college wins, and by a greater margin than these calculations would suggest. Jobs for college grads are more likely to have benefits like health and dental insurance that aren't included in the salary figure. Also, many people prefer white collar office work over blue collar "working" work even if it pays the same amount of money. Retirement benefits and paid vacations are also more common for college grads.

Another issue that I ignored is the difference in how much colleges cost. 20k is a common figure for in state flagships, but some people pay a full 40k per year in tuition plus really overpriced on campus housing. These people are in a very bad position, especially if they are among the 5% of all college grads who are unemployed.

One thing that surprised me is that changing the interest rates didn't affect the results as much as I thought it would. Perhaps I calculated something incorrectly.

Sources:

Graduation rates: http://www.american.com/archive/2010/apr il/how-bad-are-our-graduation-rates

Salaries: http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm

Years to graduate: http://askville.amazon.com/years-average -student-graduate-college/AnswerViewer.d o?requestId=13007524

Tuition: http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp ?id=76

At 5/6/11 07:49 PM, GhostShellCommand wrote: okay i think the problem with most political systems is that people don't have the emapthy nor the cognitive capabilities to actually make large-scale decisions.

I disagree with this. Society could be ruled by extremely smart people, but if they don't have all of the information that a free market brings to the economy, their great intelligence will be wasted.

I would call your system statism, or possibly corporatism. I agree that it would not be considered either left or right wing by conventional standards.

I have one thought though: how is information brought to the economy? Hayek criticized centralized planning on the grounds that order could not develop spontaneously, it needed to be consciously recognized. In a market system, all actors make decisions that contribute information to the economy. When I choose to buy a cell phone and ditch my land line, I'm slightly raising the demand to manufacture cell phones and slightly lower the demand to expand the traditional land telephone network. If a lot of people agree with me, then there will be more investment in cell phones and less in landline networks. If industries are just meeting their quotas, than how does new information affect production decisions?

I agree that operations research and computer programming have made labor more efficient, but they are only as good as the information they're given.

At least physically, the state of the world is determined by past states. Let's get abstract for a second and say that a function L(t) where t is time gives the set of all true statements that are true at a time t. Perhaps it would be good to think of a physical analogy, like a ball that falls in time. If determinism is true, than if we know L(t - a), than we know L(t) for all a > 0. So if I know the position of the ball and all of the facts about the universe two seconds ago, we should be able to run all of our calculations and know the state of the universe in the present.

All of the physics that I know of (classical stuff) describes the state at one point in time in terms of any earlier point in time. But what if I needed to know L(t - 1) and L(t - 2) in order to know L(t). Let's say that L(t) = L(t - 1) + L(t - 2), that is the fibonacci sequence. Then we can't just look at our future as determined by our present. That is, the future is actively constituted by the past. Perhaps we can describe this as an authentically historical universe, while the earlier described universe might be described as a presentist universe. History still matters, but only insofar as it has shaped the present.

In a presentist universe, our history matters, but only insofar as we remember it and insofar as it has shaped the world as it exists. But if two historical states somehow converge to one universe, than it won't matter if we previously had one history or another history. If we don't remember something in the past, it may not matter. We can then view the present as the essential element of our understanding of the future.

Perhaps, alternatively, we can think that the past matters even if it does not actually affect the present state. I'm not sure quite what to think of this idea.

Maybe there's something really obvious that I'm missing here.

Before I get into the discussion at hand, I thought of an object to Heideggerian theory that I think is worth stating: It is possible to remove half of someone's brain and keep them alive (or so I have heard). Suppose it is possible to transplant half of one's brain into a second body. Now is only one of the half-brains dasein? Are we to believe that they are still one dasein? It seems intuitive that I-myself would be one of the half-brains after the split, but this does not fit with the fact that I-myself today am two half brains.

The issue here is that being-in-the-world feels very discrete and Heidegger's theory is built upon the idea that there is a whole construct of being-in-the-world despite the fact that being-in-the-world is in fact quite continuous.

At 3/8/11 05:24 AM, Ravariel wrote:

At 3/4/11 09:10 PM, Al6200 wrote: One of the features of Heidegger's writing is the contraction of several words into nouns: ready-to-hand, present-at-hand, being-toward-death. Traditionally dasein means something close to "existence" or "life" in the German language, but Heidegger uses it to mean "Being-in-the-world". The choice of dasein over the contraction is mostly an aesthetic choice by those who translated the original German into English.

Yes, the idea of both being and relation. An object without relation cannot exist, nor can a perceiver without something to perceive.

The thing is that you can question the split between subjects and objects entirely.

Let's again return to the table from a Heideggerian perspective (which I would call modern). Heidegger begins by rejecting the idea that we can think of the table in terms of its properties. He says that the table does not exist by itself, it only exists as something experienced. If the table is ready-to-hand (that is, if it is being used), we may not be aware of the table or its properties at all. Merleau-Ponty extends the Heideggerian concept by explaining that even when we are simply grasping something, we are actively projecting it into the future and placing it into a world of significance.

Well, modern as in new, yeas, but philosophically, the focus on perception alone is a central tenet of post-modernism. It breaks down the duality of the cartesian way of thought (which, once brought into the social realm of nature/culture dualities becomes the tenet of "Modernism") into what is supposed to be a simpler paradigm.

I am beginning to remember the name from my studies, and there are several main issues with the philosophy as a whole. The first is that if we abandon things-as-objects in favor of things-as-experience, then we end up with a lack of understanding one facet in order to bolster another. An object cannot be perceived without first existing, which begs the question of the world outside our perception: can it exist without being perceived, when all we call important is that perception?

Saying that being-in-the-world is all that matters is not the same as saying that "perception" is all that matters. All are simply facets of being in the world and you cannot separate "perception" from the world of "objects" because I would argue that the latter does not exist. The position you're defending seems to be something like Hegelianism: that there is a thing-in-itself and a thing as it is revealed to the subject.

I would argue that there is no such thing as a thing-in-itself.

The second problem is that it uses Modernism's (or rather the cartesian) paradigm as the structure of it's deconstruction, tying it irrevocably to the very thing it is trying to break down. When we abandon a dualist view for one that merely removes one half of the picture, then we are not philosophically strengthened... rather we are weakened. Instead, we need to find a way that subject and object can co-exist as a hybrid object, as something of both nature and culture, that can contain both the observation, and the objective.

You're not taking out "half of the picture", you're just changing the philosophical paradigm to remove the Cartesian distinction between subject and object.

A third issue it raises is the homogeny of observation between observers of remarkably different experiences. Without a stable underlying ontology (whether or not the entirety of that "be"ing can ever be known) should we be able to expect such widespread agreement about the world? Without objects being able to enact each other into meaningful existence, how can an observer even ever become? And when all observation is gone, might the universe enact itself beyond that point?

That's an interesting argument. I would reverse your argument and say that we know a person is a person precisely because they have "widespread agreement" about the world.

Another thing to remember is that Marx was the student of Bruno Bauer, an atheist philosopher who studied under Hegel. Marx's system is really just a materialist reinterpretation of Hegel's system.

At 2/27/11 03:20 PM, ArmouredGRIFFON wrote: I'm trying to run over some old Marxism stuff and now I'm in a jiffy, can anybody explain to me how exactly we don't own our private property and the Capitalist class do, or how Liberal Capitalism only benefits the Capitalist social class when we still achieve our desires?

People do own most of their private property. For example, a middle class person owns lots of their own things, but major possessions like their house and car are both bought through debt. The average person simply doesn't have enough capital to buy something like a house. In a sense we can say that most people are not in the capitalist class because their net worth is very small.

I can't give any specific numbers, but I'm sure that most bonds/stocks/etc. are owned by very wealthy people and only a small percentage is in people's 401k investment funds and invested savings. For college students, jobs at hedge funds (which manage the money of VERY wealthy people) are considered to be highly desirable and pay very well.

There are some people who both work and posses significant capital. Marx called these people the petite bourgeoisie.

I understand how the labour is 'owned' by the Capitalists, as Marx buffs we are alienated from it, but if I bought a pencil, is it stated I own the pencil illegitimately since the labour put into the creation of the pencil is not mine? I find it debatable, since I still in Capitalist society own the pencil legitimately.

I think most Marxists would say that you use the pencil as your own means of production, so you ought to own it.

At 2/21/11 05:42 PM, Ravariel wrote:

At 2/20/11 12:00 AM, Al6200 wrote: This has some interesting implications. Firstly, there is a recognition that there is no such thing as an object in the world that simply exists. Objects only exist as something recognized, and that recognition of an object exists within a world of significations that is unique to each dasein.

As I started to read this post, I started typing up a rather extended dismissal of the Cartesian/Modernist view of subject/object separation/purification, but thankfully I read the rest before responding. While I like the fact that this Dasein (which is kind of a pun in German, as it could be a contraction of two different pairs of words Das Ein (the one, or the singular) or Da' Sein (the existence)) blends the subject/object argument back together. I have a quick and dirty breakdown of why Modernism and Postmodernism don't work, and my own social philosophy based on Actor-network theory and enactment here.

One of the features of Heidegger's writing is the contraction of several words into nouns: ready-to-hand, present-at-hand, being-toward-death. Traditionally dasein means something close to "existence" or "life" in the German language, but Heidegger uses it to mean "Being-in-the-world". The choice of dasein over the contraction is mostly an aesthetic choice by those who translated the original German into English.

The whole idea here is to remove the cartesian presupposition that the world can be divided into subjects and objects.

But it's starting to sound a little too philosophically wishy-washy. It sounds to me like the philosophical argument between the morality of a person being 50/50 at birth or tabula-rasa... where they are explicitly different, but effectively identical. This almost sounds like a postmodern deconstruction of an idea that, much like Hot Topic non-conformists, is actually still conforming to the previous paradigm.

Not so sure about this. Let's take the example of a table. In the cartesian world view, the table is an object that has certain objective properties. For example, it has a certain color, a certain shape, a certain weight, etc. Subjects experience this object. But here we run into certain problems. How do we know that the table has an objective color? What if what I call red is actually what you call blue and vice versa? We can relate this to Plato's parable of the cave. What if I only see the shadows of an object? Do I know the object or only its appearance? The Hegelian (idealist) solution is that phenomena both reveal and conceal reality as the thing-in-itself. Through history phenomena reveal the concealed truth about objects (note that this is me regurgitating summaries of Hegel, I haven't actually read his major works).

Let's again return to the table from a Heideggerian perspective (which I would call modern). Heidegger begins by rejecting the idea that we can think of the table in terms of its properties. He says that the table does not exist by itself, it only exists as something experienced. If the table is ready-to-hand (that is, if it is being used), we may not be aware of the table or its properties at all. Merleau-Ponty extends the Heideggerian concept by explaining that even when we are simply grasping something, we are actively projecting it into the future and placing it into a world of significance.

Heidegger even questions the concept of properties. He creates a thought experiment in which a person lives in a world where any object moves away from a person if they try to touch it. He says that in a cartesian world view, we would have to accept that the object has properties like hardness. But Heidegger argues that hardness really just means "how something reacts when we come into contact with it", so in this universe the idea of hardness is meaningless. Thus objects don't really have properties, but rather dasein has a particular mode of experience that we call "hardness".

In that sense, Heidegger's writings can be seen as a defense of a holistic approach to thinking. I really don't think that traditional western thought and modern continental philosophy are just two ways of saying the same thing.

Perhaps it is my unfamiliarity with the details of the writings of these authors, but I'm not sure it gives us any ontological answers to the question of consciousness... or any real solution to the chicken-and-egg problem (from cartesian subject/object duality) it seems to want to solve. Perhaps you can explain in more detail?

Here's how I would solve the problem of consciousness. Though I make no claim to originality, I don't believe that this is the view of Husserl or Heidegger. It might be similar to the thoughts of the Jewish existentialist Martin Buber, but I am not so sure of this.

Each individual can describe the whole of their experience. They can call this consciousness. Some modes of experience we can characterize as being-with-a-thing. If I pick up a rock, I characterize my experience with it as being-with-a-thing because it is wholly determined by physical laws that I understand. When I encounter a person, I characterize my experience as "being-with-another" because I recognize my projections as having some similarity to the choices that I would make.

Yo, GumOnShoe, you might want to read about a philosophical method called "Phenomenology". Namely, look into Ed Husserl and Martin Heidegger. I'd recommend "A very short introduction to Heidegger" as a good starting point.

Basically, in the Cartesian worldview, the world is separated into subjects and objects. Subjects experience objects and objects are experienced. A conscious being exists as both a subject and an object. For example, if I touch my right hand with my left hand then my body is an object that I experience as a subject.

Husserl's Phenomenology comes out of the insight that consciousness is never just "consciousness". Rather, to be conscious I must be conscious of something. So there is no such thing as an isolated subject and no such thing as an isolated object. Thus consciousness always exists in what Husserl calls a "lifeworld", and further he posits that all knowledge is based on the contents of this lifeworld.

Heidegger takes Husserl's phenomenology is a new direction, by arguing that we should disregard the terms consciousness, subject, and object. In Heidegger's writings, these terms are replaced with a concept called "Dasein", which translates to "Being-there or Being-in-the-world". Thus the original concept of a world in which there are subjects and objects is replaced with an integrated concept of Being-there.

This has some interesting implications. Firstly, there is a recognition that there is no such thing as an object in the world that simply exists. Objects only exist as something recognized, and that recognition of an object exists within a world of significations that is unique to each dasein.

So GumOnShoe, if we take this view, than the question of "What is conscious and why" becomes somewhat moot. For each person, life is simply being-there. The question of whether or not others have this experience of being-there is probably unanswerable, but I tend to think that we regard a being as conscious based on our ability to predict the behavior of that being. So for example, we think of other humans as conscious because we can understand their behavior in terms of our own.

At 1/21/11 07:37 AM, dELtaluca wrote:

At 1/9/11 01:35 PM, Al6200 wrote: (unix)
This means that you can pipe data from a python script to a C++ program to a shell script, or whatever.

That isn't just unix btw, windows has it too.

But does Windows use standard input/output like Unix does? That's really what makes the pipes so useful.

At 1/9/11 05:03 PM, Jon-86 wrote:

At 1/9/11 01:42 PM, Al6200 wrote: but I don't think that the field is going to be well protected from outsourcing and H1B visas in the future.

That happened with the software industry, big time a few years ago. Cost companies more in the long run than they saved because of all the maintenance due to rushed development and badly designed systems. Basically you get what you pay for.

That's true. Outsourcing might not happen. But then again, if it does happen then the value of an EE degree is quite limited. The only real value of it will be as a springboard to a ph.D. in some other kind of engineering or hard science (which usually requires a somewhat technical undergrad). On the other hand, a CS degree can be a plus factor for someone who doesn't work in software engineering/IT/theoretical CS. So if software engineering gets outsourced entirely, CS majors will still make out okay if they are well rounded.

Right now I work on NASA satellites as an engineer, and I find that my programming experience is useful. It helps that I know how to write off a quick Python and Unix Shell script to solve a random problem.

Your logic is right but for some reason pipes don't seem to work inside shell scripts. Even less doesn't work.

My code stores $result as the grep string and then calls,

result="$result | sed s/' '/'\n'/"

echo `$result`

grep . * | sed s/' '/'\n'/ works fine in the console, but when I call it in the shell script it complains with "|, no such file or directory. sed no such file or directory, ..."

For some reason it doesn't recognize the pipe.

Thanks, but the actual command I'm working with is grep. For grep -l means to just list the filenames. I just mentioned ls because it has the same problem.

At 1/5/11 07:38 PM, Momo-the-Monkey wrote: Which is more respectable (or better), a CE, or an EE, when it comes to the same job with computers or programming?

Basically I'm stuck between the two (EE with electronics focus, or a CE).

I would advise against an EE degree. Basically an EE degree prepares you to work as an electrical engineer. The market is OKAY right now, but I don't think that the field is going to be well protected from outsourcing and H1B visas in the future.

First and foremost, program in whatever language you're having fun and will allow you to do interesting things. In the grand scheme of things, experience with design logic matters much more than experience with a specific language.

With that said, here are a few things that will be interesting to try:

-Lisp/Scheme. If you're used to OOP/functional programming it will really be a new experience. There are a lot of programs that are one line in LISP that takes dozens of lines in C++. The tradeoff is that Lisp requires a very different style of thinking than most languages.

-Linux/Unix. I would recommend getting a linux or unix machine to play around with python and shell scripting. When I started using Linux, I thought it was really cool that I could write my own code to control the operating system rather than relying almost entirely on built in features like Windows. Unix also has something called "filters", which means that data can come into a program from a standard input/output stream. This means that you can pipe data from a python script to a C++ program to a shell script, or whatever.

-C. Programming in C is a lot different than programming in Java or a high level scripting language because it will teach you about how a computer actually works at the hardware level.

Okay, so I just started doing Unix shell scripting (with Bash).

Let's say I'm in the terminal and I type the command ls. I'll get something like:

myFile1
myFile2
myFile3

The files are printed vertically, with each on its own line.

But if I'm in my shell script and I have the command echo `ls` what I get is:

myFile1 myFile2 myFile3

The files are printed horizontally and wrap onto new lines.

Without writing some weird custom code that replaces spaces with newlines or something along those lines, is there a way to call commands in a shell script and display the result vertically?

Thanks.

It's really mean spirited to mock someone for displaying limited intellectual ability since it is something that they have absolutely no control over. Nonetheless, the idea that stupidity is blameworthy is ingrained in our culture just as much as the belief that intellectual accomplishment is praiseworthy.

Why not just implement a guaranteed income? Have the government write everyone a check for the minimum amount of money needed to get by. It's not such a crazy idea. Milton Friedman and Charles Murray have both argued for it.

Let's look at this economic system through the lens of a hypothetical farm. In a market economy, the farmer sells what they grow on the market, makes a profit, and likely chooses to invest those profits in further technology/research/development/etc.

Now, suppose that we implemented the system that you propose. The farmer grows crops and gives them to the state. The state in turn gives the farmer what he needs to have an upper middle class lifestyle. The state leaves some of his money for investment in new technology/research/development/etc.

So what's different? We might point out that, in a real market system, some farmers make more money than others. Thus, some farmers will have an upper class lifestyle and most will have a middle class lifestyle. If the state gave the farmers what they needed, then they could choose to give all farmers an upper middle class lifestyle instead. Many consider this to be a very important advantage of central planning that makes up for its drawbacks.

The big problem with centralized planning is information. The farmer knows more than the government does. He has better information on what crops to grow and what to invest in. It is very hard for a central authority to determine what needs to be produced. Many economists and I believe that this is the reason why nations with centralized planning tend to be very poor.

No one is talking about it because no one takes the global warming movement seriously. Of course people still pay lip service to it, but its proponents do not act as if they really believe in all of the dire claims that they make. How many global warming advocates argue for a rapid build up of nuclear power plants to reduce coal usage? Close to none - yet this response is truly underwhelming if one sincerely believes in global warming alarmism. The proponents actual method of support: histrionics and insulting people outside of the movement, do not fit the magnitude of their claims.

It is remarkably similar to the fundamentalist Christians who believe that the apocalypse will come within their lifetimes. It is a colorful belief, but if they really thought that it would happen, then they would take much more drastic actions to convert people or prevent the actions that would prevent people from entering heaven (yes, I know that Christians do spend a lot of time converting people, but if the apocalypse were near then it would be irrational to do nearly anything but convert people).

With that said, I don't really care about the global warming movement. The supply of fossil fuels is finite and coal has real negative externalities. A small carbon tax wouldn't be a horrible policy.

I honestly don't know. Arguments with very obvious errors are unremarkable so I never end up remembering them. The arguments that fail in interesting ways (like Pascal's wager) are usually created intelligently, so I don't feel like making fun of them.

At 7/19/10 02:14 PM, Tony-DarkGrave wrote: pff like it mattered that job shouldn't even bother running he got less than 1% of votes in his 80s run and only 5% in his run for 2008. his ideas of flat taxes and getting rid of the IRS and Federal Reserve is ABSURD.

A lot of people have moderate libertarian tendencies but end up voting for mainstream Republican or Democratic candidates. I'm just using Ron Paul as a "litmus test" of strong libertarian support. I think its likely that states with lots of strong libertarians have the most moderate libertarians, so it is a useful piece of information. It's possible that Ron Paul has positions that don't reflect libertarianism: opposition to the IRS and the federal reserve as you mention. I think that these are not position against libertarianism, but rather extreme versions of beliefs that are commonly held by the mainstream of the movement.

Anywho, here is the map with states colored by what side of the country they are on. I coded it manually, so it might contain a few errors.

At 7/18/10 06:13 PM, lapis wrote: You got an R^2 of 6%? I have to agree with your conclusion: the explanatory power of your GDP-based regression model is indeed very weak. Maybe I'm biased because I studied econometrics - maybe models with determination coefficients of under 70% were just not used as examples often enough and maybe values in the 5-10% range are common among political scientists. However, my intuition tells me that your model doesn't explain anything at all. Maybr your location-based model will be more powerful.

That there is no strong relationship is itself an interesting result, when one considers that there is a very strong linear relationship in presidential elections. I think that all of the states which had the heaviest lean for Obama were near the top of the economic distribution.

It has become a well known fact that in recent elections the wealthiest states have tended to vote for the Democrats and the poorest states have tended to vote for the Democrats. Of the states that vote for the Republicans, those which are the poorest support the party by the greatest margin and likewise those which are the richest are the most likely to be flip states.

Libertarians can be found in both major parties, but arguably their values are most strongly defended by the Republican party. This reveals to us an interesting question: how does the wealth of a state affect its propensity to support libertarianism. To give a crude, preliminary answer to this question, I will use per capita donations to the Ron Paul campaign as a proxy for support for libertarianism. It is possible that this statistic is skewed by wealthier states having more spare money to donate, but the following map allows us to see that donations for the Republican party are strongest in areas that tend to vote Republican, and vice versa, leading some credibility to the use of donations as a proxy. It's possible that campaign donations are not really an elastic type of spending, but something which people view as an essential part of their budget. Also, my data says how many people donate per capita instead of how much they donate, which also helps to control for this relationship.

http://fundrace.huffingtonpost.com/mapda ta/city/usa_cities.gif

Another issue is that Ron Paul does not encompass all libertarian beliefs, and likewise he has many beliefs that go beyond what is traditionally considered libertarian. Nonetheless, he is the most well known candidate that follows anything close to a purely libertarian platform. I could use a survey question about the size of government to measure libertarian attitudes, but I think that such an approach would introduce some bias in that the role of government is understood differently across the country (i.e., a more liberal person might think that smaller government means less military and a more conservative person might think of the question in terms of taxes).

My data comes from the following map of Ron Paul Donations, and my per capita GDP data is from the NationMaster site.

http://ronpaulgraphs.com/donors.html

My graph can be seen below. I get a correlation coefficient of 24% with a parabolic regression showing high donation levels in middle income states and low donation levels in low and high income states. This relationship, however, is weak. While the purpose of this post is not to try to explain this result, I think that libertarianism vs. statism is more of a west vs. east divide rather than a poor vs. rich divide. I might later post a graph with the states colored by whether or not they are eastern or western states.

There's not a lot of continental philosophy on this forum, most of the philosophy here is political philosophy. I guess I don't mind the occasional metaphysics.

At 3/25/10 05:24 PM, Musician wrote: "You're not entitled to MY money!" You hear it everywhere these days. On the news, in political debates... at those ridiculous tea party rallies. "It's MY money and the government has NO right to it."

But lets back up a bit here. What exactly is money? Paper? does it have any inherent value? No, currency is a part of our economy, a man made construct. We developed currency, and the entirety of our economy for a sole purpose: to most effectively distribute resources among the population of a community. We developed money, because once we started living together in populations larger than 100 or so people, we NEEDED a system to track and distribute wealth.

One of the basic rights is the right to contract. When you were given that paper, it was made under the assumption that the paper had some value. If it didn't, the transaction would be fraudulent.

The legal tender that you "own" is really just a certificate of value issued to you by the government, managed by the government, and given value by the government for the sole purpose of distributing resources throughout a society. People who say that the role of government has nothing to do with redistribution of wealth, must have a serious misunderstanding of the history of human governance, as managing the distribution of resources (and in doing so creating productivity) is essentially the reason government exists in it's current form.

No. This is not true. The government does not own you. I have no idea where you would have gotten this idea.

But I digress, let me get back to the point. Right now, all the Randians are scrunching their brows, pouting, and asking themselves "Why wouldn't I be entitled to my money? Private property is an innate human right!" Innate rights don't exist bud. There's no force of nature that bestows exclusive use of a piece of land to one person.

Randians believe that money is a human construct. Just to provide a brief (and admittedly over simplistic) summary of their political philosophy: in anarchy, the unproductive exploit the productive through the use of physical force. The productive create free markets, which allow one to keep the material wealth that one produces. The market is a human creation that exists so that the unproductive cannot exploit the productive.

I like to see Objectivism as having some essential similarities to Marxism, in that it is rooted in a historical "us vs. them" / "producers vs. parasites" narrative.

The idea that you're inherently entitled to your property is a fairy tale, like Santa, or GOD (LOL CRY SOME MORE). property rights, like just about everything in our society is a human construct.

Haha. I suppose I agree that people aren't inherently entitled to property. In a slave society (which is essentially all that existed before the free market), people aren't even entitled to ownership of their own bodies and their own labor.

So well our right to property is not "inherent", it is not really

The only reason we even have property rights, is because capitalism has proven itself to be an effective system for distributing resources. See what I'm getting at here? Capitalism hasn't survived because it's innately right or moral, it's survived because it's effective at distributing resources (note: resources include both tangible products and services. examples of tangible goods being food, housing, etc and examples of services being healthcare, military and police protection, etc) and promoting productivity. But capitalism has failings, and in order to keep society healthy, the government regulates and controls certain areas of the market in order to more effectively distribute resources.

I'm not sure if I totally agree with this, but it is a reasonable position. One question though, who decides how well resources are being distributed? If it is possible for some person to decide by some mechanism other than free choice, then why don't we just let them make distribution decisions?

My personal belief is that it is simply impossible to distribute based on some non-choice criteria without reducing a person to a simple means to an end.

In order to pay for these government interventions, we instate taxes. This is where the tea partiers cry because they're "entitled" to their money. No you're not. By being a US citizen, by being a part of our nation's community, you have signed a social contract that essentially states that you will work within our guidelines, which have been (supposedly anyways) specifically implemented to benefit the community over the individual. The government never grants you complete entitlement to all your money. No government in existence does that.

This is an interesting train of thought. You owe it to yourself to investigate the research that has already been done. Look up Nozick's Entitlement Theory and Rawl's Minimax (derived from the Veil of Ignorance).

Inevitably someone will bring up the following point: "I do have an inherent right to my money, and you know why? Because my labor inherently produces goods. I have a right to the inherent fruits of my labor, sweat of my brow, etc, etc, etc." That's great and all, but the whole argument falls apart when currency becomes involved, because as stated before money is a human construct, and in modern society, any "inherent fruits of labor" are going to be given an artificial value in currency. So then the question is "who decides what a man gets paid for his labor?"

The capitalist argues that the invisible hand of the free market will decide. After all you're only worth what people will pay you. But in this kind of scenario the hard working manual laborer who grinds a 9-6 work week deserves less compensation than the man who works a comfortable office job managing bank loans. Many of you will read that last sentence and totally agree with it, which is understandable seeing as in the US we're conditioned from birth to believe that white collared working men are somehow "better/smarter/whatever" than blue collared working men. That's fine if you believe it, just realize there's not neccesarily a factual basis for that, it's a completely emotional argument.

None of those last two paragraphs make any coherent sense. In a free system people are paid if others choose to pay them money. It doesn't rely on racism any more than a centrally planned distribution scheme might.

In contrast, the communist argues that both the banker and the worker are equally essential to society. After all, who would construct our buildings if it weren't for the worker? And who would manage the distribution of wealth if it weren't for the banker? If any one of these proffessions were to dissappear entirely, it would be chaos. So the fruits of their labor deserve equal payment in resources. Obviously communism didn't work in practice for a variety of reasons, but it's core principles are no less valid that the core principles of capitalism. Once again, there is no natural law that states the free market philosophy is moral, and that the community philosphy is not.

This is just non-sense. The central planner who just doles out money to anyone who does anything "essential" would totally fail.

So the next time you're at a Tea Party rally, making vitriol filled speeches about how the government is stepping over the line, and how we're becoming a godless welfare state, or having man on man sex or whatever you do there, consider this: Maybe you're the one with the entitlement complex.